Heat treating

CreekSide · Jan 12, 2024

In what period did they start heat treatment? The reason I’m asking is this is a quartzite Savannah River which has been heat treated which makes it an orange color. It dates late archaic give or take some years. I was thinking they started it in Woodland period. This was a creek find and the only orange color point I’ve ever found.

Older The Better · Jan 12, 2024

It may just be a personal opinion but I never thought of it as a hard line, I always looked at it as groups became less wide ranging and locked into a certain area they had to rely more heavily on local resources and heat treating made less desirable stone more workable. So it’s more a result of subsistence strategy at any given place and time vs a technological change like ceramics or the bow

ToddsPoint · Jan 13, 2024

In central IL they started heating flint regularly in the middle archaic. Extremely rare to see any paleo or early archaic flint that was heated. Won’t say they never did it, but we never see it. With a higher population using flint sources that had been picked over for 5000 yrs, the middle archaic was forced to use more common but lesser quality flint. Heating improved it considerably with easier chipping, increased gloss and color. As a flintknapper, I’ve cooked a ton of flint. At first I buried it in sand and started a wood fire on it. Later I bought a kiln for better control. 550F is the magic number for heatable midwestern cherts. Western material like agate takes less. There’s an art to it, about half guesswork, and a lot of material gets accidentally destroyed trying to heat it.