Learning Through Making

Experimental production of stone tools

Month: March 2022

Bottle tip ovate handaxe

March 28, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This afternoon Roxanna, Bella and myself went to the bottle tip. I thought from the style of the earliest bottles it was 1940s material and this newspaper from the site indicates late 1930s.

I was looking for big pieces and at first thought this was a metal pan lid. It was very concave and so needed considerable reduction to get it flat, but apart from a couple of irritating step fractures the glass behaved really well.

I took a few risks with this, but well prepared platforms and well behaved material led to this nice and lumpy but symmetrical ovate. Roxanna is not as keen on the bottle tip as me so we went to a cafe afterwards, to have some daddy daughter timeā€¦on our phones šŸ˜

Quarried materials?

March 24, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I mentioned in the last post how this very knappable material was not present in the museum lithic collections or associated text books for the area of Tuscany we were staying in.

I really enjoyed collecting these materials, and they were mostly eroding from a low wall that ran along the path to the house. I have realised subsequently that in fact all the pieces I picked up were from humanly produced structures.

Quarrying for materials is generally accepted to be part of the Early Neolithic, and in Britain some of the earliest monuments are flint mines. The Radiolarite (if that is what it is) may not have been easily available, or available at all to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic populations using the area if it in fact comes from a deep stratigraphic context.

So my materials collection experience, whilst useful for getting to know the Radiolarite and its properties, was very much a post prehistoric experience, and actually more similar to my visits to the bottle tip. Those are my thoughts from the experience and evidence to date. Looks like I will have to come back to Tuscany if I want to categorically find outā€¦.

Arezzo, Tuscany and lots of knappableĀ material

March 22, 2022 / / 0 Comments

We are staying with a friend, David, in their Tuscan farmhouse villa, and the place is literally surrounded by this amazing knappable material.

Itā€™s interesting as it seems to break up into tabular form, but also has linear inclusions running through it, perpendicular to the tabular planes. In the above photo you can see how the flakes stop as they run into the inclusion line.

The inclusion line is perhaps more obvious on the other face. A quick Wikipedia search suggests it is Radiolarite chert, and a visit to the local museum gives the impression that stone tools found in the area were made from an imported flint, not this material.

Anyway, I am bringing the first two artefacts home, the rest are for David, our host, and his neighbours who made the mistake of expressing an interest in what I was doing.

What a lovely week, spent with David, Chrissy, Penny, Karen, and my new friend, Radiolarite chert.

The process is theĀ thing

March 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Thanks to Alice la Porta we now have the best part of a tonne of flint nodules in the Teaching Lab. Thank you Alice! Earlier this afternoon I went to a talk by Julian Thomas about excavations at the early Neolithic site of Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire. Of particular interest was the pattern of rock crystal deposition. Whilst flint was found across the site, rock crystal was almost exclusively associated with cremated remains.

And whilst present in the form of very small pieces of debitage, no rock crystal tools were recovered, and the small size of the debitage suggests none were produced. The process of reduction seems to have been the thing. This is in stark contrast to the typological focus of modern archaeology discussed in Graceā€™s previous post.

Anyway, at about 5.30pm I found myself in the lab with a large hammer stone reducing a large nodule into manageable flakes. I have posted some pics of one of the handaxes made, but to reiterate, the process is the thing. I like the handaxe but I stole the 50 minutes or so of the day when I could be alone in the lab making something. Why is this process so precious?

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