MAKING AND USING STONE TOOLS: ADVICE FOR LEARNERS AND TEACHERS AND

INSIGHTS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS

John J. Shea
Anthropology
Stony Brook University
ABSTRACT
Gaining experience with stone tool technology can be an important part of professional
archaeological training as well as a valuable learning experience in its own right. This paper
summarizes its author's insights gained from making and using stone tools and from teaching
these skills to college students for more than two decades. It argues that teaching stone tool
production and use to a wider audience will, in the long term, provide a baseline against which to
measure archaeological lithic variation.
INTRODUCTION.
Stone tools are the most alien of artifacts archaeologists recover from our excavations.
Relics of a lost world of the Stone Age, they remind us that not very long ago on an evolutionary
timescale everyone made their own tools, gathered their own food, and lived by their wits.
Today, we call persons who make stone tools "flintknappers" after historic craftsmen who made
gunflints. In earlier times, when stone tool production was a more universal skill, the equivalent
terms were probably more along "that guy/gal", or "Hey, you". Few of us today make our own
tools or gather our own food. When we live by our wits, it is more often to find a parking space
than to avoid carnivore predation. Discovering how stone tools were made and used can be a
vital part of a young person's education. For students in industrial societies, a stone tool made in
a flintknapping class may be the first tool they make by hand themselves. It can also be a step
towards a lifelong interest, even a career, in anthropology. This paper provides advice for
readers who want to learn how to make and use stone tools and for educators considering
developing a class on this and other "ancestral" technologies. For archaeologists, it also offers
up insights gleaned from two decades of teaching ancestral technology to college students.
I have been interested in ancestral technology since I was a child. I dabbled with making
stone tools as a teenager in Boy Scouts, but I only began to make a serious and concerted effort
to acquire knapping skills when I was a college student majoring in archaeology and
anthropology. These efforts intensified in graduate school (Shreeve 1995). While a graduate
student, I taught flintknapping and stone tool use to small groups of students and avocational
archaeologists. Since 1992 I have taught classes in stone tool production and use to college
students approximately twelve times (once every other year, three hours weekly, to 15-20
students each term) for a total of a little more than two hundred students so far. Most of my
students have been 18-22 years old, with an even mix of men and women. Each spring, I teach
informal lessons on how to make and use stone tools at our Anthropology Society's annual "Goat
Roast" (Figure 1), at which we butcher a goat with stone tools and then barbeque it.
Initially, I taught stone tool production as a lab attached to a course in archaeological
lithic analysis. After about ten years of doing this, I switched to teaching stone tool production
and use along with a battery of other ancestral skills. These other skills include how to make
fire, glue, string, and wooden tools, how to identify useful and edible plants, how to use
projectile weapons (bow and arrow, spearthrower and dart), how to make mineral pigments and
personal adornments (stone beads), how to avoid hypo/hyperthermia, and how to identify animal

tracks and signs. For me, one of the very surprising results of this curricular shift was
discovering just how little one actually needs stone tools to accomplish many of these tasks.
Several times a year, I receive requests for advice from colleagues and other interested
persons about how to teach or learn about ancestral technology and/or flintknapping. This paper
is a longer and more systemic synthesis of my responses to those requests. Each of the sections
addresses somewhat different if overlapping audiences, learners (those who want to gain stonetool-making/using skills), teachers (those who want to integrate such skills into their course
curricula), and archaeologists curious about what insights about prehistory can arise from
teaching stone tool technology to modern-day college students.
Author's Note: Much of what follows below is opinion, opinion based on experience, but
opinion nevertheless. I am not the only person who teaches stone tool production and use.
Others who do so may have different opinions than mine. Behavioral variability, finding more
than one way to solve the same problem is one of our species' most distinctive characteristics
(Shea 2011). I present my views here in hope that they will be helpful to learners/teachers, but I
also do so to stimulate debate among archaeologists who teach lithics and other ancestral
technologies. An annotated bibliography at the end of the paper lists additional sources of
information about stone tool production and use.
This paper assumes the reader knows basic terms for stone tools, such as
hammerstone/percussor, core, flake, retouch, and core reduction (for those who do not, see Table
1). Other less-familiar terms used below require brief explanation. Flake production from nonhierarchical cores involves detaching flakes from cores on whose working edges the striking
platform and flake detachment surfaces are interchangeable (Figure 2). That is, they are
reversed/rotated between flake detachments. In flake production with hierarchical cores, striking
platform and flake detachment surfaces are treated differently from one another. Generally,
shorter and thicker flakes are detached from one side of the edge and longer and thinner flakes
are detached from the other. Shaping involves the patterned imposition of "non-intrinsic" shape,
that is, morphological qualities other than those achieved by opportunistic flake removal. Such
qualities can include elongation, thinness, notches, tangs, points, or morphologically-distinct
cutting edges (Figure 3). (Some otherwise English-language references about stone tools use the
French terms, dbitage and faonnage for flake production and shaping. For consistency and
clarity, this paper uses the English terms.)
ADVICE FOR LEARNERS
Learning how to make and use stone tools can be a lot of fun. It can become a life-long
hobby, even a professional craft. Gatherings of craft/hobby knappers occur all over North
America and Europe. Listings of these events can be found on many Internet sites. (A Google
search on "knap-ins" yields around 300,000 results.) Such knap-ins can be opportunities to learn
and share information about making and using stone tools as well as other historic and ancestral
technologies (Whittaker 2004).
Equipment
Most flintknappers maintain a dedicated toolkit. My own (Figure 4) contains various
kinds of percussors and protective padding. When I travel by air to give demonstrations, I bring
a more compact kit (hammerstone, antler billet, pressure-flaker, abrading stone and leather pad).
If you are transporting stone in checked luggage, wrap edges in protective covering (duct tape
works well) so that they do not injure security personnel and baggage handlers.

