Sarsen #3

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I’ve been working on two facsimile tools for the Education Team’s object handling collection at the new English Heritage Stonehenge Visitor Centre.

Amongst a whole range of replica and facsimile artefacts, the Team needs a hammerstone; a copy of one of the tools interpreted as hammers or mauls used to shape the stones at Stonehenge.   This copy will be handled by visiting school classes so that they can get a feel for the archaeological examples that will be on display.   I’m making two (different size and weight so the Team can chose which to use with different-aged children).

The hammerstones are almost exclusively made of quartzite sarsen – nodules of this hard material that have been beaten and bashed until they break up or, less commonly, become rounded and smoothed through attrition.   It takes hours and hours of use for a quartzite sarsen nodule to reach this state.

Perhaps this is a good time to define “replica” and “facsimile” artefact.

The words mean different things to different people, but I choose the following definitions:

Replica – an object made with the techniques, tools and materials known or thought to have been used at the time of the original exemplar.

Facsimile – an object made using modern (or a mix of modern and historical) techniques, tools and materials to create something that looks like the original exemplar.

I am making facsimiles, rather than replicas, because I am using some modern techniques and tools in the process.   This is necessary because of the long time that it would take to do the job just by working a piece of saccaroid sarsen with the nodules – I would be unlikely to meet my deadline!

The process involves removing some of each quartzite sarsen nodule with an iron mason’s pick and punch to remove the more angular parts and some of the “case-hardened” cortex, before using the newly-broken surfaces to work a piece of saccaroid sarsen in the prehistoric manner.   This action then ‘finishes’ the surface of the hammerstone.

Small quartzite sarsen nodule, 2013

Small quartzite sarsen nodule, 2013

The first nodule was a small piece of yellow-brown quartzite sarsen that appears to have been broken from a larger piece.   It had cortex on one side and showed its grey interior colour on the broken side.   It weighed 536g.   The second nodule was darker in colour, also showing its grey interior where it had been broken in the past.   It weighed 2149g.

Large quartzite sarsen nodule, 2013

Large quartzite sarsen nodule, 2013

Both were collected from a farm on the Marlborough Downs.   They were taken from modern clearance piles of waste stones and other farm rubbish such as old concrete fence posts.   This was to ensure that they weren’t taken from one of the designated or protected areas of the farm, or from an archaeological context.

I shall post photos of the finished objects when they are done.

Little Boy Blue’s Bear

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Having had to give up with the piece of apple that split so dramatically, I have now finished carving a bear for next door’s grandson, Blue.

Blue has been asking about his bear ever since I agreed to carve it.   As three-dimensional figures like this are not my forte, it’s taken me a good while to do the job.   At least it does look like a bear, snuffling along the ground.

Small bear on ?sycamore, 2013

Small bear on ?sycamore, 2013

You’ll notice that the wood is very pale.   I was recently given some off-cuts by a friend at work – her dad had helped to fell and reduce a neighbour’s tree and, knowing that I am always after wood, very kindly drove it all the way over from Stroud.   I was told it was sycamore, which is a white wood traditionally used for kitchen ware.   The bark, however, isn’t right for sycamore so I’m not really sure what it is, having not seen the tree.   Nevertheless, it did cut well and I am looking forward to carving the really big log that came into a large bowl.

Problems, problems…

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Anyone working in wood will be able to tell you about this…

I mentioned a while back that I had carved a couple of little animals for Ella and Toby, children who live next door.   Toby’s little brother has asked me to carve him a bear – a bear on its hind-legs, roaring, to be precise.   To be honest, I’ve been putting this off.   Partly, it’s because I have a couple of jobs to complete for colleagues in the Education and Events Teams at English Heritage.   Partly (mostly, let’s be honest), it’s because a bear is really hard.   Really hard for me, given that my woodworking is mostly limited to spoons, bowls and other hollow forms, and spindle turning on the pole lathe.

Nevertheless, I thought it was about time I got on with the bear.

My original thought was to base the piece on heraldic bears.   A simplified version of the Warwick bear and ragged staff perhaps, and I did some sketches.   But my carving’s not up to that, so I turned to the bears that I saw at the British Museum’s Ice Age Art exhibition.   The bear is a common motif in both Palaeolithic portable and mural art.   There is an almost complete bear in the ceramic assemblage at Dolni Vestonice, for example, as well as another 20-odd incomplete figures; bear heads from Kostienki 1; and two fabulous bears painted onto the cave wall at Ekain.   I love these two bears for their simplicity – the artist has perfectly captured the form with a few well-drawn lines.

Bear rough-out in apple

Bear rough-out in apple

I cut myself a piece of apple roundwood.   The branch had come from a friend earlier this year, shortly after it had been cut from the tree, and had been standing upright in my store for a few months.   I had started to rough-out the shape of an ambling bear, head down, snuffling at the ground.

The weather has been jolly hot and dry.   The piece of unseasoned apple, freed from its parent branch and divested of its bark, started to dry out very quickly (and unevenly).   The more wood I cut away, the greater the surface area (in relation to volume of wood) became; and the faster it dried.   The inevitable has happened.

