We were away on fieldwork in Herefordshire over July and I am very slowly catching up with things. One of those things is Mrs Anning’s twisted cordate handaxe. Ian Elliott has worked on our sites over a number of seasons, and this year he brought some lithics for me to have a look at, in particular two fantastic handaxes, one of which I will discuss in this post.
As you can see from the video this handaxe is what is termed a twisted cordate. Twisted because the cutting edge undulates around the tool, cordate because it is heart shaped. It bears a striking resemblance to my favourite handaxe within our teaching collection, a 3D model of which can be seen here: https://skfb.ly/ooCKM.
As can be seen with these two photographs, the patina, or colour on one face is different to that on the other. This indicates that it has been sat for a considerable length of time and the lower surface has patinated at a different rate to the exposed upper surface. The edges are in good condition and indicate that it has not been rolled around much if at all. Like the one we have, it is in very good condition. White, Ashton and Bridgland (2019 open access) looked at the recorded contexts of this particular type of handaxe in Britain and dated them to around Marine Isotope Stage 11, so around 400,000 years ago.
The handaxe(s) were donated to Ian’s local primary school, St Mary’s in Dilwyn, Herefordshire by a Mrs Anning. They asked Ian to give a talk about our site, he told them we had very few finds and in response they showed him their donated stone tools. I am both really keen to find out from Mrs Anning where she got the handaxes from, I think Ian is on the case there. I am now keen to make one of these twisted handaxes.
White, Ashton and Bridgland explain the technological process and it sounds complicated, so I am really interested to see if the actual systematic reduction process is as complicated as the descriptions. Watch this space!
References: White M, Ashton N, Bridgland D. Twisted Handaxes in Middle Pleistocene Britain and their Implications for Regional-scale Cultural Variation and the Deep History of Acheulean Hominin Groups. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. 2019;85:61-81. doi:10.1017/ppr.2019.1
I have a new project in mind inspired by a number of factors. The first one is the fragments of blue glass that I find at the bottle tip. Blue glass is pretty rare I have realised.
The second was seeing the melted glass bottle in Spain last year and realising I could produce a glass block, with the help of Nacho and his kiln. Talking to a friend Howard, he thought it would make an interesting three part film: gathering materials; making the glass block; knapping the handaxe.
That is how I ended up at Nacho’s this afternoon smashing the glass fragments I had previously collected and sorted, and making them into easily meltable pieces. Nacho, for his part has produced some clay moulds to get the shape, but as clay is porous the glass would bind to the clay. The aluminium food trays are to line the clay mould and stop the glass sticking.
This is obviously all theoretical at this stage, anyway, after putting the glass into a carrier bag and hitting it repeatedly with a lump hammer we managed to get one blue glass container filled.
After that we did a milk glass, and then clear glass container. And after that we went back to the bottle tip to get some materials for brown and green handaxes as well. There is a lot that can go wrong with this project, so let’s see how it goes!
Two weeks ago I had a day off work, which is absolutely unheard of for me. I woke up with intermittent pains in my chest, and as they were intermittent I was probably going to drive over to Chester to do my lecture anyway. Fortunately, I am part of a family and after a call to my doctor, Karen and Roxanna decided that a family day out to Accident and Emergency (A&E) was in order. Over seven hours I had an electrocardiogram, blood tests and a chest x-ray. I was able to observe these processes almost dispassionately. I was in no pain, and if there was a problem I was in the right place. In relation to me there was nothing serious to worry about, but I still have to find out what is causing the pains. As a visitor to A&E for the day it was both amazing to be looked after so well at a potentially critical moment, but also eye opening to see how they are managing to manage. As well as really busy and competent care professionals I spent the seven hours with a large number and range of individuals with a variety of distressing conditions and behaviours. There was a lot of vulnerable people and the less urgent cases will have spent a lot longer than me in there.
Fast forward to today, this is my fifth day of recovering from a really horrible flu bug. On Monday I had a snotty nose, Tuesday and Wednesday I couldn’t get out of bed. When I did get out of bed on Thursday I couldn’t walk because of lower back pain. Today is Saturday and I took the dog for a walk around the park. My lower back was really limiting movement and I was feeling very vulnerable to slipping on the patches of ice left over from last night. Last week I was dispassionately observing vulnerable people in physical distress, and today I was the vulnerable person in physical distress. I felt like one of the many and various people I had observed in hospital.
These feelings seems to have affected my focus because on the way back from the park all I could see was the amount of litter on the street. Being an archaeologist I think I can see a pattern. Car pulls up, driver consumes fast food, drink and cigarettes, winds down window, deposits empty packaging on the pavement, drives away. This may be an artefact of a new kind of work where drivers are living in their vehicles for most of the day. It is also incredibly selfish behaviour that makes me very angry. I have yet to see someone doing it which makes it even more frustrating to deal with.
My feelings of physical vulnerability and recent hospital experience made me realise that it is lower paid and older people (like me!) who come to rely more and more on services like the National Health Service (NHS). The deliberate underfunding of the NHS by our government is a clear strategy to turn an encompassing public service model into a profit making business one. By selling off significant elements of the service to the private sector it becomes a business model that profits from the physical vulnerability of an increasing poor and older population. Perhaps because I suddenly saw myself in this ‘new’ (poor and old!) situation it made me consider all those physically vulnerable people and the future of the NHS.
In my fevered and physically vulnerable state I imagined a clear correlation between the discarded packaging ending up in our street, and the various and vulnerable people ending up in A&E. Trafford Council will ultimately pick up the discarded packaging, and the NHS will deal with those vulnerable people, but both will spend a lot of time waiting to be sorted out.
