Me have rock
Today in Material Culture Analysis we began lithics. I was somewhat apprehensive about this lab, for a couple of reasons. First of all, and most crucially, is the fact that lithics as a discipline bore the holy living crap out of me. It just seems to consist of list after list of diagnostic attributes. Just listen to this:"In the first type, the point is fairly large, lanceolate in shape, fluted, and concave based. Fluting generally occures on both faces, occasionally on one face, but extends for only a short distance along the length of the point to the location of maximum biface width. Flutes frequently terminate in hinge fractures, and multiple flutes are common. The ends of baszzzzzz". My eyes glaze just thinking about it.
The second reason for being somewhat apprehensive is that we were expected to actually make something. The video we watched of Bruce Bradley whacking flakes off of a core made it seem so easy, but we all knew it wouldn't be, that we were going to be less 'man makes tool' and more 'monkey with rock'. And so it was. We were taken out back to the archaeology experiment area (who knew we even had one?) and shown how to flake rocks. And then we were left to it. Most of the class promptly fled back to the classroom in order to avoid making fools of themselves work on the rest of the lab, but a few of us more daring souls decided to have at it. Fun fact! If you bang two rocks together for a length of time, they will smell like burning! Who knew!
Anyway, there was a lot of banging of rocks and bashing of fingers, but very little in the creation of actual, usable flakes. Most of the rocks didn't so much flake as just disintegrate, which, unfortunately, was not the object of the exercise. But! I did manage to get one rock to turn into flakes. Usable? Who cares! They're flakes. And a good thing to, since by then my hand hurt from holding the rock, and the smashy-edge of the hammerstone was starting to look a little woebegone. And I did manage to find a big ol' chunk of obsidian buried in the sand in the pit (it flakes beautifully), so I shall be handing that in. Heh heh heh.
The second reason for being somewhat apprehensive is that we were expected to actually make something. The video we watched of Bruce Bradley whacking flakes off of a core made it seem so easy, but we all knew it wouldn't be, that we were going to be less 'man makes tool' and more 'monkey with rock'. And so it was. We were taken out back to the archaeology experiment area (who knew we even had one?) and shown how to flake rocks. And then we were left to it. Most of the class promptly fled back to the classroom in order to avoid making fools of themselves work on the rest of the lab, but a few of us more daring souls decided to have at it. Fun fact! If you bang two rocks together for a length of time, they will smell like burning! Who knew!
Anyway, there was a lot of banging of rocks and bashing of fingers, but very little in the creation of actual, usable flakes. Most of the rocks didn't so much flake as just disintegrate, which, unfortunately, was not the object of the exercise. But! I did manage to get one rock to turn into flakes. Usable? Who cares! They're flakes. And a good thing to, since by then my hand hurt from holding the rock, and the smashy-edge of the hammerstone was starting to look a little woebegone. And I did manage to find a big ol' chunk of obsidian buried in the sand in the pit (it flakes beautifully), so I shall be handing that in. Heh heh heh.