Safety
Stone tools are sharp. If you make and use them, you will get cut. Most of the cuts will
be minor and can be handled with a simple bandage. They can also involve wounds that require
stitches and prompt medical attention. Before trying to make and use stone tools, purchase a
supply of bandages, including gauze and tape to cope with more serious cuts. Have them visible
and near at hand before knapping. Have someone else present when one is knapping and the
means to summon emergency medical attention. Wear safety glasses. Sharp rock fragments can
cause permanent damage to ones eyes. Knap outdoors or in well-ventilated rooms. Fracturing
silica-rich rock releases fine, angular, and microscopic silica particles into the air. Inhaling this
silica dust can permanently damage ones lungs. Many gunflint knappers died in their thirties
and forties due to damage silica particles caused to their lungs (silicosis). As with any repetitive
stress, flintknapping can cause tissue damage, such as tendonitis. The best way to avoid such
injuries is to knap in moderation, no more than an hour or so at a time. If flintknapping causes
pain, stop, and consult a physician.
Learning
There are many self-taught flintknappers, but the most time-efficient way to learn
flintknapping is in a class with an expert knapper who is also an experienced teacher. One can
find many websites advertising instruction in stone tool production/use on the Internet. There is
no professional licensing of flintknapping instructors, so do some background research before
signing up for classes. Competence at making stone tools does not make one a good teacher any
more than it makes one a good archaeologist.
Most flintknapping is taught as a craft or hobby. Craft/hobby knappers produce
reproductions of specific kinds of archaeological stone tools or novel artifact forms inspired by
archaeological originals. These tools are usually not intended for use but rather for display or
sale (Whittaker and Stafford 1999). A smaller number of flintknappers, the author among them,
teach stone tool production as part of a wider range of ancestral skills. The tools we make are
intended for actual use, and they tend to be simpler in overall design.
How long it will take to learn to make stone tools depends what one wants to make.
Knapping flakes with non-hierarchical cores (bipolar cores, pebble cores) ought to take no more
than a few minutes, and it can be done with any conchoidally-fracturing rock. A few kilograms
of such rock are sufficient for this purpose. Learning how to hierarchically retouch flakes is also
relatively easy and can be done with similar materials. If one wants a retouched edge that is
straight, use the ventral side of an edge as the striking platform surface and the dorsal side as the
flake detachment surface. Otherwise the retouched edge follows the dorsal surface's irregular
contour.
Learning how to make relatively simple elongated non-hierarchical cores, such as
handaxes and other "long core tools" (LCTs) ought to take another hour or so. Making LCTs
requires large and flatter pieces of higher quality lithic material (large flakes or tabular pieces of
rock) amounting to tens of kilograms. More complex forms of elongated non-hierarchical cores,
such as thinned bifaces, tanged bifaces/points, and celts may require several more hours of
practice. Bifacial hierarchical cores and blade cores require a bit more time (3-6 hours) and at
least 10-50 kilograms of high-quality lithic raw material.
Raw Material Procurement

Knappable stone, i.e., stone with conchoidal fracture properties, can be found in nearly
every part of the world. The most obvious places to seek such rock in bulk are road-cuts and
geological faults. However, bedrock exposures of brittle rock often contain crystallization planes
and incompletely propagated fractures that can be obstacles to fracture propagation. Rivers,
streams, gullies and beaches located downslope from bedrock sources can contain clasts
(rounded rocks) and angular rock fragments with fewer internal fractures in them. Some
flintknapping supply companies, and knappers themselves, sell and ship raw rock, prepared
blocks of stone, or flakes in-in bulk.
Most craft/hobby knappers prefer to work with either volcanic glass (obsidian), industrial
glass, or with very fine-grained silicate rocks (e.g., flint, chert, jasper, chalcedony). Glass and
fine-grained rocks require less force to initiate a fracture, and their fracture qualities are more
predictable. They also have the sharpest cutting edges of any rock, edges sharper than metal
knives. If you are either a novice knapper, or teaching a class to novices, do not use obsidian.
The most severe injuries my students and I have suffered, and the only ones (so far) that required
surgery, all involved obsidian. Novice knappers should start with tougher rocks with larger
crystals and lower silica content, such as fine-grained volcanics (dacite, rhyolite, basalt) or
flint/chert. (For classroom demonstrations to younger audiences, freezing and then percussionflaking a block of chocolate can be a crowd-pleaser.)
Many knappers heat-treat sedimentary rocks before working with them. Heattreatment (or thermal alteration) involves slowly heating chert, flint, or some other sedimentary
rock to above 260 C (500 F) for several hours then cooling it slowly (Crabtree and Butler
1964). Exposure to heat creates micro-fractures in quartz crystals that lower the overall tensile
strength of the rock (Domanski and Webb 2007). This makes the treated rock more brittle and
easier to knap. Heat-treatment can alter the color and reflective properties of the rock, and some
knappers do this for aesthetic purposes or to improve fracture properties of tougher rocks (Brown
et al. 2009). Heat-treated rocks must be cooled slowly; otherwise they will shatter, or even
explode.
Manufacturing Techniques
Throwing rocks, direct percussion on an anvil, bipolar percussion, and freehand
percussion are the simplest ways to obtain stone tools with sharp cutting edges (Figure 5).
Fracturing rocks by throwing them at a hard substrate has obvious limitations in terms of
controlling the shapes of the resulting cores/flakes (as well as considerable safety risks), but it
works and is in widespread use among ethnographic stone-tool-makers (Isaac 1987). Anvil
percussion can produce large flakes, but one must take care that the flake detaches itself away
from you. Bipolar percussion can produce vast quantities of small, sharp and thin flakes, but as
the core grows smaller, the risk of injuring ones fingers increases. Holding the core in a clamp
formed by two pieces of wood lashed together at one end or enclosed in a bit of leather or fabric
reduces this risk. Striking a core with a hammerstone held in the hand ("freehand knapping")
offers more control, but with an elevated risk of injury as the core becomes smaller. Setting the
core on the ground and striking it from above and to the side with a hammerstone not only
reduces risk of injury but it also allows one to make larger flakes.
Most of the advice I give to novice knappers in my classes about how to initiate and
control conchoidal fracture concerns recognizing core edges with appropriate external angles,
moving the percussor with sufficient force, and abducting the wrist while striking (Figure 6). All
other things being equal, core edges with smaller external angles result in shorter flakes (Figure

