Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Debitage

A handful of quartz flakes from my our site at Quantico. Archaeologists call this stuff debitage, using the French word to cover all of the various waste pieces -- flakes, chips, etc. -- you get when making tools out of stone. Making one finished spear point from a cobble generates at least 200 waste pieces, so you find tons of this stuff wherever stone age people camped.

Another view of our excavation, and two more points.



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