uniface
Silver Member
Scarce wherever found, and likely dismissed as debitage (waste flakes) by finders accustomed to thinking that only regularly shaped bifaces or scrapers with edge retouching are proper artifacts, crested blades are evidence of the first step of the process of making lamellar blades.
Flakes are knocked off the area of a nodule that comes closest to being something like an edge from both sides, so that the flake scars form a jagged edge running down the nodule. After the cap is knocked off the create a striking platform, this jagged vertical edge is removed. Doing so creates a Crested Blade and, since flakes tend to follow (run along) established ridges, the ridges left by this first removal act as guides for subsequent blades.
An old, mediocre picture, but the only one I have of an artifact that's gone missing somehow. Fine-grained quartzite from Kentucky:
Flakes are knocked off the area of a nodule that comes closest to being something like an edge from both sides, so that the flake scars form a jagged edge running down the nodule. After the cap is knocked off the create a striking platform, this jagged vertical edge is removed. Doing so creates a Crested Blade and, since flakes tend to follow (run along) established ridges, the ridges left by this first removal act as guides for subsequent blades.
An old, mediocre picture, but the only one I have of an artifact that's gone missing somehow. Fine-grained quartzite from Kentucky:
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