Making a Stone Chisel — Splitting and Grooving Tool

A stone chisel is a narrow-edged tool designed to concentrate force along a thin line, enabling splitting, grooving, and mortising operations that broader tools like axes cannot perform. While an axe delivers force across a wide cutting edge to sever wood fibres, a chisel focuses the blow of a mallet onto a narrow edge that wedges into a groove or drives along a split. Stone chisels appear in the Neolithic archaeological record across the world, used for woodworking (mortise joints, grooves, carving), stoneworking (channelling, splitting slabs), and bone/antler working. The chisel is made by grinding a narrow piece of fine-grained stone to a straight, sharp edge on one end. Driven by a wooden mallet, it is the precision complement to the broad-cutting axe.