Experimental Archaeology Workshops

The next stage in the Stone Lab of Shikahogh is the planning and the design of the stone carving workshops. For this purpose I have started attending a series of EA(experimental archaeology) workshops at Butser Ancient Farm.

Butser Ancient Farm is an archaeological open air museum located near Petersfield in Hampshire and it is used as a research laboratory to explore the ancient world. Containing reconstructions of late prehistoric buildings it is a site for archaeologists to undertake experiments to test their hypothesis and theories.

There is a wide array of workshops conducted in the farm, ranging from a weekend explorative academic/practical workshop on EA (where I have discovered the three stages of experimental archaeology, learnt about the differences between archaeological experiments and living history as well as tested own experiments) to flint knapping, cave painting, copper smelting etc . 

Butser Ancient Farm Neolithic houses

In experimental archaeology, there are three layers to the experiments that are carried out and they overlap, building into a specific question. The first stage is the Play level, where we have an idea and we are learning a new skill, for example we are trying to build a stone house, and assuming we don’t have any prior skills, play is the level where we obtain those skills, and through conversations and workshops with stone masons and people who may have the correct skills, we can develop those methods. The absence of the particular skill may render the experiment flawed, as it will be impossible to determine whether the outcome was affected by the practitioner's incompetence.

 

Neolithic house entrance

Level two is where the experience occurs; at this stage it is more of a defined experiment, where notes are taken, methods recorded etc. and the transition from Level 1 to 2 happens seamlessly. If the experiment is to do with build and construction, this is the stage where we start employing the period tools. And level 3 is the fully scientific experiment ,where we test the idea in a manner that is replicable, and where more variables are controlled, using as much as possible the authentic tools and methods from level 1 and 2.

 

Prehistoric mallet

At this level the questions are very specific, for example a mortar used ; one way of doing this is to go and put it down on the floor to test how well it behaves over time, or one can take an archaeological example of the mortar from the past, analyse it in the lab ,get a computer to print out its constituents and then replicate it in the laboratory conditions first, then test it on the floor on the ground. There is only that much can be done in a lab however-  the scaled out buildings and constructs will be impossible to replicated in a lab; full scale replicas are needed to monitor the weathering effects, recording the rainfall, the temperatures, the wind speed and when something happens (a hole in the roof appears or something collapses) it will be possible to trace exactly what caused it. Although we cant control the weather , but we can monitor the variables.

Preparing limestone for a construction wall

Peter Reynolds, one of the founding fathers of the science of the EA, said that people who do experiential archaeology are trying to make up for character flawed; trying to find meaning in their present by analysing what/how people did things in the past, but it is truly an impossible task to be able to fully understand what it is like to live in the past. His method was to come up with a hypothesis, test it by controlling the variables and if it proofs one’s hypothesis , then it is there for others to replicate, or if no proof was found, then its prudent to go back and re-asses one’s initial hypothesis and test it again and the process is like a spiral, rather than a circle.

Mixing limestone with water and straw

Some times the word re-enacting is used to describe the EA test, but it is perhaps the wrong word to use, since many people engage in re-enacting as means of recreation and they are not testing anything. However the scientific experiment stage without the re-enactment can be obsolete and may explain nothing. When it comes to building and craftsmanship techniques, the timeline that it takes a modern man to replicate the structure, is not the true representation of the time it would have taken an iron age or medieval men to complete the task because of their skillset and because we simply don’t know how many people were involved in each project.

The amazing thing about Khachkar making in this context is that people have been practicing it for thousands of years and the skillset is preserved and is the evolved yet still a reliable representation of the ancient techniques and timelines. With Khachkar we also know that most of them were crafted by an individual stone artist, rather than a group of people.

From large scale buildings to iron smelting, every time the test is repeated, the person conducting the experiments improves their skills and thus the outcomes may differ.

Community archaeology is another area of EA, where the archaeologist gets the community involved in their history and one way to get people involved is to do EA workshop.

