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All we know is we know nothing - Ep 11
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If you want to discover some definitive answers to the mysteries of archaeology, then this might not be the episode for you (or the podcast series to be honest!). But if you want to hear theories of the start of metallurgy, discussions over Neolithic perceptions of death, insights into early hominin technology, or excellent advice on knapping, then you will want to hear this. Matilda chats with archaeologist and ancient technology expert Dr James Dilley about one of the longest-used tools in human history - the axe. Prepare your best stone tool related puns…Links
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/teabreak/11
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 11 of Tea Break Time Travel. I'm your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I am savoring a chai latte. It's a bit later in the day in this recording, and I needed something warm and snuggly, so I went for a chai latte. And joining me on my break today is Dr. James Dilly from Ancient Craft. And are you also on tea? As we are recording in the evening, I wouldn't judge you if you were on something else.
00:00:40
Speaker
I've sort of finished my outside work day, so after a tough day of breaking rock and pouring bronze, I've gone for a truly neolithic beverage in the form of a beer. Perfect, even better. I assume not a warm beer though.
Discussion on Archaeology Interests
00:00:57
Speaker
I know, no, but it's not chilled, it's room temperature as all ales should be. Oh no, now we're getting, oh gosh, I'm going to have so many ales about this when we go out. I lived in Australia for a while and there it's pretty standard to chill your beer quite extensively and I can remember my father going, what, what is this?
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, for, for ciders and lagers and certain types of beer, yeah, they are meant to be chilled. But if it's a proper ale, it's got to be, it can be slightly cool as if it would be in a cellar cool, not fridge cold, but I guess we're getting quite off topic, really.
00:01:34
Speaker
I'm always curious what different people like. We've had people with coffee, we've had people who don't even like hot drinks at all, so all sorts on here. This is our first beer though, so that's quite exciting. Great, well thank you for joining me. And I always like to give a little bit of an introduction to our guests, find out exactly how they got to where they are, because so many people ask me, oh, but how do you become an archaeologist?
00:01:55
Speaker
What did you have to do to be an archaeologist or do what it is that you do? And so far, all of my guests have said something completely different to each other. But I am curious, are you of the school of, oh, I've been interested in archaeology since I was born or more the ones who arrived to it later in life, shall we say?
00:02:12
Speaker
I'm a early, early bird on the archaeology front. You could say from birth. Well, I mean, that sounds good. And always in terms of the kind of technology side of things, or was it more broad? I think like many, many young people, I was always interested and enjoyed making things. One of those millions of kids that really and still love playing with Lego.
00:02:37
Speaker
And anytime we have a younger family over and the Lego comes out, I'm as keen to get involved as they are. And yeah, we're just making all sorts of stuff like a lot of kids do and doing history in school as part of primary school, becoming interested in the Romans and the Greeks and the Egyptians and specifically mummies because kids are morbid and they love bodies and true.
00:03:02
Speaker
I was just one of those many kids that loved the masterpiece The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiser. It's a truly cinematic masterpiece. Perfect. Yeah, that was my idea of archaeology that you'd go out and
00:03:19
Speaker
smash through tombs. Yeah, of course. And you know that that sold it for me as a quite young kid. I think I had my most mature thoughts, you know, maybe aged about seven or so that I haven't really been able to top which might say something, even to this day.
00:03:38
Speaker
that you watch all these documentaries away from the films, of course, the actual documentaries of the likes of Dr. Zahi Hawass opening yet another tomb of a high ranking Egyptian official from the upper dynasty or something like that.
Public Perception vs. Reality
00:03:54
Speaker
And quite rightly, it would be Egyptians officials usually, or archaeologists that would be opening these tombs and it would be there.
00:04:02
Speaker
project and the age of English gentlemen going over to various parts of the world and opening tombs and bringing artifacts back for a baying Victorian crowd to be locked away in the Dusty Museum have quite rightly long gone, although we're still living in that legacy.
00:04:23
Speaker
It's something that I think needs to be said though because indeed I think a lot of people do get their impression of archaeology from watching these, you know, it belongs in a museum kind of films and that is definitely a very different sort of archaeology to, well, maybe not to what is currently done but to what should be done at least.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess for whatever you think of the likes of Time Team, it might not be exactly how archaeology is done, but it provides a root way and an interest net to capture inquisitive young minds, including mine, and became interested in making things in archaeology or connected to archaeology. And I seem to remember watching someone on TV doing flint knapping as part of a documentary.
00:05:08
Speaker
And in the usual TV magic just made it look so easy. It just in a few moments turning over and hitting a piece of flint. There was this beautiful hand axe that the other side. And I was part of the young archaeologists club that we still have in the UK. And
00:05:25
Speaker
Back then, they used to do holidays around the UK to different places, and each of those different places have different themes, so kids could go up and live on one of the forts at Hadrian's Wall and live like a Roman soldier. They could be part of an excavation at a medieval cemetery, or the one that I really loved was the prehistory week that was down in Cornwall on Bob Minmore, a place called True Eartha Farm.
00:05:50
Speaker
and you did a lot of experimental archaeology, you visited some of the amazing prehistoric monuments on Dartmoor or Bodminmoor and I kept going year after year because it was just absolutely great having to go flint napping or metalworking or bone working and seeing these amazing things and the leaders of that holiday were just so inspirational and so amazing that it was that that I guess I wanted to do not just the flint napping but
00:06:17
Speaker
I guess showing how some of these crafts fit into archaeology and how they can be used as a tool quite literally to engage people. So straight after the holiday, after having a little go at flint napping, came straight back and living in North Hertfordshire, we have flint everywhere.
Flint Knapping and Academic Journey
00:06:36
Speaker
It's just in the field. You can go for a walk and quite easily come back with quite a quantity of large pieces of flint if your backpack and your back will indeed take it.
00:06:46
Speaker
which it has suffered through many times, but I had the raw material all around and was able to have a go. And I guess in what you'd expect for that sort of film drama sense, I picked up my first piece of flint and hit it a few times and it fell apart into a beautiful hand axe with just a matter of moments. And that would be the case if I lived in a film or a game, but the flint being flint just did not flake. It just sort of
00:07:16
Speaker
crushed and chunked and felt a bit because I just wasn't working it in the right way. But for some reason, I just carried on having a go, not consistently, not for hours on end, but we just have another go occasionally, sort of age nine or 10. You get interested in other stuff and just kept coming back to it. And this carried on through school and about age, I think it must have been about 16.
00:07:44
Speaker
my dad helped me make a website to showcase my growing early juvenile level skills into the likes of flint napping, which I can remember the evening that we decided the name that was ancient craft,
00:08:01
Speaker
And so it was born, I think it was 2009. That's amazing. I didn't realize it was such an early thing that, you know, it was such an early age. And it just grew from that. And a website that was sort of displaying a hobby with a few pictures, which looking back on some of the
00:08:20
Speaker
more embarrassing than others on social media not not from me because some charitable person thinks it'd be a good idea to post something to embarrass me but there we go yeah it's changed a great deal and I've changed and I went to university with
00:08:40
Speaker
suddenly with the flint napping, these really quite growing skills and had already been asked to demonstrate and make replicas for a whole number of museums. And remember distinctly, going for my interview at Southampton, from what I understand from other students, you had a object from archaeology and part of the interview was to look and talk about this object as an archaeologist might and some potential students got bits of parts.
