Pebble Tools

Today my house was being shown to some potential buyers so I had to get out for awhile. I decided to go to the park for another barefoot run. It was a great day. There was light rain so almost no one was at the park. I pretty much had the place to myself except for a couple custodians. I felt quite wild running in the rain with no one around.

After I finished I had some more time to kill so I started into the woods to my usual spot. As I crawled in on all fours a pile of pebbles caught my eye. I recalled the newsletter I got from Practical Primitive. The skill of the month was Pebble Tools. It's a skill that was taught to me a couple years ago in the Advanced Standard class at the Tracker School. I hadn't really used the skill since then.

The technique is called Bipolar Percussion, but as Tom says, "Bash two f***ing rocks together!". Simply put, you place the object rock on top of a larger rock known as an anvil and then hammer it with another big rock until it breaks.

You end up with pieces like those in the picture below. I'm hoping to try to carve up a fireboard for a bow drill with these pieces. I also grabbed a couple stones for burnishing. Those are the smooth round ones in the bottom right of the picture.

This is an easy but important skill to have considering that you may not always have a knife and it can be hard to find knappable rock. It's usually easy to find pebbles.

For a full lesson with picture on how to do this, check out Eddie's page.