Question about scrapers

[paoliguy]

Hi folks, I have very limited knowledge about knapping. A friend from work has quite a lot of chert on his property and apparently there have been quite a few artifacts discovered there. He found a small piece that looks like it might have been worked a bit and he asked me if I thought it might be a scraper of some sort. I had no idea but it seemed reasonable to me that it might have been. I sent him a link to this board and he is going to post some pictures.

Have any of you made small scrapers or know about their design or how they were made? Even if his piece turns out to just be a broken rock I now feel the need to learn about stone tools beyond arrowheads.

Thanks in advance for any info.
Mark

[JackCrafty]

Scrapers were most often made by flaking around the edges of a thick flake.  They are usually "unifacial" which means they have the original surface of the flake on one side and show new flake scars on the other.

[Dalton Knapper]

I agree with Jack. Usually a true scraper is relatively flat on one side and the bevel is on the other. You can "scrape" something with almost any flake, but to scrape a hide or something that requires durability, one needs to sharpen a flake on one side so it can be resharpened when necessary. What your friend  might have could simply be a flake that was used as a tool of some sort. There were 101+ uses for flake tools from cutting to scraping arrow shafts. Pictures would help us nail down possible uses.

[paoliguy]

Thanks guys, he is going to get some pictures posted next week I hope. Whatever it is it's pretty neat he found it and apprieciates the possibilities of what it might have been.