00:09:07
Speaker
bits of bone, bits of wood because Southampton has a real maritime. Very fortunately I had a hand axe.
00:09:16
Speaker
And the person who was interviewing me, who was actually on my PhD viver board, so was there at both ends, was not expecting me to talk about how it was made, how long it would take to make the tools that would use, what the raw materials like, how the tool might fit into the daily life of these people, and was just like, well, I was not expecting that, but you will come here, that's fine. They were probably thinking, fantastic, we have our lecturer for the Ancient Materials course now. Yeah.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, but it's it's always been apart from very early years, when I was encouraged into a practical world, but both by my parents and my grandfather, who was a cabinet maker and made me soul boxes after the war.
Bronze Age and Historical Motivation
00:10:04
Speaker
I don't have any archaeologists in the family or anyone connected to heritage, but there's always been that practical influence, I guess.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, amazing. I did not realise that it was you were sort of flint knapping from such an early age. And yeah, that's really interesting. Well, I might ask you more about that later when we talk more about your sort of experiences with these technologies. For now, the second question that I generally ask the guests is, if you could travel back in time, where would you go and why? And I must say, our last episode was with Emma Jones, who is, of course, your partner at ancient craft. And she very gleefully told me that she was happy to go before you because she thinks she may have
00:10:43
Speaker
stolen your answer yes yeah she did she ran upstairs to say oh i'm gonna nick your answer so i've sort of had to think about an answer throughout the day and it's an interesting one because how how do you find a time that you could go back and either just sit there and and look at how people are moving around and doing something
00:11:09
Speaker
just for your personal interest, because it's such a huge wide time period. And there are certain parts of pre history, whether the way that some things were done, I haven't fully understood yet. But I think I would like to go back to a Bronze Age metalworkers workshop or space.
00:11:32
Speaker
just to see how they're interacting with the space, how they're doing certain things, how they're interacting with other crafts people, whether it be the charcoal maker, the potter making their molds or the crucibles, and just see how that network fits in, really, or even to go back and see a Bronze Age gold worker finishing the Shropshire Buller mold cape, although you'd have to be there for quite a long time to see it, it would be quite a special thing.
00:11:59
Speaker
I do love that I think nearly all of the guests so far have given a similar answer to you in terms of it's not necessarily to see like the coronation of this king or the you know this great battle or anything like that it's just to witness how people indeed would have interacted with their environment and with other people back in time I think that's
00:12:16
Speaker
I mean, that's also why we get into archaeology, right? Because we're interested in the sort of everyday stories of people. Again, something very similar to the very different I mean, to the sort of Hollywood depictions of what archaeology is, which always is some sort of grand adventure. It's, I guess, smaller scale adventures in archaeology and reality. Yeah, I guess, as you said, we're not going for the
00:12:39
Speaker
the big characters, although they play a part in archaeology, it's finding and trying to tell the stories of those people who, for lack of history, if it is in a historical time period or even before prehistory, they have just as an important story as everyone else.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, it would be one day, one day. We ever and I was lamenting how, you know, apparently no one's invented a time machine because we would have found out by now.
Early Hominins and Acheulean Period
00:13:07
Speaker
Oh, well. But thank you very much for joining me on my, well, tea break, drink break today. And before we look at today's object or object type, we will first journey back to the furthest actually that we've journeyed so far in this podcast. And I'm probably going to mispronounce this, the Akulian? He'll probably know better than me.
00:13:25
Speaker
I've heard it pronounced in both ways. It's a bit like Latin, I think, because no one really knows how Latin was properly pronounced. I'm sure people from certain schools would scoff at people. Well, I like to give them some fuel.
00:13:43
Speaker
I'll go with the software. Exactly, exactly. So the Achulean period, about 1.7 million years ago, so very far back. And at this time, the environment, of course, looks very, very different. Trees dominate the landscape, huge animals roam through the clearings. And as we peruse the world around us, we happen to spot a figure crouched in the shade of a nearby bush.
00:14:04
Speaker
and it's hard to make out the details from this distance, but they seem to be naked. However, there is a light covering of fur across their entire body, although this appears to be growing thicker around the head from what we can see. We creep closer, but then unfortunately we step on a stick and the figure looks around in alarm. All we see is a prominent brow ridge, flattened nose, jutting jawline, and then the figure vanishes into the bushes. But they have left something behind.
00:14:28
Speaker
Lying in the grass is a large piece of stone chipped and worked with a nearby hammerstone to create a roughly teardrop-shaped object. And this encounter with an early hominin, exactly which one is unclear, describes one of the earliest hand axes. But today we are not going to be limiting ourselves to hand axes, because why make life easy? We're going to look at axes in general, and we'll get into the details soon. But first, as always, let's have a look at the most asked questions on the internet, courtesy of Google Search Autofill.
00:14:58
Speaker
I was amazed. I thought I was going to get loads of things for axes. Sometimes with some objects I get a ridiculous amount of questions, some of which are just bizarre, but actually there were very few. The majority of the things I looked up for axes or hand axes were related, I guess, to some kind of video game where you have axes and then people were asking of the benefits of axes versus swords when fighting Vikings or something like that.
00:15:21
Speaker
But I did find a couple that seem to be more relevant for our conversation. The first one is what are hand axes used for? Well, it's, it's a good question. I guess it is one of the big questions associated with hand axes, because
00:15:38
Speaker
there isn't just one form or shape or size of hand axe, you've mentioned the teardrop shape, but there are actually ovate hand axes, there are chordate hand axes, there are later flat bottoms bucupé hand axes, there are so many shapes and styles that are made of different materials that seem prevalent
00:16:00
Speaker
in different sites or different regions? And are all of those tools used for the same purpose? It's a very hard question to answer because it is such an extreme amount of time ago in the past and trying to reconstruct a site from
00:16:18
Speaker
that time in the Paleolithic the old stone age is extremely difficult because your usual sight from that time might be a gravel bed that was part of a river system and all of those tools and flakes detached with that hammerstone and maybe even the hammerstone themselves have been rolled around
00:16:37
Speaker
and moved away from where they were first used and made. And all you've got is a collection of flakes and finished tools that have been knocked around. And you've got to try and reconstruct that moment in time from those objects that have been moved around an awful lot to avoid repeating myself. So it makes makes it very difficult for archaeologists to try and get any kind of grip on what life was like in the paper.
