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Cover of British Archaeology

Issue 79

November 2004

Contents

news

Iron Age children's graves found in Orkney <news.shtml#item1>

First Anglo-Saxon era papal seal found (and second) <news.shtml#item2>

Coastal war defences mean more book borrowing <news.shtml#item3>

Casanova's lover knew statue <news.shtml#item4>

Roman kiln found - great tiles, poor speller <news.shtml#item5>

In Brief <news.shtml#inbrief>

features

Battlefields <feat1.shtml>
Glenn Foard and Tim Sutherland fight for history

Stone tools: the mines <feat2.shtml>
Paul Craddock and Mike Cowell solve an old problem

Stone tools: the men <feat2.shtml#men>
Paul Sillitoe learns from stone tool users in New Guinea

Viking cemetery <feat3.shtml>
The inside report on a unique excavation

letters

Identity, teaching, pagans, chalk giants and asterisms <letters.shtml>

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Cutting Edge

Understanding how flint and other stone tools were made and used offers
insights into societies almost unimaginably different from our own. In
the first part of a major feature, Paul Craddock and Mike Cowell,
British Museum scientists, report on a scientific breakthrough at the
4,000 year old flint mines at Grime?s Graves, Norfolk

Neolithic mines in the north European chalk are amongst the most
impressive remains from our industrial past. Vertical shafts up to 10 m
or more deep, from which horizontal ?galleries? or adits followed flint
seams, cluster close together. English mines in Sussex seem mostly to be
Early Neolithic (4000-3000 BC), while the Norfolk mines such as Grime?s
Graves are often Late Neolithic (3000-2000 BC). Grime?s Graves is one of
the largest mine complexes, including the only shaft in Britain that can
be descended today.

In Peter Topping?s excellent article on Grime?s Graves (BA September
2003) one important question was not posed: what did the miners actually
do with the prodigious quantities of flint?

It was long assumed that primary mine products were axes, and at most
mines, especially those on the South Downs, this is likely to be
correct. However, at Grime?s Graves the evidence was never wholly
convincing. Although many axes and ?roughouts?, unfinished or failed
axes, have been recorded from the site over the years, studies of the
knapping debitage (mostly huge amounts of flint flakes) have failed to
confirm that any specific artefact was being made.

Many years ago the British Museum undertook a major project to link
Neolithic polished flint axes, common in south-east England, to known
flint mines by their trace element compositions. Putting it bluntly, the
project was not a great success: many axes could not be assigned to a
mine. It was suggested they may have come from secondary sources such as
clay-with-flints deposits, glacial tills and river gravels. There was
insufficient difference in the flint composition between the ten or so
mines selected for analysis, for unambiguous assignations to be made for
individual artefacts. Grime?s Graves was the only mine with a clear
fingerprint, so it was frustrating that only two of over 400 analysed
axes assigned to there.

This was actually quite a significant discovery, but its importance was
lost in the overall failure to assign axes. Now, some 20 years after
reporting what they did not make at Grime?s Graves, we are at last able
to identify Late Neolithic artefacts from all over East Anglia that were
made from Grime?s Graves floorstone, the most prized layer of flint.
This to no small degree is thanks to the field surveys that have taken
place in East Anglia through the 1980s and 1990s.

Many prehistoric sites were identified by quantities of struck flint, in
particular on the edges of the then recently formed fens. Much of the
flint was from secondary sources such as the spreads of glacial material
or river gravels. At the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age sites there was
a new element, black flint that sometimes retained original cortex. This
is the soft outer layer that surrounded flint in the chalk, which, it
was argued, would be unlikely to survive glacial or river action for
long. Furthermore the cortex was rather thick, very similar to that
found on the Grime?s Graves floorstone. Thus it was postulated that this
new flint was probably coming from primary chalk sources, and in 1991
Frances Healy presciently suggested this could be the elusive Grime?s
Graves floorstone.

Some time later we were asked to assess the flint project for the final
fascicule of the British Museum?s 1970s Grime?s Graves excavations. This
seemed an excellent opportunity to carry out further analyses, this time
on samples selected on the appearance of the flint rather than on the
artefact type. With Frances Healy and Gillian Varndell, a curator at the
British Museum producing the Grime?s Graves reports, we selected a small
group of tools and flakes from material obtained by field-walking over
many years and now held at the Castle Museum, Norwich.

