overshot flaking for sale

Overshot flaking has become a thing for me recently. An overshot flake is one that travels the complete width of the artefact, and considerably reduces depth in the process. It is a part of the European Solutrean, as well as the North American Clovis technologies. I currently have an abundance of large hard hammer flakes, and my understanding of platform preparation has improved. The result of these coinciding factors is that I have begun to be more consistent with overshot flakes. This is good!

And this is the ventral. I said in a previous post that I am not consistent with overshot flaking, but I was able to turn the proto-handaxe over and after some basic hard hammer platform isolation and preparation remove another one from the opposite face. Because I was working in this considered way I started to collect the removals in order, to understand better the relationship here between my theory and my practice.

The thinning process was working and so I carried on, slowly and systematically. Ultimately things didn’t go as planned and the remnant proto-handaxe is top left in the above photograph. Number 17 was the second overshot flake and 14, 12, 10 and 8 were all good removals. I still haven’t got my handaxe, but I have got a good refitting sequence.

8)Relationship of ridges to platforms is discussed. Flat surface flaking demonstration shows the value of setting up platforms in alignment with ridges.

9)Examples showing each stage of reduction from raw stone to finished point are discussed along with the goal of each stage. Includes Paleo thinning strategies and a demonstration of how to produce overshot flakes.

Once the spalls were made, they were formed into leaf-shaped quarry blanks or preforms. The completed point was rarely formed at the quarry site. Shaping the preform required percussion flaking that was done through the use of billets made of antler, bone, wood or stone. Few if any wooden billets have survived.

Percussion flaking is used to further develop the blade shape.  This process was accomplished through the use of hammer stones or billets made of antler or wood, generally removing broad shallow flakes across the surface of the blade.  On Paleoindian points, this process often results in what is called "over shot" flaking, where the flakes travel across the blade face past the center line, often reaching the opposite side of the blade.  By the Early Archaic period, over shot flaking had been abandoned and flakes generally traveled to the center line, often forming a hump or "median ridge" along the center of the blade.  Percussion flaking was usually done randomly in a way that addressed the features of the stone.  On some very workable stone, flakes could be taken off evenly and could meet in the center of the blade at regular intervals.  This process is called collateral flaking.

Once the general shape of the blade is complete, pressure flaking is used along the blade edges to even and straighten them.  This process was done with an antler tine. Broken antler points may be recovered from some reduction sites. At this point, the removal of fine flakes usually causes some degree of serration that leaves a very sharp edge.  Some point types are more deeply serrated and are intended to remain as part of the diagnostic characteristics of the blade.  These serrations are also added through the use of antler flakers.

Cores that were worked on an anvil. Commonly used when flaking poor quality stone or opening small pebble nodules. Bipolar cores have a characteristic “scalar” shape.

The removal of small flakes from a blade or flake in order to shape it. May also be used to create specific edges. Retouching is generally carried out by pressure flaking.

This is an illustration of a replica point that shows a lot of the flaking details you can expect to see on Clovis points. Note the colors, which will guide the following discussion.

People used early-stage bifaces as cores for striking the large flakes that would become points and tools. Overshot flakes travel all the way across bifaces and remove some of the margin on the opposite side of the biface. This is a common thinning strategy in Clovis.

The purple flakes are pressure flakes from the final finishing workon the point. Some points show very little pressure flaking, and others show much more extensive pressure flaking.

It appears that Clovis points often started out mostly percussion flaked. Through use and reshaping, they came to have have more extensive pressure flaking across their surfaces. Clovis knappers took care to preserve the flute scars, and did not pressure flake across them if they could help it.

One of the most formal Acheulean large flake blank creation methods is that of Victoria West in southern Africa, dated to ~ 1000 ka at Canteen Kopje (Li et al., 2017). This technique has notable parallels with the Kapthurin Acheulean Levallois including hierarchically organized bifacial surfaces and shaping of convexities on the flatter upper surface through centripetal flaking. However, it differs in some important respects as well. For example, at Canteen Kopje the formal Victoria West cores are rare (< 10% of the core assemblage) (Li et al., 2017), whereas in the Kapthurin Formation Acheulean nearly all the large cores and large shaped tools are Levallois.

Surprisingly, the overall thinness of the Kapthurin specimens does not translate into sharper tip angles, with all assemblages having comparable tip angles except the oldest (and thickest) assemblage: Olorgesailie CL1-1. Creating shallow tip angles was achieved in a variety of ways in the Acheulean, with flaking from multiple directions, or using the dome of a large ventral surface more effective than flaking from one direction only. Rather than sharper tips, the advantage of greater overall thinness for the Living Site specimens may instead lie in the costs of cutting-edge transport, with these pieces being wider for their weight than the other assemblages. Distinctively for an east African Acheulean assemblage (Shipton, 2020), the LHA handaxes and cleavers are not particularly elongate. This may reflect limitations in very large elongate end-struck flake blank creation from Levallois cores, with reduced length compensated for by greater width to maintain cutting edge length. This accords with the previous finding for handaxes and cleavers from both the Living Site and Kariandusi that larger specimens are overall narrower and thinner (perhaps to minimize weight), but have relatively wide tips (and therefore long cutting edges) (Gowlett & Crompton, 1994).

