Yesterday we did some filming. Howard (film maker) and Jex (sound person) at the bottle tip. I had brought some props with me to explain the overall idea. Enter, my current favourite large handaxe (above) to illustrate where I want to go with things.
Next up was my best glass handaxe made from the base of a vase. This was to illustrate the limitation of size of materials, with this being exceptional, but still not very big.
Third up was this (presumably) 1950s Vicks bottle of amazing blue glass. This was to illustrate the rare blue material I wanted to collect in order to then work with Nacho to produce a blue glass block.
Anyway, after the above introduction and some bottle tip footage Howard wanted some live action blue glass finding moments. This was going to be difficult as over many visits I had picked the area clean, or so I thought. I found quite a lot, mainly a pale or lighter blue, but nevertheless illustrating the material gathering process authentically, which is what we both wanted. Let’s see what Howard makes of phase one.
I destroyed two of the large flakes produced last week before I got to this with the third. It is a Neanderthal Bout Coupe, or flat based handaxe, and I like it.
I have had a bit of a ‘John day’ today. First thing I took Bella for a walk to the bottle dump. I found some blue glass fragments and a couple of interesting bottles, but no nice thick pieces.
After a late breakfast of left over veggie Shepherds Pie I went into uni. As you can see, we have some very big nodules, inherited from Alice la Porta. When she was buying them I told her to specify big nodules, as our previous delivery had been largely small ones. I should have said medium size.
Anyway, today I wanted to try breaking one up to see how it would go. I chose what looked like the easiest nodule, with flat sections as ways in. I then proceeded to produce a series of large flakes, and a lot of small debris.
For the breaking up process I used these two hammer stones, and as you can see, I didn’t get off scott free. However, they did their job and I then wanted to make a handaxe from one of the flakes.
All together I had three goes and made two handaxes, and I really like the one made from this flake. I learned from the glass handaxe I made last week, and this time stayed focused on preparing platforms and getting long thin flakes off.
One of the transverse flakes came off nicely but stepped in the centre of the handaxe (see left hand side with brown stripes).
So I did one of my special techniques that I learned from a Bronze Age knapper, and fitted the flake back in. I then whacked it again and successfully removed the step.
If you look at the flake scar on the right hand side you can see the negative bulb of percussion in the centre of the handaxe illustrating the process.
I am very pleased with this one, it is large with nice long flat removals. I don’t know if a Homo heidelbergensis knapper would have been concerned about the step fracture, however that process was immensely satisfying for me and gives the handaxe some personality. Happy days.
I don’t normally destroy perfectly functional things in order to make my stone tools, however…I found this nice thick glass ashtray in Oxfam and it reminded me of the glass slabs I want to produce with Nacho.
So £3.99 and 24 hours later I was sat in the lab with a small hard hammer. The glass was really good to work even if it took me a while to get rid of the ‘walls’ of the ashtray.
Like the older glass I am used to, this ashtray glass had bubbles in it. I knew what I wanted, a large ovate handaxe, and my earlier removals, when I had more material were better. I have some nice flakes that will be good for arrowheads at some point.
It looks half decent, is fully bifacially worked (no original surface left) and I have retained a good size. However, it is not my best. Harder to see from the pics is a step fracture ‘island’ on one face. I relaxed a little and went ‘intuitive’, which felt right, but failed to produce descent removals.
I was concentrating more on outcome than process, and in doing so stopped giving each removal the due consideration it deserved. By the time I realised I didn’t any longer have a good way in to remove the steps. If I really wanted to make it into something I like I would lose size, and it would end up like many of my smaller ones that are either made from smaller pieces, or like this, takes me lots of removals to get it ‘right’. Anyway, the hour in the lab was the thing. It’s been a while and it was great.
Currently we are on a mini two week tour of southern Spain. A first highlight was the Archaeology Museum in Jerez.
