I’ve been using a copper tipped pressure flaking tool ever since I started flint knapping. But I’ve always wanted to try using antler. I suspect that most people who flint knap have picked up an antler tine at one time or another and tried chipping with it with mixed results and opinions. For myself, I never enjoyed the feel of an antler tine. It was always uncomfortable – either it was not long enough or its curvature felt awkward in my hand or the fat, blunt tip was just different from what I was used to. I assume that this is probably why 99 percent of the knappers I know use copper.

Like most flint knappers, the occasion often arises when we are either working in the public’s eye or we are showing friends how this was done in the past. When I am observed working with copper, people invariably ask me what was originally used. For this reason, I always have an antler tine in my knapping kit to show and use as an example. I will remove a few flakes from the piece I am working on, then put it away and immediately go back to the copper flaker. But I’ve always wanted to have something more functional that I could be comfortable with, and not just use for the purpose of demonstration. In addition, I use a moose antler billet exclusively during the early reduction stages (with the exception of hammer stones) so using an antler tipped pressure flaker would be more satisfying and would compliment the traditional nature of the rest of my kit. I am also very curious about the use of antler and want to experiment with it and possibly abandon copper all together (sometime in the future perhaps). So, when I came across the article about Making a Reduced Antler Flaker by Steven Edholm in Primitive Technology, I had to make one for myself and try it out. Below is the process I followed as outlined in the article:

First the antler should be soaked for a few days to soften up the material. I used the sister antler tine from last weeks post. After soaking, you can then engrave a channel down the length of both sides of the antler tine using chert flakes from your debitage bucket. These sharp pieces of stone are referred to as burins in the literature and in archeological circles. In the past, I’ve used this technique to split bone and have always gone too shallow. So, this time I wanted to make sure I did a good job, but I probably went deeper than necessary.  You just need to reach the pithy core of the antler.

These are the waste flakes I used:

And this is the groove they produced in the antler:

The next step was to split the antler in half by inserting something flat and rigid through the pithy center of the antler to start separating the two halves:

Now that it is split, some additional shaping will be necessary. In my case, the tips were too narrow to support the amount of pressure that will eventually be applied during the flaking process. And the pithy center needs to be reduced to leave the inner half flat for hafting. At this stage, the antler tine is still curvy and wavy and will need to be straightened. The straightening is accomplished simply by binding the antler tightly to a straight stick and allowing it to dry. When the antler is wet, it is flexible enough that it will conform to the shape of the stick. When it is dry, it will be as hard as…well, as hard as antler.

I used some braintan buckskin to make lacing for the hafting process. I just created a flat surface on the edge of a stick for a handle and bound it all together.

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