I want to suggest that both these issues are structural in nature. I believe a modern attitude has been cultivated to understand ourselves as individuals first, and to a lesser degree part of a larger society. We are encouraged to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, creatively selling ourselves as a product within the wider capitalist market place. Until of course we are no longer ‘useful’ within that market place, something that is dawning upon me as a 61 year old man.
Within this argument, health insurance becomes a ‘technology of the self’, necessary to maintain the functioning of the individual. The discarded packaging are the remains of differing technologies of the self. The single use individual portion coffee cups, plastic bottles and cigarette boxes have all served their single use, and can now be dealt with by someone else. That someone else is larger society, something largely missing from the entrepreneur of the self narrative.
So what does all this mean? It felt like it made sense in my fevered state. Trying to unpick it is a bit more tricky. However, the thing that stands out for me is how virtually all my stone tool making equipment and materials is repurposed waste. It seems that following aboriginal cultures, it is possible to find satisfaction, value, and beauty in repurposing those materials. Developing this idea suggests we could organise things differently. Perhaps a society that was designed to find the value and beauty in both discarded materials as well as older and poorer people. A society like that would certainly be better for those vulnerable folks like myself ending up in A&E, but also for people like my 20 year old daughter, Roxanna. She is fit and healthy but through no fault of her own is going to inherit the looming environmental crisis we are busy creating, one single use plastic bottle at a time. I think we need a system change.
I have recently been reading about the work of archaeologist, John Chapman, and his ideas around fragmentation and enchainment. I have also been thinking about the role of experimental archaeology, not just for exploring past processes, but also the formation of relationships in the present.
Certainly working together on the process of learning how to make a stone tool can be a bonding experience, especially when the process is stretched out over three years and leads to other projects and activities. Enter Laura and Jordan.
Upon reaching the end of their third year of undergraduate degree it felt appropriate for me to recognise in some way all the help, but also all the experiences we shared through their degree journey. These included workshops, fieldwork, surveying, filming, conservation as well as lots of coffee drinking. I have really enjoyed developing projects along with them both.
A good while ago I gave a friend, Lucette, a glass arrowhead as a birthday present. Her partner Martin transformed it into a lovely necklace / pendant, and after she sent me a photo of it I asked Martin if he could make me a couple.
As you can see, Martin came up with the goods, and both Laura and Jordan appreciated their pendants. As third years I thought I would be seeing a lot less of them once they had finished their degrees, however that has not been the case. Jordan is working on a temporary conservation project for the department, and Laura has started a Masters degree in Museum Studies on the floor below me.
The fragmentation process within John Chapman’s discussion refers largely to Neolithic pottery sherds, and how the breaking up of a pot can provide fragments that can link people to other people, but also places and events. The knapping process is also a process of fragmentation, and the gifting of these two particular arrowhead pendants (one from a bottle glass and one from flint) does seem to have enchained both Laura and Jordan to the department, so it must be true!
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?
Flint working was an entirely new experience for me but getting to approach the material in a group environment made it a far less daunting task. I have knapped before, but only with glass bottles – easy to acquire as a student and much cheaper than flint! Glass behaves itself generally and you can predict where and when it will facture (mostly) making it a great starting material for knappers. I have no right to claim any decent knowledge of knapping or the skills that come with it, but I have managed, after many (many!) breakages, to form a neat little collection of glass arrowheads for myself.
I felt somewhat confident going into the flint knapping workshop John was hosting. I had seen the flint before, but I had never worked with it. We were given a detailed run through of how the flint reacts and how we should react to the flint, thinking of it as working together rather than just working on a material. Alice la Porta showd a video of a professional American knapper who created a beautiful flint axehead in just 25 strikes – a rather impressive and somewhat intimidating display of skill.
We started trying to make our own scrappers after a demonstration from John, and it’s fair to say mine did not turn out so well. I began with a decent palm-sized piece of flint which ended up about the size of my thumb with no real clear edge that could be used as a scraper. I tried again and again with flint flakes I found on the floor (I didn’t want to waste any good bits with my terrible practice blows) but didn’t have much luck. Flint was far harder to work with than I had anticipated and certainly much harder to knap than glass. I spent a good hour or so working on scraps trying to make a scraper before we moved onto looking at handaxes. Oddly, working towards a handaxe with the flint was much easier for me – I could visualise what I wanted a lot better and working with a larger piece of flint made me much more confident in my hits with the soft and hard hammers. Perhaps it was because I was used to working towards a similar goal that I set myself when making glass arrowheads, getting full surface removal of cortex and shaping the material, that I found making the flint handaxe easier to understand. This does not mean, however, that I had any clue what I was truly doing and was solely relying on the flint to help me and suggest areas to work on next. I did, in the end, leave with a beautiful handaxe I am very proud of (after some help from John).
What I took away from this experience was that knapping does not have to be a lone effort. Beginner knappers, such as myself, need help and guidance from the more experienced, and even other beginners who might be catching on to some of the tricks faster. Though it is a personal creation does not mean a community effort cannot go into its manufacturing. I personally believe the experience would not have been as enjoyable had I been left alone in a room with an instructional video to watch and learn from. People help people when it comes to these kinds of workshops, whether that’s the teacher or other learners, community is an important part of the learning and creation process.
It took a long time for me to get used to working with the characteristics of flint as I was so used to glass. I had to relearn a lot of what I knew about knapping, but it was an eye-opening experience as it just goes to show how skills can always be developed and adapted to new (and more difficult) materials. This workshop was an excellent chance for me to make something I could be proud of, but also learn through others: there was such a variety of people at the workshop, professors, other students, commercial archaeologists, and we all had different ways of approaching the task. Getting to watch others learn and practice is, for me, one of the best ways to develop new skills and enjoying doing so.
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.
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
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!
