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Content Created: 070709 |
This page is intended to serve as a quick introduction to several kinds of Paleolithic stone tools referred to by prehistoric archaeologists.
Skip Directly to: Choppers, Hand-Axes, Scrapers, Points, Blades.
Stone tools were made by taking a piece of stone and knocking off flakes. When the flakes were used, the tools produced are referred to as "flake tools." When the core itself was used, it is referred to as a "core tool." (Naturally, smaller flakes could be removed from larger ones, so not all flakes came off of cores. Or alternatively, big flakes should be thought of as the cores for little ones struck from them. Don't worry about it.)
Both cores and flakes were used all through the stone age, but there was increasing emphasis on flake tools as time passed and techniques for controlled flaking improved.
Earliest stone tools, and those in which the stone knapper had least control over how the stone will break, were made by percussion flaking, that is, whacking a stone with something, usually another stone, appropriately called a "hammer stone". Even for the best percussion knappers, however, it was difficult to hit the stone with perfect precision.
Greater precision could be achieved by placing a piece of antler or other hard material precisely where you wanted pressure applied, and then whacking on that. This mediation allowed you to have precise targetting of force, and still have all the momentum of a falling hammer stone going into the movement. This is called indirect percussion flaking.
Still greater precision was achieved through pressure flaking (pressing against a stone until a flake pops off). Typically pressure flaking was used to remove very small chips (even extremely small ones), and was used, for example, to straighten and sharpen the edge of a blade. When pressure flaking was done with such materials as wood, bone, or antler, it was possible for skilled stone knappers to achieve truly excellent control over just how a stone would flake.
Tools varied depending upon the stone available and its characteristics.
Not all stone is equal. Obviously sandstone is far too soft to take an edge. Marble is also too soft. Granite is inconsistent in its hardness, and so on. Through most of the world, the preferred stone for most tools was whatever would take the sharpest edge, typically chert, flint or, where available, obsidian, which can be worked much like broken glass.
(More About Obsidian, More About Flint.)
Although obsidian flakes are capable of breaking with a startlingly sharp edge —sharper than steel— they do not retain it the edge as steel does, so stone tools in actual use require constant sharpening, just as stringed instruments require constant tuning and dogs need constant feeding. They were sharpened by knocking off additional tiny chips along the edge, taking care to do it in such a way as to keep the edge reasonably straight.
Naturally this technology became more refined over time. While earliest stone tools were little more than broken pebbles, the latest ones were sometimes miracles of controlled micro-chipping, culminating in the fantastically shaped "excentric flints" of some societies (notably Egypt and Mexico), which had lost all cutting function and were designed to show the stone knapper's skill and the owner's wealth.
The term "chopper" is applied to a stone, most often roughly spherical, from which several large flakes have been broken in order to produce a sharp edge or point.
Choppers are typically crude and typically early. The Oldowan technology, for example, is characterized by choppers. Most choppers use the natural breaks as cutting edges, but exhibit little retouching to lengthen the cutting edge beyond what is produced when a single flake is removed.
The illustration shows two views of the same chopper. In the upper view, a flake that has just been knocked off is laid beside the place from which it was struck. The lower view shows the pointed end of the chopper, as it would have looked from the perspective of the thing being chopped.
Hand-axes are especially associated with the Acheulean tool tradition that followed Oldowan tools and was associated with Homo erectus life.
A hand-ax is in many ways simply a refined chopper. It is flatter and may be chipped all the way around. Smaller, better controlled flakes are removed, so that the cutting edges can be longer.
Hand axes, like modern cleavers, had sufficient weight for heavy jobs, but good enough cutting edges for finer work, and were one of the most enduring tools in human history.
The brown hand-ax shown in two views here is quite typical of Acheulean hand axes. The unchipped end would have been held in the hand, and the slight concavity on one side would have made an excellent finger grip. The other end was carefully retouched to provide a long sharp edge, although it was difficult to get a perfectly straight edge when it was produced by removing a series of small flakes.