Flint looks glassy and impervious, but in fact is quite porous.
Investigations conducted in the original project showed that the first
two millimetres or so were likely to be contaminated by groundwater.
Thus to drill an uncontaminated flint core of about 3 or 4 mm diameter
the flint has to be at least 2 cm thick over a length of several
centimetres. This precludes all but the largest flakes and many core
tools and explains why items such as arrowheads and thumb-nail scrapers
were excluded from our survey. They may well have been made from Grime?s
Graves flint, but unfortunately they are not suitable for this type of
analysis.

We selected 15 chunky black flints, many still with cortex in place,
including a rather fine polished axe from Lound Run, Belton in Suffolk.
From Grime?s Graves itself 13 roughout axes were picked from the many
found there over the years, together with two disc knives, also
suggested as one of the typical mine products. These were sampled partly
to provide a comparative standard with analyses conducted in the
previous project, and in the case of the axes to convince ourselves that
they really were of Grime?s Graves flint. It was unlikely but not
completely impossible that these axes too, like the vast majority of the
other East Anglian axes, came from somewhere else. After all, axes of
Cornish stone have been found at the site, and marks made by polished
flint or stone axes in the chalk underground suggest they were used as
mining tools.

The flints were cored with a trepanning drill. Flint is over 99% silica,
which is broken down and removed with hydrofluoric acid, followed by
dissolution of the remaining elements in perchloric acid. The sample
solutions were analysed by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission
spectroscopy.

All but one of the Grime?s Graves axes and both of the disc knives were
of the same composition as the mine flint previously studied, showing
that the new analyses were comparable. The exception was an axe roughout
of what appeared to be mined flint, and it is likely to be a
compositional outlier. Eleven of the 15 East Anglian artefacts could be
assigned to Grime?s Graves with a high degree of probability. Quite
literally we had run the elusive floorstone to earth!

In the Late Neolithic many of the old sources of surface flint probably
disappeared beneath the growing peat bogs, and additional sources became
necessary. Rising sea levels are likely to have caused a movement away
from the fen areas to slightly higher land to the east, where floorstone
deposits are near the surface. It outcrops at some points on the
north-western edge of the mined area at Grime?s Graves: its very
superior working properties would soon have been appreciated and the
floorstone horizon followed back into the chalk, first with open
quarries and then pits and progressively deeper shafts as the depth of
the floorstone beneath the surface increased.

A wide range of artefacts, including a polished axe, were assigned to
Grime?s Graves, with no evidence that the flint was being used to
produce any particular object. Many of the pieces were quite crudely
produced: there is certainly no suggestion that flint was reserved for
finely made prestige items, as sometimes proposed, and the high
attribution rate of the selected items suggests that contra some
previous suggestions, Grime?s Graves floorstone was just good flint,
freely available in East Anglia. Further analytical programmes are now
necessary to identify floorstone in assemblages from other parts of Britain.

Paul Craddock and Mike Cowell work at the Department of Conservation,
Documentation and Science, British Museum

The Blade Runners

Anthropologist Paul Sillitoe learnt about stone tool use from Papua New
Guinea highlanders in 1983. Here he describes some of the things he saw,
and reflects on the implications for prehistoric Britain

New Guinea, the large island north of Australia, was the last place on
earth where substantial populations depended on stone tools. Foreigners
assumed that the mountainous interior was uninhabited, until in the
1930s gold prospectors and government patrol officers discovered over a
million people. They were astonished by dense settlements of squat smoky
thatched houses and neat vegetable cultivations along valley sides.
These people, using stone tools until modern times, are heirs to a
sophisticated horticultural tradition that subsequent archaeological
excavations in the Mount Hagen region have proved extend back over 9,000
years, making their ancestors, with Mesopotamians and Mesoamericans,
among the first humans to practice farming.

The New Guinea Highlanders? stone tools fall into two major classes. The
most eye catching is the beautiful polished axe mounted on a wooden
haft, in some places in use in the mid-20th century, owned and used only
by men. The other, the roughly knapped chert flake still used
occasionally, has attracted considerably less interest.

The stone axe blade is so similar to that found in Neolithic Europe, if
New Guinea and European axes were mixed up in a museum collection it
would probably take petrological analysis to distinguish them.
Geologically the axes from the New Guinea Highlands comprise thermally
metamorphosed basalt, chert and greywacke depending on quarry source.
They vary in colour from black through dark blue to green, sometimes
veined together, to dark and pale grey. The darker the stone the better
quality the blade usually, although colour is not an infallible guide.
The people I know test the quality of an axe head ? its durability and
the time it will hold a sharp edge?by holding it briefly on the palm,
then inspecting it for condensation, the wetter blade being superior.

Only a few mountain locations yield stone of axe quality. Several are in
the large Wahgi valley basin, where local people took stone from
quarries. Sources elsewhere are streambeds, such as along the Jelime and
Alokai Rivers. While groups living there had access to valuable raw
materials, they did not exploit them fulltime. Men collected stone for
blades as they felt like it: there were no axe factories.