And yesterday, an exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Creation in Cordoba
However, most interesting was a small ceramics workshop in the centre of Cordoba. In there I bought for seven euros a small melted glass bottle.
I also had a good chat with the woman who made it, and she did her best to explain to me the necessary kiln timings for a successful glass melt.
Going to southern Spain was a last minute thing for me. I have tagged along with Karen and Roxanna, to make sure we get to spend some nice time together this summer. However, I have really been struck by how stimulating getting away, but also engaging with new places can be.
I am really excited about making some large bevelled glass slabs, that I can then use to knap some bigger handaxes of colour. I am super busy when I get back, but a visit to the bottle tip, and a session with Nacho and his kiln are now high on my agenda!
Thanks to Brosky and Maria for making us super welcome and spending their time showing us around Cordoba. We are so lucky to have good friends in great places.
My understanding of how to hit things has developed not through flintknapping but martial arts. Consequently, this also influences how I teach other people as I find the principles to be transferable. The first issue is cultural, that generally we are taught that hitting is a bad thing, and so we don’t get that much practice. A first step then is to just get people used to hitting flint with a hammerstone and I have previously done a whole two hour session at Chester on just that.
I then move on to a discussion of impact, or kinetic energy. My understanding is quite processual, in that kinetic energy is a result of the relationship between the mass of an object (hammerstone) and the speed it is travelling upon impact. Whilst the mass of your selected hammerstone will be constant, one variable we can play with is speed at impact. If we remove angles and accuracy from this discussion, a high impact speed increases the kinetic energy, and this in turn increases the chances of getting a clean flake removal. To increase the speed of the hammerstone it is necessary to have a relaxed arm, and relaxation comes from a familiarity with the hitting process (see paragraph one). So far, so good.
Anyway, I was at home and most of my knapping gear is at work and I was feeling a little bit stressed and saw a nice tabular piece of material in the back yard. I am 99.9% sure I picked it up at the Mynydd Rhiw site earlier this year, but my problem was that I only had a very large and very small hammerstone to hand, and a small antler hammer that I usually use on glass. None of the tools were ideal but I wanted to have a go, and if my above theoretical understanding was correct, I should be able to adapt my speed of hitting to compensate for the overly large or overly small size of the tools being used.
So that is what I did. The large hammerstone was good for the first stage of cortical removals. As you can see, each of these pieces has between 80% and 100% of cortex on the dorsal face.
The next stage was a little more tricky, as I could have done with a slightly smaller hammerstone and larger antler hammer for the shaping and thinning process. As you can see, these pieces are characterised by around 50% cortical surface and they are generally smaller.
With the final stage I really had to hit the material hard with the small antler hammer. A bigger one would have worked better, but my approach succeeded and I did manage to get some nice soft hammer flakes off. As you can see, these are characterised by minimal cortical surface present.
Anyway, if the material was indeed from Mynydd Rhiw I should have made a Neolithic polished stone axe, but being me it became a small flat based cordate handaxe. This is technically incorrect because the material was originally quarried even though I picked it up from the surface. At one point it had a large step on one surface, which I removed by replacing a removal and using that as a punch to get rid, and it worked really well.
The speed thing does work, but it is hard work, and the intuitive way I normally select the appropriate tool does save me energy. There is more to hitting than this, I deliberately avoided a lengthy discussion of angles and accuracy, however this post does go some way towards exploring and explaining (my understanding of) the underlying complexity of what is generally perceived to be a simple process.
On our Herefordshire fieldwork project we camp on the local Dorstone village playing fields behind which runs an old straight track. On a dog walk last year I noticed a section that had some inclusions with conchoidal fractures.
I stored this in my memory bank, and this year ended up going on a super impromptu walk with a group of students interested in lithics. The aim was to introduce them to the art of finding knappable materials in the landscape (something I am getting good at).
Anyway, as well as an opportunity to all get to know each other a little better, it turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable material locating and testing exercise.