7). To obtain sufficient momentum to detach a large flake, most students need to move the
hammerstone 15-25 cm from the intended core surface. Abducting the wrist allows one to
continue loading force onto the flake/core during fracture propagation, pushing the flake further.
For hard-hammer percussion, hammerstones of tougher non-brittle rocks work best. The
rocks I use for this purpose are basalt, limestone, sandstone, and quartzite. Angular rocks make
poor hammerstones because their edges make them difficult to grip. Most hammerstones my
students and I use weigh less than a kilogram and are between 5-10 centimeters in diameter.
Hammerstones that are discoidal or cylindrical allow one to strike the core more precisely than
spherical hammerstones. (I prefer hammerstones roughly the same size and shape as a hockey
puck.) Hammerstones used continuously have relatively short use-lives. They quickly develop
patches of comminution (multiple overlapping and incompletely-propagated fractures) that
disperse force from the hammerstone onto multiple points on a core surface simultaneously.
This creates multiple fractures that terminate one another when they intersect early on in fracture
propagation.
For "soft" hammer percussion, I find antler the best material. One can use cortical bone
as well, but it dries out quickly and then fractures. Dense hardwoods can also serve as
percussors for more brittle stone, such as obsidian. Even more so than hammerstones,
antler/bone/wood percussors become pitted during use. One needs to regularly abrade them to a
smooth contour. Shed antler can be found around mid-winter in any area where deer, elk, moose
or reindeer/caribou aggregate. Cut pieces of antler and bone can also be purchased from pet
supply stores, who sell them as chew toys for dogs. There is a lot of overlap between what one
can do with soft vs. hard hammer percussion, but I find soft hammer percussion allows me to
detach longer and thinner flakes than hard hammer percussion does.
In seeking a point along an edge to initiate a fracture, one should look for an edge formed
by surfaces that converge at 90 degrees or less. The striking platform surface should be flat,
convex or moderately concave. The flake detachment surface should not be concave. One
obtains far better results if one abrades an edge before striking it. Doing this removes weak parts
of the edge that would otherwise absorb energy from the hammer and reduce the amount of force
transmitted into the flake as the fracture is propagating. I use angular pieces of sandstone for this
task, but any abrasive rock will do. How far in from the edge to strike depends on so many
variable that it defies easy generalization. I tell students to aim about 0.5-1.0 cm in from edge
and then urge them to experiment.
In pressure flaking, one places the tip of a piece of antler, bone, wood, stone or metal
close to the edge of the tool and then slowly increases load until a fracture occurs. (The "trick",
as it were, is to push into the rock and across the edge simultaneously.) Prior abrasion of an edge
vastly improves the results of pressure flaking. Most knappers pressure flake while holding the
core/tool in the hand between palm and fingers, with a leather pad placed under the flake
detachment surface. Others place the stone tool in a wood clamp or on some form of anvil. For
the pressure flaker itself, many knappers use a small piece of antler lashed to a wooden handle
whose proximal end they rest on their hip. Through leverage, this arrangement reduces the
amount of strain on ones wrist and increases the amount of force that can be brought to bear on
an edge. Some knappers use thick copper wire enclosed in a wooden handle for pressure flaking.
There are many other techniques for manufacturing stone tools, including indirect
percussion and pressure-flaking using clamps and levers. Guidance on these "advanced"
ancestral technologies can be found in the specialist knapping literature listed at the end of this
paper.

Tool Use
The archaeological literature offers surprisingly little guidance about how to use stone
tools. Using stone tools for forceful cutting tasks differs from using metal axes or machetes.
Metal tool edges are thin and generally cut deeper than stone tools under similar loading
conditions (applications of force)(Saraydar and Shimada 1971). They also resist bending and
torsion more so than stone tool edges. Using stone tools effectively for heavy-duty cutting tasks
requires a slower pace of work than using metal tools does. For less-forceful cutting tasks, I find
the best way to accomplish them with hand-held stone tools is to place the stone cutting edge on
a surface and then gradually increase the applied force.
The sharpest edge is an unretouched edge. Retouched edges have more complex
geometry and topography, and for this reason they lose more energy to friction during cutting
motions than unretouched edges do. Ground and polished edges can be superior to retouched
edges in heavy-duty woodcutting, but this difference varies with the nature of the task involved.
When they fracture at microscopic scales, unretouched edges are in a sense self-sharpening.
Abraded-edge tools, in contrast, require frequent resharpening.
Whether one is cutting longitudinally (as with a saw) or scraping (as when peeling a
carrot), I find edges remain sharper if one moves them in one direction only. Cutting back-andforth in both directions dulls a stone tool edge quicker than single-direction cutting. As with
metal saws and files, back-and-forth cutting allows small particles of the worked material to clog
both sides of the ridges and convexities along tool worked edges. Periodically wiping the
working edge in a direction perpendicular to the way in which one is cutting can remove these
particles and preserve cutting edge functionality.
Steeper edges seem to resist microfracturing wear better than narrower ones.
Ethnographic humans often used such steep edges for orthogonal cutting of harder materials
(Holdaway and Douglas 2012, McCall 2012). Narrow edges fracture and dull quickly, but they
can be adequate for brief use and on soft materials. It is difficult to generalize about the rates at
which abrasive wear accumulates because so many variables affect it (i.e., grit, lubrication,
loading rates, lithic materials).
If one is seeking tools to be used while held directly in the hand (i.e., unattached to a
handle), the optimal artifact size depends on how one intends to hold it. For tools held in a
power grip (fingers in opposition to palm), the tool should be larger in area than the palm of
ones hand. Thickness can vary, but the thicker the tool, the less of its surface will be securely
grasped. I prefer tools >1-3 cm thick for more forceful cutting tasks. For tools used while held
between ones fingers, artifacts much longer than 10 cm long or wide and/or 3 cm thick can
become unwieldy, causing cramps in ones thumb and palm. Artifacts much smaller than 1-2 cm
long can be difficult to hold and use because ones fingers cover so much of their surface area.
One can improve small tools potential utility by embedding them in mastic or wrapping them in
tree bark or fibers, thereby increasing the surface area available for gripping them. Doing this
reduces the edge available for use, but it can improve the tool's utility.
Hafted stone tools (stone tools attached to handles) have few size limitations.
Ethnographic examples of hafted tools range from microliths less than a centimeter long to celts
weighing several kilograms. Attaching a stone tool to a handle increases the amount of force
that can be brought to bear on its edge, but enclosing part of the tool in a handle limits the range
of tool movements. It also concentrates wear on that exposed edge. Hafting can allow one to do
things with stone tools that are difficult or impossible to do with hand-held implements, but

