Hey Will! My name is Chris and I am from Pennsylvania in America. I am 19 years old and just happened to stumble upon this gem of a channel. After about 2 days of falling down a rabbit hole of flintknapping, I ordered a beginners kit and it just came in today. I made my first dagger today! I am well aware It’s not the greatest thing, but I am proud of it! I just wanted to say thank you for teaching me through a screen and I hope you understand how many people you impact on a daily basis. Thank you for sparking a completely new interest in me!
Learnt a little! Well I've learnt a lot here Will . Watching you pushing the limits was thoroughly mesmerising to the point I let me tea get cold 😂 .Great results, well done.
Watching from Washington State, US. Thanks for the wonderful and detailed videos of your flint knapping skills and procedures. They are fascinating to behold. Merry Christmas.
The quiet snap, scratch, ting of the process seems to tickle a deep and ancient memory. How many generations of ancestors intimately knew and relied upon the mastery of those subtle sounds? Just as we react instinctively today to the rumble of a great cat or the slither of a snake, these sounds awaken something fine in our deep unconscious. Thank you!
I enjoy this level of detail as I'm sure others do to. I honestly would watch a video of the entire process quite frankly. Just food for thought. Thanks for all the great content.
You are very talented and I am jealous of your talent, I myself love crafts like yours and have tried on a few occasions to shape flint but it is extremely difficult. It is mesmerizing to watch you work to shape flint into such beautiful objects.
Hi Will, Just want to thank you for the incredible work you put into this channel! Knapping has been a mystery to me ever since I was a child. Your videos and the experiences you so genereously share with the world have encouraged me to start. I've decided to make my own antler tools and begin my journey when the snow melts next year. I wish you all the best and a happy and inspiring new year! Cheers!
Lovely piece! Ages ago in elementary school I saw Clovis blade line diagrams in an old history book, and the black and white photos, and I've been curious ever since. Thank you for this fascinating work you're doing.
So useful to see it in real time which helps learning how to manage events. Thank you. Trivial but the camera takes a few moments to refocus when you hold up the stone. It might be better to lift it and hold it still briefly while you speak.
As much as I hate hinges, part of what makes flint knapping fun for me is problem solving my way around them. I would get bored really fast if my plan with the stone always went the way i expected. Oddly enough it applies to many things in life. Still frustrating as heck though.
Something I'd love to see more of would be woodworking with stone tools. Like, how are you making the handles that you put on, or how would you cut a notch into a beam?
You should check out Primitive Archery (Ryan Gill) on RU-vid. He does a lot of stuff using stone tools to make other tools and wood work. He has a video where he makes a primitive bow, using nothing but stoneage tools. He also hunts with the stuff he makes, and has even worked with a couple colleges doing hunts on everything from pigs, to deer, and even bison, using all primitive equipment he makes. They then process the whole animal, using stoneage tools. They put the hunts together as documentaries, and the college uses them to study the effects on the stoneage tools (dulling, chipping, breaking, losing blades, and using performs on site to make additional tools), and the marks left on the animal parts (cut marks on bone). It helps the archeologists from the colleges interpret the things they find at lithic archeological sites. Very interesting stuff, and supplements the stuff Will Lord does, quite well.
Try your local pet store for some big chunks of glass. People buy them as decorations for their fish tanks. It's not as hard as flint but it's a similar material. Good to practice on, I think. Cheap as chips , too.
Yes. Glass is a widely-available material and analogous to obsidian. Note however, that glass, like obsidian, is a less forgiving material than chert and flint. Expect a steeper learning curve. If you can master glass knapping, then chert and flint should be even easier.
Fantastic skill Will, i have a couple of questions if you have the time. Do you think most hunters of this period would make their own tools or would they trade with a specialist flint napper? So would a chap with your skills be in high demand or do you think it would've been a commonplace skill back then? Thanks in advance, keep teaching us mate, best wishes, Allan.
A little of both. It's believed most people had at least basic knapping skills. At kill sites, where animals were processed down after a hunt, there is lots of evidence of tools being made on site, while processing the animal. It's believed to be to replace or repair broken and lost tools that happens during the processing. But, there are also locations, including a really big one in Ethiopia, where there is evidence of tools being mass produced, almost like a factory type setting, where there might be several knappers just sitting around producing points and blades. A final note, there is evidence, and direct history from early North American contact, that shows that bifaces and preforms were sometimes carried around by individuals and traded like currency. If you aren't familiar, a preform would be what the blade on this video was when it started. An unfinished point, but far enough along to be identified as a point. A biface would be the step before this, where a spall has been worked to thin it, but hasn't been given a definitive shape yet, and still needs thinned. I know I wasn't the one you asked, but I knap too, and thought I could help you out by answering that for you. I hope you don't mind.
Have you ever tried heating a big chunk of flint in a fire, then trying to shape a blade etc from it days later after it has cooled? I would be very interested in seeing if the flint characteristics change due to it being heated. Thanks :)
Hi Will! I was wondering: I'm tempted to try my hand at knapping, but I don't have ready access to deer antler. Can I make a similar soft hammer out of wood? And if so, what sort of qualities would you say I should look for? Do I go for hardwood? Do I want a dense, heavy wood or a something lighter? Thoughts?
Well, you could use different types of woods and have multiple types of flakers. I suspect that you would want some kind of hard-wearing, dense wood. The head should probably be formed from a knot or a fork, as these are often sturdy.
@@WillLordPrehistoricSurvival so hardwoods are the way to go? Got it. I was thinking about juniper. I have decent access to that, and it's both hard and dense, but it's also a bit easier to carve than something like oak or boxwood, and I was worried that might be an issue over time.
Thankyou very much for replying. I think I could make one maybe one day but we don’t have much flint laying arrowed in Blackpool. Also I think you dad is a expert knapper cheers.
