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Obsidian can be used to make extremely sharp knives, and obsidian blades are a type of glass knife made using naturally occurring obsidian instead of manufactured glass. Obsidian is used by some surgeons for scalpel blades, although this is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on humans. [59]
Obsidian is a naturally formed volcanic glass that was an important part of the material culture of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Obsidian was a highly integrated part of daily and ritual life, and its widespread and varied use may be a significant contributor to Mesoamerica's lack of metallurgy.
A macuahuitl ([maːˈkʷawit͡ɬ]) is a weapon, a wooden club with several embedded obsidian blades. The name is derived from the Nahuatl language and means "hand-wood". [2] Its sides are embedded with prismatic blades traditionally made from obsidian, which is capable of producing an edge sharper than high quality steel razor blades.
Blade (archaeology) In archaeology, a blade is a type of stone tool created by striking a long narrow flake from a stone core. This process of reducing the stone and producing the blades is called lithic reduction. Archaeologists use this process of flintknapping to analyze blades and observe their technological uses for historical purposes.
Glass knife. A glass knife is a knife with a blade made of glass, with a fracture line forming an extremely sharp cutting edge. Glass knives were used in antiquity due to their natural sharpness and the ease with which they could be manufactured. In modern electron microscopy glass knives are used to make the ultrathin sections needed for imaging.
Obsidian Cliff, also known as 48YE433, was an important source of lithic materials for prehistoric peoples in Yellowstone National Park near Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, United States. The cliff was named by Philetus Norris, the second park superintendent in 1878. [4] It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1996. [1][3]
Rhyolite (/ ˈraɪ.əlaɪt / RY-ə-lyte) [1][2][3][4] is the most silica -rich of volcanic rocks. It is generally glassy or fine-grained (aphanitic) in texture, but may be porphyritic, containing larger mineral crystals (phenocrysts) in an otherwise fine-grained groundmass. The mineral assemblage is predominantly quartz, sanidine, and plagioclase.
Mirrors in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were fashioned from stone and served a number of uses, from the decorative to the divinatory. [3] An ancient tradition among many Mesoamerican cultures was the practice of divination using the surface of a bowl of water as a mirror. At the time of the Spanish conquest this form of divination was still ...