Hello everybody, my name
is Noel Grayson and today, we are going to talk about
the art of flintknapping. Well, you know when I was a young little boy, a
little boy, I was probably about five years old. My mother and father, we’d go out to the lake
and one day, while we were out there my mom and dad would find arrowheads and stone tools
and stuff. You know they’d be out there fishing but one day my father hands me an arrowhead.
He picks it up off the ground and hands it to me and tells me we used to hunt with these
and he gives it to me. Like all little boys, I followed my dad everywhere, right, but when he
shows it to me, I'm holding it in my hand looking at it and I asked him, I'm inquisitive, right,
little kids are. I said how did they make it? It was a rock. How did they make it? He turns
around, now, this is Cherokee county you can find rocks just everywhere around here. He picks
up a couple of them and he starts hitting them. He said like this, and he just starts knocking
flakes off of it and it made complete sense to me. Now, when I start flintknapping, a
good piece of leather is crucial to me because it protects me, right. Now, I’m going to
be using this piece of leather to protect my skin. I’m going to be using this - what we call
"dawisgala" - okay, just flint rock. Now, I’m going around this thing looking at it. I’ve
got a flat edge right here. I’ve got to contend with that. Now, I’ve got an angle right here
but it's not too steep. Now, I’m going to have to get rid of that. Now, I’m studying this stone,
okay. I got to look for cracks. These cracks in here might have something to do with it but I
think we can still get some tools out of this. Now, to break this down, I’m going to be using
a hammer stone, a larger one actually to begin with just to get into it. Now, you can see
on this hammer stone where I have actually used it. You can see where I’ve been beating on
this thing and I’ve used it for quite a while. Eventually it will give out, okay. So
you’re always on the lookout for a new tool. So to start with, I’m going to hold it
at an angle like this and hit right here. There we go. Now, I want to get in here and
start looking at it and see what’s there because you don’t know what’s there until
you break into it. So, with that being said Now, flintknapping has been around for a long
time. It's one of man’s first occupations. It was the making of stone tools. Now, if we needed
a tool we simply made it. To make a stone tool, I’m going to be using anything that flakes. Now,
you can use flint, you can use chert, chalcedony, agates. Now, a lot of time we actually bake this
rock to make it more usable. Flintknapping itself is an old technology. Now, the first technological
advancement was us figuring out that you can bake this stone and make it more glass-like and it
makes it easier to flake. Around Cherokee county where we are sitting right now, we have a lot
of chert. We don’t actually have true flint but the chert I use, we call it "dawisgala," okay.
Now, anything that flakes works to do this. The techniques I’m going to show you and demonstrate
here are simply going to be your basic carving techniques. I call it carving because that’s what
I’m doing, okay. I’m carving a rock by flaking it. If I see something I don’t like, I build
angles. The whole thing is based off of angles, okay. So, I’m striking angles or applying pressure
to an angle to push flakes off of it. To be doing this demonstration, I'm going to be using the tips
of deer antlers, the base of deer antlers, hammer stones, and coarse stones for abrading. Let’s
go ahead and take it a little bit further. Now, now, this itself, okay, these
flakes I knocked off of here. That was our first tools. That was were it all
started at, just being able to make a sharp edge. This one right here you see how steep that
is, right. That thing is razor sharp. Let me give you a demonstration of how sharp it is.
This is a good thick piece of leather. Now, I’m being careful with it because it’s right by my
fingers but you can see how sharp that is and you see how thick it is but it's got a good edge
to it, right. Now, that’s your first tool. That’s where it all started at, just being able to do
that. Now, being able to control that flake. I’m going to downsize on this one and use this
smaller hammer stone to remove a flake. Now, I’m going to hit this angle. I want
to take a flake off down in this area. That might hamper it a little bit. You
always got to be looking at it, okay, and looking for these cracks. You don’t,
you’re not flaking cracks, you’re trying to stay away from those cracks. Cracks are
just an invitation for the thing to break. Now, we can probably get a good tool out
of that after we bake it. You can see how we can control these flakes, right, peeling a
flake off of it. Now with this, I'll go around this entire thing taking a flake here, take a
flake there, take a flake here. Flip it over, take a flake here, take a flake there,
and I'll start thinning this down. In the meantime, I’m getting lots of tools to be able to
use. You can’t actually use metal such as steel, like a framing hammer, okay, because the framing
hammer when it hits, it releases its energy too fast. A lot of times it’ll shatter, okay, but
with antler, it’s a soft, now, you can use copper too. Now, it's not a sin to use copper
because Cherokees did have copper. We had copper, a copper mine, in the southeast that was actually
in use, cleaned up until about 1950s, but we also traded, okay. We had trade routes all over
North America but I use antler myself. Antler, because it's softer, it will hit and release
its energy slowly. Now, when I use antlers, as you see, I have different size antlers here
ranging, right, in weight and thickness. Now, this basically is like a sledgehammer, okay.
