Messed Up An Artifact.

[Ahnlaashock]

Don't, not until you play with some of the float material!  You haul two hundred pounds to the house, and when you are done reducing it, and removing all the flaw, you have a coffee can full of flakes, and a few bifaces or plates.  Oh, and blisters, callouses, and cuts to spare. 
It does make learning easier tho, since I literally can go out and break up a ton of material, and only use sweat equity. 

[JW_Halverson]

Cool, send me 200 lbs of "float" and I will send you 200 lbs of Black Hills granite, I will even go collect it from the same formation as Mt Rushmore....though just not from in the borders of the monument!

[Ahnlaashock]

That does kind of change one's perspective, doesn't it? 
Aren't some of the garnet mines near there? 
They often have material that is of little use, that plates of knappable garnet can be recovered from. 
I used to have a local knapper here do small points out of South African garnet too dark for facet use.  He said it required a lot of force, but I sold every one he ever did. 
I wish I could remember the names.  I know where his house is, but I have no clue if he still lives there or not. 

[JW_Halverson]

There are any number of places where exposed granite is very friable and you can pick garnets out by the handful.  They are fairly dark and trend into the browner range for garnet.  But they are the size of mustard seeds.  Somewhere I have a coffee cup of these little gens. 

Long ago I read an account of a British colonel hunting in India and he lost all his flints for his gun.  A local knapped a large garnet and it was installed in his lock where it worked for years of hunting!  THAT would throw great sparks, I bet.

[Ahnlaashock]

I actually did this, but the one I had cracked badly along the edge. 
Around here, I can walk out to the road and get a flint anyway! 
No more with signs of work on it, at least in the immediate area. 
I did pile up several hundred pounds of maybe material, and brought home a piece with a bunch of separate plates already cracked apart, and about 3/4 thick.  Whether or not they will work, will have to wait till I have time to mess with it. 
The better material I have found, is about 150 feet from that area, and higher on the ridge. 

Nice meeting you, and talking to you! 

[mullet]

Maybe they got the candy and threw away the crap.

[caveman2533]

 I personally would give a big wooden billet a swing on a rock that large. It will drive flakes as flat as a pancake

[Ahnlaashock]

If I can find some from local construction sites that is not so fractured, I may try that! 
I was using a 1 by 3 rough cut Red Oak edge on for percussion last fall, but it did not have the weight of a round billet of any size.  All I really did was round the hold end a little, and grind a curve on the striker face portion. 
I thought I had found some of very good quality, but it appears to just be a skin over a limestone of some kind. 

I will try to reassemble the face in the next few days. 

[Sparrow]

The Clovis guys were absolute masters of the craft. There is quite alot of it out here in Washington ( Must have been good hunting )  Floods have moved most of the stuff around, but it is still a thrill to find. I would say that it is a Clovis core from what you show there, they used the best stuff from the best sources out here. Nature was destroying that piece for a long time before you stumbled on it. It is the way.  '  Frank

[Ahnlaashock]

Here it is, with two of the large pieces fitted back.  The other end had a cortex layer, so those are the remains of the platforms.  There are several flakes taken from the side too.  You can see what I was doing when I realized what I had in my hand. 
Wish I had seen this face before I hit it.  The pieces are not sitting right, so they make the scars look like they have a hump. 

[Sparrow]

I think your gonna need a big fresh hunk of mammoth ivory to make you a bopper for that replication    '  Frank

[Ahnlaashock]

I have driven straight, lens shaped blades off, up to five inches long, but those were occasional accidental results while trying to reduce a core.  To do so deliberately, side by side, is beyond me, at this point anyway. 
With the flakes they took from the side, it makes me wonder if the first one dove, and they removed that entire section to make sure the next did not follow the same path. 
Other than that, I can find no reason for the steep flakes taken on the left hand side.  Those flakes feather on one edge, but the other edge has a square step along the entire edge.  Not quite sure how you would repeat that pattern either yet. 
I would love for someone like Marty to examine it, and see how he thinks it was done.