hafting has considerable associated costs. All of the materials necessary, stone tools, fibers,
glue, and handle have to be prefabricated, and assembled in a correct sequence. Tipping
projectile weapons, rotary drilling, and heavy-duty carpentry, all involve high rates of edgeattrition. Stone tools used for these tasks wear out quickly and need to be repaired and replaced
frequently (Keeley 1982). Fibers and mastic made of plant or animal tissues often loosen under
repetitive strain. These need to be readjusted regularly during use to prevent them from slipping
and the tool coming detached from the handle. Needless to say, replacement parts need to be
maintained on hand near to where such hafted tools are being used.
Stone tools used as weapon armatures can take many forms. Projectile point shape is
more constrained with heavy and slow moving weapons, such as thrusting spears and the tips of
hand-cast spears (Shea 2006b). Tips of these weapons from ethnographic contexts tend to be
triangular and relatively thick in cross-section. Shape is less constrained among fast moving
weapons, such as arrows and spearthrower dart tips. Essentially, anything with an edge or a
sharp tip can work as a projectile point, provided one can accelerate it fast enough (Odell and
Cowan 1986).
Fat and grit complicate using stone tools for butchery. After even short periods of
cutting, fat and blood coat stone tool surfaces, requiring ever-greater amounts of force to prevent
the tool from slipping during use (Frison 1978). Grit embedded in animal hair can quickly dull
cutting edges. Experimental archaeologists disagree over the relative merits of using retouched
vs. unretouched edges as butchery knives (Jones 1980, Schick and Toth 1993). For me, time
makes all the difference. If the butchery task is only going to take a few minutes (smaller
animals or small portions of large animals), there are only negligible differences between
retouched and unretouched edges. In more prolonged tasks, retouched edges' ridges and
concavities provide purchase for fat to adhere, quickly diminishing cutting edge effectiveness.
At our "Goat Roast", I use hand-held retouched tools to remove animal hides and to disarticulate
limbs from one another. To remove meat from bones, I use hand-held flakes with unretouched
cutting edges, discarding them when they become too slippery to hold.
When using flakes for short periods, I rarely retouch them. When I do have to resharpen
an unretouched flake during butchery, I create a denticulated edge by striking the worn edge with
the edge of another flake. Such expediently retouched edges are never as sharp as the original
unretouched edge, but they work adequately for a short while. The only real exceptions to this,
in which I retouch stone tool cutting edges, are when I have a limited supply of replacement tools
or when the stone tool is enclosed in a handle.
Ethnographic humans often use stone tools to remove fat and muscle from the inside of
animal hides prior to tanning (Brandt and Weedman 1997). The fat on such surfaces lubricates
the tool edge and degrades tool performance. Spreading wood ash on the hide prior to working
speeds this process, but it also increases edge abrasion, requiring frequent tool resharpening and
replacement. Hide-scraping is fatiguing no matter how one does it, but in my experience, hafted
stone hide-scrapers work far better for this task than hand-held ones.
Cutting soft plant matter with stone tools requires little comment other than that one
should take care that stone tool fragments do not end up in plants being prepared as food.
Cracking nuts and grinding and pulverizing seeds is best done on a flat or concave tool surface.
Anvil stones pitted from bipolar core reduction can be co-opted for such tasks.
Carving wood with hand-held stone tools is a slow process. One can speed it up by using
relatively large tools and/or by exposing the wooden surfaces to fire (charring) prior to cutting or
scraping them (Crabtree and Davis 1968). Woodworking causes rapid edge dulling, and edges

used for this purpose need to be resharpened regularly. Other than charring, most of the
principles for using stone tools for woodworking also apply to carving tough materials like bone,
antler, ivory, or stone.
Digging through soil is one of those tasks in which stone has few advantages over tools
made from wood, bone, or antler. Collisions between rocks and soil particles cause rapid edgedamage, swiftly degrading stone tool effectiveness in digging.
Disposal and Discard
If you intend to sell the stone tools you make, check the Internet for pricing. The stone
artifacts that sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars are mostly knife blades pressureflaked from slabs of rock cut with a lapidary saw, mounted in attractive wood or antler handles
and marketed to knife collectors. It is illegal to misrepresent recently-made artifacts as
antiquities, and in many states it is illegal to misrepresent tools as "Indian artifacts" unless they
were made by a recognized member of a Native American tribe. One can sell artifacts as
teaching specimens for use in classrooms or for display in museums in place of genuine
antiquities, though epoxy casts of such artifacts handle the wear and tear of repeated handling
better than stone tools do. (Mr. Pete Bostrum's Lithic Casting Lab of Troy, Illinois, markets
museum-grade epoxy casts of major stone tool types.)
Many craft/hobby knappers use inscribe their initials and a production date onto artifacts
they intend to sell or to give away as gifts. This prevents such artifacts from being mistaken for
antiquities. Labeling thousands of individual flakes and minute knapping debris is obviously
impossible. The simplest way to keep modern-day knapping byproducts away from prehistoric
artifacts is to put them in a landfill with other modern-day trash.
ADVICE FOR TEACHERS
Few colleges and universities offer courses on stone tool production or other ancestral
technology skills. One suspects this is not so much due to perceived risks of injury. Colleges
and universities regularly encourage, students to participate in activities, such as football, that
have considerably higher risks of serious injury than flintknapping. More likely, it is because
prospective instructors recognize that teaching such courses requires not only relevant expertise,
but also an enormous commitment of time and money, and often lab space as well.
Preparing to Teach
First, know what you teach (see Advice for Learners, above). You do not need advanced
flintknapping skills to teach students how to make or use stone tools, but you do need to be
competent with the basics. These basics include flake production from hierarchical and nonhierarchical cores and shaping. Showing a filmed knapping demonstration by an expert (or
yourself) can show close-up images of activities that are difficult to convey to a large audience in
a live demonstration. Doing this also allows one to deal with questions that would be difficult to
answer while knapping. As Eren and colleagues report (2010), there are many videos available
on Youtube.com, but their quality and pedagogical value vary widely. Most of these videos
emphasize shaping rather than flake production or basic knapping.
There are several ways to market a course on flintknapping/primitive technology. First,
one can promote the course as basic science. Learning to design experiments and to control
conchoidal fracture are hypothesis testing in its simplest forms (Eren 2009). Second, one can
promote the curriculum as a humanities subject, as a kind of sculpture. The most straightforward

