 |
Experimental archaeology is a major part of my interest in archaeology and especially prehistory. Much of our knowledge and information about prehistory has come from experimental archaeology and use of replicas. Apart from learning new things from experiments, most activities in experimental archaeology are fun and can encourage people to develop a skill, and even make it a hobby. A good example of this is metal working and bronze casting as the work involved can be hard, but the results are highly satisfying. Below I am in the process of making my first coracle, the linen is being sewed to the hazel frame so that the linen can be coated in tar to waterproof the craft.
|
|
Above left you can see bronze being cast to make a rapier (an example is shown below), whilst in the above right picture I am using traditional methods to split logs to make planks in the way that have been used to construct the bronze age trackway at Flag Fen  |
First Understanding In the 18th century, most of the scientific community at the time believed that humans had been on the Earth for only around 6000 years, the age of the universe created by God, as described by Archbishop James Ussher's Creationist doctrine made in the early 1600s that pinpointed creation as beginning at 9:00 PM on October 23rd in 4004 BC. Archbishop Ussher's chronology also provided the following key dates for events in the Bible:
In 1797 John Frere (1740 – 1807) was watching workman digging clay for bricks in a pit at the site of the Hoxne clay brick pit (near Diss), when he noticed the regularly shaped triangular flints which they were using to fill up potholes in the road. These were Acheulean handaxes found within the site of an interglacial lake (part of the Hoxnian interglacial ~ 375,000 to 425,000 years ago). Frere, who was an active member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, identified that those tools were located stratigraphically below the large bones of extinct animals (now thought to be elephants) and from a layer of gravel 12 feet below the surface, which suggested that people had inhabited the Earth much earlier than previously believed. He described the flint tools on 22nd June 1797 as " ...weapons of war, fabricated by a people who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at the depth of about twelve feet, in a stratified soil, which was dug into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks... The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world.." His report was then published alongside the drawing below, commissioned by the Society from the geologist and draughtsman Thomas Underwood. However Frere's interpretation was too radical at the time and was ignored for over 60 years, until in 1859 when accidently re-discovered by Sir John Evans, while he was waiting for some friends at the Society of Antiquaries and looking at one of the display cases. Evans was “absolutely horror-struck to see in it three or four implements precisely resembling those found at Abbeville and Amiens”. Evans reseached the Archaeologia 13 and after finding Frere’s entry, Evans visited Hoxne. In a paper to the Royal Society on the 26th May 1859, Prestwick and Evans concluded that Frere’s conclusions were correct. in 2000 the plaque (below right) was erected in the local church commemorating Frere. It was sculpted by the Cardozo-Kinderslay Workshops at Cambridge (founded by the late David Kindersley) and incorporates a hand axe made by Phil Harding. In 2003 local artists Ben Platt-Mills and Ray Brooks created a 10 foot high oak carving called Hoxne Man, complete with spear and flint hand-axe and installed itin Brakey Wood, Hoxne.
Around 1830 the French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes (1788 – 1868), discovered flint tools in the gravels of the Somme valley, which in his view were human handiwork; but not until 1846 that he make public the important discovery of a worked flint implement with remains of elephant and rhinoceros in the gravels of Menchecourt. From 1825 Boucher was director of the customhouse at Abbeville, near the mouth of the Somme River and began devoting his time to archaeological searches in the Somme valley. In 1837 he discovered flint hand axes and other stone tools, some embedded with the bones of extinct mammals, that were later examined by Sir Joseph Prestwich (1812-1896), whose report on the matter was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1859-1860.
In 1847 Boucher was the was the first to establish the existence of man in the Pleistocene or early Quaternary period in his published three volume work "Antiquites Celtiques Et Antediluviennes". However his work was largely dismissed as the figures in his book were badly shown and they included drawings of flints which showed no clear sign of workmanship. Today’s flintknappers are fully aware of concerns around confusing ancient and modern lithics and responsibly deal with this; however this was not always the case. In 1859, Simpson was accused by Professor Tennant with the forgery of antiquities - Simpson confessed. Flint Jack gave a public demonstration of his skill at the Geological Society in London on 7th January 1862 which earned him sincere praise by Llewellyn Jewitt in the "Reliquary Quarterly Archaeological Journal and Review." In 1866 the Malton Messenger printed "Notice of the extraordinary life of Edward Simpson of Sleights. The notorious manufacturer of spurous antiquities who is universally known as Flint Jack".
