Stone Age

Nonfiction

• Flint Knapping : A Guide To Making Your Own Stone Age Toolkit by Robert Turner
  • Turner, flint knapping expert and instructor at Sussex University in England, introduces the creation and history of these prehistoric tools.
• Flintknapping: Making And Understanding Stone Tools by John C. Whittaker
  • This first-rate manual offers step-by-step instruction in flint knapping, as promised. That guidance and some related matters occupy about 250 of the book's 300 pages of text. Incorporated are a history of the craft and various archaeological insights. (Choice review excerpt)
• Making Native American Hunting, Fighting, And Survival Tools by Monte Burch
  • A valuable reference for these ancient arts, Making Native American Hunting, Fighting, and Survival Tools takes you through the steps of the basic flint-knapping of arrowheads and scrapers to the most complex decorating and finishing techniques of painting and fletching. Also included are chapters on materials, tools, and the workplace. (from book summary)
• Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution And The Dawn Of Technology by Kathy Diane Schick
  • "Tools are us," assert the authors, anthropologists at Indiana University, referring to the pivotal role that tool making and tool use played in transforming apelike hominids into modern humans. In East Africa, Schick and Toth learned to duplicate and use Stone Age-like tools for woodworking, animal butchery and other tasks. Illustrated with 100 photographs and drawings, this lucid primer is an exciting exploration of the world's most ancient technologies, of human origins and of controversies in paleoanthropology.
• North American Bows, Arrows, And Quivers by Otis Mason
  • "Otis Tufton Mason, Smithsonian report, 1893 [published 1894]; Gerard Fowke, excerpted from Stone art, thirteenth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1891-92" (from book jacket)
• Practicing Primitive : A Handbook Of Aboriginal Skills by Steven Watts
  • Practicing Primitive: A Handbook of Aboriginal Skills is a collection of information and images put together over a twenty-year period in a search for hands-on communication with our shared Stone Age past. The story of the Stone Age is our story, and primitive technology is a way for anyone who wants to understand that shared history.
• Stone Tools And The Evolution Of Human Cognition by April Nowell
  • Because no direct fossil record of early human behavior exists, insight into the evolution of human cognition must be inferred from indirect interpretations based on archaeological finds. From a time before the fabrication of delicate bone instruments and the creation of stunning works of art in the closing millennia of the last Ice Age, the only available clues to early human cognition come from the understanding of changing lithic (stone) technologies. This work presents a detailed and scholarly discussion of lithic technologies, with specific reference to their utility as markers of human cognition.
• Stone Tools In The Paleolithic And Neolithic Near East: A Guide by John Shea
  • In this useful volume, anthropologist Shea (Stony Brook Univ.) fills an important niche by providing the first multi-period survey of Near Eastern stone tool typology and technology. He begins with a brief introduction followed by a general overview of stone tool basics.

Fiction

In keeping with this month's theme of stone tools in North America, the following titles provide stories set in North America before the advent of Europeans to the continent.

• The Morning Star Series set in Cahokia.
  • Award-winning archaeologists and New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear set their saga in the city of Cahokia (located near present-day St. Louis) which once covered more than six square miles. Cahokian warriors and traders roamed from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. (adapted from Book 1 description)
    • People Of The Morning Star (Book 1)
    • Sun Born (Book 2)
    • Moon Hunt (Book 3)
    • Star Path (Book 4, forthcoming June 2019)
• The Moundville Duology also from W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear set in the Mississippian Culture.
  • People Of The Weeping Eye (Book 1)
  • People of the Thunder (Book 2)
• Cricket Sings : A Novel Of Pre-Columbian Cahokia by Kathleen King

There is also a list online of additional novels set in prehistoric North America at Historical Novels.info.