way to promote such a class, however, is to offer it as an exploration of how anthropologists

study technology and the transmission of technical knowledge. Few other anthropology subjects
so seamlessly blend mechanics, experimentation, ethnography, cognitive science, aesthetics, and
archaeology as flintknapping does.
Many students view stone tool production as a "survival" skill. It is crucial to disabuse
them of this belief. Fine motor skills degrade quickly when one is cold, tired, frightened, and
disoriented (Lundin 2003). In such circumstances, creating a bleeding wound through trying to
knap stone is, literally, the opposite of "survival" technology. It just makes a bad situation
worse.
How many students per class? In my experience, the right ratio is twelve students per
instructor, but one can boost that number up to 15-18 if one has a teaching assistant with prior
knapping experience. More than this degrades the educational experience by spreading one-onone instruction too thin. My weekly three-hour lab with twelve students only allows me to spend
a total of 15 minutes with each of them.
Before offering the course, consult with university officials about how to deal with
potential injuries and liability issues. Having students sign a waiver about responsibility for
injuries holds little or no legal power, but it shows a good-faith effort that can help in the
aftermath of a serious injury. Instructors should have first aid training and about three times as
many bandages as one thinks one will need. Young people unaccustomed to minor cuts will
apply bandages to wounds profligately. Keep a supply or latex gloves for yours and assistants'
use in treating wounds. Review basic first aid procedures before the first knapping lab begins.
In an emergency, you can overcome the "bystander effect" (people standing around doing
nothing) by telling specific students by name what you want them to do. The same technique
works well in setting up/breaking down outdoor lab equipment.
Gearing Up and Pedagogical Strategies
In equipping students, I initially had them select a hammerstone, antler billet, leather pad,
and raw material from a communal supply. This created two problems. First, expensive antler
tools, leather pads, and raw material often went missing. Second, students had no incentive to be
economical with raw materials. Some students would go through vast amounts of rock
seemingly without effect on their learning, while others were more economical. Not being able
to predict this in advance made it difficult to plan raw material purchases. Eventually, I charged
each student a lab fee for which they received a plastic bucket, several kilograms of rock, a
medium-sized antler billet, and a leather pad. We marked each with their names, and they kept
them at the end of the class. If they lost tools or ran out of raw materials, it was their
responsibility to procure replacements. I keep several dozen kilograms of rock on hand for such
purposes, handing them over to students who show me a receipt from a supplier indicating
replacement materials are on their way. Having them monitor their supplies in this way helps
inform discussions about prehistoric artifact curation practices.
The following seven factors most significantly improve teaching/learning flintknapping
in my classes:
1. Have students work in groups of two or three in an area not much more than 10 meters
in diameter. Encourage them to talk while they work. This ensures insights about what works
and what does not are shared quickly and effectively.
2. Plan seating arrangements to maximize interpersonal contact and to minimize
instructor movement (Figure 8). In the stereotypical "classroom" seating, with instructor facing

students, the students are bunched together and cannot see what one another are doing. This also
makes it difficult for the instructor to circulate among them. In "radial/centripetal" seating
students are arranged in a circle facing inward towards the instructor. Unavoidably, the
instructor ends up talking while facing away from some students. Circulating among them
requires needless movement by the instructor and reduces instruction time. "Clustering"
optimizes instruction time spent instructing. In clustering, students sit in groups of two or three
and the instructor visits them in a circuit. Having the students leave an open space in each
cluster allows the instructor to visit the cluster without requiring the students to reposition
themselves. It also minimizes the risk of students striking each other with flakes detached by
percussion.
3. Have students knap while sitting on the ground, rather than on chairs. Sitting on the
ground, one spends less time picking up dropped tools. Also, sitting on the ground for a long
time is uncomfortable. It compels students to get up, walk around and interact with one another,
further sharing useful insights.
4. Limit the toolmaking techniques to the basics. Hard-hammer percussion (bipolar and
freehand), soft-hammer percussion and backing/truncation by pressure against a stone are
sufficient for most toolmaking needs. Invasive pressure-flaking and indirect percussion can be
taught, but their learning curves are steep. Few benefits accrue to students other than those who
go on to become craft/hobby knappers.
5. Plan your classroom time carefully. Develop a structure and stick with it so that it is
predictable. Otherwise, you will spend enormous amounts of time and energy answering student
questions individually that can better be dealt with collectively. I start with a briefing (what they
are going to learn and why it is important) then let students work for about 30-40 minutes while I
circulate among them. About the middle of the lab session, we all get up and re-convene away
from the knapping area and discuss problems, questions, or other issues. If necessary, I do
another demonstration, then set the students back to their knapping area. About 30 minutes
before the end of class, I do a final 10 minute briefing and tell students they have 10 minutes to
finish up what they are doing or to ask me questions before we begin cleaning up. I do not let
students ask me questions while we are cleaning up, because during that time I have to be alert
for potential safety issues. In my experience, most accidents occur when students are hurrying to
clean up at the end of class.
6. Avoid object-focused learning. Exhorting students to make particular artifact-types
frustrates them. Few of them can learn to make reproductions of the desired artifact forms in the
limited time afforded by most courses. Instead, teach sequences of gestures, such as how to hold
hammerstones and cores and how to strike them together in addition to toolmaking strategies.
The toolmaking strategies that a comprehensive course should cover include flake production
from hierarchical and non-hierarchical cores and shaping. For the latter, I usually encourage
students to try to make reproductions of handaxes and other Lower Paleolithic long core tools
(LCTs). Shaping LCTs is a reasonable and achievable goal for novice knappers. Having the
students match their LCTs to those in Bordes' (1961) Typologie du Palolithique ancien et
moyen or its English counterpart Debnath and Dibble's (1994) Handbook of Paleolithic
Typology, can help to bridge the curricular gap between tool-making and archaeological lithic
analysis.
7. No matter what you do, students will take lithic materials back to their homes,
dormitories, or elsewhere on campus practice knapping on their own time. To avoid

