First Day - Stone Knapping

Even though its a study abroad, I still have class two days a week. Today we learned how to make and identify stone tools.

According to Holdoway, S. and N. Stern in A Record in Stone, stone tools were once as common as coke cans and were used for everything from chopping down trees to skinning animals. Beginning as crude objects these tools evolved over time as we humans evolved intellectually. Stone artifacts are studied mostly because of their durability (few items can last for tens of thousands of years w/o deteriorating, as well as their variety. Stone technologies are a form of reductive technology in that they are created my the "irreversible decrease" in original mass of the object. in analyzing stone artifacts, scientists are able to determine the source of the stone, how the tool was created, and how it was used.

there are three primary parts: the hammerstone, the core, and the flake.
As the name implies, the hammerstone is the stone forcibly hit against the core which produces a break-off piece called a flake. hammerstones are usually made of a harder material such as quartz whereas cores are predominantly "softer" stones such as obsidian or other silica based rock. When struck, a flake breaks off along a fault line partially determined by the angle of the strike. as a result, a flake as several identifiable features: a platform (portion of original exterior where the core is struck, a bulge or bulb of percussion which is a direct result of the force of the blow and sometimes ripple marks can be seen radiating out in the direction of the blow as the force of the blow caused energy to travel through the stone until it reach the outer part of the stone whereby causing the flake to separate from the core.

it sounds rather technical but when we were given the opportunity to try out stone knapping ourselves, the attributes were more readily easy to see.

Contrary to our former belief, stone knapping is hard!! we worked with obsidian which is relatively brittle and very sharp. It was extremely difficult to get a perfect flake and to be honest I wasnt entirely sure what a perfect flake looks like. They all looked good to me. It wasn't until I'd been working on it awhile that I started to kinda get the hang of it. Its kinda like sculpting in a way i guess. You have to stare at a rock and decide what it is you want to create. You cant just start hacking away at it cause then you end up with just a bunch of broken rocks.

we then had to sort them upon our return from class into separate piles of flakes, cores, scatter, tools/flakes untouched, tools/flakes retouched, and then into proximal/medial/distal parts of flakes. Classifying the stones was really the most difficult part and only lots of practice will make it easier