exposure to fire, was broken at one end, and chipped and battered at the other. It had obviously been used as a mallet, perhaps for breaking the flints of which the numerous flakes and knives found in the chamber were formed. A globular nodule of flint, one pound in weight, chipped all over, appeared to have been used for the same purpose. A very large number of flint flakes, with sharp cutting edges, were obtained from the black stratum, and from near the floor of the chamber. Nearly three hundred were collected; but of these perhaps two-thirds might be regarded as refuse, but clearly not as accidental. Some flint nodules, such as abound in the chalk, appeared to have been broken and the resulting flakes used as knives, probably at a funeral feast on the spot. Three or four cores, from which such flakes had obviously been broken off, were found.
Fig. 10. |
Fig. 11. |
Fig. 12. |
Fig. 13. | |||
Flint Implements (knives, &c.) from the Chambered Long Barrow, West Kennet. (Two-thirds size.) | ||||||
The surfaces of the flakes are almost all stained of a milky white; some throughout, others only in patches, perhaps from having parted with much of their water of crystallization.[1] These white stains do not extend very deep into the substance of the flakes. Some of them retain their original black surfaces almost unchanged; and one in particular, found with the skull of the infant (No. 6), near shards of black pottery, and among clean chalk rubble, is actually transparent. Most of
- ↑ "It is a peculiarity of fractured chalk flints to become deeply and permanently stained and coloured, or to be left unchanged, according to the nature of the matrix in which they are imbedded. In most clay beds they become outside of a bright opaque white or porcelainic; in white calcareous or silicious sand their fractured black surfaces remain almost unchanged; whilst in beds of ochreous and ferruginous sands the flints are stained of a light yellow or deep brown colour."—Prestwich, On Flint Implements, &c. Proceedings Royal Society, 1859, vol. x. p. 55.
