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Hammerstones & Pecking Stones

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  • Hammerstones & Pecking Stones

    (Introduction inserted retrospectively by [painshill])
    HAMMERSTONES & PECKING STONES

    What is a hammerstone?

    A hammerstone is a hard stone (usually a natural cobble or a stone that has been semi-shaped) used for hammering pretty much anything. They’re normally round or ovoid for a comfortable and secure grip in the hand. The uses may include knapping of lithic materials; breaking bones for marrow extraction; breaking nuts or marine/freshwater shells to extract edible meat; processing of vegetable material for food or other purposes; and pre-breaking or crushing ores for pigment or other uses.

    They’re frequently found in association with other artefacts and lithic or bone debris. They exhibit tell-tale battering marks on one or more ends/surfaces and sometimes on all surfaces as a result of the tool being rotated in the hand to constantly utilise fresh surfaces.

    Here’s the kind of impact damage you might see on a well-used example (this one’s chert):

    Click image for larger version

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    Typical Materials

    A hammerstone needs to be harder than whatever it is being used to process and not made from splintery or brittle material. Igneous rocks such as fine-grained granite or basalt, many quartzites and cherts are all suitable materials, but also sandstones (especially if fine-grained and silicate cemented) and even hard limestones may be used.

    Usage in Knapping

    The use of hammerstone for knapping is a “hard-hammer percussion” process. Typically, the impact from a hammerstone leaves large bulbs of percussion and removes large flakes or chips and may be used to split other hardstones into more manageable pieces.

    The hammerstone was also the favoured implement for bipolar lithic reduction of cores, where force was applied from two opposing directions – from the hammerstone itself and from a stone anvil on which the core rested. This was an essential technique for “pebble-tool” cultures whose primary source for lithic material was river or beach cobbles and pebbles. Cobbles can be halved or controllably shattered into usable slices for further knapping by this kind of process. Placing a pebble in a shallow depression in an anvil stone and striking it from above is the only controllable way to knap such material.

    Pecking Stones

    A variant on the hammerstone is the pecking stone. Typically these are smaller for easier manipulation in the fingers and may be flatter in profile with a keeled edge or have a blunt point. They were used for finer work on hardstones, in a repetitive but gentler percussive action - “woodpecker-fashion”. The hardness and integrity of the material for the pecking stone was even more important than for larger hammerstones. A core being worked on could be refined by progressively taking small chips off it and the same technique was used for incising designs into stone – such as for producing petroglyphs.

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    Just about the same size, shape, and degree of usage, which is not a lot. Both show battering at both ends, in each case the end with the greater degree shown here.




    Personal finds and photos by CMD
    Searching the fields of NW Indiana and SW Michigan
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