Ben,
Here's what I'm trying to get at: Imagine you are at the quarry. Not actually in the quarry because you are one of the good knappers so you are at some comfortable spot near the quarry while the young guys are down in the mud getting the stone. One of them brings you a spall of raw but decent chert. You know, a typical spall, part too thick, part too thin, probably flat on one side, domed/ ridged on the other, bigger than your palm, smaller than your whole hand. All of your current, known tool needs have been meet, but it is a long hike to get here, so you are looking to make a late stage preform, or a quarry blank, or whatever you want to call it to take home for future tool needs. What tools and techniques are you going to use to accomplish that?
[I would start with a soft hammer stone to remove any areas of large mass but would quickly switch to direct antler percussion. I spent two year taking every spall to a mid to late stage preform by hammer stone, and even with that amount of practice, I went back to antler because it works faster, and wastes less rock.]
Now it's a week later and you are back home. One of the guys comes in and reports a herd of fat elk down in the valley. You are in the mood for some good BBQ so you plan on joining the hunting party tommorrow morning. You look over your gear and find that you are two dart points short. You take out the quarry blanks from the week before and pick out the two smallest ones to make into dart points. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish that?
[I would start with a small peg punch, using my pressure flaker only for setting up the small, isolated platforms I like for punching. I would use an antler tine pressure flaker to finialize the shape of the base, and probaly make a pass or too along the blade edge.]
It occurs to you that your trusty old raw chert knife may also come in handy, but you don't have it because you loaned it to Zuma. You find Zuma and by some miracle he didn't lose it or break it. He did, however, cut a bunch of cane with it and didn't bother to resharpen it. (You conclude this is just as well because he probably would have screwed it up anyway.) So now you need to resharpen your badly dulled raw chert knife. What tools and technuques do you use to accomplish that?
[If I could get away with it, I would just pressure flake it. If the edge is too thick, or the material is too tough for me to push pressure flakes deeply in enough to maintain proper edge thickness and cutting angle, I would use the peg punch. I would start by taking a few pressure flakes from the tip down, because if I start punching right at the tip it might snap off. From there I generally punch a serries of flakes off a contionus platform beveled off to one side of the blade.]
Keith
"Here's what I'm trying to get at: Imagine you are at the quarry. Not actually in the quarry because you are one of the good knappers so you are at some comfortable spot near the quarry while the young guys are down in the mud getting the stone. One of them brings you a spall of raw but decent chert. You know, a typical spall, part too thick, part too thin, probably flat on one side, domed/ ridged on the other, bigger than your palm, smaller than your whole hand. All of your current, known tool needs have been meet, but it is a long hike to get here, so you are looking to make a late stage preform, or a quarry blank, or whatever you want to call it to take home for future tool needs. What tools and techniques are you going to use to accomplish that?"
That would depend on the material. For me, the shift from hard hammer percussion to indirect percussion, is frequently determined by the grade of the stone (grade not hardness). If the stone is really high grade, hard hammer might not work at all, without producing internal shatter in the edges. On the other hand, most stone is not that high of a grade.
With regard to ancient Americans, my theory is that they used both. But, the mobile lifestyle that the paleoindians lived allowed them to collect really high grade materials. And, so the indirect percussion technologies would have been preserved, after they came to the New World. But, once the advent of the archaic era led to settled life, in various regions, they would have used local materials. And, in such cases, hard hammer percussion would have been more fitting, assuming that the stone was of a lower grade, in many area. At that point (the advent of the archaic), I believe that the lithic technologies were tailored somewhat, for respective regions.
Also, my thought is that if there is greater emphasis on cutting (think butchering), than penetration (think killing), the paleo butcherers would have wanted sharper cutting tools, with sharper edges. And, this could have led to a preference for high grade materials. And, this in turn would have led to the choice of using indirect percussion flaking technologies, or even sophisticated hybrid flaking technologies.
That being said, I also think that there may be some difference in flaking technologies, between obsidian work, and regular chert work. And, I think that this can be seen, in terms of tools, at regional levels. For example, "peg punches", also called "antler drift" in archaeological texts, seem to be most prominent in the chert bearing areas of the eastern half of the US. And, the use of such tools spans about eight thousand years, right into the historic era. But, in areas were obsidian is worked, it seems really difficult to find such tools. The closest might be the larger antler plugs, which were shown with the previous photo of the Karok obsidian knapper.
