Stone Tool Characteristics
The stone tools used by Homo floresiensis were mostly ‘flakes’ and ‘cores’.
Flakes
Flakes are stone chips produced by striking the edge of a stone with another hard material (called hammer).
Cores
A core is the stone from which one or more flakes have been removed by a process called knapping. Cores are valuable for archaeologists because they record the manner and sequence through which flakes were struck off by past knappers. The core may be discarded (if the intention is to solely produce flake tools) or shaped further into core tools (e.g. hand axes).
Characteristics
Flaked stone artefacts are produced through ‘percussion’. That is, stones are struck by other materials to initiate flake fracture. Materials that could have been used in the past as hammer include stone, wood, bone and antler. In most cases, this sort of hammer percussion would create a series of characteristic features on the resulting flake, including the ‘bulb of percussion’ adjacent to the location of hammer impact.
The following images label the bulb of percussion and other characteristics of flake and core tools used by Homo floresiensis.
Core
Flake
Retouched Flake
Homo Floresiensis Uncovered: The Science of ‘the Hobbit’
Homo Floresiensis Uncovered: The Science of ‘the Hobbit’
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