Replacing Flint Flakes

Abstract

WITH reference to the replacing of flint flakes on Palaeolithic implements it may be of interest to your correspondent, Mr. W. G. Smith (NATURE, vol. xxiv. p. 582), to learn that I have succeeded in building up a core out of Neolithic flakes. When searching the sandhills at Dundrum, Co. Down, last August, with my friend Mr. J. S. Hyland, I noticed a number of flakes of a similar colour lying on the slightly raised shingly beach on which the sandhills stand, at a point where the sand had apparently been recently blown away. Seeing from an imperfection in the stone that several fragments had formed part of the same flint, I collected all the pieces I could find, some of which were at a yard or two's distance from the rest. Without much trouble I was able the same evening to put them together, and have so fixed twenty-two flakes into position, forming about three-fourths of the original pebble. The operator had first broken the pebble into two halves, and then chipped two-thirds of one half away in flakes, of which I found thirteen; the remainder of that half he threw down as useless. Of the other half I have nine flakes, and one is missing; the unbroken remainder is also gone. Perhaps the workman threw it away to a distance in disgust, as he does not seem to have got a single satisfactory flake out of the whole flint. The appearance of the half which I have almost complete is extremely like the illustration of the core made up out of a modern flint-knapper's flakes in Evans' “Stone Implements,” except that the crowns of the flakes are triangular instead of quadrangular. There are the same small interstices between the crowns of the flakes, showing that the blow splinters off on each side of the bulb of percussion a small fragment, as well as the flake itself. This explains why the average concavity on the core is slightly less than the average convexity of the flake at the top of the bulb of percussion.