The hand-ax shown at the right is the effort of a modern stone knapper to produce an imitation Mousterian (Neanderthal) hand-ax. He has tried to reproduce the greater attention to a straight edge, the greater number of small flakes removed, and the resultant greater utility of this implement. However notice that the "handle" end has disappeared. A tool sharpened on all sides might have greater utility by providing a range of blade-shapes, but it would have required protection for the hand that wielded it. Some specialists speculate that a piece of leather might have been used to protect the hand while manipulating such an implement.
(More About the Acheulean Tradition.)
One of the special-purpose tools that emerges from earliest times is the scraper. One can think of this as designed to remove the yucky bits from the inside of animal skins, or the hair from the outside,
but there are a great many scraping tasks involved also in vegetable preparation and in handling fibers for clothing —there is no reason to believe that all clothing was made of animal skins, after all. So we need to think of a scraper as a bit more all-purpose than the name at first implies.
Scrapers needed to have long flat cutting edges, usually slightly curved. Nearly all are made from flakes rather than cores. Some are large and course, like the one shown above right, but many, especially in later times, were made of relatively small flakes, like the modern stone knapper's imitation shown at the below lft, which is only about two inches long, and has been sharpened on one end for use in small tasks.
The action of scraping is closely similar to the action of scoring, and a specialized kind of scraper was the burin, which had a barb sticking out the side.
The barb made it possible to cut a long slot in a piece of wood or antler (or anything else). One important Upper Paleolithic use for burins was to cut two long narrow slots in a piece of bone or ivory and then carefully break out the piece between the two slots for use as a needle, one of the critical inventions in the history of clothing.
No burin is shown here, although the slight bulge carelessly left on the side of the modern scraper accidentally functioned in the same way when I tried it out.
Projectile points, including arrowheads, spear points, and the like, have been found in a wide range of shapes and sizes —what was needed to kill a bird with an arrow was different from what was needed to kill a bison with a spear— and they were made of a range of kinds of stone, depending on what was locally available. Archaeologists have created typologies based on both form and function to help in reconstructing history of human settlements in particular regions. A separate page on Paleo-Indian Spear Points contains illustrations of some common projectile points found in North America.
"Blade" is arbitrarily defined by most archaeologists as a tool that is at least twice as long as it is wide, with sides roughly parallel. It would be reasonable to say that it is also a thin tool. Blade tools appear in the Upper Paleolithic. They were made by detaching the longest possible flake from a core, and then carefully retouching the edges of it as necessary to achieve exactly the shape and cutting edge needed. Blades required a considerable degree of skill to produce without breaking, since they were thin enough to be fragile.
In use, blades were, so far as we know, usually hafted to wooden or antler handles, and by late Paleolithic times it was not unusual to use a series of quite small blades, lined up in a slot in a piece of wood or antler and glued in with naturally occurring tar. By the close of the Paleolithic such "microflints" became typical tool parts. (In Europe prehistoric archaeologists identify a stage they call the "Mesolithic." Click here for More About the Azilian Tradition, one famous Mesolithic example.)
Blades were critical for making deep holes, including deep wounds in prey animals, but they were also useful in other ways, and represented a huge improvement in the amount of cutting edge that could be gotten from a piece of superior stone. (One estimate suggests that two pounds of stone provides about four inches of cutting edge as a handax, but up to 75 feet of cutting edge when turned into blades. That is an increase of about 225 times. It is important to remember that cutting edge length is not the only property that matters in tools, of course. If it were, our kitchens would have only long knives.)
The blade tool seen above from both front and back in the illustration with the yellow background is quite typical for late Paleolithic times, and represents a considerable degree of skill in its production. The one with the red background is a modern imitation, made of high-grade obsidian.
Picture Credits The brown tools shown on this page are plaster reproductions of generic tool types from a set created by the San Diego Museum of Man for use in schools.
Other photos show tools made by anonymous modern stone knappers seeking to imitate prehistoric tool types.
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