I had an odd experience last night. Some little gray men came to visit me. They put me in their space ship and took me to a grassy knoll in Dallas. There a tame Sasquatch taught me two top secret knapping methods that allow insane amounts of power and accuracy to be harnessed from small pieces of antler. With either method, just about any random piece of solid antler can be used. The first used a piece of deer tine 0.75 inches in diameter by 3 inches long. I used it to make the preform below in under 10 minutes. The material is Onondaga Chert, width is 43 mm, thickness is 6.5 mm.
The second method used a small whitetail base, 1 inch in diameter and 4 inches long. I made the preform below from raw Georgetown. It is 48 mm wide by 6 mm thick.
Okay, just having a little fun. Like Ben I gave up my billets years ago. Just wanted to show the ways I know of that small pieces of antler can be used on toughish stone to produce big results. The Onodaga preform was made using an antler hammer as described by Cushing in The Arrow, for more information see:
http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/60533/Antler-hammersThe Georgetown preform was made using a scaled down version of Marty Reuter’s shaft punch, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaNs7H2ABBwI will fully confess to having no idea how to make controlled overshot flakes with these, or any other tools, and acknowledge the superiority of any knapper that can.
Keith
