Recreating an ancient quartz crystal dagger.

hi there guys welcome back into the Earth Lodge um just before we get started I need to have a little drink what's that you say I'm drinking out of crystal glass yes you are correct which happens to be the subject of what this video is about because over the last few years people have been showing me this completely unique Crystal dagger about five thousand years old and was found in Spain um and it has an ivory handle made out of mammoth ivory I've got the mammoth ivory but I couldn't get the crystal that's been the thing that's stopping me that has been stopping me actually having a go at that and believe you may I have been looking around anyway last week when I was touring with um Maude to wonderful places we've stopped in some shops around the Glastonbury area we're actually in Glastonbury most of the time they didn't have what I wanted no idea what I was thinking really in fact um there's a funny story with this but we're going to open this up we're going to have a look and we're gonna find out whether it's any good for the job in hand thank you there's actually two bits in here one tiny little bit which I thought I'd experiment with and then yeah it was expensive so what we have here is a double a double termination piece of quartz and what I don't know about it is whether it concoidally fractures and what I mean by that is when I try and strike a flake of it off of it whether it can travel through it smoothly I definitely want to try and preserve the length but I've got the width to do stuff with and as you can see there are some imperfections in it but it's all about giving it a whack and seeing what happens so when I say that this was so when I say that this was expensive actually this cost me a couple of hundred quid um but I was advised when I was trying to get hold of some of this that I should be expecting a price ticket of about a thousand pounds um and perhaps this was cheaper because it's not quite clear and it could be down to the fact it's slightly different type I'm not an expert on quartz I don't know but what we're going to do is I'm looking at this I'm building up an idea I'm gonna set up a platform just here and I'm going to try and cast a big flake off of the top um quite an exciting moment really when you think there's a couple hundred quid at stake for me just getting my leg pad on but while I'm doing that I'm thinking I'm gonna know whether this is any use even before I've Struck it probably with their Handler because I've got two tools at my Arsenal I've got this Dear Antler and I'm going to use this this is quartzite that's quartz um but I'm going to use this quartz quartzite Pebble to set up a platform and it's going to be in the release of them tiny little Flakes I'm going to find out a hell of a lot about that I can see um imperfections in it wish I could see it in the Flint like that um so from the word go wish me luck let's see what we've actually got here oh now that that's not the best news in the world um because it's rugged it's not um it didn't break smoothly and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to abrade the edge like this I've made the edge strong now and then we'll turn it over and I'm going to hit that right there with the deer antler bear with me I'm just building up this one hmm you see so this is this if it had been in another material would have come off in one piece what that consequently tells me is that this is not um concordly fracturing very well when you look at the surface on there it's really really rough now it's quite funny because when I was in the shop I said to the lady I said is there anything that you're doing that price and she said no she said that's what it is I said oh okay awesome because there's a bit of an experiment she goes well what are you going to do with it I said I'm going to smash it up and she looked at me as if I was balmy I said yeah I actually am and it does actually look like what I'm gonna do um I don't need this as a crystal I need this as a dagger so what I'm going to do is I'm going to push on a little bit deeper and uh see what happens they're interesting interestingly enough what the hazy stuff that I can see is sitting closer to this side and the cleanest stuff seems like it's over this side so I'm gonna keep trying to take the bottom off and things might clear it up and they might get a bit tidier you never know they might not hmm foreign Crystal that does break clean and um what I believe about it is is that it was like a plate of Crystal instead of Crystal forms by growing what I had before looked like it it developed in the crack of another rock and it was clean and it was clear and that's the stuff which I've been trying to get hold of quite often when I've mention it to people um they have no idea what I'm talking about because they haven't actually seen it we're talking about a rare substance really and also interestingly enough you can see how all of this stuff is coming off is just collapsing it's doesn't really have any um integrals [Music] can't hold itself together that was one of the cleaner flakes so far well I certainly can't take it back to the shop telling everyone got a dud foreign okay I mean his behavior is fairly consistent I know one thing it was never expecting this to happen to it right so we cast quite a lot of flakes off from the underside and that's getting a bit flat so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to try and take this hill off here from over here which involves going back to the um quartzite Rock and putting a platform into the side here which brings the edge of the stone up higher towards the point that I want to knock off and this could be massively this this could actually be the decide in fact to this it might not like what I'm going to do to it at all cool and that went right over the top there I normally brush that material off the debitage off on my hand but these little micro shards are stupidly Sharp um so that flake went right over the top that was a success come down here a little bit wait accidentally but I really need to deal I need