Porcellanite Axeheads: Neolithic Tools in Northern Ireland
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.พ. 2023
- Join experimental archaeologist and flintknapper, Dr. James Dilley as he explores the coast of Northern Ireland in search of suitable prehistoric axehead materials!
The Neolithic spread across Europe from the fertile crescent all the way to Britain and Ireland thousands of years after it first emerged. Some of the classic features of the Neolithic ‘package’ included ground/polished stone tools which in NW Europe is dominated by axe heads. Some of the well-known axe materials include flint from SE England, Langdale Tuff, Micro-diorite from North Wales, Cornish Greenstone and dolerite from the Whin Sill. But these are all lithic types from Britain, what was used in Ireland? And did it get further afield? James explores some of the materials along the Antrim coast to find out how it fitted into the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland.
*Porcellanite in Northern Ireland can only be found on private land and requires relevant permissions to be obtained. For the purposes of this video James is therefore demonstrating the same processes our Neolithic ancestors would have gone through to flake, shape and polish Porcellanite by using a piece of Antrim flint.
Filmed Edited & Produced by Emma Jones of ELWJ Media - www.elwjmedia.co.uk
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Papers:
THE PREHISTORIC ARTEFACTS OF NORTHERN IRELAND Harry and June Welsh
The Prehistoric Burial Sites of Northern Ireland - Harry & June Welsh
Sheridan, J.A. 1986 Porcellanite Artefacts: A New Survey. Ulster Journal of Archaeology vol 49 p19-32
Waddell, J. (1993) The Irish Sea in Prehistory, The Journal of Irish Archaeology, Vol. 6, 29-40
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Journals:
Aimée Little, Annelou van Gijn, Tracy Collins, Gabriel Cooney, Ben Elliott, Bernard Gilhooly, Sophy Charlton, Graeme Warren. Stone Dead: Uncovering Early Mesolithic Mortuary Rites, Hermitage, Ireland. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2016; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0959774316000536
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You might find this interesting , years ago while out walking my dogs I crossed over a newly cleaned out drain in boggy area. I noticed a greenish stone on top of the newly removed peat. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, It looked like it had shape to it. I got home checked the stone and even I could see it was an axe head, blunt at one end and wider and sharper at the business end. Brought it to the museum and they took it. I did get £50 as a kind of reward. Now they told me this green type stone was only mined in 3 places in Ireland , 2 small ancient mines around Norther Ireland and one old mine in around Kilkenny I found it in Tipperary, They were very interested in the fact that a beautiful polished axe head made its way to mid Tipp' they told me it was a sign of bartering and trading. Axe head was just over 4 inchs long , wide at one end, smoothed down to a fine edge , it then tapered back to a kind of egg shaped knob. I was also informed it was between 4,000 and 6,000 years old. ps not marble , it was a rare yet very hard stone. I have lost the info on it sadly. OK hope it helps, its in Dublin Museum. Thank you ...
That's made me chuckle... I visited Tievbulia (?) a couple of years ago and wandered all over that outcrop looking for the "axe factory" pin pointed on Google maps, I actually made a video with that making part of it... I scoured all the pits and found nought but sandstone and so decided it was a misplaced marker... Now I see it wasn't a pit I was searching for, it was the whole ridge. 😂 Well, you live and learn!
Orlando Bloom HASN'T let himself go...!
I'm so glad this video came up. This is the type of content I love.
Amen.
Cheers from Canada. Been 190 yrs since we left the area. Our best flint area is Saint John, New Brunswick harbor - where there is a lot of abandoned flint off the ships ballast. Thank you for your work!
Really enjoyed this! Very informative and engaging.
Thank you Dr. Dilley. Although I'm a Paleolithic enthusiast, I learned a lot from this video. I'd like to know more about sea travel from Scotland to Ireland and back during this era. Their seacrafts had to be bigger than a canoe or coracle.