00:17:04
Speaker
get sites where the archaeology, the stone tools hasn't moved around a great deal. And although it's not 1.7 million years ago, it's still part of the Shulian from southern Britain at a place called Boxgrove. And it's a site that's often
00:17:22
Speaker
looked at in reference, but that's because the archaeology from around half a million years ago, was in good condition, it hadn't moved around a lot. And it seems to be, I guess, to paint the picture, a site that was in a tidal zone that
00:17:38
Speaker
was right up against remnant chalk cliffs from where it used to be, raised platform at the sea, but now is almost a salt marsh flat, quite sandy sort of environment. Imagine little rivulets of water, crisscrossing it with banks of grass that were resistant to salty water or saline conditions.
00:17:58
Speaker
And in that space, these early hominins were clearly coming back to possibly for access to water if there were freshwater streams, but certainly to come into contact with animals. Whether they were hunting animals is hard to say or they probably were.
00:18:16
Speaker
But we have one site where a group of these humans came into contact with a horse and it was butchered very intensely to the extent that they were smashing the bones apart to actually get at the marrow. And for anyone that's squeamish, I apologize, and I won't go into further details. To be honest, if they're squeamish, they shouldn't be listening to this podcast because we've just begun introducing ourselves.
00:18:42
Speaker
But around that space around the remains of this horse that have been taken apart, people were making the tools necessary to go through that dismemberment process. And that is where the hand axe comes in. And in this case, at Boxgrove, they were ovate hand axes, they were generally not much larger than your parmy or even
00:19:05
Speaker
to the extent of your fingers. So a good range, but quite an ergonomic shape, a bit like a cutting disc, best describe it. They were pulling pieces of flint out of these chalk cliffs and working them with a pebble and then refining them with an antler hammer to take very, very sharp thinning flakes off.
00:19:27
Speaker
and these scatters of flint as well as the hand axes and the bones were found in place and were so well preserved in place that in one position on the site, layer four C, there is actually the triangle of flakes, the waste flakes or debitage that was detached from someone sitting sharpening a hand axe taking off those flakes.
Boxgrove Site and Prehistoric Life
00:19:55
Speaker
And that V shape is
00:19:57
Speaker
position that shows the shadow of their legs where they were positioned as they were working the flakes, because those flakes won't fall through their legs, but they might hit their legs and drop into a certain position. And actually, you can see where the larger flakes have gone over towards the right.
00:20:16
Speaker
Whereas when I've tried to reproduce this V shaped scatter sitting on the ground and sharpen a hand axe, the larger flakes have gone over towards the left hand side and I'm right handed. So that perhaps tells you that the person half a million years ago, re sharpening a hand axe, perhaps looking up to see the group working on this horse
00:20:37
Speaker
keeping a keen eye around looking over their shoulder and prevent the likes of hyenas or other dangerous scavengers getting too close and would perhaps brandish a pointed stick at them or fire-hardened spear or threw stones at them with perhaps children running around splashing between the streams half a million years ago. They then
00:21:00
Speaker
stood up walked back to the group and either joined in or passed this freshly sharpened hand axe onto someone else and once they'd butchered this horse they would take the legs that they needed the joints and would then perhaps move on to somewhere else and that's the scatter we've got left behind from half a million years ago. We have invented the time machine that's I mean that sounds as close as we're going to get really.
00:21:25
Speaker
But that that is one of those rare occasions where we can paint such a vivid picture with fairly solid evidence. I wish I could do that for every site of age, but we just can't.
00:21:36
Speaker
Oh yeah, oh no, but that's fantastic. And do we have a clue of kind of who, or you know, so we've been mentioning early hominins, who was it who actually invented the hand axe, which kind of species and yeah, time. Yeah, who invented the hand axe? Well, we unfortunately won't know their name.
00:21:57
Speaker
Bob, I think it was Bob, right? Yes. Bob and his hand axe. But we certainly know it was one of the early hominin groups, a member of the genus Homo. But the earliest hand axe has appeared just under 2 million years ago. It may have been Homo habilis, it may have been Homo erectus.
00:22:20
Speaker
The problem is in a bit like Boxgrove many of the other extremely early sites is that although you might be lucky enough to find those stone tools and patch even luckier to find those stone tools in a close proximity to where they were made and used to find human remains is extremely rare and certainly in those positions where people have gone through a butchery process at Boxgrove
00:22:46
Speaker
A tibia and two teeth were found, but still not enough to clearly identify which hominin it was. It could have been Homo heidelbergensis, it could have been Homo antecessa,
00:22:58
Speaker
could have even been another hominin but we just don't know without that skull in good condition even fragmentary but with most of the bits to show those distinctive features we just can't tell such a shame oh so we do still need a type machine there's only so much i can do we we just know and i guess that's the if even if you look
00:23:23
Speaker
much further forward in prehistory. And I know I mentioned that the bronze castle metalworkers workshop, which is, you know, that that time period is closer to today than the bronze ages to the Paleolithic that we were just talking about, which gives some sense of the extreme length of prehistory.
00:23:41
Speaker
that to try and get any kind of grip on the specific details of this time is very difficult. And I always try to get across the picture that prehistory is like 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, take away 995 of those pieces.
00:23:59
Speaker
And you're left with five bits and because, you know, sold to law, you won't get an edge piece or a corner piece to at least start you off. It would just be one of those awkward middle bits that doesn't show anything particularly distinctive. But that thousand piece puzzle that you're looking at from the box lid and thinking, well, how am I supposed to work with this? I can see
00:24:19
Speaker
culture and language and vibrant colours and people interacting. This is what prehistory should be and almost certainly what it is. But I've only got these five bits. And on those five bits, I can see a few bits of broken stone, maybe a bit of pot if we're later in prehistory or some bits of bone or maybe a post hole. You've got to work quite strategically with those handful of pieces. And it's only through things like experimental archaeology or other
00:24:44
Speaker
techniques in archaeology that we might get back one or two of those pieces, but that's still a tiny fraction that won't go anywhere near close to giving you any kind of idea of what that complete picture might have been. And that really can make it quite frustrating that there are many questions like who made the first hand axe or what were hand axes
00:25:08
Speaker
for all and every type used for that we just won't know uniformly because we just lack the evidence. Oh, sorry. No, no, that's fine. Well, why did I invite you on this? Sitting squarely on the fence here somewhat comfortably. No, this is perfect.
00:25:28
Speaker
This is what I want to communicate, to be honest, because I also try to communicate as much as possible the fact that there are many, many, many theories, and unfortunately, we can't know which one exactly is correct or not, and we probably never will know about all sorts of things. So I think it's important for people to understand that, to be able to get a sort of unbiased view of archaeological research and the kind of conclusions that are made therein. I think, yeah, it's good to understand that those are just potentially one version of things a lot of the time.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And it's important to say that, because I'm sure likewise get people saying, well, surely these were very intelligent people and with some basic engineering, they could have made an A-frame and they could have built a this and they could have done that a million years ago, and they could have made boats and gone across here and built pyramids and all the rest of it. And they may have, we just lack evidence. And it's not as if we're trying to hide things from people.
