Basalt

[zachMA]

Has anyone else been desperate enough to have experience knapping basalt? I've seen some pretty intricate stuff made from it and it seems extremely hard to break. I was able to get some kind of long flake scars just hitting a piece with a hammerstone. Is there any secret to working it besides to swing as hard as you can? I'm thinking if it's anywhere near possible for me to work I'll start making my atlatl darts and and arrowheads from it, seems like it'll live a bit longer than obsidian.

[cgode]

Are ya nuts?

[zachMA]

Figured I'd get that response I'm way too cheap to order more rock that I'm just gonna waste on learning. I ask knappers how I can more easily work quartz (all i have locally) and more often than not the answer is "don't." One I talked to (that you may know) at the CT event had a great approach and made some awesome stuff completely abo style-he basically wasted nothing and used local material that looked like you needed a chisel to break it. He told me I could find great rhyolite in Gloucester...so I took the ladyfriend out there on a 'shopping' trip and found nothing but granite, he must've meant somewhere else on the north shore. Then it occurred to me to check the railroad bed that goes through my town...sure enough it's pavement is loaded with basalt, argillite, shale and some low grade rhyolite from all over New England. Sooo yeah, looks like I'll be busting a lot of knuckles this winter

[Hotfeet]

We have basalt everywhere here if you want some. Other materials as well. I would like to try knapping but never have. However I often wondered how one would knapp balsalt it seems so hard and that it would not fracture predictably. I'm sure I'm wrong since it was obviously used but I ignorant as to how.

[marksimerson]

Ive tryed knapping and I suck at it. This was done by a master.

[bar2kl]

I don't knapp much, but I would think that a fine basalt would have a choncoidal fracture similar to flint and glass, since it's not that far removed from glass in the first place... The more cryptocrystalline variaties might be more like quartzite... Just speculating...

[zachMA]

Mark, that's a pretty awesome piece, looks very functional. The basalt I find here tends to fracture somewhat concoidially, it just hinges pretty easy and you have to swing hard as hell. Does resemble kind of a black quartzite but less silica-rich. Pressure flaking's pretty useless for any sort of thinning. I have a bit more of a knack for working harder stuff into ugly but functional points mostly for the lack of good rock in my area, so this stuff has worked alright, I'll post some of the results. Was hoping to find some rhyolite before the snow fell-_-man I hate new england sometimes.

[zachMA]

And hotfeet whereabouts are you from? I always recommend trying knapping out to anyone that hunts. As soon as I started, worked material got so much easier to recognize. Especially if you at first limit yourself to what your local Natives used. Plus it gives you that much more of a connection with the people that made them, which idk I think is kind of cool.

[arrow719]

A lot of collectors don't like basalt because it's not the purdiest material there is. But I know that the natives loved the stuff. There's lots of it in the Great Basin and the ancient knappers certainly took advantage of it. Here's some old basalt specimens.

[DesertWalker]

Damn Floyd, ya got my mouth watering..