Flintknapping comes of age; anthropologists and hobbyists alike have rekindled interest in this ancient art, enhancing understanding of primitive cultures and preserving a practical skill.

When Ishi the Yahi Indian wandered into a northern California lumber camp in 1916, people first thought him a trespasser from the Stone Age. Tired and hungry from fleeing the encroachments of the twentieth century, he was the last of his tribe -- and the last North American Indian of any tribe -- to live solely by his Neolithic hunting skills, using only bows and stone arrowheads to kill the animals from which he made his meals and clothing.

Anthropologists invited Ishi to live at the University of California to teach them how to make and use his everyday stone tools and weapons. Long-lost techniques of manufacture were thus regained in a few short lessons. While earlier researchers had studied from acculturated Indians who partially remembered some of these skills, Ishi relied on stone tools for everything he made and ate. It was as if a member of the Stone Age -- as many North American Indians were at the time of Columbus -- were to teach a graduate course on lithic technology.

Ishi's demonstrations to Saxton Pope, a doctor who first met him at the university, and others put the art of stone flaking, or, as it is more commonly called, flint-knapping -- including such nonflint stones as jasper, chert, chalcedony, and obsidian -- firmly in the arena of serious academic study. Archaeologists and anthropologists saw that it was indeed possible to learn about ancient and primitive cultures from the process of making their own stone tools, and not just from studying them as inert objects.

One of the most interesting doors opened by experimental flintknapping was toward the understanding of Meso-american tools and ceremonial goods. Obsidian was the raw ingredient of its material culture and may even have determined the rise and fall of Teotihuacan. The obsidian knife, itztli, was an aspect of the goddess Itzpapalotl, or Obsidian Knife Butterfly. Finely made key-shaped objects, known as "eccentrics" and bearing an uncanny likeness to Egyptian ankhs, are found commonly in royal tombs and cenotes. The factory site of Colha in northern Belize exported millions of obsidian axes and hoes to points far beyond Maya land.

But how obsidian was actually worked remained a mystery. Early Spanish accounts, such as those by Francisco Hernandez, Toribio de Benavente, and even Bernardo de Sahagun's illustrations, were overly vague yet praised the finished products and those who made them. Juan de Torquemada, in his Monarquia Indiana [Indian Monarchy], described the prismatic blades used by the Maya as a basic cutting tool and by the Spanish apparently as a disposable straight razor.

"They had and have craftsmen who make knives of a certain black stone, and to see them produced from stone is a great marvel and a thing worthy of much administration, and the talented person who invented this art is greatly to be praised. . . . They can cut and shave the hair and beard with them with the first cutting edge but at the second cutting they lose their edges and therefore another is needed. But the truth is that they are cheap and thus one doesn't mind using them up."

Experimental flintknappers have recently succeeded in re-creating these staples of the Maya toolbox. By tinkering with a variety of chest crutches, hooked pry bars, and foot-operated vises, all based on the Spanish accounts, archaeologists now think they know how obsidian blades were made to such high levels of perfection, conformity, and output.

North American archaeologists knap flint to answer more theoretical questions as well. Which knapping tools -- stone hammers, antler billets, or bone -- did what kind of work? What does the waste pile of flakes tell us about the finished product? Can an individual's signature style be discerned in an object? Was there such a thing as Stone Age "home economics," a standard way of making tools most efficiently with a given size and kind of raw material?

Some archaeologists then take the next step and put their tools to use. Many a deer and elephant have been butchered by modern men wielding stone knives, scrapers, and axes in order to see which tool works best to cut through bone, muscle, and cartilage.

And finally, what would a stone spear or arrowhead be without the spear or arrow itself? Just as Pope went hunting with Ishi to learn his technique, so some scholars today toss spears with atlatls and shoot arrows with long bows (often at public events called "traditional throws") to measure their range and impact. Some findings are surprising. What were once thought to be bird points were found quite adequate to bring down a deer.

Parallel to the academic flintknappers are the hobbyists and commercial producers who make stone tools for fun and profit. While most replications of prehistoric objects run only in the tens of dollars, an Arts and Crafts movement has recently sprung up. Noted knapper Errett Callahan, with both a Ph.D. in archaeology and a master of fine arts, sells for thousands an obsidian knife with a dramatically serrated blade.

Amateur knappers, whose numbers grow yearly, are doing the most perhaps to guard the skill from ever being lost again. As commercial markets or academic fashions change, archaeologists and vendors might stop, but those who knap strictly out of love will continue, passing what they have learned over to others and down to their children. As "generalist" knappers, amateurs today resemble their counterparts from the Stone Age, when knapping was not a specialty but rather a universal skill that everyone, whether they were good or bad at it, had to know.

Today amateurs gather at "knap-ins," meetings for knappers of all levels where teaching and learning is free. At a recent knap-in at Fort Osage, Missouri, in the shadow of an 1808 U.S. Army post built to trade with the Osage Indians, who themselves would have needed no instruction, over fifty knappers came together -- some archaeological replicators, and others, like William Jesse James (known to his friends as Father of the Flint), jewelry makers specializing in doodle and animal-fetish designs.

Hobbyist Bob Hunt picked up flintknapping after seeing his first demonstration six years ago. He has been knapping twice a week ever since, sitting in a circle of flintworking buddies just like others might play cards. His work -- projectile points and knife blades oddly sized and shaped, some with edges exaggeratedly serrated -- is inspired by, but does not directly copy, archaeological finds. Many, he is unafraid to admit, are what are called "goosos" -- finished "Good on One Side Only" -- for display that face up.

Most knappers came to Fort Osage to learn at the knee of D.C. Waldorf, a self-taught knapper who has built a cottage industry of teaching aids, traditional tools, and flint sold by the pound.

Waldorf s knap-in workshops are legendary. Surrounded by students at Fort Osage, he demonstrated "pressure flaking" with a deer antler tine to make a chevron-shaped Dalton point from a stubborn piece of flint. Resisting Waldorf's attempts to thin one face by conventional techniques, a bulge of flint continued to mar the piece's symmetry. Unless it were removed, the point would never fly.

Telling his audience that any Indian with common sense would not have worked with such poor flint in the first place, Waldorf himself refused to give up until he finally was able to remove the excess with a risky longitudinal approach, which in lesser hands would surely have broken the piece. The final effort left a clean "flake scar" in place of the bulge, completing an elegant system of aerodynamic parallel flutes from notch to point.

Not long ago, flintknapping came out of the woods and into the surgical suite. The late Don Crabtree, who, although unschooled, singlehandedly put the academic study of knapping on a practical footing, had long advocated the benefits of using obsidian scalpel blades in surgery, this observed from his own quickly healed wounds whenever he accidently cut himself with a flake.

After being diagnosed with heart disease, Crabtree asked his surgeon to operate on him with his own home-made feather-edged obsidian scalpels. The doctor had never seen such clean cutting and fast mending. He should not have been surprised. Obsidian edges flake at the micron level, far closer than metal can be honed. What Father Torquemada first noted has finally been learned by modern medicine. And no one expects this to be the Stone Age's last lesson for modern man.