Essai de chauffe de blocs en silex sous un foyer

Heating siliceous raw material would allow among other things to improve its knapping quality. Laboratory studies are attempting to find the ideal conditions to heat-treat stones without damaging them. However, it turns out that these conditions, once reproduced in a real-life heating scenario under a fire, do not allow for a correct heating process of the flint blocks. Furthermore, small samples are more studied than blocks. The blocks become entirely micro-fractured and thus unusable. Heating of complete blocks proves complex and it remains difficult at this time to understand the exact techniques implemented during Prehistory.
In this study, we realized real heating, under a fire, to reproduce heat treatment of flint blocks in order to knap them and to judge their knapping quality. Then, we compared our results with those obtained in laboratory.