Stone diary: Memories of flint…

My lovely flint hand axe knapped by Bruce Bradley in the early 1970s at Cambridge

These musings on the stone called flint and its poorer-quality relation chert are prompted by the recent discovery of 120,000-year-old stone tools in the United Arab Emirates. Read more about that here.

This 120,000-year-old chert hand axe was discovered in the United Arab Emirates

Those tools are made of chert, a fine-grained silica-rich microcrystalline sedimentary rock found in limestone. But when it is of fine quality and found in chalk, it is called flint.

Worked flint is beautiful – hard, glassy, grey, touchable. I first held it in my hands when studying prehistoric archaeology in the early 1970s.

At the time Bruce Bradley (now Professor) was studying for his PhD in experimental archaeology at Cambridge University. He was famous even then for his flint-knapping technique – it was said that it was lucky he wore spectacles as they were covered in tiny chips from the flying fragments of stone and he would otherwise have been blinded.

When he left he sold off many of his pieces. I have to admit I didn’t go to the sale myself, but my fellow student Matthew Spriggs picked up some flint tools for me. Thus I acquired the large hand axe, an arrowhead and a small sickle, all of which are pictured here.

And thanks to the miracle of Google, I find Matt is now an archaeology professor in Australia. I wondered what had happened to him!

A close-up of the beautiful flint-knapping on this hand axe by Bruce Bradley

Excellent flint arrowhead knapped by Bruce Bradley at Cambridge, England, in the early 1970s

Close-up of the surface of the flint arrowhead

A small flint sickle blade knapped by Bruce Bradley

I had not grown up in limestone country, although my mother’s family all came from Dorset and Hampshire, where flint abounds. Limestone and chalk are built of sediments from the calcium skeletons of tiny sea creatures, fallen to the bottom of the ancient seas.

Usually the flint is in the form of spheres or “nodules”, like bubbles in the chalk. I imagine them originally full of organic jelly, eventually turning to blue-grey translucent crystal when the rock was compressed.

Flint nodules in Denmark by Han van Hoof – this pile were weathered out of chalk cliffs by the sea

A fragment of the white rind of the flint nodule can be seen on this hand axe by Bruce Bradley

Flint nodules are used widely in building. You can see it in my pictures of the churches of Winchester Holy Trinity and St Peter’s Over Wallop, and this is a beautiful masonic hall in Winchester…

A masonic hall in Winchester, Hampshire, built of split-open flint nodules with brick bands as decoration

The closest I came to prehistory and stone tools in my childhood was watching the original Flintstones cartoons on (black & white) TV.

The original cartoon Flintstones of my childhood…

Then when I studied archaeology at university, I specialised in Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age, so missed out on the details of the older (Palaeolithic) stone age, but fine flint was still used for tools in Neolithic times.

One Sunday I went with college friends to visit Grime’s Graves, a Neolithic flint mining area near Thetford in Norfolk. It’s an amazing place, where you can climb down ladders into one of the original pits where flint was dug out.

An artist’s impression of a Neolithic flint mine in operation

The miners, using just deer antlers and shoulder blades, dug down through 30 feet of soil containing small, poor-quality flint nodules to get to the wide seams of better, tabular flint below. This could be used to make bigger tools.

An aerial view of Grimes Graves in Norfolk, showing the dips of filled-in flint pits and one in the foreground accessible to visitors

Then in 1976 our university archaeological field class took us to Denmark and I was really pleased when crossing a field I found this waste flake from a flint core, clearly worked by human hand, judging by the shape of the “percussion platform” at its base.

Dorsal surface of the flint waste flake I found in a field in Denmark in 1976

Ventral surface of the flint flake I found in a field in Denmark in 1976

Here’s my drawing of the piece of flint, done at the time…

I believe I can see the percussion platform, bulb of percussion, ripples and nibbling, as pointed out in this diagram…

A diagram showing the features of worked flint, from the Belchalwell (Dorset) website

And finally… here are some colourful Clovis points from America, made around 13,500 years ago. The workmanship is magnificent. Most of these look to me as if they are made of chert or red jasper.

An assortment of Clovis points courtesy of the Center for the Study of the First Americans

Other links:
Some wonderful flint-knapping from the teenage caveman’s gallery

Thanks to Ron Graves for this suggestion from the Lake District:
Not flint (greenstone), but the Great Langdale Stone Axe Factory – one of the most important Neolithic sites in Europe – is probably worth a mention…

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