Archaeologica.org

Hope this picture makes it it shows apart from my out of focus camera work a fairly clear bulb of percusion and rock ripple from the scraper being knapped.

http://www.freewebs.com/archaeology_dow ... tures2.htm[/img]

Seems to work when it wants too will try once more.



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fossiltrader wrote:Seems to work when it wants too will try once more.



http://www.freewebs.com/archaeology_dow ... tures2.htm

From the image, there appears to be a possible bulb of percussion at the top of the ventral side, though more detail would be helpful. You might try some stronger light and then edit the photo via Picasso, a free download from Google. What's your guess on the material?

Soo if there are no hand axes in NA, how did pepole cut timber, trained Beavers perhaps?

Actually that bulb i thought rather clear it not easy to see in picture the colour not right but it appears to be chalcedony or as we say charlie sydney lol.

fossiltrader wrote:Actually that bulb i thought rather clear it not easy to see in picture the colour not right but it appears to be chalcedony or as we say charlie sydney lol.

Yeah, the gray and white colors are tough to bring out detail. I have the same problem here. I've been looking into aluminum oxide dusting for these shades.

Chalcedony is cool material. Here's a few pieces made from Chalcedony, recovered from the Calico master pits (dated at 200,000 B.P., min.):



Chalcedony blade with a narrow ventral bulb scar (at right) and a high dorsal arete (at left), bifacially retouched along margins, and unifacially flaked at the distal end, with use-wear evident. Appears to have been used as both a cutting tool and an end scraper. Recovered from Trench 1 at a depth of 1.88 m (74 inches). D. Griffin photos



Chalcedony cores from which narrow bladelets were struck, found at depths from 1 to 5.4 m below the surface in Master pits I and II. No natural force could remove sequences of elongated flakes without battering the remaining edges. D. Griffin photo




Chalcedony blades from Master Pits I and II at the Calico Archaeological Site.
D. Griffin photo.




Crescentic chopper of chalcedonic jasper from a depth of 6.83 m in Master Pit II. Centimeter scale. Face flaking on both sides, with classic flake scars visible here. All cortex removed. The lunate working edge is battered while side flake scars and arêtes are pristine. A definitive chopper subtype in Asia, known as a "skreblo."
D. Griffin photo




Bifacial pick- or handaxe-like core tool of chalcedonic chert from Master Pit II. Face-flaked from tip to butt on dorsal side. Flat from midsection to tip on ventral side. Powdered aluminum coating reveals careful work at tip, which could not result from natural processes.
D. Griffin photo

One of the things that we proved, (to my satisfaction anyway) was that stone tools could cut down trees. Before I got there and literally tried it out myself, I had wondered if a stone edge would hold up if it were repeatedly smashed into a tree trunk.

They do.

Now, I don't think they spent a lot of time cutting down large trees for building purposes but small tree trunks, up to an inch...inch and a half diameter...would make acceptable sized spears and one of the other items that Charlie has found are stones with an obvious notch. That notch would be useful for smoothing or removing bark.

In general you can't expect to find wood artifacts 400000 years later, those javelins they found in Germany are an extraordinary exception, but the tools do work on wood.

In general you can't expect to find wood artifacts 400000 years later, those javelins they found in Germany are an extraordinary exception, but the tools do work on wood.

Definitely. Ideal strat. Makes me wonder how much of the story we're missing.

A broken hand axe is a broken hand axe, a broken spear shaft is firewood!

broken spear shaft is firewood

Good point!

....and there ARE broken hand axes in North America.

Just some quick comments here since I have my hands full at the moment. Thanks for those responses to my ravings on iron smelting, etc.

Yes, one might well suspect this was the domain of a select few (shamans and/or their technical assistants?), being a specialized and likely rather arcane pursuit at that time. There is a surprising quantity of the material lying about at some locations, but of course this could just reflect such activity over a long time span.

And indeed it is all rather dangerous, requiring a temperature of around 1200 C (I think...), not to mention, as F.M. pointed out, the possibility of instantly boiling oneself - a "Don't try this at home" type of thing...

In any event, it almost seems that Dave Gillilan's deeply buried cache, while possibly a sacrificial offering to the earth (fairly common practice), represents a kind of time capsule with samplings of several of those peoples' state-of-the-art technologies. But then the geniuses at the Ohio Historical Society insist, without looking at it, that the whole thing is a nineteenth century landfill, even after a professional geomorphologist determined from the stratigraphy that the terrain (glacial till) was, beneath a 20 cm plow zone, not disturbed within the historical time frame. (No wonder I'm half mad...)

Alan

The Truth will set you free, Alan.

Unless the club buries it.

Charlie Hatchett wrote:
[...] You might try some stronger light and then edit the photo via Picasso, a free download from Google.

You probably mean Picasa, Charlie: http://picasa.google.com/

If you shoot some good RAW files I can also do some editing for you.

These the oldest in my possesion.


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