American Lewis Erickson (the eldest of 6 children born to Norwegian parents Wisconsin in spring 1873) discovered a talent for removing flakes from old unfinished Native American arrowheads by biting on them, during a period of illness. Prehistoric stone lithics were plentiful around the village of Marshall, Dane county, Wisconsin, so Erickson had much raw material to work with. Erickson changed to using specially modified steel pincers to work on flint fish hooks and spears, using ancient lithics as guidance. With his younger brother, Erickson was constantly buying and selling genuine flint relics and this gave him the perfect opportunity to sell his fake ones, which were considered at the time to be of rare shape and perfect. Erickson never actually knapped the flint objects, but only reworked the edges of rejects and after smearing them with mud, the brothers sold around 1000 fakes to local collectors for between $2- $6 each. However a number of the collectors became suspicious and eventually Emil Sehanck (Deerfield, Wisconsin) and Theodore Kumlien (Milton, Wisconsin) visited the Erickson’s farm and found them making the spurious flint artefacts. The brothers were forced to refund the two men and later they issued the following statement to W. W. Gilman (Editor of The Archaeologist) "Dear Sir — I received your letter and I see that Mr. is not satisfied with the relics that I sold to him, but it is a fact that I never sold them to be genuine. I sold them for to be some of my curiosities and odd pieces of flint. Mr. imagined him- self what the pieces had been used for. I have only settled one case of this kind in full, but that man had a written claim against me, but I am willing to settle with Mr. in the same way as I have done to others if he will let me know. Besides, nothing was mentioned in your letter whether I was to get my relics back or not. Please write and let me know." Finally Lewis Erickson refunded (with interest) much of the profit he made to avoid public prosecution. Forgery of flint tools continued into the 20th century and prompted The Morning Post of December 26, 1911 to devote a column to "Flint Implements", "The Flint Collector", "Flints which are not genuine" and "The means by which to distinguish genuine implements from false ones". We fear so long as a clever and dishonest ' flint-knapper' lives and makes good forgeries there will always be found simple folks to buy them. Early Flint Tools - Man or Nature? To further confuse modern reproductions and ancient artefacts, many flint objects that were once thought to have been the earliest stone tools, are now believed to be natural eoliths, produced by geological processes like glaciation. The term "eolith" (or dawn stone) was attributed to John Allen Browne in 1892. Eoliths were first found in the Kent plateau by an Ightham grocer and amateur archaeologist, Benjamin Harrison (1837-1921) in 1885. Harrison's discoveries were published by geologist Sir Joseph Prestwich in 1891 and they were generally accepted to have been early man-tools, dating from the Pliocene, more than 1.8m years ago. Five years later Dr H. P. Blackmore discovered a series of eoliths in Salisbury (England) and similar finds of eoliths came from the Red Crag beds of Ipswich, found by J. Reid Moir (1910) and in Belgium, found by A. Rutot and H. Klaatsch. These were also thought to be evidence of early human habitation of those areas and may have even help with the infamous hoax of Piltdown man. Given that the mainstream Victorian scientific establishment had earlier rejected the concept that flint hand axes could have been made by early humans, the acceptance of eoliths as man-made is surprising. The French archaeologist and Director of the Institut de Pal Contologie Humaine, Paris - Marcellin Boule (1861-1942), published l'Anthropoidgie (Tome xvi., p. 257), against the archaeological status of eoliths in 1905 and later Samuel Hazzledine Warren confirmed the view of Boule after carrying out mechanical drum experiments on flints and publishing his results in "A Natural Eolith factory beneatch the Thanet sand". The controversy over the origin of the eoliths continued for over 30 years, until further evidence was discovered that ended the debate. This included the discovery of genuine late-Pliocene tools in Africa (the Olduwan tools) and that fact that no hominid remains from the Pliocene period have ever been found in Europe. Further details and illustrations of the eoliths can be found in the paper "The Differences Between Natural and Human Flaking on Prehistoric Flint Implements" by Alfred S. Barnes. Flint in early Experimental Archaeology
In 1919, Smithsonian archaeologist William Henry Holmes (1846 – 1933) published illustrated techniques on flintknapping. However he was not reporting from his own flintknapping experiments but from descriptions taken from other people who had observed native cultures or from "old men who had knowledge of the work in days preceding the coming of the gun."
In 1934, Russian Dr Sergei Aristarkhovich Semenov (1898–1978) began experimentation into flint technologies and usewear analysis at the Institute of Leningrad, that resulted in the 1957 published work "Prehistoric Technology", although his worked was not since in the west until 1964. In the mid 1970s American Jeffery Flenniken gave flintknapping demonstrations at the Institute at Leningrad and afterwards worked with Semenov and one of his students Dr. Korokova. Flenniken"s visit had quite an effect on flintknapping experimentation in Russia. His experience was documented in National Geographic, Vol. 156, No.3, Sept 1979. In June 1947, a flintknapping demonstration was performed by Leon Coutier (1895-1980), an archaeologist and former President of the Societe Prehistorique Francaise. This was filmed at the former Institute of Archaeology, Regent's Park, London (click on the Past Horizons links below) and shows his technique for making replicas of Palaeolithic tools and weapons, including hand-axes, scrapers, gravers and flint arrowheads, using a stone anvil, boxwood bars, boxwood hammers and punches (rather than hammerstones and antler hammers). One important discovery made by Coutier during his experiments was the practice of abrading. Coutier found that abrading the platform was essential preparation, especially for material such as obsidian, to roughen the surface so the hammer did not slip or lose its intended trajectory. In the 1960’s there was an increase in lithic experimentation through pioneers such as Don Crabtree (below left) known as the “Dean of American flintknappers” and François Bordes (below right).
