Learning Through Making

Experimental production of stone tools

Tag: Materials

My latest dual heritage handaxe

September 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I realised a good while ago that I am interested in categories and boundaries. This is because of my own experience, being ‘half-caste’ in the 60s, 70s and 80s, ‘mixed race’ in the 90s and by the early 2000s I had become ‘dual heritage’. These are all what are termed ‘etic’ or outside categories, how society has characterised me. An ’emic” or internal category would be how I characterise myself, and that would be as ‘Mancunian’. More than just abstract concepts, these labels have implications for the differing ways I have understood myself and been treated in the real world, hence my interest.

Onto handaxes. I am really liking this most recent offering. It is made from the largest piece of slag glass kindly provided by the folks at Salford Archaeology. I have left the base as is, referencing where it has come from, and in relation to the worked section, I like the thinned serrated edge on both sides. It would make a great cutting tool, and I am super pleased with this one.

So form and potential function if you like, mirror a Palaeolithic handaxe. However, the material it is made from, a slag glass block excavated from a factory in Manchester, anchors it very much in the modern industrial period. It has two, temporally contradictory etic heritages, or narratives captured within one beautiful object.

So what about its emic identity? I don’t think the handaxe itself can tell us, but through my visual and haptic engagement with it I would say it is pretty special. It works for me on every level, and it feels like I have expressed something of myself within the production of this object. It was satisfying to make and I am happy that I have this ability to create things of beauty such as this. And I think that its dual heritage adds to its aesthetic and doubles its narrative value. Happy days!

Endshock, or something or other?

September 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This is a strange time of year for me. Relatively quiet diary wise and along the corridor, but work wise I have a lot to do within the couple of weeks before term starts.

This flexibility inevitably means I end up in the lab and doing what I am obsessed with at the moment, making handaxes. However, over the past two days things have not gone so well.

I have been trying to work the big chunks I have had lying round for a long time, but seem to be just destroying stuff, rather than being able to make anything. I think it is because I have so much going on in my head it is difficult for me to slow down and focus.

Anyway, I was pretty pleased with this handaxe preform. It was a large clean flake removal from the bottom right nodule in the cage. So far so good. The hard hammer shaping went well and I moved onto the soft hammer. The thing to note on the above photo is the dark brown inclusion at the bottom near my little finger. This material was a lot harder than the flint it was sat within.

This is a better view of the hard section. Soft hammer wise I do not have so much choice, they are all a pretty similar size, and I could have done with something heavier to take longer flakes from this particular flint, but I did not have that option, so I just had to hit it faster with the aim of increasing the kinetic energy and therefore impact. Above is an example of what I would class as a good platform, both low and isolated, or sticking out a bit. All the ingredients to produce a good clean removal.

However, I hit the platform of hard material, again and again with no result, until this happened. Increasing the impact at one end has split the handaxe preform in the middle. I know this as endshock, although I do not fully understand the phenomena, I just avoid hard hits at one end of a handaxe. With this example I was working with it on my leg, held down at the distal end and hitting hard the proximal. I wonder if my leg acted as a fulcrum and it gave way in the middle? Is this the same as endshock? I don’t know, but I am keeping this as a really interesting example of something or other.

The performance of control

January 23, 2022 / / 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.

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