To put it in simple terms, I think that the creation of the preform at the quarry was partially dictated by the type of stone being worked - low grade chert, high grade chert, obsidian, etc.
[I would start with a soft hammer stone to remove any areas of large mass but would quickly switch to direct antler percussion. I spent two year taking every spall to a mid to late stage preform by hammer stone, and even with that amount of practice, I went back to antler because it works faster, and wastes less rock.]
Is the rock raw? You can thin it with an antler billet? Is your billet white tail? The light stuff? I know that the early experimentalists used wood clubs, moose antler clubs, and elk antler clubs, to work stone down. They used the big percussors, due to the greater mass. If you use white tail antler, it frequently is really light.
Anyway, using hammerstones to thin bifaces involves some technique. Marty Rueter helped me to learn bifacial reduction, with soft hammerstones, about ten years ago, on the KRU forum. It takes a lot of practice to develop good skill, though. Now, I can use hammerstones, until I split the preform with an overshot. I think that the key to good hammerstone use, in bifacial reduction, is in learning to torque the preform against the blow, during impact. This produces long over the face removals, and sometimes even overshots, when there is too much torque.
"Now it's a week later and you are back home. One of the guys comes in and reports a herd of fat elk down in the valley. You are in the mood for some good BBQ so you plan on joining the hunting party tommorrow morning. You look over your gear and find that you are two dart points short. You take out the quarry blanks from the week before and pick out the two smallest ones to make into dart points. What tools and techniques do you use to accomplish that?"
If they are really small, I would probably use a broken tip of a tine, about two inches long, with a slight curve. I could probably chip in the platform, and take the removals, with such a tool, via indirect percussion. I would follow Grinnell, (1879). I showed a few such points, here.
"It occurs to you that your trusty old raw chert knife may also come in handy, but you don't have it because you loaned it to Zuma. You find Zuma and by some miracle he didn't lose it or break it. He did, however, cut a bunch of cane with it and didn't bother to resharpen it. (You conclude this is just as well because he probably would have screwed it up anyway.) So now you need to resharpen your badly dulled raw chert knife. What tools and technuques do you use to accomplish that?"
Hand held pressure flaker - common deer tine, or composite bit pressure flaker.
[If I could get away with it, I would just pressure flake it. If the edge is too thick, or the material is too tough for me to push pressure flakes deeply in enough to maintain proper edge thickness and cutting angle, I would use the peg punch. I would start by taking a few pressure flakes from the tip down, because if I start punching right at the tip it might snap off. From there I generally punch a serries of flakes off a contionus platform beveled off to one side of the blade.]
I am on the fence on this one. One thing that no one has discussed is the role of peg punches (antler drift) in creating scrapers. Unlike a biface, a scraper has a very 3-dimensional nature to it. My friend Bill Wagoner pointed out that many scrapers look like they were made from overshot failures (hard hammer percussion). I could see fashioning a 3-dimensional scraper with a peg punch. It would be like sculpting a piece of stone.
But, bifaces are frequently more 2-dimensional, than 3-dimensional. Many bifaces are really flat. The direct blow of a peg punch produces a bulb, just as direct percussion produces a bulb. And, when a person is trying to create a thin, straight edge, the bulb of a direct punch blow could mar the edge. So, this is where I would lean towards a thin broken end of a tine, that can be held between the fingers, and struck on the broadside. In this case, the blow would not drive into the stone. Instead the blow would pull perpendicular, away from the face of the stone. The latter process "pulls" the flakes off. The former process "pushes" the flakes off. To avoid creating bulbous scars, I would probably opt for a process that pulls the flakes off.
On the other hand, if the edge was really thick, and beveled, I might just use the peg punch. The other flakers that I have shown seem to be going almost un-identified, everywhere. Usually, the description reads something like, "small flaker that may have been hafted", and "end is blunt", or "end shows signs of battering". Yet, there is never any sign of bitumen, or anything else on the flaker, even when they are found in dry cave sites. Based on some other evidence, I think that they are probable finger flakers (indirect percussion).
Hummingbird, I enjoyed the thoughtful questions.
