Obsidian
Obsidian is a kind of volcanic glass.
It is shiny and black, and you get it from the area around volcanoes.
When a volcano erupts, it spits out a bunch of melted rock. If the melted
rock is mostly silica, and it cools just right, at the right speed,
it can turn into naturally made glass. That is obsidian.
Obsidian is very useful, because it will hold a very sharp edge, so it makes good knives and arrowheads and fishhooks and so forth. Even today some surgeons use obsidian knives in eye surgery.
Obsidian is very useful, because it will hold a very sharp edge, so it makes good knives and arrowheads and fishhooks and so forth. Even today some surgeons use obsidian knives in eye surgery.
In the Stone Age a
lot of people wanted obsidian tools, because they were sharper than
flint. But you could not find obsidian
just anywhere. So one of the first things that people traded
for, when they were just beginning to trade, was obsidian.
To find out more about obsidian, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Archaeology for Kids: Uncovering the Mysteries of Our Past, by Richard Panchyk (2001). With twenty-five projects, like counting tree rings, and serializing cars from photographs.
Lithics (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology), by William Andrefsky (1998). A specialist's manual for studying all kinds of stone tools.
Production and Exchange of Stone Tools : Prehistoric Obsidian in the Aegean, by Robin Torrence (1986). Unfortunately out of print.
Copyright 1998-2007 Dr. Karen Carr, Associate Professor of History, Portland State University. This page last updated Wednesday, Jan 31, 2007
