Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out that there are people who can turn an ordinary chunk of that soft rock called flint into a deadly weapon:
Posted by DeLong at January 06, 2003 05:33 PM | TrackbackMaking Light: January 2003 Archives: ...Consider that there are guys out there right now, in this first-worldliest of countries, whose pleasure it is to knap flints, cherts, and obsidians into stone knives and arrowheads. The blades they make are pretty, but you can skin a deer with those things, and do surgery, and get past airport metal detectors. (Clovis points: the original North American superweapon.) On the other hand, you could just open your mail...
And while obsidian is more homogenous than flint, and hence easier to knap, plate glass (of which the first world is not in short supply) is an even nicer material.is
Posted by: on January 6, 2003 09:36 PMWhere did anybody get the idea that flint is "soft"?
Anyway, the key structural property that flint working uses - in the later technologies, anyway - is the peculiar way the refractive index for shock waves varies with proximity to the surface. This means that a shallow glancing blow will not start a crack that tends to reach in, but instead the cleavage curves back out to the surface. Thus the skilled worker can spall off small pieces as though spooning them off, working towards a desired overall shape with edges positioned as needed even if only roughly through a sort of iteration. More homogenous qualities make materials easier to work ON, but harder to achieve the right working with the materials.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence on January 7, 2003 08:27 PM