At first glance, the making of stone tools seems fairly simple, but things are rarely
as easy as they look.
Even to manufacture a basic artifact such as this one takes a considerable amount of
skill, let alone something with the fineness of these Neolithic arrowheads which were made
about 8,000 years ago.
For two million years before this, humans used a common stone known as flint to fashion
a wide range of implements which were essential to their survival.
This program is about how these tools were made and how they changed with time.
Anyone with a little knowledge can find examples of stone implements made and discarded by
prehistoric man.
The oldest implements that are found belong to the lower Paleolithic period, the earlier
Old Stone Age.
Often commercial digging cuts through a site, or ploughing brings pieces to the surface.
Many flint implements are found on freshly ploughed ground.
This fine Neolithic polished flint axe was perhaps made 5,000 years ago.
All these implements, the axe, the arrowheads and the rest, are made of flint, a highly
salacious, almost grainless, glassy kind of rock.
Over the whole prehistoric period, immense quantities of flint implements were made.
Many can be seen in our museums today.
Other kinds of stone were also used where flint did not occur.
For example, quartzite, volcanic lavas and sometimes obsidian, a black volcanic glass.
There are several reasons why prehistoric man made such frequent use of flint.
Firstly, it was an easily available raw material.
Flint occurs naturally in chalk and limestone.
But it's also very common in the form of derived pebbles or cobbles in gravel deposits.
Although there was always plenty of flint lying around, in the later part of prehistory,
man sometimes took the trouble to dig mineshafts deep into the chalk to obtain it.
At Grimes Graves in Norfolk, the flint, which is about 10 metres down at the base of this
mineshaft, was of especially good quality.
Secondly, flint is easy to shape to the desired form.
Once you know the very simple laws of its fracture, you can make various types of implements
quickly, efficiently and repeatedly.
Thirdly, flint implements were highly effective for cutting, scraping, chopping or piercing.
A freshly struck edge of flint is one of the sharpest natural cutting edges in the world.
By fixing an original flint axe in a wooden haft, we have a heavy duty tool which is still
as good as the day it was made.
The making of flint tools doesn't demand much equipment, but it does demand exact knowledge
of the way in which flint fractures.
Really, there's only one basic rule.
If you hit onto an angle of flint which is greater than 90 degrees, no feasible amount
of force, not even some tens of tonnes, will detach a flake.
But if you hit onto an angle of less than 90 degrees, a firm light tap will remove a
flake at once.
Touch it again in slow motion.
After that, it's all a matter of practice and learning the finer points of technique
and control.
When a flake of flint has been removed in this way, it shows certain characteristic
features.
Features of controidal fracture.
The striking platform is the area on which the blow was aimed to fall, and the point
of impact is clearly visible.
A swelling, roughly cone-shaped, called the bulb or cone of percussion, surrounds the point
of impact, which occurs at its apex.
Ripple-like rings, more or less pronounced, occur on the surface of the flake.
Ripple rings, they're called, concentric about the point of impact.
Sometimes there are radial fissures, little split-like marks pointing back towards the
point of impact.
A bulb or scar is a common occurrence, left where a small shatter flake has been torn
off in the area of the bulb at the moment of fracture.
The main features which are present in positive on the flint flake are also left behind in
negative on the block from which the flake was struck.
This parent block is called the core.
Instead of a positive bulb, you have a negative bulb or depression, and so forth.
The two are, of course, exactly complementary.
Once you know the features of struck flakes and cores, you can readily pick them out from
naturally shaped stones.
However, having found a flake with all the correct features of mechanical fracture, we've
still got to be a bit careful before we say that it was struck by prehistoric man.
There are many forces in nature which can cause stones to knock hard together.
If the angle is correct, struck flakes must be produced.
There are other such forces too.
How can the finder of a simple flake of flint determine whether it was humanly struck or
the result of natural action?
If the fracture is an ancient one, he must look on the dorsal side for signs of previous
flake removals from several different directions.
If he thinks a flint he has found is a finished implement, he must satisfy himself that it
shows pattern, design, intention, and flake scars of such precision and in such numbers
that the implement simply must have been carefully chipped to shape.
This one couldn't possibly be the work of nature.
Prehistoric man had to understand how flint fractured in order to use it ever more efficiently.
There were two basic methods of making flint implements.
He'll ask the flint knapper to demonstrate them both by copying two original stone age
tools.
The first is a fine flake tool, a scraper dating from around 2000 BC.
The second is a core tool, a Paleolithic hand axe.
This could be 150,000 years old.
It's been shaped from a nodule or a big pebble.
To make a flake tool, the knapper takes a big block or nodule and strikes off a flake,
which can then be used with or without further modification.
The block is the waste product.
It's called a core.
To match our original, this flake has to be worked by accurate retouch or secondary flaking
to a fine rounded edge.
A tool like this was used for scraping tasks, not for cutting, often for scraping skins,
for example.
Now for the second method.
To make a core tool, he takes a block of flint and shapes it to the form he requires by striking
flakes from it.
In this case, it is the flakes which are the unused waste product.
The initial rough shaping is done by hard hammer stone.
The finer finishing is best done with a softer hammer of bone, wood or antler.
In East Africa, the first hand axe tools were made as long ago as one and a half million
years.
They probably serve many different purposes.
This one has a useful point and sharp cutting edges.
Some have heavy hammer-like butts.
Core tools and flake tools of various kinds characterise different parts of the lower
and middle Paleolithic periods.
These were made by Neanderthal man.
His highly efficient tool kit consisted mainly of flake tools.
The arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens, physically modern man, some 40,000 years ago, sees a
change to an important new technique, making implements from specially struck blades as
opposed to simple flakes.
A blade is a long, flat, narrow, parallel sided flake with sharp edges.
It's very difficult to strike such blades consistently with a simple hammer stone.
An upper Paleolithic man was the first to master the technique of indirect percussion,
striking off the blades with the aid of a punch.
The punch enables the force of the blow to be directed to exactly the right point of
impact, close to the edge of the core, at exactly the right angle.
This punch is of course modern.
Paleolithic man would have used one of bone or antler, or possibly hardwood.
The cores from which blades have been struck have a fluted appearance with narrow parallel
scars.
They're often called prismatic cores.
This technique is important in the remainder of the prehistoric period.
It made possible many new kinds of tools, penknife blades, awls, delicate scrapers,
engraving tools, and various types of projectile point.
Another development important in the later part of the old stone age and afterwards is
pressure flaking.
These long, shallow, retouched scars were removed not by striking blows, but by pushing
off the secondary flakes.
A very fine finish was possible.
Neolithic man added another technique of working flint, which was to finish off a cutting edge,
or even a whole implement, by polishing and grinding.
But it still had first to be chipped roughly to shape by an ordinary flaking process.
The grinding was only the final stage and must have been very hard work.
Axes could be polished on any suitable hard grainy rock with sand and water to help.
All these various techniques we've been studying characterize various stages of the prehistoric
past.
From simple beginnings, man learned to make more and more sophisticated and efficient
implements, tools, and weapons.
And let us not forget that there are still peoples in various parts of the world today
who make and depend heavily on stone tools and stone tip weapons for much the same purposes
as prehistoric man.
All of this prehistoric and recent expertise depends ultimately on the ability to strike
flakes from a block of flint or other stone and to do so accurately.
If you know the ways in which flint fractures, you can experience for yourself the problems
which confronted primitive man in making this very important part of his material culture.
You will learn as much this way as from any number of textbooks.
Also, if you know this and a little about the various prehistoric stone working techniques,
you can recognize and identify the worked flints, which are not hard to find.
If you know where to look and what you're looking for.
Thanks.