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Puget Sound Knappers

Support for Felicia De Pena's Epipalaeolithic Dissertation on Flintknapping
November 13th, 2020
Host - James Keffer
Write-up by James Keffer





On October 30th, 2020, the Puget Sound Knappers recieved a request, via their website, to support the Doctoral research of Felicia De Pena.  Felicia, a flintknapper, archaeologist, and educator, wished to join the PSK and get our help in her research for her doctoral dissertation on flintknapping of the Epipalaeolithic period of the Levant (Middle East/Jordan).

The PSK was more than willing to assist in whatever way possible!   It just so happens that the webmaster, James Keffer, hosts a weekly knap-in at his shop in Sammamish each Friday and had the resouces and knappers to make this happen. It didn't take any effort to recruit the regular attendees and a couple of others to participate in this endeavor!

Felicia provided two boxes, approximately 75 lbs total, of Texas flint nodules by way of Craig Ratzat/Neolithics.com, along with bags, instructions and note sheets.

The stone used for the experiment was nodular, fine-grained flint from Texas. Each nodule had a white cortex that needed to be removed by flaking to expose the flint inside. Cortex removal was a challenge for some of the nodules. The participants had varying degrees of difficulty detaching blades from the flint after cortex removal.

The object was to attempt to make blades from the flint nodules using 'abo' tools, i.e. soft and hard billets. For that we used elk and moose billets and locally-source hard sandstone hammerstones. We would then bag the blades, debitage and left-over cores for Felicia to analyze. Her analytical focus was to see if the skill of the knapper could be determined by from the core, blades and especially the debitage.

Of the seven PSK participants, two were experts (although notably with COPPER tools), three were intermediate knappers and two were beginners, one of who had started knapping just one week before at the same weekly knap-in!  Just a casual observation from the host, but there was definitely a difference in the work product between the three level of proficiency.



The Knappers!

The Texas Flint and PSK Abo Tools!




Knapping Blades/Cores

Jim Miller

Mick Hill

Barry Bonnell

Noobie Max Chu

Jim Smith




The Knappers

Jim Keffer

Jim Miller

Mick Hill

Jim Smith

Max Grow

Barry Bonnell

Max Chu

Some of Mick's Blades





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