Category: Techniques (Page 2 of 2)

Dorstone fieldwork pop up slag glass knapping session

August 1, 2022 / admin / 0 Comments

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.

The process is the thing

March 4, 2022 / admin / 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 Grace’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?

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