10

contaminating the local archaeological record, one can provide students with lithic raw materials
that do not occur in the local geological substrate.
Lastly, students also need to understand that stone tool production and use are not
shortcuts to truth about prehistory. Competence at making and using stone tools does not make
one's hypotheses about the past more likely to be correct. Appeal to authority/experience holds
no more weight in archaeology than in any other scientific activity, which is to say none
whatsoever. This being said, any experience can be a source of hypotheses, and perhaps more so
than many other activities, making and using stone tools can inspire hypotheses about the
archaeological formation processes affecting the lithic record.
INSIGHTS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS
Archaeological lithic analysis has a long tradition of experimentation (Flenniken 1984,
Johnson 1978). This tradition has considerable depth in African prehistory (Jones 1981, Leakey
1960, Schick and Toth 1993), but it also graces research in other regions and in more recent time
periods (Callahan 1996, Flenniken 1978). This section summarizes some of the hypotheses that
have occurred to me as a result of teaching students how to make and use stone tools. One
hesitates to label them "insights", for they may well be wrong, but at the very least they are
hypotheses we may be able to test with archaeological evidence.
Tool Manufacturing
After an hour or so, most students can detach flakes from non-hierarchical cores in a
predictable fashion. The amount of time it takes individuals to learn this varies widely, but it is
probably much shorter, closer to 15-20 minutes. Learning to make simple stone tools by
controlled fracture seems to be a gestalt process, like riding a bicycle. Interruptions of knapping
activities lasting weeks, months, even years, minimally impact students' abilities to resume
knapping. To me, this suggests we should not assume a strong correlation between lithic artifact
densities and the duration of site occupation. My twelve students can generate thousands of
flakes in an hour, or merely dozens of them, depending on what they happen to be doing that day
(i.e., knapping vs. carving stone beads or making red ochre powder).
Stone tools created by novice knappers include use-battered hammerstones, bipolar cores,
pebble-cores, platform cores, and flakes. Such artifacts comprise nearly all the evidence for
hominin stone tool production prior to 1.7 million years ago. To me, this suggests early
hominins were occasional or habitual tool users (like non-human primates), rather than
obligatory tool users (like humans). If this hypothesis is correct, then prolonged gaps we see in
the early Pleistocene archaeological record not explicable by sedimentary processes or
inadequate survey may reflect long-term cutbacks in hominin stone tool production, or even the
abandonment of stone tool use for prolonged periods (Shea 2010). We can test this hypothesis
by targeting those gaps in the Plio-Pleistocene record for focused archaeological survey.
Unprompted, students rarely retouch flakes. If they need to dull a sharp edge in order to
hold a tool safely, they typically abrade it rather than retouch it. Once they have seen retouch
done, they grasp the principles instantly. Novice knappers retouching flakes will create many of
the stereotyped scrapers, notches, and denticulates in traditional archaeological typologies. This
supports the hypothesis that variation among many retouched artifact-types reflects habits of
resharpening and tool curation rather than culturally-prescribed mental templates for particular
stone tool designs (Dibble 1995). This hypothesis could be tested by comparing retouched tool
assemblages made by novice knappers with inventories of retouched flake tools from

11

archaeological sites. Patterned imposition of non-intrinsic shape by retouching flakes ought to

diverge in a measureable way from tools knapped by novices.
My students rarely make burins, and I am not sure why. When students see me make
burins, there is almost invariably a surge in burin production, seemingly just for the novelty
value of the activity. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that such festive over-production of
burins and other simple retouched tools from prehistoric sites, could have arisen from similar
motives among juvenile toolmakers (Shea 2006a). Again, comparing stone tool assemblages
generated by novice knappers to archaeological lithic assemblages might allow us to identify
purposeful burin production vs. "teleoliths" (tools novices make to practice knapping).
Long core tools, thinned bifaces, bifacially-thinned and tanged/notched points, and celts
rarely appear among novice knapping products. Exceptions to this nearly always reflect a
student deliberately trying to create a reproduction of an artifact they had seen in archaeological
literature. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis (Wynn 1995) that occurrences
of such artifacts in the archeological record from 1.7 million years ago onwards reflect the social
transmission of artifact design goals and specific procedural templates.
Teaching students to knap hierarchical cores and all but the simplest of elongated nonhierarchical cores are time-consuming processes that both require social intimacy between
teacher and student (Eren, Buchanan, and O'Brien 2015, Tostevin 2012). That is, one must often
demonstrate core management up close and by arranging the student's grip on tools directly with
one's own hands (Figures 9 and 10). In both processes, flake production occurs more slowly and
deliberately than in opportunistic/non-hierarchical pebble-core reduction. This offers more
opportunities for learning with "joint attention" (Tomasello 1999). Gaps in the archaeological
record become considerably fewer and less prolonged after LCTs and other elongated bifacial
tools appear, ca. 1.7 Ma, and fewer still after hierarchical cores do so 0.3-0.5 Ma. To me, this
suggests these gaps, unlike earlier ones, merely reflect sample error, rather than abandonments
and re-inventions of tool-making strategies. Testing this hypothesis will requires us to develop
methods for detecting learning with social intimacy similar to those for blade core-reduction and
Clovis point production. Classes in which these earlier technologies are taught are logical places
in which to start developing these methods.
Geometric microliths and similar small backed tools are easy to make. This may be in
part because one can modify them by any number of techniques, such as pressure, freehand
percussion, or bipolar percussion. As long as a student is competent in one of these skills, they
can make a microlith in seconds. Students who need a simple one-use cutting tool will often
select a small flake, blunt one of its edges by dragging it across a hammerstone, and in doing so
reproduce a named artifact-type. Often, they do not retouch the "microliths" at all. To me, this
suggests two things. First, by defining "microliths" first and foremost in terms of retouched tool
morphology, we may be missing more ancient and widespread patterns of unretouched
"microlithic" tool use. Second, there may much morphological convergence in archaeological
geometric microlith variation (Kuhn and Elston 2002). Broad regional, continental, or intercontinental similarities among microliths may be less accurate indicators of cultural connections
among prehistoric toolmakers than we think them to be. Again, microliths made by "nave"
student-knappers could be a baseline against which to measure archaeological variation in
microlith morphological variability.
Tool Function

