Stone Axe hammer.

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This came my way for illustration. an old find and a little battered. The stone is Dolerite and looks a little more green in real life. The hole is straight sided and 24 mm diameter. Cute.

i bet the hole took some boring - i wonder how they did it.

It would! There are a few examples folk have found that just never got drilled all the way through.
The current theory for perforations with straight sides is they where drilled with a hollow section of Elderberry, which has a pithy centre with handfulls of coarse sand as an abrasive. That and some rig to hold it straight and rotated with a bow, like the fire bow but in some sort of frame.
I've seen a picture of a replica set up in a museum for visitors to have a go at. I'll see if I can find that again. I'd like to give that a go at some point.

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Ok, not the picture I was thinking of but you get the idea!

Stone borer, well I suppose it's better than many of the jobs around today. Plenty of fresh air, can chat to the other bores as you are boring. Simlar method of drilling to the Egyptians but a much harder stone. Wonder what the timings are?

He he, very true. I guess it would be a long time... Not quite as long as if you had to drill the whole hole out, the beauty of this method is you will end up with a cylindrical core from the middle of the drill. Maybe make some beads from the leftovers.

The Early Bronze Age Irish drilled flint this way to make mace heads. Mentalists.
Have you guys seen any of these? They are stunning.

" />I'm not sure this picture really does it justice. That is flint... how the f.....

Thanks for that, that is astonishing. Having had a go at polishing axeheads, I can appreciate just how many hours that took to make. First I've seen of them, any more flint sculpting you know of?

" />Only this one from Maesmor, again from Ireland. The one with the spirals is from Knowth.
Can one of these be made in only one life-time?!

Even in prehistoric times some people had too much spare time on their hands. What would possess someone to want to do that with their life?

wow we cant imagine the time it would off tokk to carve flint, never thought of a hollow boring tool before, would save alot of time i would of thought - question is how did they hole the weight stone before they had one to make the jig with he he.