Big one....little one

[coteau]

Two Knife River flint scrapers. I wonder if some scrapers were purposely made small to begin with, for use on hides from smaller animals, or maybe for doing the finishing touches on hides. I know scrapers were constantly being resharpened, but I still wonder if sometimes they made them small from the start....

The small scraper is 5/8" long.

[uniface]

Hi Runtee

The pattern in the Texas Endscraper overview posted today probably bears on this. An Illinois area site survey I've got the link to somewhere similarly separates paleo endscrapers from Early Archaic endscrapers by size - paleo small ; early archaic large.

From there info is frustratingly hard to come by, but at Russell Cave (Ala), 73% of the early archaic tools were unifaces, dropping to 23% in middle archaic. It seems that some places kept using them, while in other places they only re-appear in the woodland era.

As sloppy as this is, and full of holes, size and age seem to be pretty generally correlated.

Beats nothing

[Tnmountains]

I had a friend involved with the dig at Russell cave. He is in his 70's now but still finds a few. Nice scrapers. I think they made what ever they needed in a flash and had piles of flint to use just like we have a knife drawer in the kitchen.