Since I will no longer be publishing CHIPS magazine I will have more time to fool around with my website. This page will now be devoted to stories and photos about my adventures in flint knapping. Some of this stuff comes from emails I send to friends and it is just to neat to delete, so why not share it with the world. Any way, enjoy, and I will try to add or change things as often as I can. DCW

HOW TO HAFT AN EVA POINT TO A CANE SHAFT!

One of my regular customers asked me for an Eva point to add to his type collection. I had never made one before because there is little demand for these short stemmed, shallow basal notched points. As I was making it I began to wonder, how they were tied on a stick. By the time I was almost ready for the notches I had hatched a theory. They were not “tied” on a stick, they were glued on! River Cane was plentiful in areas where these points were made and used, so here is how that plant may have been used for shafts and handles.

As a quick test, I cut a 4 inch long section of cane that was about ¾ inch in diameter. The point was 3 3/8 inches long and 1 ¾ inches wide at the base, a size that would have seen use as a knife blade. Projectile points were smaller and would require a smaller diameter cane, but the principle remains the same for both.

 As you can see I included one of the joints about 1 inch below the business end. When the notch for the base of the point is cut in, it ends about ¼ inch or so above the joint. I placed the un-notched blade into the slot and marked around the outside of the shaft. These marks formed center lines for the notches so their indentations would match up with the thickness of the cane walls. Also, the stem would come close to bottoming out against the partition at the joint, but not quite. Even without glue I had a good pressure fit, and by ending the notches in the cane walls just shy of the joint the point fit down, snug, and level without rocking. With the point and handle together you can see by the dotted line I added to the photo how the stem and notches mate up with the cane. Now all one has to do is pour some glue into the top of the cane on either side of the blade and fill up the space. The joint partition forms a cup in the bottom of the haft, and any leaks in the slots can be plugged with a little clay so the whole cavity will fill with glue. Whether it be resin, or hide glue, when it hardens that blade ain’t go’n nowhere!

The Eva point I made out of un-heat treated, high grade Dover chert has a rather wide blade as the originals might have had before re-sharpening. The advantage to just gluing with no lashings would mean that the entire blade edge, including the basal ears would have been available for cutting things. Lashing over the blade edges at the ears would not only shorten the usable blade length, but may also be cut by the sharp edges. There is no dulling, or notching in this area to indicate that lashing was ever present here. Several re-sharpenings would have narrowed and shortened the blade till re-working of the ears would have been hampered by the edges being too close to the shaft. Some Eva points have an excurvate-recurvate outline do to the results of this activity.

“Socket hafting” of other thick stemmed points and thick based lanceolates as well as the type just mentioned, may have been a fairly common practice throughout the regions where river cane grew. I think our only native bamboo is one of the most underrated primitive raw materials because it is not very often preserved in an archeological context and the massive cane brakes that ran for miles in our river bottoms are no more. Last year I tried to help a friend find some cane along the White River a few miles from my house. We went to several of the places where I used to collect cane over 20 years ago and had trouble finding any. Most of the patches had been eradicated, or died out during the last two years of drought and cold winters. Out-of-site, out-of-mind!   

Saint Louis World Series Clovis!

There is a type of large Clovis knife called a St. Louis point. I guess because many were found in the St. Louis area where they were made from Burlington-Crescent chert. The distribution spreads eastward into Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee where they are made of gray ball cherts. This 4 1/2 in point  was made from Indiana Hornstone, the gold standard of this material. It was finished in the afternoon before the St. Louis Cardinals won their 11th world series in the seventh game. I am not much of a baseball fan and even told a friend that they would probably lose it in the sixth game, and they were when I went to bed. I woke up the next morning to find out the Cards had won the sixth in a cliff hanger! I wanted to make a St Louis Clovis for my personal collection because I did not have one. So that day was the day. Using the power flaker, the first flute went OK but the second was a problem. The plan was for two guide flakes and a central large flute. The first guide went wide and long. The second was very short with a split cone deep in a sharp basal concavity. I prepared another nipple on the too-thin edge near the ear. I then placed the tip of the power flaker's Ishi stick to the side of it in hopes of catching enough meat to get under the cone crack. I gave myself a 50 percent chance, just as I thought the Cards had about a 50 percent chance of winning the 7th game. I took a deep breath and gave her the old heave-ho! I won and so did the Cardinals! So much for rock divination! The inscription is in that last channel scar and reads: "St Louis Cardinals won their 11th World Series on the day this point was made, 10/28/11. The point is also number 357 for the year, as in .357 Magnum! Enough said! Enjoy.