 

The beginning of the experimental structure

Cross disciplinary collaborations in EA are common practice, especially with material scientists, chemists and physicians, as an archaeologist is thought how to interpret the past but it will be impossible for him/her to specialize in every aspect of the scientific test stage of EA. With the emerging technologies of 3D printing and scanning, it is becoming more accessible, so for example a bronze axe used in medieval ages, can be 3D scanned then printed, and although it will not be made of the same materials but it will enable the study of traces of use and wear, then trying to replicate that with other tools.

Working with Bronze age hammer

Thus with EA we get long and short term experiments; building a house is classified as a short term project.

Ethnographic evidence is an important ingredient of an EA test; the layouts of some houses that have been replicated indicate that the residents used to sleep seating up, rather than lying down, with Tibetan tribes the lying down posture was for that of corpses and the alive should have always been upright.

Excavations provide us with the archaeological footprint based on which we rebuild the structure. Therefore a modern replicas of for example smaller test storages are left to decay then the resulting footprint is compared to that of an archaeological one to determine whether the replica was accurate.

Copper smelting

The Stages of EA can be divided as the scientific research, experiential trial and test, and scientific development. There is always a battle for the EA to be taken seriously by others and that is because of the experiential stage , where we are learning stuff, we are collecting data through the experience. And so we are developing that original quantifiable data , that comes out of it, finding out whether it works or it doesn’t work and answering the question of “how” is it done. And that’s where most people stop thinking experimental archaeology works. The next stage of the hard science, is where we start controlling all the variables and start answering the “why” questions. This stage can be done on either small or large scale, for example with buildings it is preferable to create full size replicas for weight distribution and other functional requirements.

 

Preparing for the bronze and copper smelting

With counting the crops experiment we have various variables such as rainfall, the weather, soil composition and the usage and thus correlations are built on graphs, where the experiment becomes number crunching task, calculating standard deviations , odd data etc.

Crop counting experiment

Most people are attracted to EA because they like the hands on side of it, the building aspect of it, the fun element of level one and two, but then taking it to the next level like Peter Reynolds and John Coles did with the scientific development of it is a quite big step as suddenly the “fun” element is lost. Cross discipline collaborative work is what enriches the EA experiment, by providing the most efficient data collection methods hence producing more in depth results.

EA is changing all the time, it is dynamic and still an establishing area. There is still the inherent “play” element in EA that prevents it from gaining the scientific acknowledgement. There are centres around Cardiff and Wales, where EA is set in motion as well as Crannog centre in Scotland, where the emphasis is more on the How rather than the Why. EA should be seen as a fundamental tool that allows to answer the posing questions.

 

Farm resident collecting wool

Prehistoric cooking at the Farm

At the cave drawings workshop we have explored the research conducted by Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, who have been researching rock art older even than the European art and in conjunction with a very unusual and authentic relationship with the San people. The San people are one of the few remaining Bushmen people in South Africa, so they have an unbroken tradition of living as semi nomadic hunter gatherers. The very handful of them that are left still practice a rock art of a kind, although they have not revealed everything, they have certainly been incredibly open and have shared some of the ways in which they experience the painter in their sacred places in relation to the animals that they still live largely by. These two authors have led the field in the area and their book “The Shamans of Prehistory” completely undermined the usual, scientific archaeological practice, because they have started making relationships between the actual evidence that we have of paintings and their circumstances that we know of and have measured and started making connections with the way in which they were made and the state in which the painter might have been in when they made them.

 

350000 year old stone tool

These archaeologists describe the close relationship between state and the environment and making an image that was not about being an artist, it was not about showing their work to other people, or even to each other, because a lot of the work was made over other work, sometimes we get a piece of wall that has got hundreds of engravings on it over thousands of years, so people were re-visiting these places and making work over and over again . Some of the images are very rudimentary and others are highly skilled and very graceful.

