Replicating the Sweetwater blade

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I bought my father the Sweetwater cast for Christmas in 2008. I will never forget the look on his face when he laid eyes on it for the first time. He sat in total amazement of the blade. I could read his mind, how was this made he was wondering.

After the initial shock of it, his quest to figure out just how it was made began. Dad has always "thought out of the box" in his flintknapping work and coming up with new ideas or new ways to do things has never been a problem for him. For many years, this was out of necessity because he had very little contact with other knappers, just because they weren't many around. So i believe this helped to keep his mind open on his flintknapping projects. So i had faith, that if anyone could figure it out, he could.

We spent many a hour studying the platforms and flaking patterns and discussing possible options to how it was made. He spent countless more on his own, on a nightly basis, studying the cast.

Since the Sweetwater appeared to be made by percussion with the big wide flakes and that was the prevailing theory, he started concentrating more on percussion work. But he had his doubts from the start if the blade was actually percussion flaked due to the precise nature it would require to make it. You are talking about being able to a hit 1/8 inch platform prefect every time and be able to follow through with your swing without causing breakage. The hand eye coordination needed to do this for approximately 50 large flakes found on the Sweetwater blade would be an incredible feat, seemingly impossible.

He started to believe more and more, the Sweetwater was actually pressured flaked. But he had no real way to prove it and no idea how it was actually accomplished. He could get the thinness, he had actually made some that were thinner. But the width was the problem, it was too wide to hold in your hand and pressure flake. Also, the pressure required to remove such enormous sized flakes would require more force than you could generate with an Ishi stick over an extended number of flakes needed to complete the blade. But he did know, that he had produced such flakes on occasion while pressure flaking in the past, so he knew it was possible.

Although, he still wasn't certain it was pressured flaked, it was his theory. Then one day he calls me and says he has noticed something in the flaking pattern. The best way I can describe it is an uniform "rippling" pattern of the compression rings left on the blade where the the flake itself was removed. We compared this to other pressure and percussion blades, and it became apparent that only the pressure blades had this uniform pattern.(see pictures). We believe this compression rings rippling is caused by the speed the flake is removed at, with a slower removal such as in pressure, causing the more uniform pattern. You can see the rippling effect in percussion work as well, but it isn't as uniform and normally seen at the end of the flake run, when the speed of the flake removal is slowing down.


He had seen a few knappers using lever devices over the years at various knapins. He had also read about Reinhardt who supposedly used some type of lever device. So dad had considered this as a possible option to how the Sweetwater was made. Then while at the N. Georgia Knapin in April 2009, he visited Dan Spiers booth. Dan had bought our pressure flaking video "Adjust" in the previous year and dad wanted to see what Dan thought of it. Dan replied that the video showed the importance of lateral flexibility in the blade holding hand. Dan was also demonstrating the use of a lever device and suggested to dad that he should make one as well.

The problem with the lever as he had discussed with Dan, was you didn't have the lateral flexibility as you did in your hands and it took a lot of time to adjust for proper flaking angles. Dad knew being able to get the proper platforms and angles while applying the large amount of pressure needed would be the key to success, but also the hardest to accomplish.

But he had became convinced by this point that the Sweetwater was pressured flaked, and it encouraged him even more to figure it out. Then after 4 months of various ideas including a 8 foot long weighted "Ishi stick" attached to the rafters, various support devices and various lever devices(total of 17 different techniques)all leading to dead ends. He would tear them apart and start all over. This of course lead to a lot of aggravation and frustration. He atleast was learning what didn't work. Then one day, everything clicked, and it all came together.

It took 5 hours to finish the blade, having to stop and prepare platforms over 30 times. Each flake removal is critical and on the "edge" of breaking the blade. But the more he did it, the more astonished he was over the amount of pressure and force that could be applied to the stone. Once he had this breakthrough of sorts, he told me he learned more about pressure flaking in one day than he had in years. I hadn't seen him as excited about any particular technique in flintknapping in my life and he described it as a flintknapper's nirvanic experience of sorts.

The most intriguing part of all, he actually has identified at least 8 percussion flakes on Sweetwater, although the other 40 plus are pressure flakes. One of which, is obvious from the scarring cutting into the percussion flake from the pressure flake next to it, that the percussion flake was flaked first. So we believe the Sweetwater was percussion flaked to a thin preform similar to a rectangle in shape, then the large pressure flakes were removed, then the ends shaped with pressure flakes to finish the blade.This would explain why you have large flakes which appear to have wide platforms that would require a large billet to produce. When in actuality you are not seeing the original platform of that flake because it was removed when the ends were shaped. We also found from experience if you do not make the blade in this proper sequence, breakage is very high due to the torque applied to the blade.

So this would make the Sweetwater a POP blade(pressure over percussion), which is a similar technique to what some modern knappers are doing. After the percussion, it is possible there was some grinding before the pressure as well.

Of course, like many things in flintknapping, this is only a theory. We are not saying this is absolutely the way the Sweetwater was made. We are saying it is possibly how it was made.

We are not saying it is impossible to percussion such a blade, we learned long ago to never say never in flintknapping. But if any knapper can ever totally percussion a blade to the Sweetwater dimensions, I hope to be the first one to shake his hand.