The Flint-Knapping Industry at Brandon

Abstract

Despite the obvious analogies between the ancient and modern flint industries of Britain and the equally obvious gaps in the continuity of their evolution, neither archaeologists nor economic historians have stooped to elucidate the problems of what it has become a platitude to call ‘The World's Oldest Industry’. The flint-knapping industry still existing at Brandon for the production of gunflints has alone among the flint-knapping industries of Britain been described with any degree of adequacy. A bare record survives of the former existence of a score of similar industries but the majority is unrecognized and neglected. The student of the question today has as much cause to bemoan the paucity of data as did Beckmann, who wrote in 1814 ‘Many of my readers will perhaps be desirous to know in what manner our gunflints are prepared. Considering the great use made of them it will hardly be believed how much trouble I had to obtain information on the subject’. The magnitude of the dumps of waste products at Brandon at the close of the Napoleonic War provoked exclamations of wonder from contemporary topographers, but apparently the first to realize the interest and significance of the Brandon industry was Dr J. Mitchell, who in 1837 communicated his observations to the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. In 1870 James Wyatt, F.G.S., contributed a chapter on the subject to Stevens’ Flint Chips, but the classic account from which all subsequent articles derive is that by S. B. J. Skertchly, of H.M. Geological Survey.