How to Do Percussion Flaking

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm John Olsen for Expert Village. Kind of twirling this around to make sure I have my right angles that are going to work out for me. There's another nice large blade. Little bit of blood, normal in flint knapping, it's kind of a blood sport. Very nice spall. In fact I think I'll set this right down, right now, and take this piece and continue on and make a bi-face out of it. Go to a smaller hammer stone. I'm dulling the edge. Obsidian will chip out to the last molecule, so it's extremely sharp. Sharper than surgical steal. I'm handling this bare handed. And I'm just going over this thing and looking for, trying to get an edge, like this all the way around the rock. Obviously, I've got some areas here I need to work on and this little bit here, but I'm going to go around the whole edge. Lost of waste, doing this. Primitive people would have gone to the quarry and knocked out a bunch of bi-faces, which I've about got here, and probably carried them home instead of carrying the whole big bunch of large rocks. Kay, basically I have a bi-face. It has an edge all the way around it and has two sides to it."