Learning Through Making

Experimental production of stone tools

Month: January 2022

I’ve made something (else) I like

January 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Last Saturday I took part in a session at the Whitaker Museum in Rossendale. My friend, Stephen Poole, had been invited to talk about the Pioneers of Rossendale: the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic populations that left behind in the Pennines their calling cards, in the form of flint tools.

However, the pioneers in question were also the late nineteenth and early twentieth century researchers whose stone tool collections ended up in local museums like the Whitaker. Whilst working through these collections Stephen had identified half a Mesolithic shale bead, and because of that bead fragment asked if I wanted to run a Mesolithic bead and pendant making workshop after his talk.

I was happy to help but I couldn’t do the cordage aspect of the process, so I organised the workshop logistics with Jane from the museum, and two of our super competent third year undergraduate students, Jordan and Laura, ran the whole session! This meant that I could sit back and get some cordage making practice in, and in doing so I got a little carried away.

Anyway, I had made this (not Mesolithic) knife a good while ago and at the time noted the small chalk filled hollow. I poked out the chalk and thought it would be good to thread some cordage through at some point so It could be worn around the neck. That is what I had in mind whilst making cordage at the Whitaker.

So today I pulled out the knife and used the cordage to produce my lithic necklace. The cordage is too long and I don’t wear necklaces, but I love the aesthetic of bringing the two technologies together. Anyway, thanks to Jordan (cordage), Laura (pendant) and Stephen (lecture) for doing the heavy lifting.

And also to Jane from the Whitaker for organising the microphone, stickers for name badges, and most importantly, lunch!

The performance of control

January 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

We had an excellent handaxe making workshop in the labs yesterday, and I will do a separate post about it when I get some feedback from participants. This post is about one small part of the session. Before the handaxe making started in earnest we watched a ten minute video of an American knapper produce a large handaxe from a flat tablet of Texas chert.

The American knapper was highly skilled and produced a long symmetrical handaxe within something like 25 removals. Impressive. However, I lost interest early on. We had looked at the handaxes in the teaching collection and these real examples were much less refined. In our session we were also using knobbly flint nodules from Norfolk with fossils, holes and differential texture throughout.

The video was a performance of control by a highly skilled knapper using high quality material of an optimum shape and size. The factors being controlled, size, shape, material quality, were exactly those we were negotiating. To me the video was a sales pitch to archaeologists looking for machine like knappers to take part in ‘scientific’ experiments.

However, our exploratory negotiations with less than ideal materials resulted in artefacts much closer to the examples in the teaching collection. The handaxe in the photos was made before the workshop from a large flake with a big hole, small fossil, and course grained sections. My perspective is perhaps related to a current obsession with this brilliant track by the band James, describing the messiness of life and how we engage, make mistakes, change tack, and that we are ultimately, just getting away with it.

Whilst I felt the American knapper’s video was a performance of control, our knapping session was more like the performance of being human, and I loved it.

Work to do? Make a handaxe

January 19, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have a number of projects on the go, all of which need people and dates to coincide. I find this kind of scheduling activity stressful at the best of times, and I have three immediate ones to deal with and a lecture to produce.

So after doing a significant chunk of lecture producing I treated myself to some time in the lab. This was a big flake and I reduced it down systematically. I need some new hammer stones and antler hammers as all of mine are worn.

The handaxe is asymmetrical, but in a way I can live with. The edges are all sharp, but best of all, it is a double A side. Both faces are equally interesting. The first picture shows two good thinning flakes meeting in the middle, and coincidently delineating a colour and flint consistency change.

The other face has this interesting fossil in it. I didn’t plan it like that but the texture of the flint around the fossil made me work around it and so it was a negotiated settlement. The rust colour is usually where water has penetrated the flint through flaws in the nodule.

Hammer stone and worn antler problems made me realise how I normally unconsciously choose the right tool for the job at hand. I struggled a bit trying to use a stone that was too large but unworn. This made me think about handaxe reduction.

This handaxe is…hand size! perhaps a lot of the handaxe reduction process was to transform an already useful flake into a good fit with the hand. None of the above handaxe characteristics were planned above and beyond thinking about bifacial reduction. And on that note, back to scheduling 😐

In a land down under

January 10, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Shakeel has serviced and repaired the combi-boiler so the house is now warm, but at night it still loses pressure. This suggests a significant water leak somewhere, however there is no indication of damp on the ceilings or in the cellar, so today I went under the floorboards.

Our house was built around 1900 and used to be a corner shop. The cellar underlies less than half the ground floor, whilst the corner shop bit and the wood burner room have only a crawl space. The corner shop crawl space has an access hatch and that’s where I was today. As you can see from the above picture there is plenty of crap down there.

Including some complete 1970s beer bottles and an undamaged jazzy cup. I brought three bottles and the cup out and left a nest of the rest for some future explorer. No obvious leak, but I did clad all the hot water pipes with insulation which I am happy about.

More relevant to this blog topic I also pulled out around 8ft of discarded copper pipe. This equates to 16 medium pressure flakers which are really useful for workshops, and coincidentally, I have a knapping workshop on Friday.

In relation to the leak we are going to try a central heating version of ‘radweld’ tomorrow, to see if that blocks the hole. If not the floorboards in the wood burner room are going to have to come up…

Stone cold boiler

January 6, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This story has two main characters. The above small handaxe is one, made in the lab last week from an unpromising large flake. I actually really like it although it is asymmetrical, and the cutting edges on each side are both sharp but of different character. It is almost as if each side was made by a different artisan.

The second character in this story is our kaput combi-boiler. It stopped working last week and we have not been able to get an engineer out who could solve the problem yet. In Manchester currently it is below zero degrees most nights, so apart from the wood burner room the house is pretty cold all the time. The secret of good comedy is timing 😐.

Anyway, back to the handaxe. As usual I handle these things a lot after I have made them. In getting to know the artefact haptically it occurs to me what I may want to change, and ways in to making those changes.

Picking up the handaxe first thing yesterday morning I was struck by how cold it was to the touch. It seemed to have absorbed the coldness that had pervaded the house overnight, and through the past week. It was in fact ‘stone cold’, and that was my overriding and surprising response to the object.

I was experiencing a different and unrealised capacity of the object, however, as I continued to hold and handle it I could feel its ‘body temperature’ changing, blending with that of my hand which enclosed it, and harmonising with my body temperature in general.

It made me think about how the human hand creates a haptic relationship with the object, finding a way of holding that seems to fit. However, it also alerted me to the fact that the object also responds to the human touch by warming to the person.

Whilst I grasp the science behind an inert piece of stone absorbing heat from my body and changing temperature, I was surprised by the process and think in pre-Enlightenment periods this experience may have been understood and explained in different ways, perhaps in terms of an object becoming part of the human body.

It is also interesting to think about in terms of the occult skills necessary to use the handaxe in for example a butchery process. Would the tool and the process be separated as a noun and a verb?

This is the start of an idea, however, it is Saturday, Shakeel has possibly fixed the boiler and the house is warm. A story with a happy ending!

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