Throughout the period of time in which humans have made stone tools (not only during
Prehistory), different techniques and different types of hammerstone have been used. The following are the basic types; Certain sophisticated procedures (such as the use of
Conchoidal fractures) requires more specialized tools.
Direct percussion Sleeping (passive) hammer A large stone set in the ground or firmly mounted. The stone being worked is hit against this anvil, resulting in large flakes that are further processed into tools. This technique is not well known, though there is evidence of it being used during the
Lower Paleolithic. The problem with the anvil stone is that the user handles large stones, which can be difficult to control with precision. Another way of using the sleeping hammer as an anvil is more typical of advanced periods (from the
Upper Paleolithic). Although it is based on the use of an anchored stone, the technical concept is completely different: it is about resting stone chips or sheets on the anvil and carrying out an abrupt
retouching due to impact on one side (back) or extremity (truncated) thus obtaining retouched orthogonal fractures (this is what is called abrupt retouch). It is also possible to retouch stone tools on the anvil by means of
pressure flaking, thus obtaining a regular and monofacial retouched edge.
Active hard hammer A simple stone with a
worked edge held directly in the hand as a
hammer. The hard hammer is and has been the most used throughout human history, because although other types of hammer are used as main tools for carving, stone hammers are the tools that prepared the way for the more advanced techniques. Hard percussion is the first to appear and the only one known for at least two million years (until the soft hammer is incorporated); it was used to manufacture tools throughout the entire
operational sequence until lithic technology improved. Then, the hard hammer was relegated to the first stages of making an artifact: the initial roughing, the primary workmanship (the creation of preforms, which would later be refined with a soft or pressure hammer), the attack of percussion planes inaccessible to the soft hammer, the preparation of percussion platforms in certain nuclei, etc. Despite indirect evidence of its long persistence,
archeology has revealed very few hammers. Among the oldest are those cited by Jean and Nicole Chavaillon in both Gomboré 1B, Melka Kunturé and even
Olduvai (layers I and II): Active hard hammers are distinguished by their oblong shape with one or two active edges with numerous shock marks and often small flakes (chipping), as well as some cracks. These are recognized by the numerous traces of blows they have (microstars, percussion cones, fissures, random flakes, etc...). It is possible that in the old and unsystematic excavations they went unnoticed, but it has also been said that the good stone hammers were so appreciated that the craftsman only abandoned them when they were useless. Semenov speaks of a deposit rich in hammering (in
Polivanov,
Russia), but, like the rest of the sites, they are almost all from the
Neolithic period onwards. The size of hard hammers depends on their function: there are very large ones for roughing, medium ones are used for the main work, small ones are auxiliary tools to prepare percussion platforms, or retouch flakes. As for the shape, there are circular, oval, rectangular, etc... In fact, the shape depends a lot on the style of the craftsman (at least for prehistorians who experiment with flint carving who acquire styles, different positions, and tastes). Despite the fact that stone hammers are more typical of the manufacture of wide and short
flakes, used with mastery they can achieve very precise control of rock chipping. In fact, cases of
blades manufacture with a hard hammer have been witnessed, mainly in the
Middle European Paleolithic (almost always
Levallois blades), but also in the
Upper and
Epipaleolithic. While the extraction of blades is more effective with other techniques, there are enough indications to affirm that it can also be done with a hard hammer. There are even exceptional cases of
obsidian blade of more than 30 centimeters manufactured in pre-Columbian
Mexico and ancient
Ethiopia and greater examples in excess of 70 centimeters found in present-day California. Modern experimental carvers have not been able to recreate these methods.
Soft hammer A soft hammer is a fragment of bone,
deer antler or
hardwood that is used to hit the rock and extract flakes. Soft hammers are usually about 30 or 40 cm long and the ideal size to hold in the hand. The material from which they are made is very varied, since throughout their history humans have hunted many species of deer throughout the globe, but experimental carvers particularly appreciate those of reindeer or caribou (although those of deer are the most common and affordable). The
bovine horn is not as suitable as the
cervid antler, as it has an external
keratin coating separate from the bone core, however they can be used as retouchers. In the case of wood, only especially hard species serve, such as
boxwood,
holly, and perhaps
oak. In any case, the soft hammer wears out with its use relatively quickly. Each blow eats a little from the hammer. Wood hammers wear down especially fast. The antler hammers last a little longer, but in the end they break due to
fatigue. Observation with the naked eye reveals that the
flint (or whatever the carved rock) leaves small splinters and stone chips embedded in the hammer. In archaeological excavations, soft hammers are even rarer than hard ones, as they are organic and therefore perishable.
