![]() ![]() Hohokam toolkits in particular, with their emphasis on unmodified flakes and simple scraping and cutting flake tools, have often been regarded as simplistic collections far removed from the technological sophistication of earlier hunter-gatherers. They are not particularly aesthetically intriguing at first glance. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of flakes that were produced by people in the course of their daily lives as they reduced cores and occasionally fashioned them into tools. Most of the flaked stone artifacts recovered at archaeological sites in southern Arizona aren’t beautiful points, but instead flakes. The leftmost four are from the Early Agricultural period (2100 BC-AD 50) in the Tucson Basin the rightmost two are Sedentary period Hohokam (A.D.950-1150), from the La Villa site in Phoenix and the Gatlin site near Gila Bend. ![]() Outstanding examples of projectile points from southern Arizona. It’s beautiful, and it’s a good day in the lab when you get to see one. The poster child of flaked stone technology is the beautifully pressure-flaked projectile point, formed not by striking but by pushing a pointed flaker against a thin stone edge until fine flakes pop off. Force is applied to one side of the stone, travels through the stone, and detaches a piece of the stone when it exits another side. It’s a fascinating field of study because regardless of how old the artifacts are or where on the planet they were made, the physics of knapping have been constant since day one. The practice of striking flakes from a stone core and shaping either the flakes or the core into finished tools through further flaking is referred to as knapping, and the sets of knapping behaviors, techniques, and resulting artifacts hominids have produced over the past million years are collectively referred to as flaked stone technology. If not, they struck another and another until they had what they needed, or shaped the flake into a desired tool form by striking additional smaller flakes from its edges. If the flake they created was suitable for the task at hand, they could use it as is. If they needed a sharp edge, their best option was to pick up a rock and hit it with another rock to break off a flake of stone. The people who lived in southern Arizona before the first Spaniards trekked through in 1694 did not have access to metal tools. Now think about performing those tasks without steel or iron. Maybe you sliced up a peach to make your yogurt palatable or fired up a Dremel to carve some stone beads for your Etsy shop. Think about the last time you used a metal tool. Sliva, Desert’s senior flaked stone analyst, has thoughts about an often-maligned set of stone artifacts. Hohokam Flake Tools and the Eye of the Beholder ![]()
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