Well, I don't see why they had to be bigger. There are two Waka ( outrigger canoes ) In Auckland's Maritime Museum collection that were KNOWN to have repeatedly conducted round-trip sea voyages in the open ocean. One of them was recorded often by British Navy Warships as it was on its voyage from Opua, North Island New Zealand to the Cook Islands, a one way voyage of more than 3000 miles.
That Waka was on the wall in the Auckland war memorial museum my whole childhood. She is 14 feet long, and the main hull is less than 3 feet across. The old Maori bloke who owned her and sailed her in the 1850s was famous for being intrepid, and discontent with land-life, and the British Navy Commanders loved to encounter him and they actually KNEW when and where to expect him as he was following traditional times and paths that are recorded in song, and many times the British wrote in their logs about his astonishing ability to navigate. He used to take the Cook Islanders our Kumara ( New Zealand sweet potato, the kind that grew up in the Cooks was different, and the locals there liked the different taste of the Kumara from here) , and bring back Coconuts. When he finally gave it up, one of the early Colonists brought and preserved his canoe as a wonder.
The Waka Rakeitonga from Tikopia is half again as long, but only a foot wider of the main hull, and She was the trading vessel from Port Vila to Tikopia for 25 years.
Interestingly, in Australia, the Palaeolithic Age lasted in places to less than a century ago. As a prospector in my youth I saw thousands of Knapping sites, and found many, many artefacts in the central deserts. I'm sure archaeologists from the Northern Hemisphere would find much to interest them here.
Thank you for visiting Northern Ireland ^^
Great stuff! Congrats to you and Em. Rupert and I will have to up our game ... 😊
Just wait till next week! 😉
I wish I had known you were here. I spend a lot of time at tievebulliagh, white park bay and the white rocks caves at Portrush knapping and studying the stone and flint. I am also running prehistoric experiences at mountsandel.
I’m sure we’ll be back!
@@ancientcraftUK let me know when you are and I will give you a tour of other places. Have you ever worked with ryolite? Beside me is is a forest called tardree it’s in tardree mountain which is ryolite, basalt and dolomite.
I haven’t! Will definitely let you know
@@ancientcraftUK you mentioned that the meso ancestors hunted deer which has always been a curiosity of mine as my findings are the deer died out at around 10600 bce and only wild boar were still indiginous to ireland at 9800 bce when our meso ancestors arrived. The current wild herds were introduced many thousands of years after this. This poses the questions around meso clothing and soft hammers for knapping. Have you any info or thoughts on his?
I'd like to find out more about your work Paul in the prehistoic experiences and knapping, do you have any website or info? I'm in Portrush alot and live in B'money I was studying Archeaology at Queens but had to leave over health problems.
Amazing quality and commitment. You should have your own documentary on the BBC - I’d watch it!
Fascinating!
enjoyed the video
Can’t wait to watch this!
Fascinating thank you 👍
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for that interesting contend!
Most interesting. Thank you all for your work.
Excellent presentations. ALWAYS!!
The por-cell-anite I am familiar with In Montana, USA, is like a unfired porcelain dish, a bathroom sink or a toilet. It is usually light grey, purple or ( rarely) red. It is not like the very close grain chert or flint-like material you show in this video that appears waxy, and resembles the fine chert-like, translucent material that we find in North Dakota, called Knife River Flint. Our porcellanite is formed when coal seams in the ground started burning from lighting strikes thousands, or millions of years ago, baking the clay in the soil to a porcelain like material that we now call porcellanite! It is easy to knap, and makes beautiful projectile points similar to obsidian, they were made and used mostly by archaic peoples in this area, but it is not as hard or durable material as a good quality chert. It does flake to a keen edge, but is more of a one time use projectile point, that dulls easily!
I do not see how the basalt lava metamorphized with any material, even under high pressure, that resembles a porcelain material like the porcellanite you describe. Perhaps we are talking about two different materials, with the same name?
Thank you for your videos, they are always enjoyed!
