The Neolithic Age is sometimes, especially on the other side of the Channel, called the period of polished stone:[254] but most of our flint implements were neither ground nor polished; they were merely chipped. Many specimens indeed, from one cause or another, have never received their finishing touches; but many others were of such a kind that grinding or polishing would have been labour lost.[255]
The two main divisions of flint implements.
Neolithic flint implements may be grouped in two classes. In one, which comprises the larger kinds—axes, hammer-stones, and the like—the implement was made out of a block of flint, and the splinters struck off during the process of manufacture were either mere waste or utilized for making smaller tools.[256] The other class consists of tools which were made out of flakes, the core, after all the required flakes had been detached, being thrown away.[257]
How flint implements were made.
Flint fresh from the quarry was easier to manufacture; and accordingly the cutlers established their workshops close by the mines. Their methods were perhaps not everywhere the same; but it is easy to form a general idea of them from observing the processes which are followed by tribes which are still in their stone age and by the knappers who ply their trade near Grime’s Graves. Sometimes, like the Cloud River Indians, the workers may have applied a pebble or a punch of deer-horn to the surface of the flint block, and produced flakes by striking it with his stone hammer; but Sir John Evans believes that the flakes were generally struck off with a hammer or a pebble alone; and he has found experimentally that by this simple method a practised hand can attain almost perfect precision. Laying the flakes which he had thus removed with the flat face uppermost upon a smooth block of stone, he has succeeded by blows of a pebble in chipping their ends into whatever form he desired. Similarly hatchets were first rough-hewn by striking splinters from the flint block, and afterwards gradually chipped into the proper shape. Whether the material was flint or some other stone, the method would have remained the same. When it was desired to attain the utmost perfection, the implements were ground, not upon a revolving but upon a fixed stone, and polished by stone rubbers in conjunction with sand.[258] The process by which the arrow-heads and spear-heads were manufactured, whose exquisite workmanship entrances all who see them, cannot be described; for the modern tribes who make such weapons work in various ways. Small stone tools, however, are often found, with blunted ends, made out of thick flakes, which may have been used in arrow-flaking, and which accordingly have been termed ‘fabricators’; and as they are most numerous in the districts which have yielded the greatest number of arrow-heads, the appellation is probably correct. Arrow-heads have indeed been recently made with them, but with somewhat obtuse edges; and it has therefore been suggested that the fabricator was only used for removing irregularities from the flake, and that the final chipping was accomplished with a tool of deer-horn, which, pressed deftly against the edge of the flake, detached minute splinters. The surface of many flint arrow-heads and javelin-heads is, however, covered with beautifully uniform fluting, like ripple-marks on sand; and the most experienced modern operators confess that they do not understand how this effect was produced.[259]
Fig. 5. ½
Fig. 6. ½
