Passion Project Helps Turn Rocks Into Arrowheads
WARREN, Pa. — “It’s a puzzle,” said Ryan Rickerson, a local flint knapper and Panama native, as he sat down to turn a chunk of marbled red and green Flint Ridge flint into an arrowhead.
A union carpenter, Rickerson has always had an interest in history, and has tried on different hobby hats over the years.
Before becoming a flint knapper, he said, he was interested in gold prospecting. That’s how he found out about knapping. A friend from Kentucky took Rickerson to a “knap-in,” a gathering of primitive skills enthusiasts who know how to turn rocks into tools.
After his first knap-in, in Ohio, “I went and bought myself some knapping tools and stone,” said Rickerson. He was hooked.
The first time he ever saw someone knap, said Rickerson, “I stood there and watched him for 20 minutes. He never had the time of day to look up or even say hello. That upset me. I promised myself if I was going to knap I was never going to become that guy.”
And he hasn’t. As a matter of fact, Rickerson brings along an extra chair when he travels to shows now. From the outdoor show at the Warren Mall, to the Kinzua Heritage Festival, as well as state to state, Rickerson has taken his hobby out of the garage and into public.
The best stone for knapping, said Rickerson, is any stone that feels “slick, waxy, or glassy” in your hand. The texture of the rock makes a difference, he said, but so does the type of rock. The smoother the rock’s texture the smoother its flakes. Conchoidal fractures, what knappers are after, resemble a shell in shape, and are rounded. Each blow to a good knapping stone fractures along smooth ridges, making it easy to shape them into points with sharp edges.
High-silica rocks, when cleanly broken, can produce edges “five times sharper than surgical steel,” said Rickerson of a large flake he’d just cut from the hunk of flint he’d started with.”
“That’s a razorblade,” he said, holding up the flake.
Onondaga chert, Flint Ridge flint, and obsidian or straight up glass all make great stone points in a knapper’s hands. The rock most knappers buy today is also heat treated in pottery kilns up to heats of around four to five hundred degrees. The heat, Rickerson said, changes the chemical structure of the stone, making it more knappable, and more functional after it’s knapped. The heat, he said, also brings out the color.
To watch, the process looks like something that’s just going to result in a pile of broken rock. Pretty rock, but broken. But the shards that knappers knock from silica-rich rocks are called “flakes,” and the tools they use can be modern or traditional. Because it’s soft, copper or even aluminum is a preferred metal with which to knap today. From “boppers” that take the place of hammer rocks and moose antlers, to pressure knappers or “ishi sticks” that take the place of deer antlers, modern knapping is pretty much the same as it was when the Seneca in this area did it before Europeans arrived.
That can sometimes be a problem, said Rickerson. Since the products that an experienced and meticulous knapper can produce today can be hard to distinguish from archeological relics, the craft of knapping unfortunately attracts people looking to deceive unwitting buyers of historic artifacts, Rickerson said. Others at knap-ins, said Rickerson, will buy stone points from manufacturers and then sell them as their own. “That’s why I’ll sit right there at a show and let you watch me do it,” said Rickerson, chipping away at the now discernible edge of the flint he’d been working for about half an hour.
In fact anyone who looks up instructions on knapping is likely to find entire websites dedicated to the ethics of the modern hobby.
While early knappers would have been mostly knapping for function – the sharper a point the better tool it was, for everything from hunting to cooking to gardening – modern knappers are “looking for perfection,” said Rickerson. The artistically knapped artifacts that ancient people produced, the ones that were made to be pretty rather than used, are what inspire modern knappers. “Every piece (of stone) is a puzzle. You never know what you’re going to find in a piece of rock.” Things like crystal pockets or fractures in the middle of a rock can turn a planned project on its head. “Sometimes you start out planning something but you wind up with a small point. That’s all that stone has to give,” Rickerson said.
Rickerson said that he starts each project — and he’s done many, estimating that he’s gone through about a ton of stone since taking up knapping over 6 years ago – with a general idea of what he’s going to make, but that the finished project reveals itself as he works. And as for measuring perfection, “you’re always comparing yourself to other knappers,” said Rickerson. “Thin edges are one of the biggest things every flint knapper is trying to do,” he said.
While Rickerson doesn’t rely on the sale of the points he makes to live on, he said he does try to sell “enough to support my habit. Enough to keep me in stone.”
At the end of an hour (plus time for talking and demonstrating how to use flint or glass to make sparks and start a fire), Rickerson hands over a cleanly defined, sharp-edged arrow head, that fits neatly in the palm, that he’s just knapped from a fist-sized chunk of flint.
Knapping, said Rickerson, “it’s a process. It’s a puzzle. You’re always learning something. Always trying to get better.” Rickerson said that he thinks he’s done trying out hobbies. He thinks he’s going to stick with knapping. And he said that while he’s had lots of people say they’d like to learn how to knap themselves, most get frustrated with the trial and error nature of the learning process. “You’re going to break rocks,” said Rickerson. You’re going to get cut. It’s just part of the process.” Most people, he said, get discouraged too early and quit. But Rickerson said that if someone were really interested in learning he’d teach them how to knap.