Making a dagger from a stone with. Will Lord

hi guys i'm running a uh one-to-one flint napping workshop and this is the gentleman who's on my course today mark and mark's bought a stone for me to explore playing with so would you mind showing it check that out [Music] so we thought i'd turn the camera on and let you watch it's singing already i usually like to get to know a stone like this before i start whacking into it but well here we go it's like napping a church bill what i'm going to do i'm going to chuckle the offcuts into there because they'll be beautiful to work on wow i don't think i've ever had a bit of flint is that sung like this what the sensible thing to do with this would be to break it in half but we're going to we're going to explore the length of it i might break it in half accidentally if i keep hearing it like that can you just hear this there's such a thing as a song in a stone there's certainly a song in this one uh uh i've never wanted to quiet a stone down before but this needs quite an in down it's that thick bit on here that's making this bit sing and it's because it's such a good piece of flint oh don't do that [Music] i feel like it's my birthday this is an awesome piece of stones i feel like i've waited my whole life for this piece of stone to come through my hands hello baby do you know what i mean come on um it's the scale of the thing isn't it [Music] the thing is about this stone it won't let me off once just not at all um if i hit it wrong i'll break it confidence is key to this you do know they're giving you 150 quid for this rock don't you [Music] i'm having a sexual experience get in there look you can see right through that's the quality it's the finest silica i've napped a lot of flint this is the finest [Music] you can actually hear when the flint is happy and you can hear if any of my shots are causing the flint to be distressed it's like the shape of the sound has got a bit of a t-bone in it and that's what we're avoiding um [Music] i normally wouldn't tell you where a piece of flint like this would come from but i think i will this came from a beach along the north norfolk coastline and it's quite an important place because where this flint come from actually defines england archaeologically because the very first hand axes the oldest hand axes and and footprints even um were found on this beach and prior to actually knowing about this place we used to think the earliest footprint was 550 000 years ago in england but this particular place pushes the um the footprint of the human on english soil back to about 850 000 years they said a million when they first found the very first hand axes there because they were dating the sediments but then they realized that because of an ancient riverbed that used to travel that was throwing a little bit of uncertainty across the date so they retracted it by about 150 000 years you have to get the platforms constructed right because there can be lots of things about the shape of the platform that can cause it to not happen when it's smooth rounded about 70 degrees to the platform of the direction you're traveling into and obviously i don't really need to be trying to thin this too much although that is part of what's happening i'm playing a game playing a game of scale versus balance trying not to cause things to go wrong hinging stuff so all the flakes arrive at the surface nicely i have to try not to take anything out too deep that would be the worst thing i could do well it's one of the worst things i could do [Music] it takes me back to a um a dagger that i made 32 years ago the first stagger i ever really managed to make from start to finish and uh what was interesting is i found the i actually found the rock that i was going to make the dagger from and i knew i wanted to make a dagger and i pondered over that rock for two years i passed it every day and i looked at it and told it i was gonna make a dagger from it and then one day i knew it is its day so i picked it up and set about it caused a little bit of a moment in there um that'll take some getting out but we will see what we can do but anyway i didn't get two years to ponder this i met this flint this morning when mark so kindly brought it along he said there i want to see you make a dagger out of that i'm trying to get over this problem you can see just there nothing wrong with the flint or me i caused the problem almost do full recovery one small screw up it's not always given that you're gonna get out of it we're doing our best she's still singing i want to get to here but i kind of need to come through here a bit first it's all golfing completely the other direction i'm basically hitting it with the deer antler you know here um and i'm using i believe that to be a piece of uh it's not quartzite this is probably basalt volcanic it's really it's got nicer i'll translate it properly it has a nice abrasive quality to it stone edge tv this is [Music] you can hear the cells inside my body saying pay attention right across the stone get in there which was helpful because it's helped me with this lump that i've been trying to reach over here if any rocks could talk hey sounds gorgeous i believe it's talking i believe it's singing the song of the stone because i've ever heard a piece queen that seemed like it i'm raw like it it's roaring when them flakes are coming off in it here any single one of these strikes could actually cause us to break it right through the middle so that's why we're um in a little bit of a a moment we're looking at over probably 3 000 impacts to go well [Music] not much of a tall order i haven't even got to the bottom of the cortex yet so the cortex is the skin of the flint because what you might not know about flint it's basically it's basically a sponge a very very old sponge it's a piece of coral reef system from about 100 million years ago it's the exoskeletal structures of micro marine organisms and seabed started out before the dinosaurs or during [Music] seen some stuff here haven't you part one [Music] gosh that stone age telephone with the tight area to play certain things you have to watch out for when you're flint napping a little shapes certain little shapes can be bad news [Music] you get to recognise them after a while so this isn't something that you normally just sit down and do ladies and gentlemen i've been doing this craft of flint napping for over 45 years i grew up at the knee of a flint knapper and i've been smashing rocks ever since but hopefully all them years are paying off now i quite like that at the end gentle suggestion the back of the handle you imagine my hands gotta fit around this then we're gonna have a blade going out the front we need to steer that across right boy you don't you make one from time to time it's got like a landscape in the middle with a nipple going on so i mean what i'm doing at the moment is i'm looking around for the best approach because things get thinned out and things get filled up which is a weird thing to say when you're thinning i'm moving the edge backwards and forwards all the time and that has a persuasion on where i should be taking the flint from you might be saying are you crazy hindered like that flint respects being hit like that it means it understands what i'm trying to remove it needs me to do that if i want to take a dagger out of this that's the way to do it [Music] right up the tip have a little lump sitting there it's quite difficult [Laughter] what you get is you get lots of little micro moments going on it can be challenging you attempt to clear them not all your attempts are going to go right to start off with it can always cause quite a lot of difficulties that's better we got through that lump whew imagine a stone age tribe sitting around the flintlapper there wasn't many flint knappers that would be putting stunts like this they're making a whole bunch of tools but from time to time somebody would have accelerated with this skill set and i think they would have had a tribe of people sitting around watching probably praying that everything was going to go right much like you are now but throw a screen instead of a campfire or something [Music] oh we just took the top off the nipple is that good or a bad thing uh so how's your nerves over there probably worse than yours yeah new songs now you know who's working here don't you baby we are working it you know what i'm 51 years old i've been wearing glasses for reading for the last 11 years and i should really have mum right now but not because i'm scared of the flint just because i can see it [Music] i just lost my handle [ __ ] can you dig that right so we round it up at the back that's what you do about a situation like that yes i'm sorry if you're young my swear word landed on your tender ears there are times in life where permission is granted to swear that was one of them wasn't that an exciting journey hmm i wonder what title i'm going to put at the front of this movie so we said we were making a dagger didn't we well it was a bit long so we're gonna do is we're going to narrow in the neck at the back here so i can get handlebar on it anyway if you watch that from the beginning to the end i'm sorry to disappoint and uh but no doubt there'll be a part of you that considers that was reasonably entertaining and um you might have learned a little bit about just how hard this craft can be and if you can't take um on the chin don't ever flint that right that's what flint napping is about you go through these corridors and sometimes you'll get luckier than others i think we understand that as the dagger handle on the bottom there thanks for watching you've been watching will lord and um if you'd like to you could always um come in and watch your shop with me and i'll give you some flint and let you go through the exact same process all the best

Channel: Will Lord Prehistoric Survival

Views: 25,344

Keywords: Will Lord, Primitive technology, ancient technology, flint knapping, neolithioc, hand made craafts, stone daggers, flint knife

Id: A3qHoyAtQZU

Length: 31min 58sec (1918 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021