From our research the term porcellanite seems to cover a broad range of rock types that have a similar appearance rather than formation, which makes things confusing. The amount of geological research into Irish porcellanite is also rather limited sadly. The geology in Northern Ireland is quite striking as you see dark basalt overlaying white chalk with flint, really not what we're used to!
Yeah, those rocks didn't look anything like porcelain. These tools don't seem to have sharp edges. I'd like to see them try to cut something.
Was looking for this comment. I'm also from Montana...
@@ancientcraftUK one of the reasons that pretty much all flint in Ireland is in north east. The harder volcanic basalt capped the limestone and chalk preventing mass erosion. 👍
I'm so glad I came across this. I collect flint tools nothing as lovely as these, very interesting! Found a black flint adze once ( my best find)👍👍👍👍👍👍
I hope you do a part 2 to this.
Wow, that clear axe (?) head at 9:18 was gorgeous.
Great video and very interesting topic. Will there be a video on how these axes and other tools were used for woodworking?
Now this is what catches my interest so much more interesting then the endless cat videos on TH-cam
You can add my collection of agatized flint from the Thames valley,I'm the biggest collector and peeper,but your series would have to relate to fossil's,as most of the polished blades of agatized flint I have made ,are just that transparent fossil's in flint
Crazy.
I have an ax head I was given by an uncle years ago that is smooth with a blade just like these black ones, only it's a greenish stone and has two grooves in it, one assumes for binding to a handle.
Thing is, this was explained when given to me as a Cherokee tomahawk head.
Says a lot about the way the human mind works that two groups of people separated by an ocean produced objects so similar in form and presumably use.
This was amazing. I hope we get to see more. Maybe even a recreated porcellanite axe put to the test? They're beautiful
Primitive Technology makes something rather similar and uses it harvest trees to build a hut FYI.
Agreed, it is amazing.
@@unnaturalselection8330 yeah I am aware. But THESE axes are something else. And to see one put to use crafted by an expert in the field would be awesome
Flints are actually baked jellyfish impressions that became filled with silica, chert and quartz precipitated out of the great geysers of The Flood.
Who made your leather clothing for the video? It's very well done as far as I can see, and makes the history come alive in a vivid way. Love this stuff even though I don't do flint knapping.
As a local I look forward to this.
I worked on a dig on a Paleolithic chert quarry in Montana. Montana State University. Thanks for the work, subscribed.
Was that the "Smith Chert Quarry," in western MT?
@@k1j2f30 I'm not sure, probably. The site was just a big pit with some side alcoves, maybe 50 feet across & 15 feet deep. It was a long time ago. It was near a cement plant on a big hill overlooking a river, way out in the middle of noplace.
@@vapormissile Thanks for the reply, sounds like, close to Three Forks, maybe.
On the south coast of Australia some beaches are strewn with rounded boulders of handable size which are white on the outside but almost black on the inside. Would these be chert
I don’t think they knapped barefoot,it doesn’t work for me. I was wondering if they tried heat treatment on this flint?and does it change color when treated.thanks for sharing this great video.
Very interesting overall. I was not aware of porcellanite until watching this. What kind of stone was/is used to polish the tools? Presumably, it is about as hard as the stone of the tools.
It would have been quarried and then roughed out at teivebulliagh but then moved to the coast to be flaked and ground using the sandstone and quartzite. Lots of flakes and chips can still be found at tievebulliagh. Flaking Porcellanite is more difficult than flint but it’s possible and it creates a very good edge when ground.
The polishing stone needs to be harder than the polished stone.
As a builder of wooden boats, of all sorts including replicas, (nothing before 1500), and having a huge interest in Maritime archeology --I would really like to know something about the vessels that transported people and products across the Irish sea, back then. Are there any depictions?
Logs boats are the earliest known craft in NW Europe prior to the mid Bronze Age. After this we start to get plank & sewn craft such as the Dover boat or Ferriby boats. They’re amazing bits of carpentry!
