Phil The Flint-Knapper


The two archaeologists in the picture are called Phil Harding and Maisie Taylor. They're not doing a strange digging dance, they're actually looking at some very special pieces of wood and stone, as they've been doing an experiment.


	Phil and Maisie get up close to their pieces of wood.


Almost every week on Time Team there's a special section of the programme that happens alongside the digging. The team call this 'the cameo'.

The cameo section is all about a skill or craft dating from the period of history being investigated in the dig that week.

The idea is that the craft chosen will help to explain how people lived at these sites, how they worked and how they made things.


Here are some of the flint pieces Phil was using for his knapping experiment.

For this programme the chosen craft is called 'flint-knapping'. Several years ago archaeologists working at a site close to Northborough and dating form about the same time, found a wooden bowl.

The bowl had marks on it which showed the hollow part had been scraped out, probably using a tool made from flint, after the surface of the wood had been burnt for a while on a fire, to soften the wood.


Today Phil and Maisie are having a go at making a tool from flint, by doing some flint-knapping. This basically means knocking small pieces of flint off a stone, to create the shape they need. They'll then have a go at using the tool to scrape a piece of wood out, like the one that was found.


	Here's the log being burnt before it's scraped out. Ouch, sounds painful doesn't it?


Maisie explained what flint-knapping is all about - "Flint has this particular property, it's almost like a crystal, and if you hit it in a controlled way you can get whatever you want. You can get long thin flakes, you can get short fat flakes, you can get thick ones, thin ones, and you can turn them into knives, into scrapers, into anything you want."


Flint-knapping is very controlled, and a knapper has to be careful - you can get a very, very sharp edge from a flint. We know that people who lived in Neolithic times used flint to make tools as the tools have been found. We asked Maisie what that tells us about the people who made them.


Here's a flint tool Phil made. Tools made and used by Neolithic people would have looked very much like this.


"These flints are not just chipped stones, they're carefully made stone objects. They're not primitive... They knew more about stone tools than we do and they could do fantastic things with stone tools. They're not just bits of stone stuck into wooden handles."

So who would have done the flint-knapping back then? We asked Phil...

"You don't have to be exceptionally skilled to do it. Ordinary people drive a car, there are very few people who can't drive a car in this day and age and flint-knapping is just the same, it's just a skill and you have to learn how to do it."

"I think that in the Stone Age people were as dependent on stone, on flint-knapping or stone working as people now are on driving cars.... in the Stone Age everybody would have learned how to work stone."


To find out how successful Phil and Maisie's flint-knapping experiment was, you'll have to keep an eye out for the Time Team at Northborough programme.

Please don't try flint-knapping yourself unless you have a grown-up helping you out, you can get a very sharp edge!