Blank
A blank is a thick, shaped stone biface of suitable size and configuration for refining into a stone tool. Blanks are the beginning products of lithic reduction, and during prehistoric times were often created for trade or later refinement at another location. Blanks were often formed through the initial reduction of lumps of tool stone at simple quarries, often no more than easily accessible outcroppings of the local tool stone (although this was certainly not the case at Grimes Graves in England). Sometimes the shape of the blank hints at the shape of the final tool it will become, but this is not always the case. A blank may consist of either a large, unmodified flake or a reduced core, often with a rough subtriangular or lanceolate shape. Rough chopping tools, derived by removing a few flakes along one edge of the cobble, can also be considered to fall into this group.
Read more about this topic: Lithic Reduction
Famous quotes containing the word blank:
“I have often wondered how they manage to get return envelopes which miss, by one-quarter of an inch, fitting the blank you are supposed to return. They say, “Please fill out and return the enclosed envelope,” and the enclosed envelope is always one-quarter of an inch too small.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)