Hammerstone

[2] The hammerstone is a rather universal stone tool which appeared early in most regions of the world including Europe, India[3] and North America.

A hammerstone is made of a material such as sandstone, limestone or quartzite, is often ovoid in shape (to fit the human hand better), and develops telltale battering marks on one or both ends.

Hammerstones were used widely in crushing mineral ores such as malachite during the Chalcolithic period, the earliest part of the Bronze Age, and cassiterite prior to smelting of tin.

Hard percussion is the first to appear and the only one known for at least two million years (until the soft hammer is incorporated); it was used to manufacture tools throughout the entire operational sequence until lithic technology improved.

[8] Semenov speaks of a deposit rich in hammering (in Polivanov, Russia),[9] but, like the rest of the sites, they are almost all from the Neolithic period onwards.

[10] The size of hard hammers depends on their function: there are very large ones for roughing, medium ones are used for the main work, small ones are auxiliary tools to prepare percussion platforms, or retouch flakes.

Despite the fact that stone hammers are more typical of the manufacture of wide and short flakes, used with mastery they can achieve very precise control of rock chipping.

The bovine horn is not as suitable as the cervid antler, as it has an external keratin coating separate from the bone core, however they can be used as retouchers.

Observation with the naked eye reveals that the flint (or whatever the carved rock) leaves small splinters and stone chips embedded in the hammer.

François Bordes and Denise de Sonneville-Bordes exhumed one from the most recent Solutrean strata in the Laugerie-Haute cave (Dordogne).

The piece was broken into several fragments and incomplete, but retained the functional end, where the marks of the blows could be seen and microscopic embedded flint bits were visible.

The soft hammer has a lower yield than the rock, that would make a layman think that it is impossible to carve flint or quartzite with a piece of wood or antler.

The moment the rock reaches its elastic limit and breaks, the potential energy is released and the hammer returns to its original shape.

Both percussion with an intermediate piece and pressure carving share common technical points, among them the difficulty of distinguishing the scars left by one and the other.

It is one of the steps of a laminar extraction method, which means that by itself it has no value, since it requires a previous preparation of the core and continuous maintenance gestures of the same (done this way, the work is very similar to that of a stonemason with his mallet and his chisel).

In fact, it is difficult to identify the bone pointers in the excavations, since they hardly have characteristic marks, that is, different from a percussion with any other purpose.

Proposed examples are that of the Fageolet cave (Dordogne), dated in the Gravettian, those of Villevallier and Armeau (Yonne), both Neolithic, and those of Spiennes (Belgium), from the same period.

[14] Unlike the technique of indirect percussion with a pointer, pressure carving with compressors is not only used for the extraction of flaked products (specifically stone blades), it is also used for retouching tools.

They have also developed many others, but this type of retouching is quite well known (In fact, many enthusiasts manufacture and sell highly accurate replicas in memory of the Native American heritage of certain regions[16]) and the interest from researchers, experimental prehistorians, has gone to the extraction of blades by pressure.

On the other hand, if there is a Silver Age of pressure retouching, it must be the Solutrean, in the Upper Paleolithic (the most emblematic case being that of the Laurel blades); Although the technique was known before, it was hardly used.

As the extraction of blades was perfected, accessories were added: first the intermediate piece or pointer for indirect carving, then the abrasive pebbles to prepare percussion platforms, then the compressors with handles, later the core fixing systems (the former were used to hold them in the hand, then the feet, and finally autonomous, but increasingly complex), the latter attached to the crutches or walking sticks (at first they rested on the shoulder, then on the abdomen and finally on the chest), to which was added a bone, antler or copper tip, a lever mechanism and a recess to increase its elasticity and potential energy.

Apparently in this site they specialized in foliaceous pieces, for example arrowheads, and sickle teeth;[18] that is, it was a regional production destined for domestic use.

Apparently, from the historical origins of the town in the 14th century, flint was used as a construction material (including the bridge over the river that gave it strategic relevance).

The flint carving technique was very simple and standardized, aimed at obtaining wide and short but resistant chips of about three centimeters.

The hammer used in the final phase, that of the flake itself, was a long and narrow-handled wooden peg, with a small, almost tiny, metal head with two thin and prominent ends.