CORES & LAMELLAR
BLADES
SNYDERS SITE
CALHOUN COUNTY, ILLINOIS
MIDDLE WOODLAND HOPEWELL
PRIVATE COLLECTION
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    In North America, core and blade technology solidly appears during the Early Paleo-Indian Clovis, again in the Eastern Middle Woodland Hopewell and, in a minor way with micro-blades on some Mississippian shell drilling sites. The three cores in this picture are surrounded by a large number of core blades, called lamellar blades. These were the most common knife form used by the Hopewell people. In 1961 William Fecht lists 47 different types of artifacts he recorded from the Snyders site. For lamellar flake knives, rather than a counted number he wrote in the number recovered as "many." Archaeologist Anta Montet-White wrote in 1968 that, "The small prismatic blades are the largest component of the Hopwellian industries. Specimens from burial sites show no visible traces of wear. Village assemblages yielded abundant series of unmodified blades as well as retouched specimens." Large numbers of them were found on the Snyders site.
    The Snyders site Lamellar blades were made from a wide variety of high quality cherts. Most of the examples found on the Snyders site were made from either Burlington, Cobden of Kaolin chert. The rich colors are the result of heating the chert to increase the workability of the stone.
   Greg Perino is reported to have found a cache of 22 very large flake tools in a storage pit on the Snyders site. They range in size from 4 3/4 (12 cm) to 6 11/16 inches (17 cm) long and from 1 9/16 (4 cm) to 3 1/8 inches (8 cm) wide (Montet-White: 1968). The core blades in this picture represent a normal range in size for these tools, from 1 1/4 inches (3.2 cm) long to 2 3/4 inches (7 cm) long.

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