Photos: Part 2 - working high grade Colha in reverse

[AncientTech]

[AncientTech]

"Wow!  That is pretty cool.  So, it is raw chert, huh?"

"Yeah, it is raw something or other - maybe agatized coral - I cannot swear that it is chert."

"So, are these the last stages?"

"Yeah, pretty much the last stages.  I have just started working on developing the very end stages.  As you can see, there is virtually no pressure involved in all of that fine flaking.  If you run through the archaeological records of cut antler tine tips, you will never get to the end of all the instances that have been recorded.  And, that is what I used here, the same old cut antler tine tips that have been recovered thousands of times, from archaeological contexts, in the Americas, over the last hundred years, or so."

"So, you are using archaeologically documented tools?"

"Yes, tools that have been documented probably thousands of times.  It was actually well known to past archaeologists, in North America, who did a lot of digging."

[iowabow]

Nice point!

[AncientTech]

Thanks, I put it on Facebook and got dozens of "likes".  It looks to me like there are many people out there who are interested in evidence-based flintknapping.

I had no idea what it would take to attack the world's greatest mystery - New World flintknapping.  It is so amazing that there are hundreds of records that point to ideas, and processes, that we hardly know anything about, while the practices we do know - like baton knapping - seem to be missing from all of the records.  It is amazing.  It is what drove me back into flintknapping, in 2010. 

When I started, around 1985 I simply wanted to do something that I never saw another human being do - make a chipped stone point.  Then, I wanted to shoot it, so I made arrows from "arrow weed".  I had no idea that thirty years later, all of my preconceived ideas would be fully overturned, and I would end up producing stuff with technologies that I could not have envisioned just five years ago - and all based upon actual records.  I am still pinching myself.  I am quite lucky.  If it were not for hosts or records, I would not have been able to make the leap.  Did you know that in at least one Native American language, the word for chipping flint is the same word as for picking fruit?  Did you know that in other accounts the "flint flaker" was a magical object that could be shot like an arrow, to kill supernatural foes?     

There is actually a great deal of evidence that points to what the recent Stone Age inhabitants of the Americas, both thought and did, with regard to flintknapping.