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:
“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty city is herself,
To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Living amid the same perpetual whirl
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end—”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)