00:26:27
Speaker
If they did that, then great. But we need the evidence to say it did. Otherwise they could have had flying cars or could have had all sorts. But if you don't have the evidence to prove that, you just can't really say anything definitively. And the problem is even with those occasional sites, let's say Boxgrove or another late site or Must Farm, for example, from the late Bronze Age, that's just one window into a society that stretched over
00:26:56
Speaker
many thousands of miles and just because they might have done something in a certain style at this site doesn't mean they did it elsewhere. Or even for proxy hunter gatherer groups, for example, I'm often quite sternly told when I suggest that it might have been the whole group of hunter gatherers that were involved in hunting that
00:27:15
Speaker
Oh, well, it would have just been men who would have been hunting. And we know this because there's this particular group in Africa or somewhere in the world, and it's only the men that are allowed to hunt to sort of turn around and explain, well, they that group that you mentioned, they live
00:27:30
Speaker
completely different climate, different environment, they live at a completely different time. Yeah, you just can't use that as a proxy environment. It can be interesting, but it's not a perfect proxy environment.
Evolution and Use of Axes
00:27:43
Speaker
And that's why you have to be so cautious with archaeology, whether it be the evidence in front of you evidence from elsewhere, or the past theory must be looked at critically at all times.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yes. Couldn't agree more. I think my most used word is suggests. This suggests that, rather than that. It's always very nerve-wracking to put something like, this shows that, or this proves that, and you're going, oh, oh, no. Hey, everybody. Chris Webster here to talk about one of the latest supporters to the Archaeology Podcast Network, The Motley Fool.
00:28:15
Speaker
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00:29:50
Speaker
So we know a little bit more about axes or hand axes, or well, what we know is that we don't really know much about them, I suppose is the answer to that discussion. But perhaps we could talk a bit more about sort of other kinds of axes or sort of axe heads in general. So for example, hand axes, you mentioned briefly, they're probably used alone in the hand. I mean, I guess that's why they're called hand axes. But when do we first start to see hafted axe heads appear?
00:30:16
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess the tale of the axe steal the the title of the recent very good book Sitting on my shelf and remind myself who authored it off just rearranged the library and tilt my head back I could have seen it and said I was written by this person
00:30:34
Speaker
That's why you should never clean up or tidy or rearrange or sort this. Can we relay this to Em because she does a very good job of keeping me, the website, the social media in check. But yeah, sometimes I'll come into the workshop and think, where was that?
00:30:53
Speaker
And the same could be said here. But anyway, so for the the earliest type of axe, I guess, and it's perhaps worth combating what a hand axe is. And as you correctly say, it's a tool that would probably be used in the hand, hence the name. So is it really an axe? Would you use it for chopping wood? Well, probably not, because
00:31:12
Speaker
it would almost certainly do a huge amount of damage to your hand. Because if you now go and look for a picture of a hand axe of a search engine, or if you have one in your mind, or even lucky enough to have either a replica or real one close to hand, unless it has the natural skin of the stone, the cortex, it might be flaked around the base. And if you're holding that in your hand,
00:31:34
Speaker
even with a piece of leather and start whacking it into a tree, it will quite quickly start to do damage. So they're not used for heavy duty hitting or crushing of any kind, they're quite precise cutting tools. And the modern equivalent is very much like a bread knife, although it's not used for cutting meat, it needs that soaring action to work.
00:31:56
Speaker
And that allows you to clamp it quite tightly into your hand as long as it doesn't have any sudden hard action into the back of your hand and it's just used for cutting. It works very well. It doesn't need to be wrapped in leather have any kind of handle and a butcher's
00:32:12
Speaker
sort of long saw knife, which is just like a long bread knife is very much the same in its purpose. But that changes as we go far further forward in time, but beyond even the Upper Paleolithic, the time that modern humans came in, and we actually need to go to the Mesolithic. When we see the first kind of half did and by half did I mean fitted into a wooden handle,
00:32:38
Speaker
axe, the Tronche axe, but there are other types of axes from elsewhere around the world. But these axes would have been used for felling trees and woodworking to make the likes of dugout canoes, bows, or other wooden implements. And they would be flaked much like a hand axe around the edge that you do in the process of flint mapping. And they would have one final flake
00:33:03
Speaker
to provide a razor sharp edge. Again, like some hand axes were in Boxgrove is one of those sites where the Tronche flake was used as a final hit to provide a razor sharp edge. But instead of being ovate or flat, these pieces of flint were, I guess not cylindrical would perhaps be a good definition of a long rectangle rather than ovate and flat.
00:33:30
Speaker
And these axes would have been used for clearing areas of woodland so that deer came in to start eating shoots and then provide cover around the outside for hunters to knock them over with either spears or darts or bows and arrows.
00:33:47
Speaker
And wood would be needed for log boats and a whole variety of other structures, including shelters. But perhaps the iconic stone axe actually comes from the Neolithic, the polished stone axe head that could be made from flint, but could be made from a variety of other materials. And that would be usually flaked or pecked. Instead of flint knapping, this is where you're taking a pebble.
00:34:14
Speaker
usually fairly close to the axe shape and then just hitting it with another pebble, breaking off and crushing tiny areas on the surface to slowly form it into the shape. It takes a long time, it's hard wearing on the hands, and then grind it to give it a consistent cutting edge and a smooth surface that would then be fitted into a wooden handle or something like ashwood or fruitwood or birch.
00:34:40
Speaker
And it's that axe that would have been used in the early Neolithic for clearing huge areas of woodland to open up for these new people with their new ideas of agriculture and building longhouses that needed all of that space and all of that timber.
00:34:56
Speaker
which I always find interesting when people sort of say, Oh, we need to live like what, you know, with nature, like they did in pre history. And I'm there thinking, you do realise how much woodland people in the Neolithic cleared, like when they were going around their daily business. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit like the paleo diet. That's, yes, this is definitely how they ate in the Paleolithic. Hmm.
00:35:18
Speaker
Not really. So the idea is then that sort of stone access or hafted access indeed came about more in relation with woodworking and with, like you say, clearing and building these long houses, etc.
00:35:35
Speaker
do you have, and I'm only saying this because, like I say, when I did all my Google search autofill checks, there were so many things coming up about war hammers and war axes, battle axes, and all of this kind of thing. Do you think that stone axes may have been used as weapons? I guess this is something that people also sometimes consider? Or is it something that is less likely? To answer simply, yes.
00:35:58
Speaker
do have actual examples of individuals that were killed with stone axes, the early Neolithic. And the thing to remember about the the Stone Age is that it's only up until we get to the Neolithic that there seems to be exceeding
00:36:15
Speaker
limited evidence of violence. You get the occasional bit of evidence that could arguably be an accident or just two people having a bit of a scuffle and it gets out of hand, but it's pretty rare. By the time you get to the Neolithic with these new people with their new ideas and their need for flint axes or stone axes to clear areas of woodland, the chance of being killed violently
00:36:40
Speaker
goes up to about 33% regardless of your age or sex. And long barrows or burial tombs from the early Neolithic are often filled with the bones of people that have been on the end of blunt force trauma or even been hit by stone tipped arrows.
