Sunday Afternoon Finds

How Do

I thought I would show a photo of the lithics that I found last Sunday. All were found within a few hundred yards of each other, in less than 2 hours, eroding out of a low cliff at a very well-known site close to me here in Bournemouth.

Every single one shows re-touching, and a couple have small patches of highly-polished, glass-like areas indicative of wear. The site itself has several dates of prehistoric occupation, from the early stone-age through to the bronze-age, plus Roman and medieval.






Thanks for looking


Andy

That's a nice find, did you just find the flint or was their other stuff such as animal bones?

Hi Grendel

No animal bones as yet - the ground is probably too acidic, but almost every time I go I find bits of broken beaker (2 pieces in the picture above) and of a rather poor quality (possibly funerary urns?)

Last Sunday I also found a piece of flint that has been repeatedly heated and has that typical, crackled look of fired flint. What makes this piece interesting is that it has some baked clay stuck to it, and this has clearly been smoothed and shaped. I haven't a clue what it could have been?

I also found a section of clay pipe stem and an old penny from the 1920's.


I now have around 100 flint tools from the site.



Cheers

Andy

nic collection Andy and well saved - is flint natural to the area or have it been transported to the site?

So no animal bones, and usage signs on some of the flint, possibly from a non-butchery use then.

If there are signs of potterer making, could the flint be for carving designs on the pots prior to firing.

Flint does occur naturally at the site. Six feet thick deposits of Pleistocene flint gravels overlie the whole area, themselves a good source of early stone-age tools. It is a coastal site and the beach is of sub-angular flint.

Grendel, your suggestion of beaker carvers is as good as any, but the areas of high polish in small (3 - 4mm across), particular areas of the tools, I think is caused by repeated cutting (or rather a stripping motion) of grass, as grass contains silica which can leave glass-like polished areas on flint (I saw that on a documentary on TV )

So, what are they doing with stripping grass? Could this be tinder? cordage?

There is some (but not a lot) of debitage to be found there, so I believe that the tools were being made somewhere else, and just occasionally re-touched where I find them? Most are scrapers and blades, with a couple of points, but none show the beautiful symmetry of the 'classic' flint tool.

The pebble, in the top right of the photo, is just that, except it has several flakes taken off it at one particular place. Could this be a hammer stone? as I can't think what else it could be?

It is the burned bit of flint with the fired clay on it that has got me intrigued, and I wonder if perhaps it is a fragment of a kiln? Does anybody know anybody I could show it to?

Any more ideas on tool usage would be appreciated as well.


Cheers

Andy