Obsidian cache

[willybee]

Originally Posted by paleotroy

Yes, I've knapped obsidian and I couldn't disagree with you more.

Go back and look at the photos again and look more closely at the more crude looking knives that are without bases....Notice the curvature?

Rokdok said these were a cache...That means they were all found together...If that's true then you can be 99% sure that they were all knapped by the same person.

The large broad blade looks out of place as part of the "cache"....I can only go by what info rokdok has supplied.

Troy-i agree that the large broad blade looks out of place, in fact, it may actually be an indian artifact. i have a bag of obsidian needles from modoc national forest that i bought a while ago. granted they are only 3 or 4 inches long, but they can be up to several feet long and many of them ARE CURVED and look exactly like they were removed from a large block, mostly because they were, only by natural processes. out of 18 needles in my bag, 5 of them look exactly like flakes removed from a core. they even are flat in the inside of the curve! wow!(see photo)



there are even PLATFORMS, if you look close, natural ones. notice the identical patina on my needles to rokdoks (like dirt that won't come off?) (these are mahogany needles-rokdoks are black). now, if a person was to look around at the MILLIONS of these suckers, literally a WHOLE MOUNTAIN OF THEM just laying there, could he pick out ones like rokdoks? MAYBE he could, thats all i am saying......

real life experience cannot be replaced by viewing videos on the internet, and here is a photo of my most recent effort, a 9 3/4 inch obsidian monolithic knife, made from tri flow mahogany obsidian. as an experienced knapper, particularly with obsidian (i make big gaudy impossible to pass off as real stuff)-i am very familiar with how obsidian breaks. these giant curved skinny things would work once, maybe, no matter if they were needles or not to start with.
OR possibly some mentally challenged indian left this cache of unusable points buried south of phoenix................you decide.

willy

[rokdok]

Yeah, those "needles" look EXACTLY like the points i posted.

[DesertWalker]

Is that ground where you are holding it? Otherwise you got some bloody knuckles..lol

[rokdok]

Originally Posted by willybee

Troy-i agree that the large broad blade looks out of place, in fact, it may actually be an indian artifact. i have a bag of obsidian needles from modoc national forest that i bought a while ago. granted they are only 3 or 4 inches long, but they can be up to several feet long and many of them ARE CURVED and look exactly like they were removed from a large block, mostly because they were, only by natural processes. out of 18 needles in my bag, 5 of them look exactly like flakes removed from a core. they even are flat in the inside of the curve! wow!(see photo)
Attachment 21817


there are even PLATFORMS, if you look close, natural ones. notice the identical patina on my needles to rokdoks (like dirt that won't come off?) (these are mahogany needles-rokdoks are black). now, if a person was to look around at the MILLIONS of these suckers, literally a WHOLE MOUNTAIN OF THEM just laying there, could he pick out ones like rokdoks? MAYBE he could, thats all i am saying......

real life experience cannot be replaced by viewing videos on the internet, and here is a photo of my most recent effort, a 9 3/4 inch obsidian monolithic knife, made from tri flow mahogany obsidian. as an experienced knapper, particularly with obsidian (i make big gaudy impossible to pass off as real stuff)-i am very familiar with how obsidian breaks. these giant curved skinny things would work once, maybe, no matter if they were needles or not to start with.
OR possibly some mentally challenged indian left this cache of unusable points buried south of phoenix................you decide.

willy

Attachment 21818
Attachment 21819

Tell you what, Mr. Obsidian Master, a genious such as yourself should have no problem replicating these, right? Since you already have the needles, i'll bet you can make something as simple as these in just a few minutes.I'll be waiting for you to post them.

[rokdok]

I'M still waiting.

[drdave514]

Calm down just a little bit. You're frothing so hard you misspelled the world 'genius'.

That's some funny stuff right there!

[rokdok]

Sorry, i'm in my mannic phase.I just got off the phone with Dr.Zachary Hruby. He is a meso-american lithics specialist. He looked at these, and said he felt they were definitely pre-historic as they were obviously made off of a prismatic core, and no-one he knows of is able to re-produce that technique well enough to consistently strike blades that length off of such a core.He also said he thought they were ceremonial, as the atl atl darts he was used to seeing are much shorter.I posted these hoping someone out west had seen similar artifacts, as i am not very familiar with your obsidian lithics.