Heat treating stone !

Interesting.

Things like this make you wonder how they ever discovered that heating the rocks made them more suitable for tool making.
 
Maybe they jabbed a chunk of mammoth on the end of a spear, stuck it in the fire to cook it, and left it in a little too long. . .
 
I have an uncle that was a pretty well known flint knapper (there's a whole group of collectors and makers for paleo knives too!). He would heat treat a lot of his stone in a kiln before knapping. It would not only make the stone flake clean and glassy, it would often change the colors. Some of the stone would go from drab to brilliant colors. Brazillian agates and fossilized palm wood are my favorite, just gorgeous stuff.
 
a lot of knappable stone has to be heat treated before it it is easy to work. it embrittles the material a bit, and makes the fractures travel more predictably. try to pressure flake raw jasper and you might see the nessecity.

i like to work with obsidian because it's brittle as glass to begin with, clean and ready to go as is.
 
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