The Mousterian flake tools
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- cutlery
- saw
- wrench
- flake tool
- vise
The Mousterian and related flake industries followed the Acheulean. A refinement of the prepared-core technique, termed Levallois, was developed during the middle to upper Acheulean. In this method, a core was craftily trimmed in such a manner that a skillfully applied last blow would detach a large preshaped flake directly usable as an implement; the core was discarded. Such a flake tool, with one flat surface, is known as a unifacial tool because a single bevel forms the working edge. There are two principal kinds of flakes, points and scrapers. The former are roughly triangular, with two trimmed or sharp edges meeting in a point, the base or butt of the triangle being thick and blunt. The side scrapers have a sharp edge in the long direction of the flake, with an opposite, thicker butt section. The scraper could function as a knife, although it is speculated that it was used for working wood and skins, a supposition leading to the idea that skins were being used for clothing.
Late Paleolithic toolmaking
The fourth phase of Paleolithic toolmaking was introduced perhaps 40,000 years ago by the Aurignacian industry, a forerunner of the last and most brilliant achievements of the Old Stone Age. Extraordinary inventiveness was characteristic of the Aurignacian tradition and its several short-term successors. They can be lumped into a unit of development that spans the next 25,000 years.
Fully modern humans—whose first representative is the Cro-Magnon—emerged within this period, perhaps 35,000 years ago, during the time of the development and elaboration of rock technology, which, by providing a variety of specialized tools, mostly of the flake and blade types, at last brought materials other than rock into extensive use. It was also a time when the great plains in northern and eastern Europe carried such a heavy reindeer population, in addition to wild horses and mammoths, that it has been called the Reindeer Age. This produced a hunting economy providing food and great quantities of bone, horn, skin, sinews, and, while the mammoth lasted, ivory; with it grew new technologies exploiting the unique properties of materials hitherto unworkable because of their hardness. This technological diversification was made possible by new techniques and rock tools, whose specialization and complexity fit them to the fresh tasks. The most significant tool was the burin, or graver, a stout, narrow-bladed flint able to scrape narrow grooves in bone; two parallel grooves, for example, would allow a sliver of bone to be detached as stock for a needle, pin, awl, or other small object. Larger pieces of bone were worked into hooks with one or more barbs or points. Sections of antler were carved into splitting wedges to work out long pieces of bone to form the dartlike projectiles of the spear-thrower. Sandrock polishers were added to the tool kit to sharpen and shape tips, needles, and other articles.
A spectacular item that developed by the end of the Paleolithic was the spear-thrower, a hand-held stick, of wood or antler, notched at one end. Functioning as an extension of the arm, it added considerable kinetic energy, and therefore range, to a short spear tipped with flint or bone. The tipped projectile represented still another innovation, for it was the first hafted implement.
Hafting, or the fitting of a handle to a cutting edge, was a momentous and far-reaching invention of about 35,000 years ago. It was a critical step toward the creation of new tools and improved models of old ones. In its simplest form, the haft may have been no more than a grass or leaf bundle whose limited function was to protect the hand when a fractured rock was used as a knife. Mechanically, the handle became a force-transmitting intermediary between the source of the force and the toolhead. An extension of the arms, the handle provided an increased radius of swing. This moved the toolhead faster to give it more kinetic energy for a harder and more telling blow than the arms alone could provide. A man using a hand-held axhead could cut only small trees, whereas with a hafted ax he could fell a tree of almost any size.
The prepared-core technique that provided preshaped flakes was refined and extended to provide preshaped blades, long, slender pieces of flint of trapezoidal cross section, each corner having a straight cutting edge without the serrations of a chipped tool. This is known as the blade tool industry, a final complement to the core and flake tool technologies. Such blades made thin and splendid knives of great variety; many of these knives were backed; that is, the back of the blade was blunted for safer handling. Thin blades were further reduced to smaller pieces, often having a geometric form such as triangular, square, or trapezoidal, called microliths. These small bits of sharp flint were cemented (using resin) into a groove in a piece of wood to form a tool with a cutting edge longer than it was feasible to produce in a single piece of brittle flint; examples are a spear with a long cutting edge or the farmer’s sickle of later date.
The second major mechanical invention of the Upper Paleolithic was the bow, a device even more effective than the spear-thrower for increasing the distance between the hunter and the hunted. It is difficult to date precisely, for the only evidence of its use is found in cave paintings. Mere finds of rock points without bows prove nothing because such tips were used on the projectiles of spear-throwers. The earliest representations of the bow come from North Africa from 30,000 to 15,000 bce. Once the bow had been devised, it spread with astonishing rapidity, its effectiveness making it the weapon par excellence. When the bow was pulled, it stored the gradually expended energy of the archer’s muscles; this energy was suddenly released to give the projectile a “muzzle velocity” far higher than that possible from a spear-thrower and of superior accuracy. It was a principal weapon through the 15th century ce and was ousted then only by gunpowder.
Neolithic tools
The Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age, the age of the ground tool, is defined by the advent around 7000 bce of ground and polished celts (ax and adz heads) as well as similarly treated chisels and gouges, often made of such stones as jadeite, diorite, or schist, all harder than flint. A ground tool is one that was chipped to rough shape in the old manner and then rubbed on or with a coarse abrasive rock to remove the chip scars either from the entire surface or around the working edge. Polishing was a last step, a final grinding with fine abrasive. That such a tool is pleasing to the eye is incidental; the real worth of the smoothing lay in the even cutting edge, superior strength, and better handling. The new ax would sink deeper for a given blow while delivering a clean and broad cut; its smooth bit, more shock resistant than the former flaked edge, had less tendency to wedge in a cut.