 

Cave imagery inspired artwork produced during the workshop

There seems to be the seamless transition between the carver and the object it takes place through the rock wall, thus the archaeologists portray the wall as not being hard but like a membrane it is a living tissue, its almost like a curtain , where things pass through both ways.

Earliest practitioners of art and science , were not called either artists or scientists , they were called alchemists, the smiths and the makers and all the people who could produce things, were the most powerful people, who had the most important knowledge to pass on and if one could relate itself to other things and make an image of it, that person was considered important.

To put the time into perspective- in one of the caves there were found carvings of three rhinoceroses and there is 3000 year gap between the first and the third image, a gap that is longer than our civilisation.

Cave imagery inspired artwork produced during the workshop

 

Shamanic meditation

Take a deep breathe and make yourself comfortable... You can gaze outside or you can gaze at the fire.. or you can close your eyes.. and actually right now listen to the rain… and just imagine yourself as an empty vessel and it is raining through you, but you are not getting wet..it is about the flow of the rain…just relax, pull yourself to the ground and listen to everything … be grounded as though you completely belong here …as we did, a long, long, long time ago.. and you could sit here all day, it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t do a thing..it would probably be better if we didn’t …just for a change.. listen to the rain… and if it makes you sleepy , close your eyes … because we could be in the cave, watching the rain through the opening of the shelter… and it is quiet and it is safe and there is nowhere else we would rather be …shamans told us where the seed of our will is, just below the naval, listen to it.. inhale.. exhale… you might be dimly aware that there is something else in the cave with you…just around the corner of your vision… you may not see it but you can feel its presence.. it is watching you …it is wondering whether you are ready to notice … some creature , maybe stepped out of another place, another time , another world… maybe it belonged to a herd or a group or a solitary creature .. but you know it really well…its like an old friend.. and your quietness is drawing it nearer … and you slowly look …and you know it.. you can see, feel its form.. sense its nature … it is part of you, probably… part you don’t know very well yet… as you listen to the rain it becomes clearer …now try to capture something of this creature in your own with your own hands in matter .. When you are ready to draw, open your eyes…

 

Flint Knapping workshop

During the flint knapping workshop with Robert Turner, we have learnt that in the last period, around 35 thousand years ago , we know people were here , we don’t however know whether they were Homosapien or Neanderthal. What we then find of their presence, they were forced out by the ice age and didn’t get back till about 10 thousand years ago; hence the big gaps in the tool records. Nevertheless, if we work from 10000 BC, what we find is that the toolkit changed because we had hunter gatherers, ,hunter gatherers who did some farming too, hunter gathering farmers, farmers that hunter gathered too and farmers and as they developed different toolkits. Therefore if we look into the beginning of the Neolithic , which was probably about the best period in terms of tool records, we will find around 90 different tool types. Whereas, approaching to the Bronze age the number suddenly decreases to 3; the toolkit changed depending on the circumstances. One of the things we find is that when metal entered in circulation, it was a “rich men's” material, thus those who couldn’t afford them, made replica metal daggers in flint.

R. Turner creating a blade

During the stone tool making workshop we tested our skills at creating a hand axe, an arrow head and other stone tools like  scrapers, denticulates, piercers and microliths, as well as pressure flaking and working with glass. Two methods were employed with hammer stones and copper tools, which are more accurate. When choosing a flint, its important to understand the concept of the platform; the surface that we strike on, to flake the piece. Most flints will be covered in cortex, the external shell of different thicknesses, which absorbs the energy thus it requires to hit a lot harder than the actual flint. The strict requirement for a platform is that it needs to be less than 90 degrees, which ensures the most efficient extraction of the flakes, otherwise, if its more than 90 degrees, then flaking becomes impossible. So, once the right flint has been selected, we work on clearing the flint off the cortex, by identifying a new platform with every new strike and working our way around the flit edges.

