How To Make A Prehistoric Flint Axe Stone Age Technology

Hi, I'm James. I'm here at the Neolithic Houses at Stonehenge and I'm about to attempt to make a Neolithic axe head. I've got this large piece of flint here. So the first point I'm going to strike is here. The flint that I'm using is around about 80 to 90 million years old. You get flint from the whole area around here under Stonehenge. You get it across from North Norfolk in a band all the way through to Dorset. Now it looks very different. It's much lighter, there's a lot less of that waste material and the skin of the flint. It's starting to take on a bit of a lens profile to it with this consistent cutting margin all the way around and these are those edges that I'm going to use to start to take even more flakes off and help me refine this preformed blank into a longer, thinner axe head. I'm just working on refining the butt or back of the axe and this is where it'll go into the wooden handle. So I need to make it quite even so it has a good fit into the wooden haft. In some cases I can predict the rough shape and size of the flake before I strike it. So as you'll see I'm working on one side and the flake's coming off the bottom so you're almost working blind. You have to go with that confidence that the material will stick to its mechanical principles and will flake off in a certain way. The flint is made up of silica that would have been secreted by tiny organisms that would have knocked along the sea floor and that would have been compressed into this rock that we have today. So I think this is about there now. This is ready to be ground and finished into that really nice polished surface that you often see on Neolithic axes in museums. And this is an example of a finished polished flint axe head. This will have taken about 60 hours worth of work to get it to this kind of stage. It really is a beautiful piece of work as well as being a really good functional tool for cutting down trees and woodworking. It'll fit into a handle or haft a bit like this and there it is a Neolithic axe.