Although the polished rock tool is the index to the Neolithic Period, it may be noted that the ice sheets were receding and climatic conditions were assisting the conversion of hunters into herdsmen. The new, relatively sedentary life spawned further inventions, such as pottery. From the standpoint of tools, the potter’s kiln and art were necessary steps to metals, for a modification of the kiln probably provided the high temperatures and equipment needed for metalworking, first for melting native metals and later for the smelting process that gave rise to a wealth of metals, several of which proved to be superior materials for tools.
The polished Neolithic ax, a heavy implement, was in sharp contrast to the delicate small-rock work of the last stages of the Paleolithic Period and was a reversal of the traditions of products that had yielded ever more lineal feet of cutting edge per pound of stone. The ax and its companion adz met the need to clear land as agriculture developed. An efficient tree-cutting tool was indispensable for the slash-and-burn agriculture then devised. Trees were either cut down or killed by ringing them with an ax; the debris was burned over, with the ashes conferring a slight enrichment of the stump-filled field. The soil was next scarified with sticks or stone-headed hoes resembling the adz to prepare it for seeding among the stumps. Without manuring or other treatment, the land was exhausted after a few years, necessitating a repetition of the clearing process elsewhere. The consequence was a shifting settlement pattern, with a good ax needed not only for felling trees but also for working timber for settlement.
Wood began its broad role in human life with the ground and polished tools of the Neolithic. Home and fire, furniture and utensils, cradle and coffin were products of the ax, adz, and chisel, which could fashion wood intricately and with precision. This kit of tools turned wood into an almost universal building material, for a host of new things was now possible, such as dugout canoes of oak, paddles and framing for hide-covered boats, sledges, skis, wooden platters and ladles, as well as other household gear. Mortise and tenon joints were invented for the structural framing of substantial habitations. Some of the gabled houses were up to 30 metres (100 feet) long and 20 metres (66 feet) wide and are believed to have served as both granaries and living quarters for perhaps 20 people comprising several families.
In a revealing experiment, 4,000-year-old polished rock axes, furnished by the Danish National Museum and carrying the sharpness left after their last use 4,000 years ago, were fitted with ash handles modeled after that of a Neolithic hafted ax preserved in a bog, giving the ax an overall length of nearly 63 cm (25 inches). (A modern steel felling ax has a 91-cm [36-inch] handle.) When these were used in a Danish forest, it was soon found that the violent action of the modern technique of swinging a steel ax and putting shoulder and weight behind the blade to give long and powerful blows was disastrous, either ruining the edge or breaking the blade. Proper handling meant short quick strokes that chipped at the tree, the body action being constrained to mainly elbow and wrist motion. After getting into form, the men found it possible to fell an oak tree more than 0.3 metre (1 foot) in diameter in half an hour or a pine 61 cm (2 feet) in diameter in less than 20 minutes. One-eighth acre (600 square yards, or 0.05 hectare) of silver birch forest were cleared by three men in four hours. One axhead cut down more than 100 trees on its original (old) sharpening. It was concluded that Neolithic people and their ground flint axes had no great difficulties in making large clearings in the forest for the purposes of cultivation. It may also be remarked that it was less trouble to clear the forest than to break the age-old and tough sod of the plains.
The Neolithic farmers of northern Europe, with their practice of deforestation for agriculture, were completely dependent upon polished axes. This created a heavy demand for good rock that depleted local sources and resulted in flint mining in well-endowed locations in what are now England, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Sicily, and Egypt. Often more than just mining, these operations were ax factories where flints were shaped into rough form by chipping at the pithead and then traded. Grinding and polishing were done by the consumer.
An idea of the magnitude of such a mining enterprise is offered by the well-explored workings known as Grimes Graves, about 130 km (80 miles) northeast of London. The site covers about 34 acres (14 hectares) and includes both opencast workings and 12.2-metre- (40-foot) deep shafts with radiating galleries that exploited the flint deposit laid down as a floor under chalk beds. Excavation was probably by wooden shovel (a product of the polished ax and chisel) or possibly the shoulder blades of oxen. It is estimated that 50,000 picks made of red-deer antlers were used during the 600 years of activity in the mine, which began about 2300 bce.
A last innovation of the Neolithic was the augmentation of the two older techniques of working stone, chipping (or flaking) and grinding, by a third, the pecking, or crumbling, method. In this procedure a point of the rock being worked was bruised by a hard hammerstone, the struck points crumbling into powder under relatively light but rapidly delivered blows. This technique allowed the manufacture of tools from numerous varieties of appropriate but nonflaking rock and the production of hollow ware, such as querns for grinding grain, mortars, and bowls. It also could be applied to flakable stone; such a stone, after having been roughed out by flaking, was pecked to level the ridges between flake scars before grinding and polishing.
Stone tools maintained themselves during the Metal Age, yielding only slowly to the new material, which was expensive and the product of special skills. The copper and bronze tools and weapons for hunting, warfare, husbandry, and domestic use that constitute impressive displays in museums were rare luxuries. Even the much more abundant iron, which overtook and replaced copper and bronze articles, was available only sparingly for many centuries.
