But in a study this year in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Eren and co-authors found that fluting was practical. The risky habit has perplexed scholars, with some speculating that it was an artistic flourish, a way for toolmakers to show off. Based on debris found at archaeological sites, Clovis people broke about 15 to 20 percent of their points while trying to flute them. The goal is to test why tools had certain properties: Was a form preferred because it was aerodynamic, durable or just in fashion?Įren recently investigated tools made by early Americans some 13,000 years ago called Clovis points, which have distinctive channel-like divots known as flutes. This unlimited supply of replicas - “as many as we need for statistical validity,” Eren says - enables them to conduct destructive experiments, like firing from the Spot Hogg Hooter Shooter. When identical copies of tools are required, his team uses lapidary equipment, or rock-cutters, to mass-produce them. Now he can create any tool type by hand from the 6,000 pounds of rocks his lab houses, shipped from around the world. “It was like a true apprenticeship,” Eren recalls.įor two years, Eren practiced the craft about eight hours a day - save one day per week, when he restocked his rock supply by hiking the beaches of South England, loading a backpack with 150 pounds of flint. Patten, all renowned for their toolmaking skills. It’s gesture.”Įren started making stone tools in college classes, but to become an expert, he trained at the University of Exeter under Bruce Bradley, as well as with Jacques Pelegrin and Robert J. “Most people think you need to beat the hell out of these things,” says Tryon. Every year Tryon teaches archaeology undergrads basic toolmaking the students struggle to produce forms perfected long ago by human ancestors. “Making a stone tool is not a random procedure,” says Tryon. Some reassembled cores have dozens of pieces, each a step in a complicated sequence of premeditated maneuvers.
Though tedious, this methodology of refitting has proven essential for understanding stone tool production. For three years he studied 2,259 pieces recovered from a site in England, managing to rejoin more than 500 of them (and concluding that shellac dissolved in spirit was the best adhesive for the job).Įren's lab produces and tests a variety of tools, including replica Clovis points.(Bob Christy/Kent State University) Smith reported his efforts to reassemble flakes and scraps into their original cores, like 3-D jigsaw puzzles. In the 1894 book Man, the Primeval Savage, Worthington G. Researchers deduced these steps through feats of reverse engineering. To ensure the flake fractured with the right proportions, toolmakers often first shaped the core by knocking off scrap pieces in a systematic way. Typically, a rock (the hammerstone) was used to strike another rock (the core) to remove a slender piece (the flake) that was further sculpted into the desired form, such as an arrowhead or knife. Unsure how stone tools were used, archaeologists fared better at determining how they were made. But they had no evidence that scrapers scraped or points impaled. Scholars in the 19th century devised names, like scraper, point and burin, based on shape and assumed function. It looks like a temple.”īecause stone tools are a forgotten technology, the purpose behind different styles is not self-evident. “When you find a pot, you can say it looks like a pot. “Here’s the problem: Stone tools are the least-familiar things we excavate,” says archaeologist John Shea of Stony Brook University. It’s just a matter of learning to read the stones. It has a history of the people that made it and used it,” says Christian Tryon, an archaeologist at Harvard University. Archaeologists have dug up billions of them.Įvery one of those artifacts “has a story. Thus, stone tools provide the richest record of human behavior across time and space.
While artifacts made of wood and other perishable materials degraded, those made from rock endured. For the next 99 percent of our time on this planet, our ancestors depended on stones to survive: for hunting, food preparation, constructing clothes and shelter. As early as 3.3 million years ago, human ancestors began bashing rocks into tools - a move that set our lineage on a distinct evolutionary path.
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