Don Crabtree (1912 - 1980) will be remembered for "Crabtree's Law", which states that "the greater the degree of final finishing applied to a stone artifact, whether by flaking, grinding and/or polishing, the harder it is to conclude the lithic reduction process which produced the stone artifact." This Law points out that the final finishing state in the production of many types of stone artefacts actually removes visible and often important steps in the process of lithic reduction. He suggested that understanding the technological processes by which the stone tools were produced were important if archaeologists/flintknappers wanted to truly analyse the stone artefact, including techniques for tracing the distribution of material from their sources to the final location of discard. François Bordes (1919 - 1981) was a French scientist, archaeologist and geologist and was a professor of prehistory and quaternary geology at the Science Faculty of Bordeaux. Bordes changed the approach of prehistoric lithic industries, by introducing scientific and statistical studies in the use of experimental flint knapping. He duplicated some 63 tool types and made over 100,000 stone tools in his life; he also concluded that there were four Neanderthal cultures based on stone tool assembleges. Bordes wrote many books which include the Old Stone Age and A Tale Of Two Caves and many articles under the "pen name" Francis Carsac. Do Experimental Lithics have a place in Academic Archaeology? With today’s archaeology student learning about modern scientific approaches like chemical and spectrum analysis to understand the past in great detail, how does the replication of ancient stone tools help? Are simple ways of learning about how our ancestors lived any use to future archaeologists, or is it simply an impressive skill to educate the general public? William Holmes (1894) was one of the first archaeologists to attempt a systematic analysis of lithic tools, but it was not until 1964, at the Lithic Technology Conference in France, archaeologists first began to demonstrate the value of flintknapping in lithic analysis. (For more information on early experimental lithics, click here) Although a simple concept to understand, flintknapping is difficult to master, taking time and practice. It is done well by two types of individual; the artisan/hobbyist knappers who demonstrate their craft to the interested general public and the specialist archaeologists who use their skill and knowledge to discover more about how our ancestors lived. Experimental lithics typically takes one of the following types:
Case Study 1: Exeter University - Solutrean Points
The hoard was examined to understand the manufacturing techniques, allowing the archaeologists to reproduce them under controlled conditions. It was realised the “overshot flake” technique was originally used and so the group learned how to make exact copies. As each archaeologist used a slightly different knapping techniques (e.g. the sitting position; the way the flint was held, then struck and from the dorsal/ventral side), each small stage was recorded as an “action”. The “action” was described as all knapping performed between the archaeologist thinking about his next major strike on the flint. By accurately recording information for each “action” it was possible to show in detail how a rough out was made into a finished solutrean point. This gave the archaeologists understanding of the thought process for early man who created the lithics during the last ice age and insight to how each tool was made e.g. what decisions where made at each stage and how problems in the flint where overcome. Detailed information was recorded on the site about the where the artefacts (both solutrean points and debitage) were found. This was to show where the flint was mined, knapped into rough outs and then finally made into near complete lithic tools. The results showed that a small number of sites were used in the manufacturing process. To understand how the knapping areas may have changed over the years, a taphonomic study was performed. The archaeologists knapped a solutrean point in a controlled area to plot how the debitage and flakes would lay on the ground. This was recorded and compared to the ancient knapping areas to see possible differences caused by geological changes. Case Study 2: The functional efficiency of Acheulean handaxes Reading University (Hosfield & Machin, 2005) conducted an experiment to determine whether Acheulean handaxes had been “over engineered” for their primary butchery purpose. Artisan flintknapper John Lord created 60 different Acheulean style handaxes which varied in shape and symmetry; these were then used by local butchers to see which was most effective (depending on their size, shape, thickness, angle, weight etc). 30 fallow deer were skinned and then butchered with the 60 modern handaxes.
The future of Experimental Lithics The future of experimental lithics according to some looks bleak, whilst others say that the technique is slowly being re-learnt. Some flintknappers have made suggestions on how it could be used in the future, such helping student archaeologists recognise genuine artefacts. Some Universities teach lithics and a few also teach experimental lithics; most of them are on personnel research though. There are few flintknappers in Britain, but more in America, however experimental lithics is still performed by a small number of mainly hobbyists, rather than for academic research. One archaeologist even suggests that hobbyists should be discouraged as they may affect quarry resources. Experimental lithics does occur in relevant places, like Grimes Graves and Creswell Crags which have regular flintknapping demonstrations to show the public what early man did with the material he worked so hard to get. It seems important for the public to glimpse their past and interpret what happened in it. A common reason for flintknapping is “Fascination in how early man made tools out of stone to sustain our future”. Click here to see my ==> Flintknapping
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Jacques Boucher 
