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The Knappers
| Article
# : |
18935 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,317 Words |
| Author
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David Lampe
David Lampe is a free-lance nonfiction writer and the author
of five books. |
They call themselves flint knappers, their get-togethers knap ins; these urban and suburban men and women hunch forward on chairs or, more likely, squat on their haunches, plying the world's oldest craft, one that predates Homo sapiens. With lengths of deer antler, thick animal bones, or big pebbles, the knappers strike flakes from chunks or nodules of stone, quickly shaping arrow-heads, spear points, knife blades, ax heads, and other everyday tools and weapons of the Stone Age.
They call themselves flint knappers because, in Europe, flint is the most commonly knapped material. But, in fact, any cryptocrystalline rock is suitable. In America, chert is the most readily available, although, along the West Coast, obsidian, a black volcanic glass, is also often knapped. Of the three types of blades, obsidian blades are sharpest, while those made of chert and flint are more durable.
Contemporary flint knappers take their work very seriously. Some of their work will be used in experimental archaeology, and a few of their pieces will make their way into museum anthropological exhibits. But most will be kept by the knappers themselves--to study, to ponder over, to cherish.
About a century ago, researchers began to replicate the methods by which the ancient stone artifacts found on prehistoric sites were made. In recent decades, interest in knapping has intensified considerably. Today it is demonstrated and discussed in schools of archaeology, where some students learn to knap. The Magazine of Lithic Technology was put out for a time by Washington State University, and, on a less serious level, an intriguing newsletter, Flintknappers' Exchange, kept its four hundred or so subscribers in the United States and abroad in touch with one another.
Contributors to the newsletter praised and discussed each others' works--sometimes almost lyrically--and peppered their observations with such expressions as platform preparation, hinge fractures, bifaces, feathered edging, fluting, and basal thinning. To advance the argument that prehistoric knapping may have been done by teams, one pair of contributors presented photographs of themselves knapping together, one over the other's shoulder, shaping a single flint. A subscriber with only one arm wrote to ask for the names of any other knappers who shared his impediment. A favorite unresolved argument in the newsletter was whether the craft should be called flint knapping or flintknapping.
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