By Diedra Eby
On Saturday, Sept. 20, Professor Jon Boyd led a one-day class called “Stone Tool Making” on PCC’s West Campus. Students learned to recognize stone tools, or lithics, and their byproducts, such as debitage — the sharp-edged leftovers that scientists study to determine what was made during the flintknapping process. Some of these fragments can even be used as scraping tools
Archaeologists recreate tools to study wear patterns and determine how ancient tools were used — for gathering, butchering, or cutting wood. It also helps them understand how the tools were made, which in turn supports time and labor studies of prehistoric activities, such as how long it took to chop down trees, make tools, or craft bows and canoes.
“Most of what we know about Stone Tool Making,” Professor Boyd said, “comes from the last ‘wild’ Indian, Ishi, who worked with anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Professor Thomas T. Waterman.”
Here, student Daniel Bonnichsen wears protective gear while working obsidian into a stone tool. Photo by Diedra Eby.
Ishi, rather than being run off of his land, was the last member of the Yahi tribe. On August 29, 1911, after the death of his family and other remaining Yahi, was cornered by dogs outside the town of Oroville, Calif. Holding Ishi in the local jail, town officials reached out to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, then known as the University of California Museum of Anthropology. He spent the rest of his life living in the museum and demonstrating the Yahi tribal ways of life, primarily stone tool making which was already a lost art.
In addition to Ishi, the following knappers have been highly instrumental in our current knowledge: Francois Bordes, December 30, 1919–April 30, 1981, a French Paleoarcheologist who determined paleolithic sequencing, Don Crabtree, a self-taught knapper from Idaho, Dr. Bruce Bradley, considered one of the best knappers in the world, and Jon Boyd’s mentor, who taught archaeology at the University of Arizona and wrote the popular book “Across Atlantic Ice.”
Stone tools can be made from materials such as obsidian, glass, basalt, flint, chert and so on, to a hardness of quartz and quartzite, so long as the material is silica-based. The harder the stone, the more difficult it is to work. Students wore protective eye wear, gloves, and covered their laps in leather.
Students carefully sorts through shards because they are surgically sharp! Photo by Diedra Eby.
Percussion flaking is the process of pounding one very hard rock, in this case quartzite, against another much softer rock that is prone to flaking, in this case, obsidian. Repeating this process against a less than 90 degree angle will create a flake with a very sharp edge and begin to take the roundness off of the rock being worked. The shards have extremely sharp edges which have been compared to scalpel blades. They can be used to cut through leather or scrape hides or cut plants.
In a study by Disa, Vossoughi, and Goldberg, obsidian blades were shown to leave significantly narrower scarring after surgery in a blind study at seven, 10 and 14 days (though by 21 days, scarring was the same in both surgical and obsidian blades). Importantly, obsidian wounds contained fewer inflammatory cells and less granulation tissue at seven days in the same blind study.
After flaking tool stones to as close to arrowhead shape as possible, students switched to knapping with an antler or one of the “Ishi” tools such as an antler with a nail or copper wire in the end or a dowel with a nail or copper wire in the end.
Students used the antler tool, braced against the opposite thigh for leverage, to flake off smaller, more controlled pieces — a process called ‘pressure flaking’ using the “Ishi” tool. This process allows for very small fletching.
This class is followed up with a two-day archeology workshop with an emphasis on field and lab techniques to be held on Oct. 11 and 18 at the West Campus.
Malachi Brewster proudly displays a finished stone tool after a hard day’s work in Professor Boyd’s one-day workshop. Photo by Diedra Eby.