@@ancientcraftUK I wish there were more surviving examples. I have never seen mention of a transitional type, as such as were still in use in parts of the Caribbean, forty years ago-- essentially a log with a stem and sternpost mortised into the log a foot or two in from the ends, the log shaped to be the bottom of the boat and a couple of planks added up from there. The ram like bow makes hard landings on rough beaches safer and may be an ancestor of the weaponised ram. I can see a craft like this in the Irish sea. Maybe single log dugouts--but that takes a very large log. Dunno. So fascinated and curious!
I found a really amazing hand axe whilst visiting a marble mine in Connemara, is there any way to “Date’ it please? It’s been kind of ‘knapped’ and shaped.
could you use porcellanite from other sources, like Poland or Czechoclovakia?
In theory yes!
I don't understand why they even made those polished axes out of flint. if they knew how to knap them, why go through the massive effort of polishing them? once its polished, the edge will never be as sharp as a knapped axe, and you can't quickly correct a dulled edge on a polished axe short of spending a lot of time abrading it again. With a knapped edge, an antler tine or a billet and you can fix it up quickly.
I have some animal effigies and stone tools from southern Ontario if anyone's interested
The Aztecs left them there. Which worked so much better than trying to cut down trees with potato axes that the Irish used.
Neolithic people were responsible for deforestation?? Not sure I heard that correctly…
That is correct. When farming arrived forests were cut down. Throughout the centuries though more de forestation took place to create housing , ship building etc. the forests were replaced with fast growing species like spruce as the forestry service was invented to make money. Lots of our Broad leaf forests were destroyed to make way for money making by the British government.
Hype
Bit of a cliché that only the rich could possess "X". I'm a blue collar and have never in my life seen a rich man swing a tool. Plus doubt it was the upper class that cleared those forests.
🤔 huh?!..... Last time I was in Ireland traveling and sightseeing... There's one common aspect of almost every place you go out there... The lack of trees... Almost everywhere they have cut down all their trees... Except for the patches that the government regulates... I can't see that anybody living in Ireland would have much use for an ax in there quiver of tools.. So if I'm to believe that these are amazing axes that are coming out of Ireland.. I believe I'm calling BS.... For obvious reasons.. that I shouldn't have to point out... But when all hell breaks loose not a bad thing to have as a weapon... After all the bullets are depleted...
oh thousands of years ago, during the neolithic age, most likely there were trees....
I too would have been very concerned in 4,000 BC with what I was going to do when all the bullets were depleted...
Axes were produced when Ireland was heavily forested, same as Britain & forested northern latitudes & plenty more found in North America, These also work well as hoes and planting/digging tools for roots. When bullets are depleted we'll all be pretty much finished & full of holes, with 350 million guns alone in private hands in the US, not to speak of military & police arsenals and all the peppers & end timer militias plus the paranoid Cristo fascist religious sects with their huge hordes of unregistered guns & bulks of ammunition. Average Joe public in the US has... say 100 -500+ rounds of ammo per gun kept on hand, that number times 350 million- do the math, you won't need a hand axe, spear, atlatl, sling.or bow /arrow. Maybe a sailboat if you know how to sail, and know navigation & location of some remote uninhabited island , there the hand axe or two will come in very handy indeed for splitting coconuts.
@@leslielane2534 They say upon European contact, a squirrel in Maine could travel tree to tree all the way to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Is this a troll? You went to Ireland, realised there was few trees and so somehow it would have been the same over 6000 years ago?
Also your on the internet - ‘the Irish will never be tamed while the leaves are on the trees'. (Queen) Elizabeth expressly orders the destruction of all woods in Ireland to deprive the Irish insurgents of shelter.
There was also a successful attempt to destroy the wolf population, also it was the age of ship building and a lot of wood after that period went into ship building.
A bit more content please. Get that camera going.
If TH-cam paid the bills, we probably could afford to get that camera going a bit more 😉
There was no 10,000 years ago.
The Ice Age came after The Flood of 4,370 years ago when all the water was evaporating and making thick clouds that blocked the sun and made lots of snow and rain to fall on the poles and mountains.