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In 1964, a conference of American and French prehistorians explored the techniques of manufacture of chipped-stone artifacts. The conference was held at Les Eyzies, France, and included sessions in which implements were manufactured and discussion sessions in which artifact collections were evaluated in terms of observable evidences of manufacturing technique.

Pressure techniques were used to remove 83 blades from a preformed obsidian core weighing 820 grams, yielding 17.32 meters of acute cutting edge. The blades represented 91 percent of the original weight (2.1 centimeters of acute cutting edge per gram of original material), thus demonstrating the efficiency of the pressure-blade techniques for the production of acute cutting edges.