00:36:59
Speaker
Our chance of being killed violently today around the world, including countries that are unfortunately in an unstable situation with those that are fortunate to be in a far more stable situation is only 3%. So from 3% today to 33% in the early Neolithic in Britain, that is quite dramatic. The early Neolithic was an extremely brutal time to live.
00:37:27
Speaker
Why people were being killed, whether it was fights, skirmishes, ritualized killings, we just don't know. But it clearly was quite a violent time and people were on the ends of probably clubs, axes, arrows, you name it, tools that could be used for woodworking, hunting, could equally be used for injuring and even killing people.
00:37:48
Speaker
And I guess, indeed, I can remember, I think I actually chatted about this briefly with Emma. In the Neolithic especially, from what I remember from my days of undergraduate archaeology and looking at death and burial in the past and everything, that's almost when you see the weirdest kind of burials as well. Like you say, so people who have been dismembered or had some sort of violent blood force trauma, but then were buried on swan wings or something like that. There seems to be a very wide and weird variety of burial rites as well.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess it's going back to trying to work out how and why people did certain things in the past. And for, you know, the example mentioned the vadbeck squand burial is an amazing unusual example of clearly a mother and child that were buried with a great deal of care that shows that
00:38:41
Speaker
people clearly had very close relationships and loved family members or friends to a great degree. And you even see that back far further in time to our Neanderthal cousins from the often referenced Shanadar cave with the old man of Shanadar with the serious injuries that would have made it very difficult for him to hunt or obtain his own food. So it was clearly looked after. But at the same time, you equally see huge amounts of violence.
00:39:11
Speaker
So how cheap life was, I guess, to not make it sound a bit too crass is hard to gauge exactly. But the severe increase of violence is a little troubling in the Neolithic. And that doesn't really drop off too much, unfortunately, I guess, is a sad component of the coming modern world. Indeed. It all started when we started clearing the trees. We should have just left the trees where they were. The gods were unhappy, apparently.
Metallurgy Origins and Advancements
00:39:41
Speaker
that's you that's definitely the solution right that's the living in the trees exactly the catalyst is when people started land grabbing and protection resources industry started you know with the production of tools anyway
00:40:00
Speaker
if we sort of progress a little further in time, so we've talked about the different kinds of stone axes that you can have, there was the flint axis, the polished axis, etc. And then, obviously, at some point, the good old bronze age appears, you know, suddenly like that, that's definitely how it happened. And we obviously start to then see bronze axes, but I can imagine they
00:40:22
Speaker
are quite different, at least the ones that I have seen in style. Or do you see, for example, at the start of the Bronze Age, people almost replicating these stone axe head shapes first before they then progress to the kind of what we would typically see as a bronze axe head?
00:40:38
Speaker
You do to some extent, and I guess it's interesting to see that gentle transition because I'm often asked, well, how, how do they come up with, you know, you don't just get lumps of metal or bronze lying around. And that's true. You don't get lumps of bronze lying around because it is an alloy. It requires two materials to come together. But
00:40:58
Speaker
The Bronze Age didn't start with bronze, it actually started with copper and gold. And although gold wasn't often made into tools, copper certainly was. And sometimes the copper age is just bolted on to the start of the Bronze Age, whereas elsewhere around the world, the copper age or the Chalcolithic actually has its own defined time period. And if you've ever worked with copper wire or copper piping, you'll know that copper is reasonably soft,
00:41:24
Speaker
But it's quite hard to break without serious manipulation and even then it will usually be quite a thin piece of copper like wire or the walls of a copper pipe. If you start trying to break a piece of copper that's any thicker than about five mil, it actually becomes very difficult.
00:41:42
Speaker
it's a very flexible material. So to make something like an axe head out of copper, it might not have the same hardness as stone, but it's certainly nowhere near as brittle as stone because stone axes even polished axes can break with a misplaced strike copper axes won't. So that means that you can make a much thinner cutting edge so it will actually bite into wood far deeper.
00:42:06
Speaker
And for those earliest copper tools and copper axes, they probably were made from a naturally occurring copper metal that's known as native copper, in the same way that gold can occur naturally as gold metal, native gold, and it would be that kind of gold that gold panners would come across then often be taken out by bandits and raiders for gold nuggets from the nearby stream.
00:42:31
Speaker
But with that naturally occurring native copper, for societies and groups that would have been very used to manipulating a material through percussion from that stone tool heritage, hitting this unusual, slightly shiny material in native copper wouldn't have been particularly unusual to them. And actually, as soon as they started to hit it, they would have realized that as you deform the metal today, it starts to warm up and get hot.
00:42:59
Speaker
not ridiculously so, but even to the extent it becomes uncomfortable to hold. And again, these would have been people who would have been familiar with changing the material properties through heat, whether it be clay to ceramic or even heat treating flint to make it easier to work. So both through hitting native copper into a rough shape or even heating in a fire to make it easier to hit and with a bit more heat and a bit more heat and a bit more heat, it becomes even easier to
00:43:29
Speaker
forge and work. With a little bit more heat, and even a bit more, instead of it being a hot solid thing actually melts. And at that point, rather than forging it, you're melting it
00:43:41
Speaker
And you can melt it into a fairly basic open mold, like an ice cube tray for a flat axe head. And at that point, you're starting to change from direct manipulation to a slightly more complex process, that you're taking something and really changing the material properties of it to a cast object. And that allows you to make more complex shapes.
00:44:05
Speaker
But even with those native or eventually cast copper objects, you have the copper metal, importantly. And whether it be your copper pipes in your home, or your copper axe head over 4000 years ago with use, or perhaps someone left a tool outside or in a wet place, they would have noticed that the surface would have started to go a bit green, as that copper starts to take on oxygen from the atmosphere and effectively oxidize and try and turn back into an ore.
00:44:34
Speaker
And people would have noticed that that funny workable copper metal that's going a bit green is, it's interesting because there are rocks from that place where we got native copper that are also green and unusually heavy. And I wonder if we try and hit them or try and heat them up to the same temperature that the copper melted. I wonder if we could get some copper metal out of that funny green rock.
00:45:02
Speaker
And at that point, you've changed from forging that native copper to smelting it. And that is the huge technological leap that we still rely on today. So rather than a lucky piece of copper metal being in a pottery furnace, or some other unlikely process of people discovering metal, it's a far more gradual
00:45:25
Speaker
process of discovering metalworking and smelting built upon previous tool production heritage. And once you've got copper, which is soft, but useful, at some point with that metalworking and prospecting experience and heritage either accidentally came across tin as they were trying to go for a copper ore and perhaps tried to smelt something like paratakomite, which has copper and tin in it naturally, or they just
00:45:54
Speaker
came across a piece of tin oil for Cassiterite, which can be extremely heavy, they would have known or certainly will this a bit like the copper ore is unusually heavy. I wonder if copper or perhaps some either other useful metal could come out of this and would have come across tin. And with that experimentation, a small amount of tin would have changed that soft copper into a hard alloy that we know as bronze. And the beauty of bronze is that
00:46:23
Speaker
As I said, it's harder and it can be cast into higher definition, more complex molds rather than fairly basic open molds. And alongside that metal work started to develop from the flat axe into the flanged axe to the palstave axe and eventually the socketed axe. And then soon after that, the Iron Age appeared and everything got a bit boring and modern.
