The First Rule of Flintknapping

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores a key difference between modern and prehistoric flintknapping evident in the archaeological record. Modern knappers generate dense concentrations of flakes, while such clusters are rare in prehistoric sites, suggesting shorter reduction episodes in the past. One likely reason for this difference is that modern flintknappers generally do not use the pieces they produce; production is the end goal. In contrast, tool use was the goal in prehistoric settings. In that light, I argue that this difference in flintknapping can be explained by the idea that prehistoric flintknappers attempted to maximize the utility of the pieces they produced while minimizing the loss of potential utility in the pieces they reduced. This idea can be simplified to what I call the “First Rule of Flintknapping,” or “Only remove as many flakes as necessary.” I argue further that prehistoric flintknapping might have mimicked modern knapping when raw material was abundant and in the case of formal core reduction. In both instances, the cost of the loss of potential core utility was reduced, allowing prehistoric knappers to engage in extended bouts of reduction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50228