Knapping A Massive Brandon Flint Nodule with Dr. James Dilley

hello i'm dr james dilley sat in my preferred arrangement surrounded by pieces of flint on this rather cold day about to break open at least one of these bits of flint but this flint is special it comes from one of the most famous flint locations in the uk from near grimes graves it's a really fantastic opportunity to actually have a go at napping some of this flint for those that know a little bit about flint you might know how it might have been formed or where it's come from but for those that don't a little bit of a recap flynn is not igneous volcanic and it's not metamorphic so it hasn't undergone huge amounts of pressure or heat it's actually sedimentary it forms in chalk but flint has its own category of bio sedimentary it's almost purely comprised of silica dioxide exactly like glass and like glass it can be flaked to be very sharp predictably this particular flint comes from the louise nodula chalk system and it's about 86 to 90 odd million years old this selection of flint i have here came from a secondary deposit that's much later but it's still from the same primary source people have been using flint in the uk for almost a million years up until almost today for adding to walls or doing masonry work a little bit later or earlier rather than making gun flints and earlier than that perhaps churches for striker lights and even further back for stone tools as you all know in my line of work it's mostly stone tools in pre-history so for pieces like this i might be thinking about how i could possibly make something like a flint axe head like this example here which hasn't been polished but it's the same sort of really jet black lovely flint but to get anywhere near to that stage i need to look at how i can break open this piece of flint and i'm going to start with the biggest i think this is about 60 kilos in weight it's too big for me to easily balance on my leg to work it so i'm going to break it open as people would have done in the neolithic and i'm going to use one of these oversized hard hammers for the oversized piece of flint it may have a couple of cracks in it but to be honest if there's a couple of cracks in it it'll make it easier to quarter down into smaller bits make life a little bit easier i'm not going to make one giant stone tool out of this so we'll give it a couple of taps and see how it goes so it's making an interesting sound it doesn't doesn't sound totally clean some of these other bits do sound a bit better but this one sounds a bit more dull so it may crack but i've got to try and find a good spot to either get some good flakes off or at least encourage it to crack so let's see let's take a flake off here there we go so one big nice flake let's see really jet black flint and uh conveniently two huge pieces of flint here and you can see it's it's got a lot of material in the middle huge amounts of fossil deposit but with these two fantastically flat surfaces i've got now i can flip it on its side and either use this as the world's biggest blade core or i can chop it into smaller pieces to get some good flakes off and see if i can get one of them so this will essentially be exactly the same as well as i'm napping normally but just on a large scale sounds much better now listen to the ring in that okay hopefully the first of many so [Music] i think there's some more of that flake to come off [Applause] so so i've got a nice big chunk here for a blade core you can see it's still got a lot of this fossil material in it's a nice mix between the darker material and the grayer fossil material that grayer material is a lot more resistant which is quite good for axes because it won't be quite so brittle nice big flake for a hand axe uh uh so oh i'm tempted to leave this for now because i've got potential for a giant blade core here it's got the nice prismatic length to it and with one flake here i can make a really nice steep platform to drive off those long blades so rather than just continuing and bashing it down into smaller flakes i think i'll leave this i've got plenty of really good flakes here to work with so make some smaller tools some axes and then i've got the other bits to work with so it's time to have a go with a couple of these pieces so now i've got my selection of flakes and still a whole nother half to go there i'll see if i can actually make that first tool out of some of this fantastic grimes groves flint so this flake looks pretty good might be able to sneak a decent hand axe out of it this is how a lot of hand axes would have been made from flakes in some parts of the uk where you tend to get more nodular finger shaped pieces of flint and you tend to get more of the pointed ficron shaped hand axes that might be the one tool but from areas where you get more of this tabular flint they were more often than not derived from flakes just like this so i've got my nice flat side and i've got this clearly convexed ridged side that i'm going to have to thin down quite dramatically and that's the first thing i'm going to do so i'll take one of my