Back to the Stone Age calendar
Although we talk about this as being the Stone Age, the people who lived then made use of other material they found too. The most popular was flint.
We told you a bit about flint knives last time but we thought we would look in more detail here. Flint is found in the ground and can be made into different shapes,
usually using a stone or rock to sharpen or smooth it. Flint was used to make axe heads amongst other things. The tools were made by chipping or something called
knapping. This meant you would remove some flakes of the flint using either another stone, just like a hammer, or by a softer hammer made of bone or antler.
Once this was done the piece of flint was then polished either using a mixture of sand and water or a special rubbing stone. It took a long time but ended up with
a sharper cutting edge which could then be made even sharper if needed.
This picture from Encyclopedia Britannia shows how the axe might have been made,
Stone Age miners would dig deep into the ground so that they could bring out the flint that was in the chalk rock. The
first picture below shows the landscape today at a place called Grimes Graves in Norfolk. The lumps in the ground are from the filled-in mines dug by our Stone
Age people. The other picture shows a couple of different flint axes, one with a wooden handle and one that would just have been held in the hand.
Flint is not found everywhere so, now these people had begun to settle down in one place, some trading probably started. Instead of just finding
your own food and materials, people would begin to swap what they needed in exchange for what they had too much of. Maybe certain places were not that good
for growing some crops but had flint so “I’ll swap you some flint for some barley” will have happened.
It would be these flint axes that would be used to cut down the trees and make space for these people to build their now more permanent houses.
Unfortunately it could take about 100 years to cut down an area about a mile square, especially as there were so few people about.