François Bordes and Denise de Sonneville-Bordes exhumed one from the most recent
Solutrean strata in the
Laugerie-Haute cave (
Dordogne). The piece was broken into several fragments and incomplete, but retained the functional end, where the marks of the blows could be seen and microscopic embedded flint bits were visible. The
petrological analysis additionally determined that it was the same type of flint as the carved pieces extracted from the same archaeological layer. Despite this brittleness, soft hammers have a series of advantages derived from their
elasticity and resistance to
stress-deformation. The soft hammer has a lower
yield than the rock, that would make a layman think that it is impossible to carve flint or
quartzite with a piece of wood or antler. However, its
elastic limit is much higher, which makes it bear more tension and it is the rock that breaks, instead of the hammer. This does not happen, however, with the bone. Bone strikers are often unsuitable for carving, in fact bone is more of a carved raw material than rocks. During the percussion itself, which lasts thousandths of a second, the soft hammer, being a non-isotropic linear elastic, varies its tension state and increases its internal energy in the form of elastic potential energy. The moment the rock reaches its elastic limit and breaks, the potential energy is released and the hammer returns to its original shape. Also due to its elasticity, the contact surface between hammer and rock is greater, since the hammer adapts to the percussion plane. The percussive area is larger, so the fracture is more diffuse than if one were to use a hard hammer, so the
conchoid is also less pronounced. It is a process so fast that it is invisible to the human eye, but its consequences have been exploited for more than a million years. In practice, these elements give the craftsman greater control over carving, in easier-to-direct results, and in more precise and defined varnishing; in short, the carving is more efficient and its results more effective: Artifacts carved with a soft hammer have a much finer finish than those where only the hard hammer has been used. The soft hammer appeared during the
Lower Paleolithic, specifically in the
Acheulean (it is very visible in certain bifaces), 700,000 years ago in
Africa and half a million years ago in
Eurasia. However, the soft hammer does not replace the hard hammer, on the contrary, it complements it. Typically, the roughing or preparation of the piece is done with a hard hammer, and the finish with a soft hammer. Carved objects have scars from both types of hammer. Often the finished and used tools were recycled, re-sharpened, possibly with hard hammer, so there would be several alternate phases of hard and soft hammer. Other times, in the case of the cores, although the extraction of flakes or sheets was done with a soft or pressure hammer (see below), the hard hammer was necessary to prepare the percussion platform and eliminate protrusions that could disrupt the operation. The carving experiments of Professor
Luis Benito del Rey, tenured professor of Prehistory at the
University of Salamanca, serve to distinguish, with a certain degree of acceptable precision (since there is never complete certainty), carving scars by direct percussion with a hard hammer. and those of the soft hammer compared to each other. The direct soft hammer was used throughout the
Upper Paleolithic of Eurasia to obtain blades and flakes, by means of a specific preparation. Prehistoric carvers were able to obtain blades of over half a meter in length. Although the experiments have been able to recreate the methods used, they are still poorly known and the results are often subject to size accidents and fortuitous behavior of the material.
Precision and indirect percussion Both percussion with an intermediate piece and pressure carving share common technical points, among them the difficulty of distinguishing the scars left by one and the other. The remaining nuclei of both are, on the other hand, completely different. In the case of pressure, the tool is no longer a hammer in the strict sense of the word, since the compressors, that is, the tools used, do not hit; they only press so hard that they exceed the elastic limit of the rocks, breaking them according to the conchoidal fracture model. For this reason, it is difficult not to associate the compressors with the hammers.
Hammer with intermediate piece (pointer) Carving with an intermediate piece is a specialized technique for obtaining lithic blades. It is one of the steps of a laminar extraction method, which means that by itself it has no value, since it requires a previous preparation of the core and continuous maintenance gestures of the same (done this way, the work is very similar to that of a
stonemason with his mallet and his chisel). If we consider the core to be ready, there are two known ways to use the pointer or intermediate piece: • The first is to hold the core between the knees, with the percussion platform up and the extraction face out. The end of the pointer is placed where we want to extract the blade and hit it decisively with a shaft that acts like a mallet. This method yields good products: long, medium-sized and highly standardized blades or sheets, but with a strong general curvature. • The second is to hold the core underfoot. This results in much straighter blades, but smaller ones. If one tries to increase their size carving accidents are more likely to occur. It is thought that indirect percussion with a pointer appears in the Upper Palaeolithic, and it coexists with direct percussion. In any case, the scars of these techniques are impossible to distinguish, except in exceptional cases. In fact, it is difficult to identify the bone pointers in the excavations, since they hardly have characteristic marks, that is, different from a percussion with any other purpose. Proposed examples are that of the
Fageolet cave (
Dordogne), dated in the
Gravettian, those of
Villevallier and
Armeau (
Yonne), both Neolithic, and those of
Spiennes (
Belgium), from the same period.
