3 Flintknapping Techniques: How to Make Stone Tools

Flintknapping is the shaping or chipping away of stone cobbles or lithic materials like obsidian, chert, dacite, and quartzite.

Stone Age flintknappers and, later, Native American craftsmen used tools like deer antler billets and hammerstone to craft stone tools, spear points, and arrowheads for hunting and battle. Contemporary use of flintknapping tools typically occurs in survivalist or bushcraft enthusiast circles.

If you have no modern tools at your disposal, knowledge of the art of flintknapping could help you create Stone Age tools, utensils, and hunting weapons in a survival situation. Adding these survival skills to your bushcraft toolkit could enable you to solve complex problems with simple solutions in the field, thereby conserving valuable time and energy in the wilderness.

Learn these three standard flintknapping techniques to craft stone into tools and various other valuable implements:

1. 1. Abrasion: Raking, or abrasion, is the process of using an abrader or grinding stick to remove micro flakes from the edges of small chunks of flint, known as bifaces or nodules. This technique requires excellent control and focus on completing fine detail work, such as crafting fishing lures or flintlocks for classic musket firearms.
2. 2. Percussion flaking: This technique effectively removes large flake around the shape of your projectile point or Clovis arrowhead. Traditional flintknappers used antler tines as soft hammers to break large flakes from the edge of stone spalls.
3. 3. Pressure flaking: When working stone with this technique, you can use specialized flintknapping tools like a palm pad or ishi stick. An ishi stick is a small cylinder of wood with a sharp metal point attached to one end. Press the metal point into the edge of your spall to break off flakes and shape the edge of your arrowhead or tool face. Flintknappers typically use a thick piece of cloth or leather draped over one leg for protection from the pointed end of the pressure flaker tool.

Certain outdoor activities carry an elevated risk of serious injury. Wilderness scenarios require extensive survival gear, including but not limited to food, water, maps, protective clothing, and first aid, along with mental and physical fortitude. This article is for educational and informational purposes and is not a substitute for hard skills and expertise.

Prepare for any outdoor journey by grabbing a MasterClass Annual Membership and committing Jessie Krebs’s wilderness survival course to memory. As a former United States Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape instructor, Jessie can teach you everything you need to know about packing for a trip (neon is the new black), purifying water, foraging (crickets: the other white meat), starting a fire, and signaling for help (forget SOS).