pebbles and start to set up a few platforms to come back on myself if i just started hitting the edges now and hope to drive flakes underneath they'd come underneath and terminate about here with really i need them to travel across the surface and actually thin the piece down but these aren't very big flakes i'm just changing the angle you can see on this side here i've just dropped the angle a little bit so when i make contact the shock will travel further rather than just going straight down but when you're changing the angle of these flakes remember that these new surfaces these flake scars effectively are going to be your strike points so they need to be as clean and as flat as possible if there's lots of ridges flake scars little troughs or fractures of any kind when you come to hit it that might distribute the shock in a weird way so unless it is nice and flat you need to make sure you keep it really tidy so i'll go for one of those first flakes to drive across the back and you can see it's driven right across the back of it just taking some small flakes off just to maintain a gentle curve across the back the shock doesn't like to travel through concavities so i'm just dropping that angle a little bit there keeping a very close eye on how clean those flake scars look so this hand axe is going quite ovate at the moment i didn't particularly have a shape in mind i often try and leave it to the flint to dictate what kind of shape it wants to be it could still be a pointed hand axe maybe we'll go back to being pointed hand axe and i'll probably change my mind again in a moment so i've prepared all of these edges all the way around i'm going to use another stone but to abrade the edges intentionally blunt them that may seem a bit counter-intuitive but i'll get much better contact the very thin sharp fresh edges are also very weak so won't allow shock to travel across the surface as easily i often get asked can you use these flakes for other tools of course you can in fact this flake that's just come off is absolutely razor sharp it's far sharper than i could ever make this hand axe because it has that really really straight molecule thick edge on it and when i've done butchery experiments before rather than going straight in with a hand axe i tend to start with a flake to actually start to cut through the hide animal hairs can blunt a hand axe very very quickly whereas using a flake a fairly disposable object in comparison gets through it very very quickly and then once you actually down onto the meat a hand axe is the tool to use and certainly as a modern flint knapper i use all of these flakes for making tools from other parts of pre-history which is not such a luxury people would have had in the paleolithic to take off a flake and think oh that'll make a good neolithic arrowhead i'll save that for several hundred thousand years i'm going to bring in a different tool now a red deer antler hammer flakes detached by antler hammer can really travel across the surface because you're only clipping the very edge so the shock has to travel over a distance rather than deeply into the stone another razor sharp flake this is actually getting to the point where the quality of the flint is so good i could use this as a blank for a beaker dagger and i'm starting to dip in and out of different time periods going from the extreme ends of the lower paleolithic right through to the early bronze age so so you so so smaller soft hammer for some of these final flakes i don't need the weight of the heavy hammer so [Music] you [Applause] [Applause] so i think that's pretty good for a pointed hand axe a little bit dusty but uh sure if i get some moisture on it see the color of the flint a little bit better there we go it's a not bad starting piece for this giant piece of flint i suppose we could have played an equivalent game of guess the number of sweeties in the jar for guess the number of potential hand axes that could come from this but uh that's hand axe number one but hopefully i'll be able to get some neolithic tools from some flint so close to a famous late neolithic site we take great pride in the videos produced for the ancient craft channel we would really love to continue making more videos with new tutorials site visits artifact showcases and of course nap time we have a patreon account where you can support us in our efforts there are competitions and replica artifact giveaways check it out here and thank you to those who have already signed up thank you for watching please subscribe to our channel if you haven't already

Channel: AncientCraftUK - Dr. James Dilley

Views: 94,494

Keywords: flint, flintknapping, prehistory, mesolithic, ancientcraft, james dilley, Ancient Craft, bipolar percussion, Ancient, craft, neolithic, palaeolithic, primitive, technology, primitive technology, stone age, prehistoric, microlith, bushcraft, archaeology, archaeologist, experimental archaeology, knapping, dilley, experimental, survival, stone tool, flint tool, lithic

Id: qfuR7Zy1Cv4

Length: 28min 28sec (1708 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021