Flintknapping 101

Dr. Gus Costa

Archaeology Now celebrates International Archaeology Day by featuring Dr. Gus Costa. Learn about one of the oldest technologies known to man and about the tools that humans created thousands of years ago. Their knowledge of geometry and geology was profound indeed.

Dr. August “Gus” Costa is an independent consulting archaeologist that provides specialist support in geoarchaeology and artifact analysis. Gus earned a doctorate focusing on paleoanthropology at Indiana University, where he was a Fulbright and Leakey Foundation fellow conducting expeditions to India supported by the National Science Foundation. His academic work in India focused on the earliest human occupation of South Asia. Gus led a field program that identified the most productive Ice Age fossil locality in western India and discovered a new species of extinct antelope as well as numerous prehistoric cultural remains. Gus has more than 20 years’ experience in archeology and has carried out field and lab-based work in Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as numerous projects within the US including Texas, Arkansas, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Gus is an adjunct lecturer at Rice University where he has taught courses in geoarchaeology, paleontology, paleotechnology and Asian Prehistory. Since arriving in Texas, Gus has been active in local public archeology projects and served as lab director for the Houston Archeological Society. Gus has contributed to numerous cultural resource surveys and acted as a consulting geoarchaeologist for both survey and large excavation projects in southeast Texas. In the last five years Gus served in various staff and management roles including Principal Investigator and Vice President at Moore Archaeological Consulting, Inc. in Houston, Texas.