Flint knapping

[Samuel]

I had a go at Flint knapping for the first time yesterday. It was run as a workshop by a local arts outreach company and the leader was a researcher in experimental archaeology.

This is something that I have wanted to rh for as long as I can remember, and it did not disappoint. We were set fairly simple tasks of breaking a fist sized lump of Flint into flakes, using a suitable one to shape into a knife blade and the rest to shape a hazel stick into a handle. The leader then helped us attach the blade using a glue ,ace from tree resin, bees wax and charcoal.

What became very clear was that this craft is one that is easy to start but extremely hard to become expert at. There is a real joy in the feeling that travels up your arm when the Flint flakes just as it should after a blow, but learning the character of the stone, adapting to it as it changes shape in your hands and learning to react to each pieces unique properties and flaws is where true mastery lies. And that takes years. But for just one day it was a lot of fun.

There was something truely primal in this activity. It was literally hitting one stone with another and then using the product of that to make a functional tool. There was nothing but your body and mind and the most raw of natural materials. It almost felt like a spiritual experience. Maybe that is over egging it but it really made me think about our technological achievements and how, in essence, all of the high tech gear I'm surrounded by every day is just another type of Flint knife. I also left feeling incredibly grateful for cutlery in a way I never have before... Two hours carving hazel with razor sharp flakes of Flint, just to make a handle will do that. (The blade took about 40 minutes as a comparison)

I would highly recommend having a go at Flint knapping if you have never done it. It made me feel connected with the unique abilities of our species in a way that no other creative activity ever has. Amazing.

[Leonard James]

We were definitely the master species when it came to adapting natural materials for our own use.

Whatever made us go so haywire when it came to conjecturing about our origins? 

[jeremyp]

We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys -- Newscaster in H2G2

[BashfulAnthony]

We were definitely the master species when it came to adapting natural materials for our own use.

Whatever made us go so haywire when it came to conjecturing about our origins? 

And developing weapons of mass destruction, etc.

[Leonard James]

And developing weapons of mass destruction, etc.

I'm afraid the only way to scare the shit out of the enemy is to be one step ahead. Grim, but true.

[torridon]

I had a go at Flint knapping for the first time yesterday. It was run as a workshop by a local arts outreach company and the leader was a researcher in experimental archaeology.

This is something that I have wanted to rh for as long as I can remember, and it did not disappoint. We were set fairly simple tasks of breaking a fist sized lump of Flint into flakes, using a suitable one to shape into a knife blade and the rest to shape a hazel stick into a handle. The leader then helped us attach the blade using a glue ,ace from tree resin, bees wax and charcoal.

What became very clear was that this craft is one that is easy to start but extremely hard to become expert at. There is a real joy in the feeling that travels up your arm when the Flint flakes just as it should after a blow, but learning the character of the stone, adapting to it as it changes shape in your hands and learning to react to each pieces unique properties and flaws is where true mastery lies. And that takes years. But for just one day it was a lot of fun.

There was something truely primal in this activity. It was literally hitting one stone with another and then using the product of that to make a functional tool. There was nothing but your body and mind and the most raw of natural materials. It almost felt like a spiritual experience. Maybe that is over egging it but it really made me think about our technological achievements and how, in essence, all of the high tech gear I'm surrounded by every day is just another type of Flint knife. I also left feeling incredibly grateful for cutlery in a way I never have before... Two hours carving hazel with razor sharp flakes of Flint, just to make a handle will do that. (The blade took about 40 minutes as a comparison)

I would highly recommend having a go at Flint knapping if you have never done it. It made me feel connected with the unique abilities of our species in a way that no other creative activity ever has. Amazing.

Lovely post, thanks 

[Rhiannon]

Samuel, did you see Neil Oliver's History of Ancient Britain with the discussion of the knapping of stone axes on a hillside? IIRC it was suggested that it was done there for spiritual reasons. The axes were also much more worked than was necessary for them to be effective, polished to a smooth finish that would have taken many, many hours of labour to achieve, again suggesting tools weren't just utility items to the people that created and used them.