The Acheulean Levallois of the Kapthurin Formation differs from that of the MSA both here and more generally in four respects: it is much larger; it has a lower diversity of preparation techniques; overshot errors are much more frequent; and only one preferential flake seems to have been produced per reduction sequence (i.e. there was no recurrent flaking). The large size of the Levallois cores may be explained by the large cutting tool end products. The need to shape large surfaces from multiple directions probably also partly explains the centripetal flaking patterns, while the extreme force required to strike very large Levallois flakes seems to have often resulted in overshots. Although the flatness of Levallois flakes was later used to facilitate hafting in the MSA, the large size and lack of hafting traces or modifications indicates that these handaxes and cleavers, were, like their predecessors, handheld. This early example of the hierarchically complex Levallois technique (Muller et al., 2017) thus appears to predate hafting in east Africa (e.g. Sahle et al., 2013), which is perhaps unsurprising given the even greater extremes of hierarchical complexity required for hafting (Lombard & Haidle, 2012).

The lack of recurrent flaking on the same surface of the Kapthurin Acheulean Levallois cores may be explained by the need for only a single large flake. However, there was also apparently a lack of repreparation of the dorsal convexities once the first preferential flake had been struck, even if the core was still large enough for further work, and even if the preferential flake was unsuccessful (overshot). Similar, single-use cores were also a feature of large flake blank production in the Victoria West industry (Li et al., 2017) and the Acheulean Levallois at Amane Oukider (Arzarello et al., 2012). Acheulean knappers seem to have moved through unidirectionally organized stages in their flake blank creation, just as façonnage handaxe knapping proceeds from roughing out, to shaping, to thinning, to marginal trimming (Newcomer, 1971). In the MSA by contrast, débordant and other repreparation flakes allow for a return to an earlier stage of the Levallois process and the creation of a renewed preferential surface. Part of the explanation for this, and the greater diversity of preparation techniques noted in the MSA (Tryon et al., 2005), may be the greater diversity of end-products: Rather than two types of shaped tool, MSA Levallois has been characterized as ‘the toolkit within the core’ (Shimelmitz & Kuhn, 2018). Systematic blade production at the Living Site also suggests these hominins may have been shifting away from individual large portable ergonomic tools, to portable toolkits. A parallel may be drawn with the final Acheulean industries in the Levant and India, where the frequency of handaxes and cleavers drops off when small prepared cores become part of the assemblages (Jagher, 2016; Shipton et al., 2013).

Actually, the little antler cylinders probably were the predominant post-hammerstone flaking tool, used in many or most parts of North America, from the advent of the archaic, and onwards. Obviously, the longstanding question in archaeology relates to how the tools might have been used. In the 1979 edition of Flintknappers Exchange, one author offered the view that they are worthless, and good for nothing but making gravel, and bloody hands. I happen to think that he was wrong, which means that while the flintknapping community is great at talking about point types all say long, they are not so great at admitting what types of flakers are found right alongside most of those point types.

For those of you not familiar with the Ice-Age Atlantic crossing hypothesis, basically the idea is that during the Last Glacial Maximum (at approx. 26.500-19.000 years ago) glacial ice build up in the north Atlantic allowed European populations to cross over to North America and to colonize this virgin territory. The archaeological “cultures” typically cited in relationship to this hypothesis are Clovis in North America and the Solutrean in Western Europe. In particular, apparent similarities in the manufacture of bifacial tools between these two archaeological entities, and their reported use of overshot flaking (flakes that travel across the face of a tool to remove part of the opposing margin) to thin bifaces, have been frequently used to argue for their being a connection between Western Europe and the first peopling of the Americas. A basic introduction to the debate can be found here

In recent years considerable genetic, archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence has accrued suggesting that the first human societies in North America came from Asia, not Europe. Never the less, this debate still continues in the academic arena and 2013/2014 has thus far been a particularly productive period for publications on the topic utilizing experimental research to discuss the merits of the Ice-Age Atlantic crossing hypothesis. Three recent publications are of particular interest for those interested in the role that experimental archaeology can play in major debates such as this. The first of these contains experimental data designed to test the effectiveness of overshot flaking in thinning bifaces:

Eren et al’s results suggest that overshot flakes are by products of a general biface thinning technique and in and of themselves are not very reliable or optimal at thinning bifaces. This conclusion seems to suggest that Solutrean and Clovis bifaces were produced using similar, simple, biface thinning techniques that resulted in occasional, accidental, overshot flakes. The article also contains a discussion of the existing archaeological evidence for overshot flaking in Clovis assemblages, not much, and the lack of comparable data in Solutrean assemblages.

Lohse, J.C., Collins, M.B., Bradley, B., 2014. Controlled overshot flaking: a response to Eren, Patten, O’Brien, and Meltzer. Lithic Technology 39, 46-54.

Eren, M.I., Patten, R.J., O’Brien, M.J., Meltzer, D.J., 2014. More on the rumour of “intentional overshot flaking” and the purported Ice-Age Atlantic crossing. Lithic Technology 39, 55-63.

My understanding is an overshot flake travels completely across the the flint piece being stuck. Being the bulb of percussion grows at it travels, the flakes are usually much wider where they detach from more than from where they are struck from.