Stone-flaking involves striking pieces off a rock. The pieces are called ‘flakes’, and the rock is called a ‘core’. At the most basic level, all stone tools are either cores or flakes. The history of stone technology tracks how humans have refined their stone-flaking techniques to make the specific cores and flakes they needed for tools.

In making a stone tool, the stone-worker, or ‘flintknapper’, strikes flakes from a core. A core is, technically, any stone from which flakes have been removed—this can include cobbles and chunks of stone, or flakes that were struck previously and then further reduced.

Flakes are the waste products of making a stone tool. Flakes have very sharp edges and were often used as cutting tools. Each flake will have a bulb of percussion at the place where the flake was hit. This is similar to what happens when a rock hitting glass forms a cone.

In lithic technology, the objective piece is called a core or a flake-tool. Force, or load, is transmitted by a hammerstone. The fracture products are called flakes or, collectively, débitage (French for “waste”). Fracture refers to a cleavage plane that forms when a brittle material breaks.

The cortex of a core or flake is the weathered, outer surface of the rock. Archaeologists often examine flakes to determine the amount of cortex on them in order to gauge the stage of manufacture and the degree to which cores were being used to exhaustion.

When a flake is detached from its core in a Hertzian fashion, the flake propagates in a conchoidal manner from the point of impact or pressure, usually producing a partial Hertzian cone. The cone of force often leaves a distinctive bulb of applied force …

Core-flake technology, including pebble tool and flake tool assemblages from the Early Pleistocene to the Holocene. This is a unique phenomenon because pebble tools such as chopper-chopping tools decrease and finally disappear with the rise of more complicated technologies in most cases.

2011年6月1日 · Using molded glass cores with surface morphologies that highly resemble prehistoric ones, this experiment demonstrates that while core surface morphology does exhibit some influence on flake size and shape, a high degree of variation in flakes produced with the same core surface morphology shows that the effects of other independent variables ...

Above all, based on the detailed lithic analyses, two distinct technological assemblages are identified at SDG7. One is a flake-tool technology, which is the local and dominant technological assemblage in North China, characterized by free-hand core reduction without preparation and simple tool modification.

2020年6月1日 · Cores-on-flakes are a common feature of Middle Palaeolithic techno-complexes. This study focuses on demonstrating the development of this phenomenon until its culmination during the Late Middle Palaeolithic period in south-western France.