This is the fourth installment of my series covering my first attempts at flintknapping. As a bit of a disclaimer I am not a professional archaeologist, paleontologist, flinknapper, historian, or geologist. I’m just a person with an interest to both learn this difficult skill and share the learning experience with others. Hopefully this will be a help as they start their journey down this path.
In this part I continue through my first week of learning to knapp. In part two I covered my first day with proper tools and stone.
This episode can be summed up with an old military/bushcraft saying that I'm fond of;
‘Embrace the Suck.’
What that means is that even though whatever you are going through right now may feel lousy, you will make it through and you will be better off for it once it is over and you are past it. It makes many of those crumby situations much more bearable if you recognize them for what they are and acknowledge them appropriately.
On the first day there was chaos; on the second there was pain. I had not fully realized exactly how many times I had missed the stone and hit my leg until the following morning. My upper thigh looked like I had taken a hit from a baseball. It wasn’t a serious kind of pain by any means but I definitely did not want to learn bad habits by working through and around an injury even this mild. So, day two evolved into a book/video study day while the swelling went down.
On day three I was feeling up to trying again. I had decided to calm down and be a bit less heavy handed today. I chose some obsidian, some dacite and another hunk of the raw Texas chert. Instead of working one for any length of time I would rotate and try to keep from getting too heavy handed. That strategy seemed to work for a while.
After a while of settling in on a rhythm of find the platform, abrade and look for flaws, then accurately hit the platform, I was starting to purposely remove flakes with better than chance reliability. I was starting to get the hang of it. There are so many factors in play for any given strike that it is near impossible to cover them all in words, pictures, or video. The angle of the stone, the arc of the swing, the power of the swing, and the quality of the platform are all three dimensional variables that go into every swing of the billet. Things were going rather well for a while and I was getting a nice biface shape on two preforms,
and then; crack.
No worries, lets work the other piece.
Nice shape on raw stone and then 'snick'
Clean in two
This is getting a bit frustrating.
Along with all of the variables mentioned above there is also how to hold the rock, where to brace it, and how firm to brace it. Knowing when to stop being aggressive in flake removal and knowing how a particular stone reacts when thin are also factors that cannot be easily shown. When the rock is in your hand you will be face to face with all of these factors at the same time.
While occasionally frustrating knapping is definitely proving to be a hobby that is well worth the time investment. It has some great Zen qualities to it that are hard to describe.
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