I told Tim Hoverd, Herefordshire County archaeologist, about our adventure and he pointed out that this particular old straight track used to be a railway line, hence the glass slag that we were finding. I wanted to end this post with some kind of witty Alfred Watkins reference. However, I have now ended up reading about the Golden Valley Railway on Wikipedia. C’est la guerre.
I have been away for the whole of July on fieldwork in Herefordshire, and one element was the excavation of a scheduled ancient monument, Arthur’s Stone. Associated with this was an outreach project designed to engage locals with the excavation. Enter Martin Lewis.
Martin used to farm in the local area and when he heard we were up at Arthur’s Stone he brought this massive Neolithic axe up to show us. It was found by him in 1984 during a potato harvest, and only three fields away from where we were currently working.
Its main attribute was size, being flaked and patinated but not really polished. However, in areas with what looked like recent chips the material looked familiar, and it wasn’t flint. It reminded me of the material from the ‘axe factory’ that I visited in the Llyn Peninsula earlier this year.
Indeed, Martin brought up a report about the find which stated that the material was from South Wales, and it also suggested that what I read as recent chips were in fact original flake removals. I am not sure why they would say that as it makes no sense to me. I would say it was produced, it patinated, and more recent accidental chipping, perhaps by the potato harvesting machine has revealed the original material. That is my reading and it would be interesting to know why the authors thought differently however they presented no further explanation.
What is interesting to me though is that although I couldn’t tell you the kind of stone it was made from, I could tell straight away the approximate geographical area that the stone had come from. I think this aspect may well have been another important attribute of this object during the Neolithic.
Today we made a visit to a Neolithic ‘axe factory’. I say we, Karen and Roxanna stayed in the car whilst I went for a wander. The term ‘axe factory’ is embedded in an economic view of the past and the subject of one of my favourite lectures at Chester: Stone Age Economics.
Anyway, once out of the car I followed the obvious path up to a distinct pile of rocks on a small summit. It was some kind of collapsed structure, but the stone it was made from clearly wasn’t knappable. However, the summit gave me a good view of the area I had crossed, and I knew from previously looking at a 1:25 scale map approximately where the ‘factory’ was located. It was lower down, within spitting distance of the car park.
The ‘factory’ was found in the 1950s after a fire, and comprised a series of pits with surrounding lithic scatters. A knappable volcanic material outcropped in certain places, and the pits were the result of Neolithic people digging down to get at the seams below the surface.
Whilst getting pretty close to the car park I saw a sunken feature filled with foliage and surrounded by some interesting looking fragments. The material looked knappable and it appeared to be debitage, what is known as ‘shatter’. Shatter has no obvious evidence of human modification, such as a bulb of percussion, but forms a significant component of any reduction process. These pieces were very well preserved for surface finds. Or they are not very old.
These three large pieces were at a different pit, but show the material more clearly. The thing to note is the outer cortex and it’s thickness on these flakes. Anyway, the star of the show, and the one I brought away with me is this large piece below.
The above image shows the inner gray fine grained volcanic material on the left, in contrast to its outer cortex on the right. So far, so good. The following image shows part of the outer face, and on it what I think is a flake scar from a hard hammer removal.
This suggests that the outer surface is not homogeneous, but the thickest cortical part formed in Geological time. Presumably this piece was then quarried during the Neolithic and the aforementioned flake removed, perhaps to test the quality. The piece was apparently then abandoned. If this did occur during the Early Neolithic it would have been perhaps 5000 years ago. Long enough for a patina, or new surface to develop over the flake scar.
So I am arguing three phases: an original geological cortex; then a flake removed in the Neolithic and over 5000 years a patina formed over that flake scar; finally, a historical period removal revealing the grey inner surface.
Because I believe this is a humanly modified piece I need to register it with the local Finds Liaison Officer and let them decide. Tomorrow I need to find a museum!
Update. I didn’t find a local museum so I will contact the National Museum of Wales to see what they think…
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 time…on our phones 😐
