How to Shape a Knife by Flintknapping

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm John Olsen for Expert Village. We've got this nice shape going on here and we're going to continue to process it. I'm going to make a knife. I'm going to make a couple of notches right here and I'm going to sharpen the edges and kind of clean it up a little bit and we'll call it done. But I'm going to move into something different. It's more of an Eastern style of flint knapping and what was done in Cahokia, Mississippi river drainage area. They had access to copper. Copper out of the great lakes. They found native copper in nodules and they were pounding them. And this is like a 5000 year old tradition. They were actually making points out of them, knives and a few things like that by just pounding copper. They weren't smelting it. They were just finding it in its natural state. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set this down and I'm going to bring a rock up here. A couple of my hammer stones, the hard ones and I'm going to take this piece of copper and I'm going to make a chipping tool out of it. Which I'll stick into a piece of wood. Basically what I'm going to do is flatten this out, just like they did, with rocks. I'm going to make a nice little knapping tool. Some of the finest points made were made by using copper and antlers too. I've made that into like a little blade. I'm going to stick that into a handle of wood and it's a little loose so I'll just take a little stick here, shove it in there and try to make it stick in there. There we go. Pick up my point. Get rid of my hammer stone. Going to still use my little hammer stone occasionally. I'll tuck it right here. And I'm going to start notching this thing. And the notches are for where you haft with a piece of cordage or sinew or something like that to a stick where you have a handle that you can hold on to while you're skinning or butchering or whatever you're doing with this knife. So, I'm going to push in here and make a little notch going in there. Hold that up there like that; you can probably see that notch pretty good. I'll turn it over and push some little flakes off the backside."