[Samuel]

Missed this one Rhi, sorry

I had heard that before from friends who are archaeologists. And of course it makes perfect sense. At a time when our survival depended on an intimate relationship with nature it is no surprise that those connections were felt deeply by people and gave rise to creative expression, as it almost always does.

[Rhiannon]

No worries, Sam. 

I wonder if it has something to do with the probable animist beliefs people held? I suspect it had something to do with honouring whatever spirits were thought to reside in the stone itself.

[Samuel]

Who knows? It's got me thinking about your thread about offerings though. What else would you call that investment of time to polish a Flint axe using sand! Prestige of owning such an object might have had something to do with it but I can quite believe that Neolithic bling was all there was to it.

[Rhiannon]

I don't think they had the time to create bling for bling' sake. Not of the kind that would take that long to create.

[Samuel]

Probably not. But then I don't suppose their idea of bling was anything like ours. Ritual significance, sacredness, usefulness, aesthetic beauty, time investment... it probably all blended together for them. Worth measured by a multiplicity of meanings.

I recently visited Wiltshire Museum and they had a lot of neolithic gold. One object was a knife handle that was decorated with gold studs. They were tiny! about a mm long and the width of a human hair. The studs were carefully arranged showing that each was inserted individually, and there were thousands of them. There were so many that if one was placed every minute it would have taken over a year to complete! Also, it is theorised that children would have been the only ones with the eyesight and dexterity capable of carrying out the task, and if it was only one child doing the work they were likely almost blind by the time they had finished. Or at least only able to focus on objects that were very close to them. I mean first of all, WHY go to all that trouble? and second of all a general what the fuck! Amazing. Its impossible not to stand in awe of the cultural weight that lurks behind these sort of objects. A culture that we are unlikely ever to understand. Spine tingling.

[Rhiannon]

I agree completely, we'll never know, which is why I tend to think 'for ritual purposes' often equals bollocks. 

'Worth measured by a multiplicity of meanings'...nice. 

[Leonard James]

One object was a knife handle that was decorated with gold studs. They were tiny! about a mm long and the width of a human hair. The studs were carefully arranged showing that each was inserted individually, and there were thousands of them. There were so many that if one was placed every minute it would have taken over a year to complete!

It is entirely possible, of course, that they had developed a much easier and more efficient means of doing such work which is now lost in antiquity.

[Rhiannon]

It's possible, yes. But very often archaeologists find evidence of how things were made - they know where flint was knapped because of the huge amount of discarded flakes for example. Even a small scale industrial process such as that leaves traces.

[Gordon]

Moderator:

This thread contained a derail that mainly consisted of members sniping - these posts have been removed.

[Samuel]

During that Wiltshire museum trip I also visited the new stone henge visitors centre. It was largely good but one object in a case displaying many really caught my imagination, and it was Flint flakes Rhiannon.

They had been collected from the end of a long barrow but get this, they had been painstakingly reassembled to make up the original lump of Flint! The label was tantalising... "5000 years ago someone sat at the end of the long barrow and broke this Flint into shards to make tools"...  It it was the fact that the  nodule had been remade that made it so powerful. I can't quite explain it.

[Rhiannon]

Yes, I can imagine. 

[Enki]

Some years ago I used to go field walking in North Lincolnshire with a group of enthusiasts under the direction of the prof. from a local museum. The fields were divided into grids which we walked just after the field had been ploughed. We found all sorts of artefacts(mainly Roman, Iron Age and later pottery fragments). However we regularly came across flint flakes, and I was lucky enough to find a flint nodule which had been used to produce some of the flakes. However I vividly remember someone calling out from another grid. It was obvious she had found something interesting, so we all marked where we had reached in our own grids, and walked over to her grid. We weren't disappointed. She had found a superb flint arrowhead, beautifully crafted. I found the whole experience exhilarating. As far as I know this is now on display in the museum in Scunthorpe.

Great times.

[Rhiannon]

That must have been so rewarding.