Alaska News

Cutting edge: Master rock-knapper introduces new generation to an old art

Randy Tedor stood with a chunk of obsidian in his right hand and a cylindrical rock in his left. He made a quick strike with the stone. It made a dull, grinding, crunching thud. A bit of obsidian dust drifted to the floor.

"I didn't go hard enough," he said, using the rock to smooth out the "plateau," the spot where he wanted to hit the obsidian. Then he struck again. This time there was a sharp, deep "crack" sound.

"You hear that?" he said. "That's how you know you got it right." And he peeled off a large flake of razor-sharp volcanic glass from the main chunk.

Knapping, or flint-knapping, the breaking and shaping of rocks with quick blows, was a skill known to our ancestors going back perhaps four million years. They used it to craft weapons, hunting tools, knives and other items needed for survival. It involved precision hand-eye coordination but also an understanding -- either taught or instinctual -- of physics, chemistry, geology and geometry.

"You have to be able to read the stone, find the impurities, the cracks," Tedor said. "I could talk to you about it for a year. But until you actually do it, it's impossible to understand."

Tedor will lead hands-on knapping workshops over the next two weekends at the Anchorage Museum. The first weekend will cover basics and the second will move on to finer rock-chipping skills. But don't expect to walk out with a beautiful arrowhead.

"Guys who like to smash rocks will say you have to turn 500 pounds of rock into dust before you get it right," he said.

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It's always been like that. Tedor said a common feature of ancient knapping sites is a plethora of "big, ugly, non-functional" pieces along with a smaller number of more refined points. The theory is that children were brought to places where material was abundant, given a little instruction, then let loose to whack away until they got the hang of it.

"It's the same thing in my work," he said. "If I showed you some of my early stuff, you'd see the evolution of technique as I figured out what I was doing."

Prehistoric witnesses

We can thank one of Tedor's old girlfriends for the fact that he became an archaeologist.

"She was going to UAA. I wasn't. One day she brought in a college catalog and slammed it down on the table right in front of me and pointed at it. She said, 'I cannot be with an uneducated man. Pick a major.'

"The A's were the first courses in the catalog. I went with archaeology."

The relationship didn't last much longer, he admitted. But he fell in love with his field of study. As a boy, he'd roamed fields in his native Pennsylvania, looking for artifacts, and was fascinated by arrowheads and other items his grandfather brought back from trips. The joy of that childhood pastime reawakened.

Now he makes a living checking out construction sites for possible archaeological issues. "I've traveled all over Alaska," he said. "I've worked in Russia, been to France. It really kinda panned out."

In 2004, a guest teacher led a class on knapping and Tedor was hooked.

"I started practicing all the time," he said. "I didn't just want to understand it, I wanted to be able to reproduce it."

Learning how to make and use an ancient tool helps you connect to the people who made the artifacts found at digs and gives the modern scientist a little insight into their thinking, he said. "You can learn a lot about different individuals when you look at the errors in their work and what they did to fix mistakes; you can see different styles and techniques."

The raw material of a spear point is common enough, he said. There are large deposits of obsidian, flint, amber, chert and other suitable rocks all over the world. "If we have to go back to the stone age, we'll do alright," he said.

However, these deposits are not evenly distributed. Trade in both rough rocks and finished points flourished throughout prehistory. Fragments dating back 10,000 years found at Broken Mammoth in the Tanana Valley originated in the Kobuk River area, 300 miles away.

Some arrow and dart heads show signs that they were made from larger points. "A big one would get chipped, so they'd knock it down to make a new one in a smaller size," Tedor said.

In notable cases, the information contained in chipped rocks has roused epochal controversy. The similarity of spear tips found in Clovis, New Mexico, and France have given rise to a much-debated theory that at least some of the earliest Americans may have migrated from Europe.

"The Clovis people had a specific method for reducing the mass of the stone, a method of taking large, wide and thin flakes off across the face. It takes a tremendous amount of skill," Tedor said. "The only other place where we find that technology is in France."

Scientists argue about the linguistic and genetic evidence for the so-called Solutrean hypothesis, but close analysis of the details of the spear points continue to be at the core of the debate.

Other information is a bit more personal. Tedor recalled an early field trip where his group found one half of a point on top of a hill near Tangle Lakes. "We searched all around the area and finally found it way down at the bottom of the hill. How'd it get there?"

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Speaking more as a knapper than a scientist, he offered what he thinks is an obvious answer.

"It broke while some guy was making it. He got mad and threw the other half as far as he could throw it, probably with a few choice words. We haven't changed so much."

Primal knowledge

The technology hasn't changed much, either. Modern knappers have modern tools at their disposal -- the "copper bopper" billet, a metal version of the rock hammer. But Tedor is an "old-school knapper," who mostly sticks with the hard rock hammer for the big hits and a "soft hammer" of bone, antler or ivory for the smaller chips.

Being a "prehistoric detective" is a major reason for his fascination with knapping. "I'm interested in general wilderness survival, catching glimpses of how people did it," he said.

But there's a deeper reason. Interacting with a rock, unlocking its secrets, creates a kind of communication with the natural world that isn't as it may once have been.

"For a master knapper it's like sculpture," he said. "They see the arrow inside the rock and how to remove the surrounding rock from it."

He compared it to hunting. "The stalk, the kill, putting your hands inside the dead animal. Your awareness goes up to such a degree that it's humbling. It teaches things you never knew.

"All of us still have this primal knowledge. Unfortunately, people don't get much of a chance to find it. The kids nowadays aren't getting it. They're disconnected from the natural world."

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He recalled a recent field camp where young college students not only didn't know how to run a washer and a dryer, "some of them thought carrots came skinned. We had carrots with the skin on and they were like, 'What's this? We're supposed to eat this?' They didn't know how to wash dishes."

On the other hand, he said, he's been amazed by the self-reliance of kids in rural Alaska.

"There's an amazing sense of independence out there," he said and recounted seeing a kid get a four-wheeler stuck near Hooper Bay. "He didn't just leave it, he didn't call the tow truck. He couldn't. He popped off the seat and opened the idle, put it in gear and pulled at the same time. When it got unstuck it tried to get away from him, but he caught it. He had the independence to handle that situation. We don't do it that much any more."

Education is another reason he likes to knap. "I do a lot of things for kids in the schools," he said. "I'll give them a piece of leather and tell them to try and cut it. They'll pull, they'll try their school scissors, they'll bite it with their teeth. Then I break off a piece."

Obsidian can be sharper than surgical steel, so sharp that it leaves virtually no scar. The dean of modern master knappers, Don Crabtree, fashioned the stone blades his doctor used to perform open heart surgery on him in 1978.

Tedor took a chipped rock to the corner of a leather bag. With a light touch of the blade, a piece of bag fell off.

"Like a hot knife through butter," he said with a smile. "I watch their faces. They all go, 'Ooh!'"

RANDY TEDOR will lead a two-day workshop on flint-knapping noon-3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18 and 25 at the Anchorage Museum. Tedor recommends these classes for those 15 or older. Cost is $190, $170 for museum members. Register online at anchoragemuseum.org.

Other professional archeologists will be at the University Mall starting at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18, with displays of artifacts, movies and various hands-on activities. The University Mall event is free.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham has been a reporter and editor at the ADN since 1994, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print.

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