"My, That's a big one!"

Now, when you get some good “Ridge” it’s up to you to honor it by making the best you can from it. This I did with a giant sawed slab that Ed Moreland gave me on the occasion of our 2006 visit. It was the biggest I ever saw in this material that was relatively clear. The dimensions were about 16 x 7 x 7/8 inches. It had laid around in my shop four years until about two weeks before I left for the 2010 Flint Ridge knap-in. It was then that I decided to make an example of it. I wanted something special to show off on my return and it took 30 hours spread out over 10 days to get it. I have to admit, every bit of skill I possessed, and a considerable amount of luck, went into wrenching  a Type IV-E dagger [D-452] out of that slab. At 14 1/8 inches, it was the largest I have made to date and right up there with the biggest ever found in Southern Scandinavia! Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with it, ‘til Saturday night when my asking price was met!  [Excerpted from my article on the 2010 Flint Ridge Knap-in that appeared in CHIPS Vol. 22, no. 4.]

"THE RED DRAGON OF HELGOLAND"

In mid May 2011, I made a dagger [D-457] for Tom Holck of Denmark from the largest nodule of rare Helgoland flint found in modern times. Being mostly blood-red in color, this is the only traceable-to-its-exact-source Western Baltic flint. It comes from a little island called Hegoland in the Baltic Sea a few miles off the coast of Germany where it joins Jutland. Up to about 3 or 4 thousand BC the deposit was available to prehistoric people, with the rise in sea levels it is now well below the surface. Diving in the area is forbidden due to shipwrecks and un-exploded ordinance left from WW II. The only way to get this flint is to find the mostly small pieces that wash up on the beach. Obviously, it is very scarce and is used mostly for jewelry. After I sent scans of the finished dagger to Tom, he sent this amazing group of photos back to me. In these we see four views of the massive nodule before I got it.  Superimposed over one of the views is the scan of the 10 1/8 inch dagger placed approximately where it came out of the nodule.  As you can see I used about 95 percent of the total length, just removing the cortex on the pommel end to square it and a little white is still on the tip.  This was very tuff Baltic flint, however, I played it safe and did not heat treat it due to worries about a couple of cracks and some white spots. I did not know how the material would react to even a low temperature of 335 degrees. I did cook some of the chips, and sure enough, some cracking occurred around these white spots. Making this dagger was a four day fight with my hands hurting all the way. It had to be mostly percussion flaked, was left a little thick due to one crack in the blade, and some white spots interrupted the pattern on the back side which I figured would happen anyway. The stitching is a little straighter than the scan shows, is very fine and even, but fell a bit short due to stopping at a concrete spot. When finished I was fairly happy with the results, and so was Tom. After all, this was a one shot deal with no backup pieces if I failed. Making it all the better, is the fact that no Type IV daggers are known to be made from this material, perhaps the water was already over the source by the Late Neolithic II. So, this, and a 3 7/8 inch miniature [D-456] I made from one of the large flakes, may be the only two Helgoland Type IVs in existence!