Compressor Unlike the technique of indirect percussion with a pointer, pressure carving with compressors is not only used for the extraction of flaked products (specifically stone blades), it is also used for retouching tools. In fact, pressure carving to obtain blades includes a vast repertoire of methods, not all of which are known to researchers. All of these methods require a certain level of specialization, as demonstrated by carving experiences. Because of its complexity and the fact that we do not discuss a striker, this section is brief. There is a method of pressure retouching, called subparallel covering retouching (due to its morphological aspect), which was rediscovered by the American archaeologist and experimenter Donald E. Crabtree in the 70s, and expanded by this same archaeologist with the collaboration of Butler, Tixier and others. They have also developed many others, but this type of retouching is quite well known (In fact, many enthusiasts manufacture and sell highly accurate replicas in memory of the Native American heritage of certain regions) and the interest from researchers, experimental prehistorians, has gone to the extraction of blades by pressure. To carry out this technique, the piece must be held firmly on the palm of the left hand (holding the lithic artifact firmly is one of the most difficult techniques to learn). The compressor is held with the right or it is levered while holding the left hand between the thumb and the rest of the fingers, pressing as hard as possible. The compressor can be made of horn or
ivory (sometimes with a flint embedded in the tip The opposite case is that of the
Valladolid reservoir of
Los Cercados (municipality of
Mucientes). There, a series of Copper Age finds appeared, basically wells filled with archaeological remains. One of them produced a series of utensils typical of an artisan, specialized in the carving of indigenous flint: carving waste, roughing products, flakes, discarded tools, and above all stone hammers and what have been called bone retouchers (this type of pieces are rarely preserved, that's why they are so important). Apparently in this site they specialized in foliaceous pieces, for example arrowheads, and sickle teeth; that is, it was a regional production destined for domestic use.
Modern metallic hammerstones Stone carving, as is known, is one of the human forms of artistic manifestation and is used both in
sculpture and in
architecture. Currently, flint and other conchoidal fracture rocks are used as construction materials, either as
ashlars or as an aesthetic coating. However, this phenomenon does not concern this article. On the other hand, the carving of flint or other rocks, in the prehistoric way, has persisted for use on agricultural instruments (sickles, threshing ...), spark stones (tinder lighters, flint firearms ...) and even manufacturers of semi-precious
gemstones in
India and other countries. The difference is usually that hammers with modern metal alloys are used.
England : Neolithic Flint Mines in Brandon, England.To the north of the English region of
Suffolk, there is a rich tradition of flint carving centered around the town of Brandon where prehistoric, probably Neolithic, flint mines called
Grimes Graves are preserved. Apparently, from the historical origins of the town in the 14th century, flint was used as a construction material (including the bridge over the river that gave it strategic relevance). After the appearance of
gunpowder, many of the Brandon's artisans dedicated themselves to making spark stones for
firearms. Although advances in military technology ended this activity in the middle of the 20th century, there are still some master carvers who use various metal hammers.
Spain Until a few decades ago, in Spanish towns such as
Cantalejo (
Segovia), flint was carved for the manufacture of agricultural
threshing machines. The flint carving technique was very simple and standardized, aimed at obtaining wide and short but resistant chips of about three centimeters. For this, different hammers were used. The hammer used in the final phase, that of the flake itself, was a long and narrow-handled wooden peg, with a small, almost tiny, metal head with two thin and prominent ends. The metal mass of this type of hammer is very small compared to its long and flexible handle, which, in addition to increasing the speed of the blow, combines the potential energy of the wooden handle with the hardness of the small metal pick. Thus, a direct hard percussion is obtained, with a soft, elastic impact.
India In the
Gujarat region (
India) there are still artisans who make thick
chalcedony necklace beads by knapping. This activity is concentrated in the city of Cambay (or
Khambhat) and has certain peculiarities; It uses the kickback technique between a pointed metal passive hammer and an active
water buffalo horn hammer. The craftsmen shape the beads, holding them against the metal hammer and hitting them with the horn, causing little pieces to fly off little by little. The result is a very efficient method. Although the technique persists today, it is suspected that it must have appeared in very ancient times, perhaps with the first
brass instruments, in the Chalcolithic. ==See also==