Jordan: Basic Stone Tools

This page is intended to serve as a quick introduction to several kinds of Paleolithic stone tools referred to by prehistoric archaeologists. This page is devoted to stone points and blades, usually associated with hunting activities. Other kinds of stone tools include various hammers and grinding basins, not described here.

(Picture sources for this page are numbered in captions visible by holding your mouse over each picture and are expanded at the foot of the page.)

Overview

Flakes and Cores

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.

Percussion and Pressure

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". Whacking with something slightly softer than stone —such as antler— allowed somewhat greater control in some cases.

Even for the best percussion knappers, however, it was difficult to hit the target 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 targeting 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.

Materials

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.

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 "eccentric 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.

Choppers

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 at the right 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. (More About Oldowan Tools)

Many specialists distinguish between "choppers" often with only a flake or two removed to sharpen an edge, and "chopping tools" which have flakes removed from two sides of the cutting edge. While choppers were made by Homo habilis, bifacial "chopping tools" are found with Homo erectus, and merge into hand axes. The chopping tool shown here is from northern China, but is almost certainly much later than Homo erectus. Compared with the simple chopper above, notice how the skillful removal of a series of flakes has produced a nearly perfectly straight cutting edge.

Hand-Axes

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 left is the effort of a modern stone knapper to produce an imitation of a later, 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.

Scrapers

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, photo by DKJ

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.

For most tasks, 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 left, which is only about two inches long, and has been sharpened on one end for use in small tasks.

Scrapers were specialized to various uses. Smoothing the sides of an arrow might require a notched scraper, for example, like the one at the right. Scraping out a dish-shaped hollow might require a more defined curve, and so on. Not surprisingly museums are full of scrapers that appear to have been specialized in various ways, at least until they were grabbed for use for some other task.

Burins

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.

Any slight bulge carelessly left on the side of a scraper can allow it to function as a burin, so the line between scrapers and burins is often difficult to draw. The "burin" shown here, with the small barb on the lower-left side, was found out of context. It may or not have been intended to be a burin (depending on whether the barb was deliberate), and it may or may not actually be prehistoric. The three "scrapers" in the picture above all have small barbs which might justify calling them "burins" for some prehistorians.

Awls & Projectile Points

Punching holes in leather is a common enough challenge that many modern pocket knives include an awl, merely a pointed piece of metal, often without a sharpened blade on the side. Some Upper Paleolithic stone tools have roughly this shape and are usually identified as serving largely this purpose. The prehistoric black one and the modern yellow one shown here are examples. However, the barb on some burins is quite large, and therefore burins and awls grade into each other. The awls shown here might be classed as burins by some prehistorians.

Hafting an arrowhead to the arrow's shaft has traditionally been done by wedging it in and tying with animal sinews or plant fibers. Even if the shaft is much more carefully bevelled than this one, the widening it presents reduces the penetrating capacity of the point.

However far more complex are the points used in hunting, including arrowheads, spear points, and the like. These 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. For present purposes, the examples given there can illustrate the genre.

Terms frequently used for specialized kinds of points associate them with thrusting spears (heavier points) and throwing spears (which must be lighter), with arrows (used with bows) and darts (used with atlatls), and with harpoons (with separable handles) and leisters (with multiple prongs).

Blades

"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 (bitumen). By the close of the Paleolithic such "microflints" became typical tool parts. (In Europe prehistoric archaeologists identify a stage they call the "Mesolithic." A famous example is the Azilian archaeological tradition.)

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. Notice the intensive "retouching" that sharpens the edge by removing tiny chips of stone.

Like points, blade tools often were intended to be hafted to a handle. The modern "pizza knife" shown below illustrates how a blade would have been tied, using animal sinew or plant fiber, to a handle made of horn. The picture at the right shows a Neolithic blade forced into a handle made of a large bone.

Materials Other Than Stone

It is important to remember that we have stone tools because they are easily preserved, and, especially for very early periods, we lack examples of tools made of materials easily lost, ranging from flexible plant fibers used for clothing, basketry, fencing, or shelter thatch, to dense but ultimately impermanent materials like wood, ivory, antler, or bone. Many, perhaps most, tools used in the Paleolithic were probably not made of stone.

The modern Amazonian toothed knife shown at right is made of bone, and the modern Costa Rican arrow points shown at the left are wooden. Similar tools made and used in the early Paleolithic would almost surely not survive to modern times. (We do in fact have some bone and wood tools from late Paleolithic times.)

But the early Paleolithic surely had non-stone tools. It seems inconceivable that Homo habilis would have made choppers but never used a stick to pick his teeth, or that Homo erectus would have hunted with a stone-tipped thrusting spear, but would never done so with a pointed wooden pole. We know that wood and bamboo can produce remarkably sharp points and that they are still used as skewers today. Why should we imagine that to be a modern or even an Upper Paleolithic discovery?

Curators at the Wangfujing Paleolithic Site Museum in Beijing wisely included a life-sized waxwork showing a wooden spear being sharpened with a stone scraper as a reminder of this. In fact, at that site (dating to 22,000 - 23,000 BC) a fair number of bone and wood tools were recovered, including the bone burin at the left below and the bone points (possibly awls) at the right.

Basic Stone Tools

A Beginner's Guide for College Students