| Stone Age Materials
During the Stone Age flint and chert were shaped (or chipped) for use as cutting tools and weapons, while basalt and sandstone were used for ground stone tools, such as quern-stones. Wood, bone, shell, antler and other materials were widely used, too. Stone artefacts are most commonly found today. During the most recent part of the period, sediments (like clay) were used to make pottery. The period encompasses the first widespread use of technology in human evolution and the spread of humanity from the savannas of East Africa to the rest of the world. It ended with the development of agriculture, the domestication of certain animals and the smelting of copper ore to produce metal.
How Stone Age Tools were made
About 150,000 years ago, the first of several dramatic advances in tool technology took place. With their increasing brain capacities, early homo sapiens acquired the foresight and ability to perceive in a raw lump of stone into finished tools of a complex nature. To produce such implements required long series of preparatory steps, but with new methods, developed from the old techniques of percussion and, later, pressure flaking, early men produced tools of increasing sharpness, delicacy and beauty.
How to tell that your artefact is authentic
Colour and Patination:-
Flint is made of two constituent: Opal Silica + Crypto-Crystaline Silica, in variable proportions. Freshly extracted flint is covered in a soft outer layer called the “Cortex”, a whitish skin that covers the whole flint. Flint itself (beneath the cortex) is normally Black but can be also Dark Blue to shades of Brown and Red ,Yellow ,white. Some flints are also banded different colours (like the lower Thames gravel flints). Different colour flints can indicate their place of origin e.g. Grey flint = Lincolnshire, Black flint = East Anglia & Kent, Banded flint: yellow/brown = Thames Valley. When worked flints are exposed on the ground surface or become buried in soils over time the body (area not covered in cortex) of the flint is altered by weather/and or salts in the soil and a Patina is formed. (a chemical alteration to the flint surface where a colour change occurs).
The Mechanics of Patination:-
Stage 1: The acid in rain water over time dissolves away the most soluable part of the flint (the opal silica) leaving behind a porous surface. Stage 2: This porous surface over time absorbes mineral salts from the soils or gravels it comes into contact with…eventually forming a skin on the surface = a “patina”. This altered outer skin can be distinguished from the body of the flint if the flint surface is chipped. The patina colour can also indicate as to the find location of the implement (not necessarily its point of manufacture)…e.g. White patina = Cotswold's & Sussex Downs (chalky areas); Dark Brown = Fenland (Peat staining); Yellow & speckled Green = Warren Hill, Suffolf. The amount of patination i.e. depth of skin/colour is dependent on various factors …exposure/salts/weathering type…so it is not possible to date the age by patination alone, but it does give a good indicator of its location and authenticity. If an implement is chipped in antiquity at a different point in time then two variables shades of patina will be observed, but a modern day chip/damage will expose the natural internal body colour of the flint. Graham Woollard, eminent collector and teacher.
Please return to our Stone Age artefact links at the top of this page to view the Stone Age artefacts we have for sale.
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