12

An adept tool user can make any kind stone artifact cut pretty much anything. That
ancestral tool users did so is regularly demonstrated by the wide range of functions inferred from
microwear and residue analyses of stone tools from pre-agricultural contexts (Odell 2001). This
suggests that for the earlier phases of prehistory there is little to be gained by reconstructing
stone tool functions with the goal of developing broadly-applicable functional typologies (Odell
1981). It may be vitally important to know if particular stone tools from a specific context were
use to cut grass, whittle wood, or divide loaves and fishes; but, any such form-function
correlations are likely to be transient things, ones that varied on cultural/historical timescales.
We should be skeptical about extrapolating them to geological/evolutionary timescales.
One of the difficulties of using insights gleaned from making and using stone tools is that
prior exposure to archaeological hypotheses about lithic variation can become hopelessly
entangled with insights we think arise solely from making and using stone tools. For example,
because I do most of the carcass disarticulation at our annual "Anthropology Goat Roast", I
maintain a curated/transported toolkit consisting of a small LCT, an retouched pointed blade, and
a relatively large flake with one steeply and invasively retouched edge (Figure 11). When I have
students remove meat from parts of disarticulated carcass, I have them select implements from
among tools knapped expediently at the start of the event. This pattern is similar to popular
archaeological models for the contrasts between portable/curated and local/expedient toolkits
(Binford 1979, Kuhn 1993, Parry and Kelly 1987), and very similar to hypothetical curated and
expedient components of stone tool assemblages discarded by Neandertals in southern France
45,000-100,000 years ago (Geneste 1988). I am fairly certain I arrived at this strategy on my
own back in the mid-1980s, but it is not impossible that my strategy reflects insights from the
archaeological literature I read as a student.
CONCLUSION
Each year, after my "Primitive Technology" class is over, and I am nursing all manner of
cuts and contusions, at least one colleague asks me why I do it. Why don't I just lecture about
stone tools like professors do about other subjects? I have two answers at the ready. The first is
that I want future generations to remember the skills that got our ancestors through the
Pleistocene Ice Ages so that they can use them to get through the next one. But this is really just
rhetoric. Even if centuries passed without stone tools being knapped anywhere on Earth, future
humans who needed stone cutting tools would re-discover how to make them. The real reason is
that teaching students how to make and use stone tools is an investment. Archaeology needs a
baseline against which to measure the significance of variation in the prehistoric lithic record.
What does it mean that there are two, or six, or ten different ways to detach flakes from cores in
evidence in one lithic assemblage and different numbers in others? How different do two lithic
operational sequences have to be in order to assign significance to that difference? Answers to
these questions cannot come from the archaeological record because we cannot observe how
stone tools were made and used in the past. To assign meaning to variation and variability, we
need to observe stone tool production and use. The number of ethnographic contexts in which to
do this is diminishing. The only way to overcome this problem is to create more ethnographic
stone-tool-makers. One way to meet this goal is by making detailed observations of craft/hobby
knapping, but craft specialization like that practiced by craft/hobby knappers appears to be a
recent institution. Most credible evidence for it in prehistory dates to Holocene times and from
relatively sedentary societies (Clark and Parry 1990). To develop more general models of lithic
production, we need to create large numbers of stone-tool-makers/users who are not craft

13

specialists and whose lithic "fallout" we can study in order to develop middle-range theoretical
principles for interpreting archaeological stone tool variation. One cannot use students in one's
classes as experimental subjects, of course, but graduates of those classes, properly motivated
and compensated, can be such experimental subjects. The more of them there are, the more such
experiments can be done.
Making and using stone tools can be both a richly rewarding hobby and a valuable
teaching strategy. Few things visibly connect one with the prehistoric past better than stone tools
do. They are vivid reminders of our ancestors' ingenuity. Surely it is no accident that the only
hominin species to survive the Pleistocene ice ages was also the one with the most widespread,
enduring, and variable record of stone tool use. Australopithecines and early Homo made and
used stone tools in Africa between 2-3 million years ago, remained there, and became extinct. A
few species of the Genus Homo who ventured further into temperate and tropical Eurasia met the
same fate. Yet, a mere 200,000 years after Homo sapiens began making stone tools in Africa
(McDougall, Brown, and Fleagle 2005), we are globally-distributed, effectively immune to all
but biosphere-level threats of extinction, and seriously contemplating dispersal beyond Earth
(Roach 2011). In "packing for Mars", however, we will not need to bring along stone tools. All
the materials we need to make them are already out there waiting for us.
In trying to convey stone tools' importance to our students and the general public,
archaeologists are often undone by our choice of words. When we refer to stone tools and other
ancestral technology as "primitive", our audiences hear "crude" or "unsophisticated". The surest
way to convince people that stone tools are neither crude nor unsophisticated is by teaching them
how to make them and challenging them to use them as creatively as their ancestors did.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Hilary Duke, Justin Pargeter, Metin Eren, and one anonymous reviewer for their
comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Edited by M. Otte, pp. 61-70. Lige: Universit de Lige.
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(Peabody Museum, Harvard University). Oakville, CT: Oxbow.
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Age and Its Effects on Archaeology. American Antiquity 64:203-214.
Wynn, T. 1995. Handaxe enigmas. World Archaeology 27:10-24.

