- Usually we have a fist fight, don't we?
- Yeah, you'd goose me. [chuckling]
That was just laying here?
- That was just laying right here.
- There's nothing like walking a field on a spring day.
- In farm fields across Wisconsin,
spring is the time to pick rocks.
- Look at this piece Bob.
- But Bob Keiper and Gary Eldred aren't farmers.
- Oh, look at the color in that one.
- They're flintknappers
and they're looking for rocks shaped by ancient hands.
- All of the different cultures of Indians
from Paleo all the way up to modern times
are found in that field.
- This field is just below an ancient rock quarry called Silver Mound.
- My guess is they were quarrying it
right off this slope
and taking it down there to work it up.
- There never was silver in the hill
but the ancestors of modern First Nations people
found something more precious;
a rock they could shape into knives
and scrapers and arrowheads.
- When you find this high-quality material,
you know that it's a workshop site.
- Broken pieces and raw material were left on site
and covered up by the passage of time.
- You just can't imagine
how much material there is in these fields.
- Each year spring brings old stones to the surface
and the farmer makes rock piles on the edge of the field.
- Of course he says,
"Take all the stone 'cause it wrecks my farm machinery."
- These rock piles are like little treasure chests,
aren't they?
- Listen to this stuff.
[clink, clink, clink, clink]
It just rings.
- Every one of these pieces will have been tested.
- Bob and Gary aren't just looking for artifacts,
they're looking for the raw material
so they can make their own points.
- We're going to take this one.
Oh, it's got honey in there and it's thick.
Oh Gary! Look at this.
- Bob and Gary enjoy knapping together
but the term has nothing to do with sleep.
- Knapping is a German word that means to break stone.
So flint knapping is "to break stone."
- A few thousand years ago,
people used a hammerstone and a deer antler.
Modern tools aren't that much different.
- Most knappers don't have fingernails.
They're all broke off.
- Knapping is about technique and the quality of the material.
The stone must be hit in just the right spot
to knock off a flake.
- The question is should I take this one or this one?
- That makes the original stone thinner and sharper.
The flake itself could become a smaller piece.
- You against the stone is what I like to think
but a lot of times it's you against yourself.
- You can also tell almost right away by the sound of the crack
whether it was a good one or not.
- A knapper can work for hours
only to find a flaw in the rock that makes it useless.
- So he just threw it away.
- Gary thinks that's why this stone was discarded.
- He was trying to make a atlatl blade or a hand knife.
So to get that off,
the piece would have ended up being too small
for what he needed.
So he just tossed it.
So the idea of picking up these pieces like this
that are discarded on the sites
really gives you way more insight than the finished blade.
- Not every stone is knappable.
- Outcroppings of silicified sandstone like Silver Mound
were destination spots for ancient toolmakers.
- It was not only Native Americans that worked flint.
I mean my ancestors, you know, Norwegian and German,
they worked flint too.
We all went through the Stone Age.
All of our families went through the Stone Age.
It wasn't just our Native Americans here.
- Gary and Bob each remember finding their first arrowhead as boys
and wanting to know how they were made.
- I just kind of stuck with it all these years.
It's just -- I don't know why
but the whole history of the thing just captivated me.
- You just can't pass up a piece like that.
- You can pick up a flake of stone
and you make this connection with whoever it was
that knocked that off or made that point or broke it.
- They also travel the country attending knap-ins,
where knappers get together
to trade stone and stories [clink] and break rock.
- There's a rhythm.
If you get eight or ten guys together
and once they get focused,
there's not a lot of talk going on.
- Even the knap-in has a connection to ancient peoples.
- Can you imagine what it would be like
way back when another group comes to the same quarry site?
- Is there a conflict?
Or is it a time to share knowledge, experience, stories?
- Gary and Bob have each been knapping
for more than 40 years with no plans to stop.
- It's like opening up presents.
You never know what's going to be inside the next rock.
- Here, here. Use this.
[chuckling]
Isn't that a beauty? -Yeah.
- It's all about the creation for me. [clink]
You sit down and knap [scrapping sound]
and something flows through your mind.
It's just this primordial connection that's there.
I don't know. I can't -- I can't explain it.