Knapping and grinding an axe is a time-consuming and laborious business.
It is interesting that no finished polished axes have been found at
European quarries such as Langdale, only roughed-out blanks. Likewise in
New Guinea persons did not sit and grind out finished tools at the
quarries, but put roughed-out pieces into circulation, to be shaped and
polished up as exchanged from hand to hand. Grinding required access to
abrasive sandstone. To this day, people can take you to sandstone
outcrops and boulders with scoop marks, often by watercourses, where
their ancestors used to sit honing axe blades.

Men occasionally damaged axes, meaning a visit to a nearby grindstone to
hone a nick from the edge. Sometimes disastrously, more extensive damage
would demand both knapping and grinding to return an axe to use.
Grinding was laborious and monotonous, and the limited blade supply,
increasingly an issue with distance from stone sources, prompted men to
remove the minimum stone necessary. This often resulted in somewhat
lop-sided blades. Within certain limits, so long as the axe had a sharp
and usable edge, its shape was all the same to them.

The implications are intriguing for prehistorians, who name entire
epochs after stone technologies (Acheulean, Neolithic and so on). In the
Highlands of New Guinea some writers have expended much effort in
classifying stone axes by shape (for example, noting the angle at which
the blade is set or the presence of an edge-facet). When I asked
Highlanders about this they laughed, maintaining that all stone blades
fall into a single named category. An archaeological typology would
belie the users? conceptions.

Another intriguing issue concerns the geographical movement of axes.
Looked at in terms of the archaeological record (ie the distribution of
objects after the disappearance of those responsible for putting them
there) the dispersal of stone axe blades in the New Guinea Highlands
looks surprisingly like that in prehistoric Britain. Some axe blades
moved over considerable distances, sometimes hundreds of miles?just as,
for example, axes originating in the Lake District have been found in
southern England. How did they get there?

We tend to talk of trade, imagining parties visiting regions and buying
up axes, or people selling them on from hand to hand. Trade implies
purchase and sale in a market-like context, to meet some ill-defined
economic need or demand. Our own mercantile cultural background and our
experiences of capitalist market-organised society prompt us to think
this way. But this is only one interpretation of what our Neolithic
ancestors might have been up to.

Ceremonial socio-political transactions are central to lives throughout
the New Guinea Highlands. People present wealth to one another at
important social events such as marriage, birth and death, and to settle
disputes with compensation. Stone axes often changed hands as wealth in
these contexts. So we see axes moving in transactions motivated by
social and political concerns, not economic and resource ones. It would
be ridiculous for me now to suggest on this evidence from a culture on
the other side of the world and thousands of years later, that
Melanesian ceremonial exchange-like transactions moved stone axes around
England. But something like it is a possibility, and just as plausible
as trade.

In some parts of the Highlands, notably in west New Guinea, people
helved stone axes in Neolithic European style, forcing the blade into a
hole made in the head of the haft and securing with hoop-pine resin or
rattan. Mostly, however, thanks to a matchless binding material in
rattan climbing palm stems, New Guinea axe hafts differ from European ones.

The men I know of the Southern Highlands mounted their blades in split
sockets lashed onto wooden hafts using split rattan strands, following
an ingenious pattern that became tighter with use, as the stone head was
rammed into the socket. It took a man?only men hafted and maintained
axes, each attending to his own axe?just over eight-and-a-half hours to
haft one for me, working with stone tools throughout. He spent 88% of
this time making the haft, socket and strands. However, men more usually
rebound axes than made new parts.

Some groups mounted blades as axes, others as adzes. Those I know
mounted the head at an acute angle to the haft, generally at 60-70
degrees, with the cutting edge more or less parallel to it. It was
invariably some degrees out, the socket twisting around in the binding,
for example, or the split in the socket not quite true. Within some 10
degrees or so either way this did not impair the tool?s efficiency. The
man who bound up the axe for me was amused at my concern over the
blade?s slight angle: from his viewpoint, interest in the precise angle
of blades is misplaced.

People had three primary uses for stone axes: felling trees, clearing
vegetation to establish cultivations and fashioning stakes for fences to
protect gardens from pigs; collecting firewood, again felling trees and
cutting up into suitably sized billets; and making artefacts in wood,
bamboo and cane, stripping off bark to beat into barkcloth, and so on.

