XXXVI. CUSHING'S ACCOUNT OF SHAPING PEOCESSES 



THE following very interesting account of the flint-working 

 processes is extracted from F. H. Cushing's memoir entitled 

 " The Arrow." It appears that this account does not relate 

 to the stone-shaping work of any particular tribe but is rather a 

 composite account, embodying all the processes familiar to Mr. Cush- 

 ing, wdio had intimate acquaintance with the aboriginal handicrafts, 

 and experimented extensively and with exceptional acumen in every 

 kind of process known to him. 



Lone: before I wont to the Smithsonian or lived in Zuui I had elaborated from 

 the simple beginning I have chronicled here, some seven or eight totally distinct 

 methods of working flintlike substances with Stone Age apparatus, and subse- 

 quently have found that all save two of those processes were al)solutely similar 

 to processes now known to have been sometime in vogue with one people or 

 another of the ancient world. . . . 



They first sought the material, mined it arduously from buried ledges with 



fire, mauls, and skids, or preferably, when the country 

 [QuaiTjing] afforded, sought it in banks of bowlder pebbles, digging such 



as were fit freshly from the soil, if possible, and at once 

 blocking out from them, blanks for their blades by splitting the pebbles into 

 suitable spalls, not by free-handed percussion, but by holding them edgewise on 



a hard base and hitting them sharply and almost directly on 

 [Making Spalls] the peripheries, but with a one-sided twist or turn of the 



maul or battering stone with each deft stroke. The spalls, 

 sometimes 20 from a single cobble or block of moderate size, were with almost 

 incredible rapidity trimmed to the leaf-shape basis of all primitive chipped 

 tools by knapping them with a horn, bone, or very soft, tough, granular stone 



hanuner mounted in a light handle. For this the spall was 

 [Roughing Out] placed flatwise on the knee or on a padded hammer stone, 



so called, and held down by the base of the thumb of one 

 hand and rapidly struck along the edge transversel.v and obliquely to its axis 

 lengthwise, with the outwardly twisting kind of blows used in the splitting. 

 The blanks thus formed were then carried home for leisurely or opportune 

 finishing, and carefully buried in damp soil, not to hide them, as has been 



usually suitposed, Init to keep them even-tempered or uniformly 

 [Transportation] saturated ("full of sap and life" these ancients thought); 



whence the so-called caches of numerous leaf -shape blades 

 which are now and then found, for example, throughout old Indian ranges. 



In finally forming arrow points from these trinuned blanks, the smallest 

 of them only were chosen. The first care in fashioning one of these was to 

 remove protuberant points from its edge and sides and to thin it down by 



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