Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Ancient art, modern craft

Flint knapping, one of the human race's oldest endeavors, is enjoying a resurgence.

By BILL COATS
Published January 23, 2006

	[Times photos: Ken Helle]
	Instructor Carl Dowell, left, of Jacksonville, shows Laurie Grossman how to support the stone before striking it during a flint knapping class sponsored by the Tampa Bay Fossil Club on Sunday in Lutz.
	A display of arrowheads and spearheads.

LUTZ - A few years back, Tampa's Richard Schemitsch traded $2,000 worth of antiques for 10 elegant brown and red spear points, crafted 7,500 years ago by American Indians.

Over the weekend, Schemitsch learned how those points were made.

Carl Dowell, who has produced such work as a hobby since childhood, came to town and showed off his craft to 31 novices.

Dowell crouched, holding a flat piece of glassy rock called Gainesville chert. He swung a weighted, copper-topped tool down on the edge of the chert, producing a sharp "crack".

Dowell's fingers - thick, grimy and calloused - unfolded from the chert holding a broad flake of rock.

"No way," gasped Schemitsch, 43.

It was Schemitsch's first lesson in flint knapping, one of the oldest of human endeavors, now enjoying a resurgence.

Across North America, 5,000 to 10,000 people are knapping, estimated Dane Martin, co-owner of Chips, one of two magazines published for knappers. In a sign of knapping's artistic acceptance, a top knapper recently sold one of his points for $1,100 and another for $700 at an Ohio auction, Martin said.

Knappers gather virtually every weekend somewhere to smack rocks and sell their art and supplies. South of Gainesville, the Ninth Annual Knap-In and Primitive Arts Festival begins Feb. 24 at Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park.

A smaller event is scheduled the previous weekend at Withlacoochee River Park, east of Dade City.

Part of knapping's appeal is its visceral link to ancient ancestors. We all are descended from knappers.

"The human race learned to make tools and that's what allowed them to elevate themselves to the top of the food chain," Martin said.

Dave Davis, a Spring Hill knapper who started the Dade City knap-in with his fiancee, looks beyond a streamlined arrowhead.

"To harvest your own deer with it and skin it with a knife that you made ... that's kind of a dream of mine," Davis said.

"I would just like to try and get an idea of how people did this 11,000 years ago," said 83-year-old Lewis "Woody" Woodworth of Wesley Chapel, who paid $35 to attend Dowell's class Sunday.

Like most of the weekend's students, Woodworth is a member of the Tampa Bay Fossil Club, one of the nation's largest, which sponsored Dowell's visit from his Jacksonville home.

Michael Searle, the club's president, said knapping has been a popular topic at club meetings, and the weekend's two classes filled quickly.

"We could have easily filled another class," Searle said. "Time just wouldn't allow for it."

Many knappers say the work is addictive.

"It's tremendous stress relief," said Hugh McKenzie, an Orlando marketing executive and knapper who helped Dowell teach the weekend's classes in Searle's back yard. "There's something satisfying about pounding a rock to pieces."

Knapping's comeback started with what Chips' Martin calls "the dark period" about 30 years ago. Some of the best knappers were secretive, selling their work as genuine antiquities to collectors.

Today's knappers credit D.C. Waldorf, a neighbor of Martin in the Missouri Ozarks, with changing knapping history in 1975 by publishing The Art of Flint Knapping . By promoting knapping as an art, the book encouraged knappers to sign their work. That helped heal a split between knappers and academics, who were angry that fraud was corrupting the archaeological record.

In 2004, anthropologist and knapper John Whittaker of Iowa published American Flintknappers . Whittaker used surveys and his own knap-in trips to peg the typical knapper as a middle-age, college educated white male with conservative political leanings. But Whittaker and other knappers say the hobby attracts a wide range of people.

"The rock is the great equalizer," Martin said. "It doesn't matter if you have money in the bank."

In Lutz, the novice knappers also learned that strength doesn't matter as much as aim. Rock is broken rather than chiseled, and the direction of the blow determines how the rock breaks.

Some of Dowell's students snapped exquisite rocks by striking them too close to the center.

"That was a beautiful piece of stone!" teased Dowell, after Searle's wife, Seina, broke one. "Look what you did to that!"

She slowly shook her head.

Others developed a knapping knack, and quickly produced rough arrowheads and a pile of razor-sharp rock flakes at their feet.

Bill Burnett, a disabled carpenter from Clearwater, was itching for a new activity.

"For two weeks, I've been ready to come," said Burnett, 50. "I thought it'd be something I'd be pretty good at."

Another quick learner was 10-year-old Joseph Branin of Pinellas Park. Joseph had dabbled in knapping with cousins, enough that his school, Grace Lutheran, invited him to lecture second-graders about it.

On Sunday, Joseph out-knapped his mother, Leslie, who was plagued by square edges.

"You think you might get the rocks out of the rock garden and start whacking them up?" she asked Joseph.

"Yeah," he replied.

--Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 23, 2006, 00:59:12]