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Description: | A flint pick, made by knapping. This pick is shaped like an elongated teardrop, with a roughly diamond-shaped cross-section. The butt end is rounded. This is a crude tool, made quickly. It is complete, except for the point, which has been broken off; the edges adjacent to the end have also been chipped; these chips reveal the light grey flint below the cortex that coats the artefact, suggesting that the chips occurred a long time later; however, their possibly regular nature might hint at re-use several thousand years after the pick was first made; alternatively, they could just be from plough damage. The butt end has received a large number of small chips, such as would be produced by repeated hammering: this suggests that either the pick had a secondary use as a hammer, or that it was hammered-upon. This may have been while it was being used as a hand-pick. If the pick was being as a hammer, then this may have been for the rough dressing of stone (hammering on other materials, such as timber would have been done with wooden mauls, not stone hammers); if the pick was being hammered upon, then it may have been used to split wood, although this is unlikely, as wooded wedges would be used for this purpose. The most likely use of this artefact then is a double-ended hand tool for dressing stone. This artefact is coated all over with a thick (1.2mm) white cortex, which is stained orange in patches by iron veins in the flint. The only gaps in the cortex are those where the object has been later damaged. One face is very well preserved, with a rough patch of original cortex. The other face is rather worn, with some of the original surface eroded away in patches. This artefact is likely to date to the Neolithic period. | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Temporal: | -4500
-1500 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Dom Andrews | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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