to make a bold attempts at this tip here because if this gets too thin I don't want to be striking the tip because we'll just snap it enough okay right so you know what even though it's not napping how I wanted it to it's still napping and I'm feeling like I would like it to work out because I'll go with it you know I'll still if I can get what I want from it I will still put it into um I'll still put I'll still put um a mammoth tusk ivory handle on it but that all depends whether we get there and um I'm not sure the other crystal that's very close by is the lens of my camera that's one thing I'm hoping I don't break which happens to be seven inches away from this point of impact so can you see there appears to be um a correct Lane in there that's always been in there at the moment it's holding itself together what the um future of it is undecided I guess see even with all of that strange rugged surface the flakes are getting across the stone they're doing what I'd want them to do so that's good so we're making a crystal dagger let's remind ourselves there was a originally made over 5 000 years ago that must have been um quite a thing what isn't going to get included in this film is the production of the ivory handle and I've been looking at that closely because it seems like a two section piece and it's curved and quite intricate let's see what I'm saying okay look at you can just see from these flakes this is quite an ordeal for this Stone to be going through so every time I take something off I've got to set a situation up with what's called a platform prior to trying to get it keep getting little Bloods probably do with the little caption don't try this at home and incidentally if you know more about quartz than I do which is easy because I don't know a lot about it and you happen to know where I can get a piece that would break like glass I'd be interested in that I was told by the experts who are traders of such things so a they couldn't get a bit at the moment I didn't have a bit and if they could get it it was going to be costing me the tune of about a thousand pounds so that's quite a lot of money for a rock that you're gonna treat like this because if there's anything because if there's anything like Flint one bad shot that's the end of it you imagine smashing into a thousand quids worth of stone like this don't get your nerves don't get your nerves going something's happening guys we're making a crystal dagger and it may be the first time it's been done since the original five thousand years ago and just for the record it could all go wrong at any time so just a record foreign something for the nerves thank you incidentally you know a piece of obsidian beautiful material Flem with nice features in it now so what is a rock ever worth how do you put a price around such things well sometime back I sent a rock to America for a friend of mine and that was a it was one of the finest bits of Flint I'd ever had and that cost me 200 quid just to post it that was a gift so when a rock's right a rock is right it's worth its weight in gold especially to us Nappers then if you know me one thing you do know is I've never met this actual dagger but it'll get a strong sense I'm talking about the Spanish one I've got a strong sense but it's gonna I knew that that end was coming off well I didn't know that but it has come off I've got a strong sense I don't actually mind because from what I read the actual dagger is eight and a half inches long and that probably includes the handle but that's a that's a fact or a statistic that I don't actually know um so with this being about five and a half inches long now once you've got your handle it kind of makes sense that makes so even though that little back end has come off it doesn't matter it's one of the things we do as modern people these days we're big knives and all that sort of stuff but in the Stone Age they generally they didn't they're things that worked for things I could use and the size of the dagger wasn't ever going to help you I think big daggers like that kind of come into the territory of walking through jungles and using friends and maches but nothing to do with knife skills really all I know is every time I hit this I need to make that strike worth 200 quid because then if I give it a 30 quid I see a game over in other words I've got to stay in charge so if you've got this far through the movie well done I've decided not to shorten this movie and make it watchable in a minute and a half I felt this deserved some detail so full movie full length that's good kick in Little Things biting biting me in the finger tiny little Shard so kind of hang around they lay there foreign if this was Flint I'd be really pushing to make it micro thin really thin but with this I know I'm not going to get if I try and do that I'm not going to get a dagger oh into the nature of the material cool stubborn area that as you can see um if you're kind of calculating doing this for such an expensive rock as well as mentioning that there's a bloody big deal from anyone's perspective and I've learned during making this I thought after I'd hit it once I honestly thought there's about 20 hits before I tried we'll walk away from it and say do you know what there's no dagger in that stone and um in a lot of ways I was wrong because we have a dagger right now maybe just um a little bit of trimming at the back here like on the original so that licks that'll accept the journey into um a piece of mammoth tusk well hmm I guess we did a thing I'll show you the mammoth tusk I'm going to be using that is a piece of mammoth tusk out of the Arctic tundra um and that's going to be going in there like that yeah well I hope you enjoyed that that was um a challenge from anyone's perspective now that challenged me um if you did enjoy it do us favor like it follow my posts share subscribe or whatever and um we'll keep on there'll be another part to that Journey all the best Cheers

Channel: Will Lord Prehistoric Survival

Views: 46,607

Keywords:

Id: 4hdvxIBu5HM

Length: 32min 27sec (1947 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023