Bruce Sterling

MAKE THE TOOLS

THAT MADE YOU

Flintknappers reveal our technological origins, one chip at a time.

HANDMADE TOOLS ARE TWO MILLION YEARS old. Modern humans are just 200,000 years old. Before we humans came along, our Stone Age ancestors spent 1,800,000 years making tools out of rocks.

It follows that you, a modern human, have evolved superb eyes and hands for that job. If you invest some thought and effort, you’ll find that you can make much better Stone Age tools than a Stone Age guy.

Genuine Stone Agers often had to trudge dozens of miles to dig up flint with prehistoric shovels of antler and bone. Today’s sophisticated stone maker can order rock supplies shipped by FedEx. You can even have stone neatly prepared for you into arrowhead-sized blanks, so you can concentrate on the fun part of stonework, which is “knapping.”

Top-class stone hackers give public classes and shoot how-to videos. They call themselves “master knappers” and hang out with museum curators and archaeologists.

At this point, the abo knapper has created a Stone Age throwing spear. After his first kill, he’s got sinew, blood glue, a loincloth, bone tools, a canteen, some rawhide sandals, and basically everything he needs besides a cave-art gallery.

Entrepreneurial Market Knappers

The second school is referred to as “market knapping.” Here you find the guys who make modern arrowheads, stone knives, and custom spearheads for the joy of it and for the tourist trade. These guys tend to be congenial folklorists, hobby hunters, and local craftsmen.

The Purist Approach

There are basically three schools of knapping. The first, and most honored, is “abo knapping” — the purist approach that uses only natural, prehistoric tools and techniques. The high concept is to re-create the Stone Age lifestyle with a scholarly understanding of prehistoric skills.

An ideal abo knapper would thrive if dropped naked in a wilderness. He would find a suitably brittle rock and crack it open with a cobble — this cracking process is referred to as “spalling.”

Then he would knock long shards from the freshly cracked edge (known as “percussion flaking”) and sharpen and refine the edges by peeling and prying off bits with a pointy piece of bone — called “pressure flaking.” He would then smooth out a wooden stick, carefully notch the stone blade, and haft that into the tip.

The Flintknapping Avant-Garde

The members of the last and rarest school of knappers have a different perspective: they use engineering terms like “ conchoidal fracture” and are into high-performance stonework. They will knap most anything, including semiprecious stones, broken pop bottles, busted toilet bowls, telephone insulators, and the billets of purified silica used to make fiber-optic cables. These avant-gard-ists tend to be jewelers and rock hounds.

Not for the Weak

Knapping is serious, hands-on work. It takes patience and some muscle in the shoulders and forearms, and it requires vigorous pounding, prying, and chipping on brittle, glassy materials that can pop off and fly at high velocities. Assuming that you preserve your eyesight (always a great idea), you’ll still have to manage the safety of your fingers and your feet. If you wonder whether stone weapons hurt, just ask a mammoth.

Photograph courtesy of Piltdown Productions, Lynchburg, VA

Bruce Sterling ( bruce@well.com) is a science fiction writer and part-time design professor.

118 Make: Volume 01