Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 7-45. Making a discoidal knife.
Cautions about Working with Stone
It is essential to wear safety glasses or goggles when working with stone. Flying shards can
damage your eyes or even blind you. Additionally, the dust from stone cutting contains tiny
particles with sharp edges that act like tiny knives, settling into lungs and creating scar tissue
and cumulative damage. Breathing too much stone dust over a period of years can lead to
silicosis (similar to asbestosis). Do your stone cutting and grinding outside, protect your lungs
with a dust mask, and wash the particles out of your clothing. Cut stone is sharp, so protect
your skin and keep plenty of Band-Aids around when learning these arts. Of course, in a sur-
vival situation, simply do your best to protect your skin and eyes without modern safety
goggles or gloves.
Flint Knapping
Flint knapping is the art of chipping away at a stone to make it into something useful with a
sharp edge. I'm no expert, and will just give you a few guidelines. Both
Primitive Wilderness
Living and Survival Skills
and
Primitive Technology: A Book of Earth Skills
have decent sec-
tions on flint knapping. John and Geri McPherson, authors of
Primitive Wilderness Living and
Survival Skills
, have an instructional flint knapping video called
Breaking Rock
. For more in-
formation on this subject, you might also try
Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone
Tools
by John C. Whittaker, or
Flintknapping: The Art of Making Stone Tools
by Paul Hellweg.
True flints can be hard to find in most locations, but most cherts, jaspers, agates, quartz,
and so forth will work as long as they are fine-grained and fracture with sharp edges. When
flint knapping, the main principle to remember is that stone tends to break into a wide cone, at
roughly 120 degrees from the line of impact (
fig. 7-46
). Most people would intuitively guess
that the stone would break roughly in line with the impact, so you must modify your blows to a
