knapping basalt

Just to ask, has anyone here knapped Basalt? It can be bought by the brick or slab and is a common building material, and I've heard that the finer grades almost rival flint and the rougher grades are like granite!

There's a good vid on basalt knapping here, only having ever seen highly grainy basalt I was pretty amazed by the glasslike quality of the stuff on the vid. After seeing it I went out to a place I knew had tons of the stuff, found nothing even slightly knappable though.



Not sure how common this stuff is, but the lava must have cooled pretty quickly.

its not basalt like we have, but great clip - makes me want to get out knapping

I've seen that vid all the way through, palaeomanjim is an excellent knapper. I have been tempted to get a Basalt brick and have a go at a really crude handaxe...
According to my book of rocks and minerals Basalt is one of the most common rocks here and on the moon!

lots of basalt was distributed in the ice age, i find it in the fields but its very grainy as said a bit like granite, the basalt in the vid seems to have a ring to it like obsidian.

I had a very large basalt hammerstone here, it was a huge pebble I collected it for spalling huge nodules, being as there are no huge nodules here today I had a go at knapping it. Breaking into was hell, I used a huge quartz pebble a few shards fell off rather concoidally but revealed huge grains. I managed to get a big flake on one side setting up lots of platforms. Gave one platform a few solids whacks to remove a tiny flake at one end and a quarter size chunk flew off the opposite end. Chose another platform and the same happened again. It fractures coindally sure enough, but there was no predictability. You hit one bit another bit flies off. Anyway gave up on any idea of a biface checked out some upper paleolithic pebble tools and worked on making these.






here's my approximations,

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This is why I asked, I picked up a small piece of Basalt whilst in Italy and was able to take off a few test flakes. I kinda wish I'd picked up a bigger piece (and one without 90 degree edges!).
It is rough 'ol stuff though.

I picked up some rock that I believe was Dolorite (very much like Basalt) while foraging for materials at an ancient volcano (in Dudley of all places) when teaching primitive skills a couple of years back. One of my keener students had a bash at it and produced a decent edge on it with a hammerstone - not pretty but darn functional and he used for some light woodland tasks.

There some phylite by the river where I live, you can take flint like flakes of it, thinner and damn sharp, but it can't be shaped as it's metamorphic and similar to slate so only fracture in two directions.

Can you heat it though?

No, it's not a knapping rock, it's structure is wrong, you could only ever take thin flakes of it but never convex it as it's slatelike.

yar, slate-like stone simply aint worth bashing at all..... i had lovely large thick piece that i was starting to grind an axe from. it was taking a long time, obvs, so i thought i'd try a short cut and bash off a couple of bits with a hammer stone which was plain daft and it was no longer a potential axe but potential bannerstones, which they remain.
ETA: however, if making a knife from a thin slice of slate, you can rest it on an anvil and nibble away at the edge for primary shaping.