The considerable variety of axe blades related not to specific tasks,
but to their scarcity away from stone sources. People could ill afford a
specialised range with less than one axe each (all the men I spoke to
who had owned stone axes said they had shared them with their fathers
when alive and 15% of them subsequently continued to share with a
brother). This led to the use of improbably small blades, any damage to
which was often critical as axes became scarcely effective.

Nonetheless some axes were clearly better suited to some work than
others?for example large axes for felling large trees, smaller ones for
finer artefact work ? and relatives might lend axes to one another.
However, men were possessive of their axes and loaned them reluctantly
only to persons they trusted.

As well as physical damage through reckless use, they feared weakening
of the axe through improper relations with the other sex. Men believed
that contact with a woman could dull an axe?s edge irrevocably,
particularly at certain times of the moon. In many cultures throughout
the New Guinea Highlands men fear menstruating women, believing that
they can cause serious illness, even death (men and women frequently
live in separate houses). The weakening association of women extends to
not using an axe for two or three days after coitus, one reason that men
were chary of lending axes to others!

Imported steel axes and machetes have now replaced stone axes. There has
been debate over the impact of this change. It has been said that a
stone axe took three to four times longer to complete a task than a
steel one, and that in the stone era men spent 80% of their time in
subsistence activities, in which axe work features prominently. Steel
axes reduced this to 50%, prompting extensive social changes.

These time estimates are probably too generous. In experiments with men
working at different tasks, I discovered that in cultivation work and
artefact manufacture steel axes proved 1.5 times, and in firewood
collection 1.2 times faster than stone. Overall, steel implements were
1.4 times faster. Yet this statistic is of little practical use.

The different activities are not directly comparable. People collect
firewood daily, clear a garden perhaps every year or two, build a house
every five years and make some artefacts only once in a lifetime, if ever.

Neither is it always feasible to compare the tools directly. Stone and
steel axes require different techniques. A stone axe was used with
short, rapid pecking blows, putting less weight behind it to reduce the
risk of damaging the more fragile head, in contrast to the
wider-arching, more powerfully administered chops of a steel axe. Their
comparative efficacy varies across tasks. Men use steel axes for work
not previously attempted with stone, like felling and splitting enormous
hardwood trees.

On top of this, time alone ignores the more efficient exploitation of
the environment, and better quality work, facilitated by steel tools.
Indeed men will now sometimes spend more time working with a steel axe,
because they can obtain a better finish.

Steel tools doubtless led to changes. However, the evidence suggests
these were not so dramatic as first thought, stone axes not proving as
inefficient as one might imagine. When colonial patrol officers first
offered Highlanders steel tools, to their consternation they refused
them, demanding instead seashells of the sort they valued highly and
used in the socio-political exchanges central to their lives. There are
even stories of people pulling pearl buttons off the newcomers? shirts!

While not as glamorous as the axe, the stone flake has many uses,
including shaping, scraping, paring, shaving, smoothing and boring
materials such as wood, bark, bamboo, cane, bone, tusk and seashell, and
butchering meat.

All men can knap chert blades: they say only men make knives, but if
asked will pass skills on to their female kin. They use flint-like and
brittle siliceous rocks that fracture with sharp edges akin to a sliver
of glass. The process seems rather random, tool-makers striking at a
nodule until they obtain a suitable piece, usually after one or two
blows. They rarely touch up, and it takes only a few seconds to produce
an irregular flake with at least one very sharp edge, although
occasionally individuals may mount it in a rough wooden handle.

Sometimes a specific implement like a narrow borer takes longer,
requiring several blows to obtain the right flake. It may take 15
minutes or so to obtain the flake, mount it in the split end of a stick
and roughly bind it with suitable vine or bark fibre strand to hand.

It is largely men who use chert knives, although occasionally women
will, for instance to smooth the handles of their digging sticks.
Although they have surprisingly sharp cutting edges when freshly
knapped, flake tools soon become dull. People make new ones as needed,
for raw materials are plentiful and no one exercises exclusive rights to
sources such as streambeds. In addition to a chert nodule, a man
requires a hammerstone, such as a piece of hard basalt, pieces of which
are often littered around homesteads where they are used for cooking in
earth ovens. Occasionally individuals keep a good tool for use again,
but they are small and easily lost. They dispose of used tools and
debitage carefully, out of the way of bare feet, or, in the case of
unused pieces and sizeable cores, where they may find them again.

The versatile little flake is an integral part of the Highlander
tool-kit. While stone axes carried a considerable exchange value (large
ones could change hands for a pig), flake implements readily made from
materials that are in good supply are not traded. Even with the advent
of steel tools flaked blades remain in use, if somewhat less so than
previously, for they have extremely sharp edges and can be selected
according to size and shape for particular tasks.

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