Pressure Blades and Total Cutting Edge: An Experiment in Lithic Technology

Abstract

Pressure techniques were used to remove 83 blades from a preformed obsidian core weighing 820 grams, yielding 17.32 meters of acute cutting edge. The blades represented 91 percent of the original weight (2.1 centimeters of acute cutting edge per gram of original material), thus demonstrating the efficiency of the pressure-blade techniques for the production of acute cutting edges.