 

Choosing the right stone

Despite our best efforts, it is impossible to know if the stone is suitable for took making, until we break it open. The key is to understand the right amount of strikes required to shape the piece into a desired form , and this insight is accumulated through time and practice. The size of the flint could be non essential; it is possible to produce a very successful tool from a relatively small piece of flint, provided it is of good quality. Earliest men had this knowledge and produced tools in accordance. They had vision like Leonardo Da Vinci did; they were letting out the piece of sculpture, the shape that was trapped inside the lamp of stone. The easiest shape achieved is the one that is congenial with the existing inner structure of the piece, thus it is important to visualise what is inside of the flint. Flint knappers of ancient times have been opportunists; sometimes they would make tools like scrapers, denticulats etc. out of the leftover flakes produced during the initial knapping. The initial stage is the creation of the core tool- this is the process of taking the piece of stone and reducing its geometry to tool like shape. Flint forms in chalk, however the outer 8-9 mm of this chalk layer is of different chemical consistency, it’s a rotting debris that produces hydrogen sulphate gas. This gas has an ability to do iron exchange with silicon, that in turn produces silicon dioxide, which filtrates down the layers and conglomerates, slowly turning into a flint during a long period of time (hundreds of thousands to million years). Therefore the further down the layers , the purer is the flint.

Copper tools and raw flints

 

Some of the rules we have learnt during the workshop.

• Every time hitting the flint results in a radiating cone of fracture within the flint even if it does not shear
• If one strikes too far in one the platform, it will only result in formation of a hidden shatter cone, thus the second and third hits increase the volume of fractures until the flint disintegrates.
• Flexing the arm for a strike will lengthen the radius of the strike and so strike, thus making it easy to miss the spot originally aimed for .
• The edge of the flint where the striking occurs must always be abraded to get a clean platform shear especially for delicate work
• If striking too near platform edge, the platform may crush especially if it has not been abraded
• Hitting without sufficient force results in getting a hinge fracture as shock wave escapes part way down the blade due to the experiencing a loss of energy
• Hitting too hard , however, renders an overshoot as the fracture tries to continue
• Only hitting with the right amount of force accomplishes feathering
• The length of a blade or a flake is dependent on the angle of attack of the strike
• Hitting abruptly at a steep angle produces short flakes
• Hitting invasively at a low angle produces long flakes
• If there is a flaw, it results in step fractures as the shear takes the easiest path of resistance or hits an inclusion that will not transmit the shock wave
• Hinge and step fractures can only be eradicated by striking a new flake from the opposite end; they cant be removed by striking from the same platform
• Flint shearing follows the ridges of previous removals to produce a crested blade
• Single or double crested blades depend on the platform preparation
• A platform is never bigger than 90 degrees
• Isolated platforms work best especially when scored, as the latter gives the blade a flow to start its shear
• Platform preparation should be done on every strike requiring accuracy
• In creating levellois it is essential to prepare the turtle, decapitate the core then strike well into the mass
• The weight of the hard or soft hammer is crucial as this imparts proportional energy
• Hard happers produce a bigger bulb of percussion than soft hammers
• Curved hammers must have a smaller radius of curvature on their striking point than the curve of the zone of percussions, increasing the chances of hitting the correct spot
• Pressure on the flint, or even a touch with supporting hand or pad on the strike line will terminate the flake from formation
• Support should be applied on the long flints, otherwise there is an end shock risk as the shockwave travels the length of the flint
• Support must be applied everywhere except where the removal flake wants to run
• Where there is a steep hogback, its prudent to consider rotating the biface and forming a new cross section median line by removing the original edge
• The slotting of the tool must be perpendicular to the work piece to avoid the breakage of the piece
• Cortex will absorb shock quite often far more than initially anticipated
• From a slab zig zag the edge to remove cortex by rotating the tool
• Rotating will always provide a new platform for the next flake to be removed
• When quartering, one has to seek the path of least resistance
• It is important to have a vision of what one is making inside the blank or the spall
• There is no such thing as too accurate or too much preparation
• Repeating hitting will do nothing but shatter the work piece or produce a series of step and hinge fractures
• One has to be definite about all their actions at all time

Neolithic tools