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Replicating the Sweetwater blade.
By Dwayne Earnhardt. August 2009
But he had became convinced by this point that the Sweetwater was pressured flaked, and it encouraged him even more to figure it out. Then after 4 months of various ideas including a 8 foot long weighted "Ishi stick" attached to the rafters, various support devices and various lever devices(total of 17 different techniques)all leading to dead ends. He would tear them apart and start all over. This of course lead to a lot of aggravation and frustration. He atleast was learning what didn't work. Then one day, everything clicked, and it all came together.
It took 5 hours to finish the blade, having to stop and prepare platforms over 30 times. Each flake removal is critical and on the "edge" of breaking the blade. But the more he did it, the more astonished he was over the amount of pressure and force that could be applied to the stone. Once he had this breakthrough of sorts, he told me he learned more about pressure flaking in one day than he had in years. I hadn't seen him as excited about any particular technique in flintknapping in my life and he described it as a flintknapper's nirvanic experience of sorts.
The most intriguing part of all, he actually has identified at least 8 percussion flakes on Sweetwater, although the other 40 plus are pressure flakes. One of which, is obvious from the scarring cutting into the percussion flake from the pressure flake next to it, that the percussion flake was flaked first. So we believe the Sweetwater was percussion flaked to a thin preform similar to a rectangle in shape, then the large pressure flakes were removed, then the ends shaped with pressure flakes to finish the blade.This would explain why you have large flakes which appear to have wide platforms that would require a large billet to produce. When in actuality you are not seeing the original platform of that flake because it was removed when the ends were shaped. We also found from experience if you do not make the blade in this proper sequence, breakage is very high due to the torque applied to the blade.
Click image to Enlarge
So this would make the Sweetwater a POP blade(pressure over percussion), which is a similar technique to what some modern knappers are doing. After the percussion, it is possible there was some grinding before the pressure as well.
Of course, like many things in flintknapping, this is only a theory. We are not saying this is absolutely the way the Sweetwater was made. We are saying it is possibly how it was made.
We are not saying it is impossible to percussion such a blade, we learned long ago to never say never in flintknapping. But if any knapper can ever totally percussion a blade to the Sweetwater dimensions, I hope to be the first one to shake his hand.
Sweetwater cast