That is a framing hammer, and I'll switch from these different sizes, different
tools for different occasions. At certain times, I want to hit something, take
a big flake off and start working my way down, ending with doing fine detail work, if you
want to call it fine, with nothing more than the tips of deer antlers. Now, I’m going to
be using these to simply push flakes off, and it's all technique. You don’t need to be strong to do
this. You just have to understand what’s going on. Now, once you get it down like this, you
downsize. Now, I’m using the base of an antler right here but you can use stones. You
can use hammer stones to do this with too. Now, I’m going to take this and I got a sharp edge.
I don’t want to hit that sharp edge, remember, and I want to change the angle
of it ever so slightly like this. And that’s about the angle I
want. I think I can get that. I’m going to strike it right here, remove a
flake down here, and remove some of that mass. See how that’s done. Now, I’ll continue to do
this looking at it, saying, okay now that I’ve got that thick spot
out, I want to take a flake right here and take that thick spot out. I’m just going to keep
removing flakes much like we did the big stone. Now, working it down like this.
It takes time and to me, it’s like looking at a Rubik’s cube and figuring it
out but all I’m doing is carving a rock. Look at that. Now, you have to pay attention to
the convexity and concavity on the face of the stone. You don’t want to drive flakes into concave
areas. You want to have that convexity to it and that’s why I look at it like this. I could
probably get that flake but I’m not going to. I’m not going to because mainly I
don’t like little spots like that. So, I’m probably going to
get that from the other side. I'll save that for later. You don’t
have to solve all your problems. You can save them, think about them for awhile. That’s a good one to take in life
too. You don’t got to solve them. They won't go away but there’s going to
come a time you’re going to be able to fix them. I’ve actually entered art shows using and they
actually have a primitive category for lost arts, flintknapping being considered a lost art. Okay,
now it went from actually utilitarian, okay, we were making these stone tools to get by, okay.
Now, that’s the good thing about stone tools. Old stone tools, that guy didn’t have a choice. Okay,
nowadays, we have a choice and we can take them to that next level which puts them in an art form
and we can do some really nice flaking on them, make them look perfect. Even though the
guys back then could do it, believe me, they had a lot more skill than what we got because
they relied on it. They had to have that skill. Tips like this we would have used for knives,
cutting implements, we would stick them on shafts. We hunted big animals like mastodon, woolly
mammoth, the short-faced bear, a giant tree sloth. All the big game like that, all the mega fauna
were taken with tools like this. Now, the final thing is touching it up, getting the shape. Now,
this is actually how you sharpen a stone tool because when they got dull we didn’t just
throw them away. We would actually turn around and resharpen that edge because
every time I take a flake off, it leaves a sharp edge on it.
Now I’m just using, as you see, an antler to do this with the tip of a deer
antler but you can use bone to do this with too. A little bit rougher flaking and I can just use
another stone to do this but once you grasp the concept of what’s going on and how it works, you
can use anything. Once I learned how to do this, people would see me doing it. I was basically
just kind of like a hometown novelty but guys around town would see me and say I’d like
to learn how to do that. I said well come on, I’ll show you. I'll get you started. I’ll show you what
I know. It’s a passion I have to teach others how this is done. Now, I’m not the best at it. I know
a lot about a lot of stuff but even being a master flintknapper, I don’t consider myself a
master because I still have a lot to learn but if I can show somebody and save them a
lot of trouble learning how to do this that’s important. It should be carried on.
This is something, this is an unbroken legacy. This is an old ancient technology.