00:46:48
Speaker
prehistory. Yes, indeed. The Stone Age and the Bronze Age specifically, when coinage starts to come in, I mean, it gets too easy. That was, I think, yeah, the best description I've heard of the possible way that metalworking and metallurgy started. I have to say that whole concept, the sort of origins of metallurgy and how we first see it emerge was the reason that I got involved with artifacts
00:47:15
Speaker
material culture studies. And now I'm more specialized in artifact analysis side of things. And I've gone in a very different direction. And I'm now looking at bone needles. But it's always something that really fascinated me indeed, that idea of kind of how these technological innovations first took place. And I think that, yeah, I just have to say, Bravo, that was a really fantastic description of how a possible way could have occurred in terms of going from stone to metal, for example. So thank you for that.
00:47:42
Speaker
That's all right. It's a possible way. That's the key thing to remember. It's not necessarily the way but it seems the most reasonable to me and I guess with lack of evidence, we know that people did this. Clearly, a process was out there and trying to work out either the simplest and if they did it in a more complex way, we'll bravo to them until we have the evidence or the most logical way is really what we work off until that changes.
00:48:10
Speaker
indeed as we were saying earlier as well there's you know many many theories and no one knows which one's the correct one but personally I think that that description was fantastic thank you very much and then as you say it continues goes to the iron age we get iron and steel and then yeah the the modern axe is born at some point as well but of course they're still around today I mean the axe is a pretty standard tool to have in I think any home I think well I mean maybe not any home
00:48:38
Speaker
spoken like an archaeologist who just has random tools around the house, but I would assume that it's one of those relatively standard items. It wouldn't be weird to have an axe in your house, put it that way, especially if you're living in maybe more rural areas and do a lot of woodworking or wood chopping for fires, etc.
00:48:58
Speaker
And but why do you think the axis then is such a long lasting tool? I mean, they've been around then for, yeah, two million years. Really, that seems to be something that definitely we've stuck with it, I guess, because it works so well.
Significance of Axes Across History
00:49:11
Speaker
Or what are your thoughts on that?
00:49:13
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it's whether you want to make a distinction between the hand axe and the woodworking tool because they are separate things. Hand axes may well have been used for light woodworking and certainly later hand axes show
00:49:30
Speaker
possibilities for Neanderthal use for woodworking just in the hand. But yes, I guess the axe as the half did acts for felling trees and woodworking has had a dramatic impact on us as humans in later prehistory for changing us from
00:49:49
Speaker
groups or societies that would have been hunter-gatherers that would have moved seasonally to a different campsite to exploit different resources as they replenished or when they became available at certain times of year to groups that would have
00:50:05
Speaker
been based in one area for longer, not necessarily permanently settled, but would certainly need to invest more time into caring and turning and planting and sowing seeds and crops into land or building larger houses and building bigger populations. I guess the question is, was the axe a catalyst for this or was it a tool or component that allowed the process to happen in the first place? And I guess it's something that
00:50:34
Speaker
could be argued over to the nth degree. But it certainly is a major part of Neolithic society, whether you look at the shape of long barrows from a bird's eye view that looked like an axe head laying on the ground, or some of the huge standing stones that look a bit like an axe head that's had its blade planted into the ground. So the axe head is standing tall.
00:50:58
Speaker
or even as we go into the Bronze Age and we actually see the artwork of axes pecked into the sides of tombs or even at places like Stonehenge or for axes elsewhere in artwork from places like Scandinavia or very stylised axes or oversized axes right up until the modern day where axes are still used for woodworking. They're often the carpenters or green woodworkers tool but
00:51:26
Speaker
You look at flags or symbols or even I guess symbols of governance that the acts
00:51:36
Speaker
plays a role in society far beyond a simple woodworking tool, even today with very strong Neolithic roots to have a blade fixed into a handle. And although it might not be fixed in the same way with the wood around the blade or with a stone blade, that idea certainly started in excess of 8,000 years ago in the Mesolithic and really flourished in the Neolithic with the arrival of farming.
Crafting and Skill Development
00:52:05
Speaker
Well, if that doesn't highlight the importance of technology to human development, I don't know what does. I'm just just selling axes here. How wonderful.
00:52:20
Speaker
Okay, so we did already introduce how you started into archaeology, how ancient craft came about in the first section of this episode, but maybe we can go into a little more detail about your own experiences indeed with technology and how the axe, which as we know now is one of the most important objects in human history, is so important in your life potentially as well. So you mentioned already you had a lot of experience with stone napping already just from your own kind of interest when you were younger,
00:52:48
Speaker
Did you also do, for example, metalworking, broadcasting? Did that come later? It came a little bit later because when you're, I guess, 11 or 12, the idea of me going out into the garden and heating up some metal to well over a thousand degrees was perhaps a little
00:53:05
Speaker
just a little bit out of my reach for a young age, but it came came slightly later. But I guess my core craft if you excuse the pun is flint napping. There aren't many jokes in flint napping yet. Yes, working quite hard.
00:53:23
Speaker
I don't know. There's a good account called I think they're called pre hysterical or something on Instagram and they do a lot of cartoons focusing on flint blades and things and the puns are fantastic. Yes. Yeah, I think it's the one with sort of an exhausted core is one of the well known ones. Yeah, I can totally totally relate to that kind of humor.
00:53:46
Speaker
It's when I'm doing a public demonstration and you'll make one of these rare jokes and occasionally they'll get it or they'll sort of look at you blankly, which is made even worse when you say, if you excuse the pun, then there's all like, uh, there was a pun. There was a pun. You have to explain it.
00:54:07
Speaker
And so now you have, I mean, the amount of replicas that you're making as part of ancient craft is astounding in the sort of range of different materials being used. Do you have a preference? So I mean, it seems like stone knapping, like you say, is the core of craft. But is that still your favourite? Or are there other
00:54:25
Speaker
ones that have grabbed your interest. I get asked that question a lot. Do I prefer flint napping or bronze casting? And to tell the honest truth with this well rehearsed answer, it depends on which material is behaving best. If I have a bad day flint napping, I prefer bronze casting or vice versa. I've heard, isn't there a well-known phrase, a good workman leverblades the tools? I wouldn't blame the tools, but I can blame the material.
00:54:54
Speaker
That actually was one of the things that made me feel slightly better about myself whenever I try to do flint knapping. I'm terrible at it because I'm very impatient and I just, yeah, I don't like technologies that require me to plan things that much in advance and understand that much when things go wrong. But one of my attempted teachers, I've tried many different times, did say to me, sometimes you just have a bad bit of flint and you know, you should just put it aside, get another one and start again.
