Annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution . * I- OS O uj ^ _it~\ — •iS ^ HOLMESJ PROCESSES OF FLAKING 59 produced and the rather haphazard arrangement of the percussionpoints prechide the idea that any process capable of accurately adjustingthe point of contact between the tool used and the article shaped couldhave been employed. At best such a method would certainly not bereadily applicable to a stone of the refractory nature of the manner of deliveiing the stroke seems sufQciently deter-mined, the precise method of holding the s
Annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution . * I- OS O uj ^ _it~\ — •iS ^ HOLMESJ PROCESSES OF FLAKING 59 produced and the rather haphazard arrangement of the percussionpoints prechide the idea that any process capable of accurately adjustingthe point of contact between the tool used and the article shaped couldhave been employed. At best such a method would certainly not bereadily applicable to a stone of the refractory nature of the manner of deliveiing the stroke seems sufQciently deter-mined, the precise method of holding the stone shaped is left to con-jecture. My own ex])eriments have been conducted on the assumptionthat it was held in the hand. The account of flaking processes givenin the following paragraidis is based on the belief that freehand per-cussion with hammers of stone or other hard and heavy material wasthe exclusive or principal (juarry-shop process. lleferring to the series of graded rejects illustrated in plate xvii, weobserve that the process of manufacture and the steps of development. Fig. 10—First step in bowlder tlakiug. were essentially as follows: Grasping a bowlder in either hand (sup-posing bowlder hammers to have been used), the first movement was tostrike the edge of one against that of the other at the proper angle todetach a flake (figure Id). The second movement and the third weresimilar, and so on until the circuit was completed. If no false strokewas made and the stone had the right fracture, these few blows, occu-pying but as many seconds, gave as a result a typical turtleback—abowlder with one side faceted by artificial flaking, the other side, savethrough accident, remaining smooth. If the removal of a single rowof flakes was not sufficient, the work was continued until the one sidewas reduced to the proper degree of convexity, and the availability ofthe stone for further elaboration was made apparent. A type profile 60 STONE IMPLEMENTS [ETH. ANN. 15 is il
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