From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 21:12:13 EDT
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of Darryl Maddox
>Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 8:24 AM
>1) When I was at geology field camp the students were forever picking up
>pieces of flint thinking they had found a piece of an arrow head or some
>other artifact. The problem was no one could come up with a way
>to tell the
>real, but less easily identifiable artifacts such as scrapers from regular
>pieces of flint. As Dr. Harris said, "either most of these are natural or
>there were a lot of indians here for a long time and they weren't very good
>at making stuff". Last year I found a piece of flint and thought it was
>just that and nothing more - until last week when I happened to pick it up
>in such a way that it fit naturally and comfortably into my right hand and
>the lower front edge was round and sharp, there was a small
>indention on the
>left side for my thumb (I am right handed) and small flat plane on the top
>front part for my index finger - a scraper? I don't know but it would be a
>good one whether natural or not (and I suspect not because of the lack of
>very small chip marks around the front lower edge).
>
The way you tell a real from a fake flint scraper is via the retouch work on
the cutting edge. One can see the tiny uniform flaking required to sharpen
the edge. If the piece doesn't have pressure flaking on the edge, then it
probably isn't a stone tool. Soft tools like antlers were used to do this.
And in detecting design in stone tools, we know that the makers behaved like
us, thus we can anthropomorphize the desgner.
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