00:55:22
Speaker
Yeah, and that's very true. And I guess talking about experiences, I've taught an awful lot of flint mapping workshops, as I'm sure you can guess, with probably hundreds of people. But over the unprecedented times of COVID and the lockdowns that we had here in the UK,
00:55:40
Speaker
people had time on their hands at home. And although we were lucky enough to be in a situation where we could still fulfill orders and send them out in the post, because people just wanted to buy stuff while they were at home. With a lot of museums in fairly uncertain times for football, we thought, well, perhaps we could make an online flint napping tutorial. And for any proceeds that
00:56:09
Speaker
people wanted to donate for our time or for anything else that we could sort of direct them to various museums or worthy causes. So came up with the idea of perhaps just doing a live flint napping tutorial on Twitter and you know maybe 20, 30 people might watch it if we were lucky and so called it hashtag nap time very original. I love that.
00:56:33
Speaker
we sat down with phone propped up against a another piece of flint and I sat there with my rock and then became aware quite quickly that 14,000 people had tried to start watching this process unfold and my sister Heidi that were just watching the phone on the screen that I couldn't see just to make sure everything was all in order the expression on their face and the widening of eyes suggested that rather than something going wrong is perhaps the
00:57:02
Speaker
the large number of people that were tuning in to watch me bashing a rock and try and do it for themselves and it was amazing to see afterwards the pictures people were showing of the setup, everything ready, all their pebbles they'd collected because we'd given a little bit of notice. People from all around the world, friends, family even, they had a go at napping in the garden and it was possibly a moment that
00:57:27
Speaker
I don't know whether across the world, but certainly over a very wide area, there was possibly the most amount of flint mapping happening within that hour since prehistory.
00:57:39
Speaker
It was a special moment, I guess, from quite unusual times. I won't say unprecedented again, because it gets used quite so much. But it was great to change my style of teaching and challenge me to be able to teach a very difficult process. As you've outlined, it is very hard and I wasn't naturally good. Very few people are naturally good.
00:58:03
Speaker
And I still struggle with it, certainly for Flint doesn't want to behave. But these days, and since then, I've realised that
00:58:14
Speaker
The key to teaching something like flint napping is to set realistic goals from the off and to really set the expectation with people that might have a grand ideas of coming along to just a day or even a few hours flint napping and hoping to go away at the end with a beautiful hand axe or a dagger or a spearhead and to really set those expectations where they should be and absolutely crush their dreams deeply in front of them.
00:58:44
Speaker
As we should. I mean, that's what education is, right? For people that have been on my workshops, they will have got used to my somewhat dry sense of humour quite quickly. They can verge on the cruel sometimes, but it's all a good experience. But the key is to rather than
00:59:00
Speaker
have people worry about what tool am I making? What should it look like? Is this the right shape to take away all of that stress and actually just worry about the process? And that's how I start OB. Well, here's a piece of flint. All I want you to worry about is taking off flakes. I'll show you the process for me doing it. I'll draw it out for you and I'll show me doing it. I will direct you in your hands, do it. And now you're going to do it. And the first few flakes might be a bit hit and miss quite literally, but
00:59:30
Speaker
After just a few minutes, people start to get the hang of just taking flakes off because that's all they're worrying about. They're not worrying about, well, is this a tool? Is this a this? Is it a that? They're just taking flakes off. And if I had my way, people would do that all day.
00:59:48
Speaker
just taking flakes off, because that's all flint lapping is just taking flakes off. And then you start to add some of the other components in taking off certain flakes or longer flakes or thinner flakes. And then you can start to look at how you can turn some of those flakes into tools like scrapers or sores or burins even. And then perhaps
01:00:10
Speaker
apply some of those skills that started with the basic and the macro, and then down to the refined and the micro to something more complex, like a by face or a two face tool, or perhaps even a hand axe, because then you've built up that foundation, that gentle slope of learning rather than giving people a stone and expecting them to turn it into a tool straight away, because it's unrealistic.
01:00:36
Speaker
it's setting off that gentle ramp, that curve of learning and I've almost always found that if you strip away the difficulty in the complexity and if there's some past experience in that frustration that actually
01:00:53
Speaker
most people can get flint nap in and it might look as if it's a test of strength and it's not and certainly if any of you have watched nap time on YouTube on the ancient craft channel it might look initially that when I'm breaking open a large flint or even going through the process with an antler hammer that it's a test of strength and it's not. To really I guess think of
01:01:17
Speaker
something else rather than being able to hit something hard. If you can knock a six inch nail into a piece of wood and you can do it within a few hits without hitting the piece of wood either side, you can do flint knapping because it's not the ability to hit the nail into a piece of wood with one hit like karate kid. It's the ability to hit the head accurately consistently over many occasions that
01:01:47
Speaker
Flintnapping is a test of accuracy and understanding the process rather than strength and brute force. And that's why pretty much anyone can do flintnapping if you're able to hold flint and hold a hammerstone. And in fact, over the years, I found teaching people of different ages from different backgrounds, all sorts that actually on the whole, females are much better at taking on what I'm trying to get across to them because on the whole blokes just want to bash rocks.
01:02:18
Speaker
I mean, you said it, not me. We've all been there.
01:02:23
Speaker
when you just want to hit something and it, well, if it won't work, I'll just hit it harder. And there are similarities that you see elsewhere. Well, if, you know, if you don't understand me speaking English slowly and loudly, I'll just speak louder. And there are similar, similar from elsewhere, but on the whole, if you're able to accept that it is a difficult process and you set yourself reasonable goals and steps that if, if I can take these flakes off.
01:02:52
Speaker
and there may be problems along the way, but I will get there and have that determination to be able to get over those problems and give it the right amount of time for your brain to able to understand the process because there will be difficult parts of flint napping, whether it be how to thin down something, how to take off lakes in a certain way or set up blade cores.
01:03:14
Speaker
that light bulb moment will rarely happen as you're doing it. A bit like learning a guitar or an out of the box concept, you need to go through the process of learning a new riff or trying to hold your hand to produce a certain shape as your
01:03:33
Speaker
making those sounds. And you'll go away perhaps sleep on it, do something else. And it'll click because your brain has had that chance to catch up over something that's quite difficult. When you come back to it, it will be a little more familiar and the possibilities of progressing further will be there.
01:03:50
Speaker
And that, I guess, is flint mapping. It is a very difficult process. It has often been referenced, particularly by me, as being one of the hardest crafts out there that uses a natural material because that natural material can be so inconsistent. As you said, it might just be a bad bit of flint on that day. Full of fossils, cracks, there can be all sorts of colours and resistances, even bits from the same quarry. Two bits that are next to each other can be completely different.
01:04:18
Speaker
but being able to work through them in the same way and face and get over those problems in the same way that people would have in the past allows you to build up those skills, those problem solving methods that people did many thousands of years ago.
01:04:35
Speaker
And indeed, I think your point of that you have to learn kind of the, almost the mechanics of it as in the muscle memory first, if that makes sense. So sort of get an idea of does what you actually have to do as a basic thing is applicable in everything really, I mean, not even in definitely in other kinds of art, but even it just made me think of so I'm a swimmer. And my main stroke always used to be butterfly.
