Larry's done 3hrs-24min.-22sec. more work on the celt. Notice that Larry is notching the edges. It seems to help the process if he creates these notches and then removes the material between them. Larry is also moistening the stone periodically, to keep down the dust and let the chert dust adhere to the basalt. If the chert pieces stay on the basalt they appear to remove extra material.
The celt is now 21"-(53cm) long by 8"-(20cm) wide.
Larry has barely begun shaping the surfaces. He's got a long way to go.
The chert hammer is now down to 795.7grams
(The weights are incorrect in the photos) and is really rounding out. The debitage
is generally smaller now (710grams) with fewer large pieces of chert and more basalt
debris.to the next total 3 hours 24 minutes 22 seconds
and you have a
Grand Total of 5 hours - 38 minutes - 22 seconds at this point.
We've gone from
this,
to this,
to this,
to this,
in roughly, 5 1/2 hours. Stay tuned....
Now we've done 3hrs-3min-22sec more work on the celt. It's 207/8 " (53cm.)
long by 7 1/2" (19cm) wide. It's taking Larry longer and longer to recuperate
between sessions. The hammerstone is much lighter and Larry has decided to
update about every week instead of every few days. He is toying with the idea
of using a newer, heavier hammerstone and saving the one he has now for work
on the celt bit, later. The hammerstone looks like this,
and weighs 569.5 grams. As you can see, it's rounding out more. Here's the
debitage at this point.
It's getting finer with smaller chert pieces. At this point, (438.6 grams)
almost all the debitage would go right through a 1/4" screen.
We are now at :
8hrs-41min-23sec
We've gone from this
to this
Stay tuned....
IT BROKE!!!
3/Feb./'04
After an additional
2hrs-31min-28secs the celt unexpectedly, broke. Larry heard a increasingly lower
pitch to the battering for the last 4 strokes and that was the only clue to any
fault in the stone. Here's what it looks like now
.
As with all axe/celt experiments, there's always a risk of running into flaws in
the stone. The flaw is shown here.
The lighter colored material is the unseen crack in the stone. At this point
Larry has worked
11hrs-12min-51secs on this celt.
The only other piece of this stone Larry has is much too large to be worked with
stone tools. Larry has to decide if he will work the remaining stone with modern
tools or completely forget about the replication.
"Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you!
