The Knappers

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.

Articles in the newsletter explained how to recognize whether a prehistoric implement was begun by one knapper and finished by another or how to tell the work of a left-handed caveman from that of a right-handed. A few knappers, such as Harry Shafer of Texas A&M University, can even recognize the work of knappers from the same family; the craftsmanship of a father may be clearly apparent in the work of his sons.

Even with the tools of modern stonemasons and gemcutters, flint is a very difficult medium to work. The knapper must sense where and in what direction a particular flint will fracture. Some knappers liken the ability to knap to learning to ride a bicycle--instruction is followed by failure after failure the, for no apparent reason, becomes success. With each tap, a novice causes the hard, seemingly unpredictable material to flake more nearly where desired and at precisely the chosen angle. As with bicycling, the knapper possesses a skill explicable only to others who possess it, an ability that, even neglected, will ever be completely lost. Learn to knap, some knappers insist, and in your soul you will forever be pat caveman.

Modern man meets the Stone Age

Not until almost a hundred fifty years ago did anyone begin to guess the age of the stone implements found around prehistoric habitations or what studying the artifacts could reveal about the people who fashioned them. When they were studied, and somewhat later still, replicated, knapped artifacts proved to be very revealing indeed. For example, comparison of similar artifacts from different parts of the world has suggested prehistoric migration and trade routes. The care with which the implements were knapped also suggests that early people (however primitive their lives may seem to modern man) mist have possessed as strong an aesthetic sense about their work and mist have taken as much pride in their craftsmanship as anyone today. Even the Neanderthals' flint objects were as finely crafted and decorative as they were functional. The few remaining twentieth-century Stone Age people, in places such as New Guinea, initially shape their lithic implements crudely but then finish them, not by knapping, but by coating them with resin or similar substances.

Studying knapping--and actually working with expertly replicated tools--may even suggest to archaeologists how early people may have arranged their days. Working with replicated tools, one can determine, within minutes, how much time it took caveman to fell trees, how quickly tools wore out, and how and why certain wear patterns occurred. (To determine such things with genuine prehistoric tools would, of course, mean destroying irreplaceable artifacts.)

Using replicated tools, some modern knappers have conducted very dramatic experiments. At Front Royal, Virginia, the Smithsonian Institution's resident knapper, anthropologist Dennis Stanford, once organized the butchering, with hand-knapped knives, of a four-thousand-pound elephant. Although modern knappers do, from time to time, kill game with flint-tipped weapons, there was no need in the case of the Smithsonian's elephant; it had died of natural causes.

For Bruce Bradley, a Cortez Colorado archaeologist, the butchering was hardly a novel experience; on a previous occasion, he had dismembered another elephant and a bison for PBS television cameras. "I suppose we could have killed that one with flint-tipped spears or arrows," he said--and then admitted, "but we didn't because we're not that great hunters, and we might simply have wounded it."

Lithic masters

The majority of knappers are men. Indeed, anthropologists generally believe that knapping was always men's work, since in twentieth-century Stone Age communities only men knap. Yet, among modern knappers, a few women knap. One example is Margaret Graham of Waco, Texas, an entirely self-taught knapper, who has produced work of sufficient quality of be exhibited in the anthropology section of the Baylor University Museum.

Graham learned the craft by watching primitive knappers in Mexico. (Only watching, she stressed, since only the men were allowed to knap.) Graham first roughs out a stone implement and then does the finishing while sitting on her haunches, elbows wedged between her knees. In small hops, like a toad with hiccups, she uses her legs as calipers to thrust her forearms at each other, putting so much force on her antler tool that its tip gouges the flint, loosening tiny flakes.

Modern uses for knapping

Many serious modern flint knappers do not sell--although they may exchange--their work. However, in recent years Flenniken and Callahan have established thriving businesses. Marked replicas of prehistoric tools are much sought after by serious collectors, as are exhibition quality art knives, often bought after bought as investments. These knives are not replicas of prehistoric artifacts, although many are knapped in the traditional way. These is also a brisk trade in scalpels and other special blades, as well as hunting knives.

Such works should not be confused with the thousands of Indian arrowheads and items of similar type sold to the public, often at craft shows. Although some of these are indeed historical artifacts, all too many are crude modern copies. While experts may recognize them for the fakes they are, some knappers have become better than the ancients, producing replicas indistinguishable form the genuine artifacts. Their work does great harm archaeological research and the reputation of serious knappers.

The last group of knappers working commercially on a large scale ceased doing business some twenty -five year ago. In the small English town of Brandon, Suffolk (population 3,344), eighty miles northeast of London, three knappers used to work industriously in a factory behind a pub, appropriately named the Flint Knappers' Arms. These they shaped cobbles to replace those that had been dislodged from the walls of traditional East Anglian flint-faced buildings and also turned out over a million gun flints each year. These were exported to the Gold Coast and to South American tribesmen, who were still convinced that what killed was not the projectile but the flash in the pan and the bang of their ancient flintlocks. Each of the three knappers had served a seven-years apprenticeship, not merely learning to knap, but how to do it at very high speed.

In its heyday--during the Napoleonic Wars--Brandon's flint industry kept two hundred local men and two hundred French prisoners of war busy. As a result, silicosis was the local scourge until about 1830, when percussion cap weapons began to replace flintlock and most of Brandon's knappers had to find other employment. Although the last of these knappers worked beneath exhaust hoods and were provided with dust masks, they still measured the passing of their working hours in the traditional way, by the number of candles they burned alongside their anvils.

The noted anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey went to; Brandon to learn knapping and to see the 12,000-year-old flint mines at nearby Grimes Graves. While he was studying at Cambridge, American knapper Bradley also visited Brandon, hoping to get information for his doctoral thesis on knapping--but arrived too late to learn very much.

Crabtree once pointed out that although knapped implements would seem to have no practical use today, there is in fact a place for them:

Knapping can be a bloody business when the splinters fly, but the wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than knife cuts. Electron microscopes reveal to us that a traditionally knapped obsidian blade is many times sharper then the sharpest platinum blade we can forge. An obsidian or flint blade cutting through flesh severs the cells more finely than steel, so the incision heals more quickly and leaves hardly any scar. There's a place for knapped blades in surgery.

When Crabtree himself had to have part of a lung removed, he introduced his surgeon to the knapper Flenniken. Following the surgeon's specifications, Flenniken knapped a set of obsidian blades. The incision they made, Crabtree later insisted, healed quickly and cleanly--and to prove it, he would lift his shirt to show that the scar on his chest was indeed barely visibly.

Since then, Flenniken has knapped hundreds of blades for surgical use. A colleague needing open-heart surgery decided to demonstrate the superiority of obsidian blades, so he asked his surgeon to make half the incision with an ordinary scalpel and half with an obsidian blade knapped by Flenniken. Not only did that part of the incision made with the obsidian blade heal more quickly, but while the scalpel left an ugly visible scar, the obsidian blade left only a faint pink line.