01:04:59
Speaker
I haven't done that properly competitively for many, many, many years, but I went swimming the other day and I didn't let the butterfly and it was that I still remember that moment when I was younger, indeed, when you just get the technique, like you suddenly find your rhythm and it's like, Oh, this is how you do it. And this is how it, it makes it
01:05:17
Speaker
possible to swim however many lengths of butterfly but indeed if you get in the pool and assume that right okay I want to be able to swim 200 meters butterfly right now you can't do that you first have to learn the the general technique of it and I mean that sounds very similar indeed to what you're saying with the uh with the flint knapping in terms of you just have to get the feel of it first almost and the understanding of that side of things which uh yeah I find quite interesting
01:05:41
Speaker
I'm also curious whether, because you mentioned indeed that the, I'm going to go back to the stone knapping versus bronze casting, but not in a slightly different way, because stone knapping you experimented with a bit more when you were a child, whereas bronze casting came later, was it then the case that the sort of approach or the way that you, yeah, yeah, approach, I guess is the best word for it, the way that you approach those two different materials,
01:06:04
Speaker
I mean, how long, for example, did it take you to get that technique when you were a child? Because I can imagine, like you mentioned, you're just, you're hitting it, you're expecting a flake to come off, but it's just kind of slightly denting the hammer or whatever was, then I can imagine maybe if you came to bronze casting later in life, you already had that idea of, right, first, I need to learn the technique, or how did that differ?
01:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, they are quite different processes. And I can remember some of the occasions quite early on trying to make certain tools. And I still have in a cabinet some of my very early attempts at stone tools, including very rough flakes that have been bashed.
01:06:45
Speaker
including what I considered a hand axe, which actually, if you look back on it, is sort of the equivalent of a fairly rough Bronze Age core.
Advice and Conclusion
01:06:54
Speaker
But I was delighted with it at the time. And that came three or four years into the process of self teaching, to give you some idea of the amount of time that it takes. And that, that fairly
01:07:08
Speaker
crude, I guess generously labeling it as a hand axe is a good reminder of the amount of time that it took to get to that stage and the determination involved, whereas bronze casting
01:07:23
Speaker
apart from perhaps the confidence to be able to pick a crucible that's glowing bright orange full of 1000 degree or over 1000 degree liquid metal the confidence of being able to pull it out and turn in in your wrists and pour the liquid metal accurately into the mold opening into the sprue gate
01:07:44
Speaker
There is more, certainly more knowledge-based hand-eye coordination or accuracy-based, whereas flint knapping is certainly a balance between the two. Bronze casting is a lot more knowledge-based. And there's certainly, whether it's be mould making from clay or, I guess, as I said, pouring out a crucible, there are some hand processes, accuracy involved, but it's certainly very knowledge-heavy in comparison to flint knapping.
01:08:13
Speaker
that's very interesting. As a final question, what would your advice be or suggestions? I mean, you've made some fantastic suggestions so far for people who want to, for example, start flint knapping by themselves, but specifically the work that ancient craft does obviously is multifaceted, but one of the things at least
01:08:33
Speaker
that they're becoming very well known for is all the fantastic replicas that you guys make. And for people who might be interested in something like that, so in, for example, trying to replicate, be it a prehistoric technology, a prehistoric object, what would your advice be to those people?
01:08:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, to start off, that's quite a good pun with a multifaceted talking about flint mapping. Just to highlight that, because that was a good one. But how to get into a prehistoric craft and
01:09:07
Speaker
I guess it's how you want to use it because we often get asked and get messages from various people asking, you know, oh, can I be an apprentice or can I come along and help as part of this process? And if we could say yes to all of them, we'd have a whole school and, you know, I'm sure we would eventually need Offstead to come and keep everything in check that we're teaching these people to be good flintlappers or competent bronze casters to fit into a modern world. But
01:09:37
Speaker
for how people today could pick up a craft, whatever it be, whether it be making pewter tokens for medieval traded goods or for making a medieval silk garments or even bronze axes. I guess the key thing in the world of archaeology, if you feel that like me or M, that you want to approach it from
01:10:06
Speaker
learning a craft that can be applied to research and outreach to teach people, whether it be in person or through media, as we are, or even TV, knowing your subject is very important because what you're saying, however confidently you're getting across, you are producing primary evidence or data through your experience or even as a personal communications person.
01:10:35
Speaker
and having a good grip of your time period is important because whether it be someone who's young or old they will see you and hear you going through that process and will listen and will take on what you say and you will often get some right curveball questions whether it be what were hand axes for or who made the first hand action was it?
01:10:57
Speaker
But being able to answer those questions either in an accurate way or even a deflective style comes down to both knowing the time period and practice. And I guess the thing to conclude now that I've really over-engineered the response is to know
01:11:17
Speaker
your, your time period that the craft is in or no, the craft do, do research, but learn, learn the craft along the way because you'll get bogged down and get bored of research and I do, but the two have to come together because the two
01:11:34
Speaker
components will support and strengthen each other. And I'm still learning, you know, plenty. And each time I pick up and read a new report of somewhere or a new book or, or something like that, you learn along the way. And the problem certainly with pre history is that is such an enormous time period. When we try to cover the paleolithic through to the end of the Bronze Age, representively on a timeline is only about 99 point
01:12:02
Speaker
8% of human tool use and archaeology on the earth. So we've sort of given ourselves perhaps a
01:12:10
Speaker
too long a time period to try and cover, but wouldn't really want to leave anything out. profess quite openly that there are parts of prehistory and crafts are prehistory, I'm certainly not even slightly proficient in, or even slightly experienced, because you can't do everything. So find the niche, whatever craft is that interests you or even time period, and get to know it comfortably. And if you can find that craft that interests you, whether it be flint napping or spinning,
01:12:38
Speaker
and practice frequently and just be prepared to struggle. Occasionally it is part of the journey and being able to get over and through those problems will make it far easier later because you will have reinforced the troubleshooting solutions, the routes around those problems and it will be easier later. You'll be a far better teacher because you've gone through those steps.
01:13:06
Speaker
which I think is just a lovely metaphor for life in general as well. So I think any suggestion for any facet of life I would say is fantastic.
01:13:17
Speaker
So that marks the end of our tea break today. Probably time to get back to work. I have a lot to catch up on. Many, many, many years of flint knapping experience to get under my belt before I can move past my frustrations. But thank you very, very much for joining me today, James. And yeah, taking us on a journey through so much of human history in such a lovely and succinct way. I very much appreciate you taking the time. No problem. Just keep napping, I guess. With a K. With a K. Not with a K.
01:13:45
Speaker
And if anyone wants to find out more about James's work, the work of ancient craft, the different kind of axes or other technologies we discussed today, check the show notes on the podcast homepage. I'll try to put up some nice links. I hope that you all enjoyed our journey today and see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel. I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
01:14:12
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.