Category: Materials (Page 3 of 4)

Neolithic Fieldwork

July 30, 2022 / admin / 0 Comments

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.

Neolithic ‘axe factory’

May 18, 2022 / admin / 0 Comments

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…

Bottle tip ovate handaxe

March 28, 2022 / admin / 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 time…on our phones 😐

Quarried materials?

March 24, 2022 / admin / 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 out….

Arezzo, Tuscany and lots of knappable material

March 22, 2022 / admin / 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.

It’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.

I’ve made something (else) I like

January 31, 2022 / admin / 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 / admin / 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 / admin / 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

Blue glass point

January 10, 2022 / admin / 0 Comments

In a land down under

January 10, 2022 / admin / 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…