Help distinguishing flakes

[Chrisz]

Good day everyone. I hunted a bit yesterday and brought home a lot of flint, but nothing special. Some I can easily identify as flakes, others seem to be just natural flint pieces, and then many I’m unsure of. This post isn’t really asking for help identifying which are flakes, it’s more-so asking how do you guys go about distinguishing between flakes and natural flint, especially if the characteristics of a flake are not necessarily very visible? Basically I like to keep flakes, but I don’t need a bunch of ‘not flakes’ in my collection. Thank you

[Ron Kelley]

Hey Chris, Reduction flakes or waste flakes are a great indicator of an ancient site. Most of my waste flakes are very thin. The bulb of percussion is a good indicator of a percussion flake (third picture). A picture may help:

[Chrisz]

Ok gotcha. Yeah, I found a few thin flakes also. I appreciate your help, and your pictures help a lot.

[SGT.Digger]

Uhave some chips in there, I’d save all the flint I found from sites and put them in my rock garden/cactus bed. Some of those it’s hard to say unless you handle it something broke those down to be that small though

[Chrisz]

SGT.Digger Thanks. Yeah I’d rather bring them home then leave something good laying out there. I appreciate your comment.

[Quartzite Keith]

What you show looks typical of debitage from "quarry" type site where they were breaking up rock to look for usable pieces and doing a littler test flaking and trimming. What Ron shows is the actual bifacing flakes, which is the next step in the process. Sometimes those two things happened side by side, or sometimes the bifacing was done a short distance away at a more comfortable work site.

[Ron Kelley]

Those two big knives were knapped from a whole rock. The debitage in the picture is what I got.

[Chrisz]

Quartzite Keith Ahh. That makes sense. Thank you very much!