This page is currently being developed to disseminate information to the archaeological community and the interested public on experimental lithic replication developments and techniques. There are several web-sites in the WWW that are highly informational on flintknapping as well as a list-server to provide virtual interaction between these participants.

What is Flintknapping:

For the uninformed, the art of flintknapping, is the purposeful use of lithic reduction technologies. This is a process of using a variety of techniques, including: direct percussion, direct freehand percussion, indirect percussion, bipolar percussion, pressure, and even bashing/smashing. The intent is to reduce a mass of raw material into useable blanks or even into a tool itself. The blanks (flakes, spalls, blades) may be used as expedient tools or further reduced into a variety of shapes or forms (scrapers, bifaces, projectile points, etc.). The cultural process of reducing the raw material from procurement to final discard is the reduction strategy. What is recovered in archaeological sites is a representation of the lithic reduction continuum via the reduction sequence. There are a variety of resources to learn about flintknapping on the web. Some of these are listed below.

• Knapper's Anonymous

• The Knapper's Corner

• Native Tech

Now I'm sure some of you good folks are wondering "what makes this fellow such an authority?" Not much really other than I've been doing this for 12 years, enjoy the hell out of it, studied under the likes of Tom Hester, Mike Collins, Phil Wilke, Harry Shafer, Jeff Flenniken, J.B. Sollberger, Gene Titmus (really some of the greats in lithic technology today, in my opinion) and have worked with several others. I have a B.A. in Anthropology from Southwest Texas State University, an M.A. from The University of Texas at Austin, and am currently in the Ph.D. program at Texas A&M University. Bill Dickens, another excellent lithicist, and I have started our own lithic technological support service, visit us at StoneWorks Archaeology.

Current Projects:

To view a slide show presentation of projects I am currently working on, click on the link below.

Projects: Experimental Study

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