UNUSUAL CUMBERLAND POINT

This unusual 5 9/16 inch Cumberland point [11-182] was made from a piece of Indiana Horn Stone that had some stripes in it. In 45 years of knapping I have worked hundreds of pounds of Horn Stone, and believe me, this color pattern is rare! I could see the point in the piece and proceeded to try and get a classic Cumberland by using the methods I described in my two part CHIPS article on the subject. [See CHIPS Vol. 22, nos. 2 and 3.] After preforming by percussion, I prepped the first face with a series of pressure flakes and got the cross section perfect for a full length flute. This was accomplished using my bench mounted power flaker. Dr Albert Goodyear, University of South Carolina, calls this "Instrument-Assisted Fluting" and I am glad that big wig archaeologist are now beginning to except the fact that punches and lever devices may have been used. On the other hand I know of at least one underground commercial knapper who has made far more Cumberland points than I have who can do it with free hand percussion with a hammer stone while backing the tip up against his leg. I have done this on small points, but with my eyes, the way they are now, and the few points I make, the risk is not worth it. As can be seen in the scan, the flute ran clear to the tip, snipping off about 1/16 of an inch. Perfect for a classic Cumberland! I prepped the other face the same way and even had the nipple set up below center plane almost even height with the median ridge, when applying the pressure I had to stop. Something was not right. Too much force was going into it at the wrong angle, so I backed off. However, I backed off just a little too far on the angle of force application and the flute ran short and to the side, leaving a remnant of the nipple. From this remnant I made another nipple for the second flute that would follow the nice ridge left by the edge of the first channel. I hoped that it would run the same length, and it did! There is at least one example of a "double fluted" late Cumberland-Barns type point that I am aware of and this "save" or "recovery" would have been done in the old days for sure, given the skill and knowledge it take to make these points. So now we see a classic on one face and a rare recovery on the other, plus a nice piece of material to boot. This very special point went to a friend who was kind enough to "donate to the cause" when he heard about me having problems with my hand. He loves points made from Horn Stone!

A DISC MACE FROM A HOLY ROCK!

After finishing the Hegoland dagger, Tom got me into another interesting project. A small, beach battered flint nodule with a natural hole in it that was the result of a chalk inclusion being eroded out. When I saw it and the plans for what he wanted made from it I said "Holy S*** how in the Hell am I going to do that! "Disc Maces" made from flint are extremely rare, with only one in the Danish National Museum. The picture at top, shows the rock with a hole in it, which I called the "Holy" rock because it looked like something a shaman would want to put in his medicine bag, along with a drawing of the mace from the DNM, and my version of it superimposed over one of the photos. Because this thing looked so much like an artifact already and was heavily coned on the outside with a texture like granite, I had misgivings about attacking it. This, I conveyed to Tom, who assured me it was not an artifact and was expendable. You know when you get that special feeling and all is just right, well, I had it the day I went after the "Holy Rock!" It took about 2 hours once I got the first flake off the nose of that thing. I had to finally hit it with a steel hammer. With the first flake removed and a platform started in clear flint I used my copper boppers a little, but mostly my copper punches. No flakes could be removed from inside the hole due to the angles being wrong. All flakes were from the rim, which is like that of a square-sectioned  axe. It was a real battle to get past the cones and keep as much material on the rim as I could. The disc, which is a bit elliptical, is about 2 3/8 inches wide and is about 3/4 inch thick. I would have liked to have thinned it more so it would have been more in proportion to the drawing, but to remove another set of flakes off the faces would have meant loosing more of the precious diameter in platform preparations. Given the shape and condition of that pebble, I got all I could out of it, and was lucky to do that!

"Any direction, for as long as it is FORWARD!"

This is the picture I see as a screen saver on the computer I use every day. It is one of my model ships that I converted to radio control just before the wife's passing and she took this wonderful photo of it under full sail with a fair wind just too the port-stern quarter. Square-riggers are at their best with the wind coming from this direction but they can't sail directly into it. Some are efficient enough that they might go as high as 70 degrees. "On the wind" my little Thermopylae can do about 60. In order to get somewhere against  the wind the ship is forced to sail a zigzag course. It is called tacking and is hard work for the crew and so it is with me. I sail with the wind when I can and tack when I must, just for as long as I am making "headway!"