Was great to present a poster at #ESHE2025!

While risk aversion can have short term benefits, this will limit long term skill acquisition and technological ceilings. We suggest that late Acheulean handaxe forms required tolerance of greater learning costs via deliberate practice, indicating 'mental time travel' and social support for learners

Simply, novices should cease knapping soon after a cutting edge is established, with further attempts at shaping tools tool increasing risk of a poor functioning tool. The novice rough-outs are similar in attrivutes to early Acheulean handaxes from Ubeidiya, which could reflect similar risk-aversion

Additionally, novice handaxes were more likely to break before completion, happening for 26% of attempts by novices and 7% for experts.

Edge crushing was recorded from handaxes and was three times higher on novice tools (1/3 of circumferences). Crushing % negatively correlates with rate of successful flakes for novices but not for experts. This indicates that knapping errors can be reversed by experts but they accumulate for novices

Recorded sequences of successful flake removals and mistrikes show clear differences between expert (top) and novice (bottom) knappers. Mistrike rate rapidly decreases for novices, outnumbered successful strikes by the end of the rough-out stage.

A PCA analysis of 3D shape and morphometric data show that expert handaxes improved much more than novices' from rough-out to final stages. Showing greater value of continued knapping for experts

We recruited 10 expert and 10 novice knappers, asking them each to replicate 4 flint handaxes, mimicking a target form. We 3D scanned handaxes as starting blanks, rough-outs (i.e. a biface prior to shaping) and finished forms. Flaking Sequences were also extrapolated from experiment footage.

More ceramics! So fun to work with!

Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition

My latest weekend pastime has been to model clay replicas for my little museum! Particularly fond of the Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1) skull!

And here's the scan from the same handaxe! A razor (tranchet sharpened) tip!

Spent the day with master flint knapper, John Lord, to 3D scan handaxes. Some were made by him, but this one was collected from a quarry spoil heap at Lynford and dates to 65,000 years ago! Fresh as the day it was made!

Been trying my hand lately at the 'coup de tranchet' ("slicing blow") technique that's famously abundant on Boxgrove handaxes. A tricky detail that testifies to complex cultural transmission 500,000 years ago!

A wet knapping session with intresting flint! Any ideas what the inclusion could be??

My favourite thing to make has always been handaxes! This making process is my central research interest; how do knapping kits affect tool forms, and what drives hammer choice? Can we infer cultural variation not only from handaxes but also from the broader technologies that support flint knapping?

Finally abandoned 'X' and back to sharing some knapping! I've got some lovely vibrant flint left over from experiments to play with!