“Recently there have been many reports about collecting cans for recycling,” says archaeologist Lasse van den Dikkenberg, a PhD student at Leiden University. “But reuse is timeless. They also did it in the Stone Age.”
He takes a stone tool that is more than 4,500 years old and centimeters in size from a plastic storage bag. “This was once part of a flint axe. After it broke, a fragment was made into this tool. One side was used as a scraper, and with the tip on the other side holes could be made to repair a broken earthenware pot.”
Its reuse in the Stone Age has been known for a long time. But it happened on a much larger scale than previously thought, concludes Van den Dikkenberg in a recently published article in Lithic Technology.
“For my research, which is part of an NWO study into life in and around Neolithic houses, I used experimental archaeology,” says Van den Dikkenberg in the Leiden Laboratory for Artefact Studies. There are thirteen microscopes on work tables that can be used to analyze, among other things, traces of use on stone tools. “By using all kinds of counterfeit flint tools for different tasks, such as scraping hides, chopping wood and cutting flax, and then analyzing the traces of use, the largest reference collection in Europe has been built up here. The only question is what will happen to it, because professor Annelou van Gijn, who set it up, has retired and is not being followed up. So now students no longer receive lectures in usage trace analysis.”
Hunting, fishing and farming
Van den Dikkenberg, who did receive that training, looked at the reuse in one specific group, the Vlaardingen culture, who hunted, fished and did some arable farming in the South Holland delta between 3400 and 2500 BC. About 120 sites of this culture are known, with foothills as far as the river area near Nijmegen. “There was no flint in the area of the Vlaardingen culture,” says Van den Dikkenberg. “They got their axes from Hesbaye in Belgium or Rijckholt in South Limburg, ready-made, because the manufacture – shaping, grinding and possibly polishing a stone – was specialist work.”
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Such an ax sometimes broke during use. Based on the discovery of small tools with a piece of polished exterior still visible, archaeologists already knew that parts of such a broken ax were reused. “They estimate that in the Vlaardingen culture about 10 to 20 percent of all flint tools were made from recycled axes and chisels.”
Van den Dikkenberg wondered whether fragments of the non-polished inside of an ax had also been reused, and to what extent. To find out, he decided to experiment with breaking four modern flint axes – about 17 to 18 centimeters long, 6 centimeters wide and almost 3 centimeters thick – and to make new tools from the fragments. “We did the experiment with the public. During the National Archeology Days, Diederik Postma, an experienced flint worker and co-author, showed in the educational yard Masamuda in Vlaardingen how the reuse works.”
No polished surface
More than half of the 466 fragments larger than 1 centimetre, or 59 percent to be precise, did not have a polished surface, Van den Dikkenberg determined. “They were no longer recognizable as coming from a flint axe. The experiment indicates that at all sites of the Vlaardingen culture, only 41 percent of the flint objects originating from a broken ax have so far been recognized as such.”
At the site of Hekelingen III, near Spijkenisse, where 1,023 flint objects were found in 1980, about 180 had so far been recognized as coming from an axe. According to Van den Dikkenberg, there must have been almost 450 in reality, so more than 40 percent of the total flint objects found on the site. “There are so many that it almost seems that they counted on an ax to break so they could make other tools out of it. But that is still up for debate.”
Hekelingen is an outlier, but Van den Dikkenberg concludes that at many sites more than 20 percent of the excavated flint objects must have come from broken axes. It is striking that at other sites there seems to have been little reuse.
In Forum Hadriani, in Voorburg, only 4.4 percent of the 1,748 flint objects found came from broken flint axes, estimates Van den Dikkenberg. “We tend to assume that recycling is the logical consequence of consumption. But if that’s the case, all sites would yield about the same percentage. Now it seems that the people in Hekelingen III have used up ten times more axes than the people in Voorburg Hadriani. Why would they do that? Perhaps this distribution is not just a logical consequence of the consumption of flint axes. As is often the case in science, the research also raises new questions.”