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Annotated Bibliography of Resources for Learners and Teachers for key topics.
Conchoidal Fracture Mechanics
Cotterell, B., and J. Kamminga. 1987. The Formation of Flakes. American Antiquity 52:675-708.
Cotterell, B., and J. Kamminga. 1990. Mechanics of Pre-Industrial Technology. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Flintknapping
Callahan, E. 1979. The Basics of Biface Knapping in the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition. Archaeology of
Eastern North America 7:1-180.
Crabtree, D. 1972. An Introduction to Flintworking. Pocatello, Idaho: Idaho State Museum, Occasional
Paper No. 28.
Patten, B. 2009. Old ToolsNew Eyes: A Primal Primer of Flintknapping; Second Edition. Denver, CO:
Stone Dagger Publications.
Waldorf, D. C., and V. Waldorf. 2006. The Art of Flint Knapping (5th Edition). Branson, MO: Mound
Builder Books.
Whittaker, J. C. 1994. Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools. Austin, TX: University
of Texas Press.
Videos
Bradley, B. 1989. Flintknapping with Bruce Bradley, Ph.D. Cortez, CO: INTERpark.
Madsen, B. 2003. The Cutting Edge: A Million Years of Stone Technology. Jerusalem, Israel:
Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University.
Websites
Metin Eren's Youtube.com channel (www.youtube.com/user/MetinIEren)
Neo-Lithics (www.neo-lithics.com) Also a reliable source of knapping supplies, books, videos.
Ethnography of stone tool production and use
Brandt, S., and K. J. Weedman. 1997. "The Ethnoarchaeology of Hide Working and Flaked Stone Tool
Use in Southern Ethiopia.," in Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the 12th International
Conference on Ethiopian Studies. Edited by K. Fukui, E. Kuimoto, and M. Shigeta, pp. 351-361.
Kyoto: Shokado Book Sellers.
Gould, R. A. 1980. Living Archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hayden, B. 1979. Palaeolithic Reflections: Lithic Technology and Ethnographic Excavations among
Australian Aborigines. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Hayden, B., and M. W. Nelson. 1981. The Use of Chipped Lithic Material in the Contemporary Maya
Highlands. American Antiquity 46:885-898.
Holdaway, S., and M. Douglas. 2012. A Twenty-First Century Archaeology of Stone Artifacts. Journal
of Archaeological Method and Theory 19:101-131.
Weedman, K. 2006. An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Hafting and Stone Tool Diversity among the
Gamo of Ethiopia. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13:188-237.
Whittaker, J. C. 2004. American Flintknappers: Stone Age Art in the Age of Computers. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Videos
Brandt, S., K. Weedman, T. Belkin, and J. Shipley. 2006. Woman the Toolmaker: Hideworking and
Stone Tool Use in Konso, Ethiopia. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

17

Ancestral Skills other than flintknapping

Callahan, E. 1987. Primitive Technology: Practical Guidelines for Making Stone Tools, Pottery,
Basketry, etc. The Aboriginal Way. Lynchburg, VA: Piltdown Productions.
Watts, S. N. 2004. Practicing Primitive: A Handbook of Aboriginal Skills. Salt Lake City, UT: GibbsSmith.
Westcott, D. Editor. 1999. Primitive Technology: A Book of Earth Skills. Salt Lake City, UT: GibbsSmith, Publisher.
Westcott, D. Editor. 2001. Primitive Technology II: Ancestral Skills. Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs-Smith,
Publisher.
Bulletin of Primitive Technology. Backtracks, LLC Primitive Skills, Rexburg, ID.
(www.backtracks.com).
Schools and other sources of information, resources.
Aboriginal Living Skills School (www.codylundin.com).
Boulder Outdoor Survival School (www.boss-inc.com).
Jack Cresson's Primitive Industries (www.freewebs.com/archaeomanswife/).
John Lord's Flintknapping.co.uk (www.flintknapping.co.uk).
Tomas J. Epel's World Wide Web Portal (www.hollowtop.com).
NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR
John J. Shea is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. He is a
paleoanthropologist whose research investigates the stone tool evidence for human evolution in
Southwest Asia and Eastern Africa. Shea is the author of Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and
Neolithic Near East: A Guide (2013) and numerous other books and shorter papers. His
forthcoming book, Stone Tools in Human Evolution, will be published by Cambridge University
Press in 2016.
Correspondence to: John J. Shea, Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University,
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4364 USA. Email: john.shea@stonybrook.edu.

18

Table 1. Technical terms for stone tools used in this paper.

Term
Definition
Core
Artifact featuring large-scale fracturing
damage on their surfaces.
Core reduction
A sequential series of acts that result in flakes
being detached from a core by controlled
conchoidal fracture.
Flake
Piece of stone detached from a core by
fracture.
Flake detachment surface
On a core, that side of the worked edge under
which a fracture propagates after it is initiated.
Hammerstone
Stone used to initiate fracture in another rock.
Retouch
Small-scale fracture scars on the edges of
artifacts though to result from purposeful
human activity.
Striking platform surface
On a core, that side of the worked edge on
which a fracture originates.
Worked edge
That part of a core's circumference from which
flakes have been detached.

19

Figure 1. Stony Brook University' ANT 417 Primitive Technology Class.

Figure 2. Cross-section views of core worked edges showing (a) unifacial hierarchical flake
production, (b) bifacial hierarchical flake production and (c) non-hierarchical flake production.

2
2

1
2

1
3

4
3

20

Figure 3. Stone artifacts (a-c) whose shapes are intrinsic to the materials of which they were
made and artifacts (d-f) on which non-intrinsic shape has been imposed by shaping flake
removal. Sources: a-c. Pebble-cores from 'Ubeidiya, Israel (Shea 2013), d. long core-tool from
Mantes, France, e. Neolithic arrow from Munhata, Israel, f. Clovis point from Fenn Cache,
western United States (Shea n.d.).

b
c

f
10 cm

21

Figure 4. Knapping gear in the authors flintknapping kit: A. boxwood billet, B. reindeer antler
billet, C. moose antler billet, D. combination punch and billet, E-F. antler pressure flakers, G-I.
leather pads, J. discoidal quartzite hammerstone, K. cylindrical basalt hammerstone, L. sandstone
abrader, M. hafted antler pressure flaker, N. flowering dogwood billet, O. diamond-tipped scribe,
P. safety glasses. Not shown, bandages.
g

i
b
a

l
o

10 cm

Figure 5. Flake production by (a) throwing, (b) anvil percussion, (c) bipolar percussion, and (d)
freehand percussion.

22

Figure 6. Abduction of wrist in freehand percussion knapping.

Figure 7. Schematic cross-section diagram of a core's worked edge showing the effect of core
external platform angle on fracture propagation length.

23

Figure 8. Possible seating arrangements in knapping classes, a. "classroom", b.

"radial/centripetal", c. "clusters", d. key and detail of seating in clusters.

b
Student

Instructor

Instructor
movement
d

Figure 9. Social intimacy in teaching stone tool production.

24

Figure 10. Author guiding a student in how to hold a core and hammerstone.

Figure 11. Stone tools in the author's butchery kit. a. long core tool (LCT), b. long blade/point,
c. thick unifacially-retouched flake.

c
b
a

25