Bear rough-out in apple wood

Bear rough-out in apple

A number of radial cracks have developed in the piece.   It took no more than a day for one of these to run the whole length of the bear.    The greatest shrinkage in roundwood like this will always be in its tangential plane, and most quickly from its outside surfaces.   It’s no surprise that this piece has pulled itself apart in this way.   Time to start again…

Bahn, P.G. and Vertut, J. (1988)  Images of the Ice Age   Leicester: Winward PressCook, Cook, J. (2013)  Ice Age Art   London: The British Museum Press

Been away…

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Well I notice it’s nearly two months since my last blog post.   I’ve been away, enjoying sunny Denmark!   I had a great time and learnt a huge amount.   The trip has already influenced some of my activities since returning, to do with edged tools – axes, this time – and holding devices.

It’s amazing to me how little attention is paid sometimes by archaeologists to the whole question of what is required to make something.   The concept of the chaine operatoire is making its way out of flint analysis and into other areas.   Even so, it’s really easy to concentrate on different forms of a tool type and loose the bigger picture.

Take holding devices, for example.   This issue really exercises me, because I spend a great deal of time getting my holding devices right so that I can use my tools the way I need in order to complete tasks the way I want to.   They really are essential.

I mean things like benches, dogs, pigs, clamps, brakes, cramps, donkeys, shave horses, vices, claves, holdfasts, grips…the list would go on and on if I further subdivided these classes according to trade or specific task (for example, cleaving brakes, shaving brakes, bending brakes, peeling or rinding brakes).   I regularly use my shave horse and clave, and I’ve just built two pigs inspired by those at use in the boatyard of the Vikingeskibsmuseet in Roskilde.

I’m sure that tools which did the jobs of these holding devices would have been used in prehistory, just as they have been in historical periods and today, especially for woodworking.   They enable a piece to be worked effectively – by which I mean, safely, accurately, efficiently, to attain the desired end result.

The aims of the Bronze Age boat project did not include anything about using prehistoric tools other than the edged tools and plank stitching that was so wonderfully applied at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall (and rightly so, because the experiment design didn’t require it).   But check out the photos and brilliant time-lapse photography in their boatyard.   You’ll see just how important (modern) holding devices were to the build.   Now think about all the materials that you might need, and their configuration, to do a similar job in 2012BC.

Sarsen #2

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Before I write more about sarsen objects, sarsen tools and sarsen working, I thought I would summarise sarsen geology.

Sarsen is a silcrete sandstone, formed through the surface or near-surface silicification of other deposits.   In Wiltshire, sarsen stones probably represent locally-silicified zones in the 4m to 5m thick Paleocene deposits overlying Cretaceous chalk; perhaps the Reading Beds or upper Bagshot Beds.   The sand, silt and mud of these layers are thought to have been cemented by water-borne silica, aided by silica-rich plants growing at the time.  It is possible that this silicification happened rapidly, over some 30,000 years or more.   The cementation was, however, uneven.   As the Paleocene deposits eroded, the scattered silicified patches were left on the surface.   You can see these most clearly on the Marlborough Downs, in the Fyfield National Nature Reserve, where sarsen stones lie sleeping across the beautiful landscape.

Archaeologists tend to talk about two types of sarsen in Wiltshire.   The most common – and the one of which the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge are comprised – is “saccaroid” sarsen.   The less common is “quartzite” sarsen, which appears in the archaeological record as the principal hammerstone material at Stonehenge.

Saccaroid sarsen

Saccaroid sarsen

Saccaroid sarsen’s fresh break is white to grey in colour.   The name is derived from the similarity of the fresh break’s surface to broken sugar loaf.   It is made up of quartz sand grains and is usually found in large boulders.

quartzite sarsen

Quartzite sarsen

Quartzite sarsen is usually a darker grey-brown colour, comprising much finer grained, clayey silts.   It is usually found as nodules up to c. 60cm diameter.   Fossils are rarely found in sarsens; but root voids and silicified roots are common, part of the characteristically  gnarled look of much sarsen.

These two distinctions are useful although they mask sarsen’s subtle variations.   For example, pebbles can be found cemented into the mix; varying amounts of iron oxide stain the stone red-brown; the cementation varies, leaving some grains of sand more-or-less well “glued” together.   The “case-hardening” effect brought about by atmospheric weathering also affects texture and hardness.   These variations can be found between stones and within individual boulders.   And the shapes and sizes of sarsen stones vary immensely; from smooth, rounded boulders to irregular, contorted, pitted blocks.

Geddes, I. (2000, 2003) Hidden Depths: Wiltshire’s Geology and Landscapes   Bradford on Avon: Ex Libris Press

Summerfield, M.A. and Goudie, A.S. (1980) “The sarsens of southern England: their palaeoenvironmental interpretation with reference to other silcretes”   In Jones, D.K.C. (ed) The Shaping of Southern England   Institute of British Geographers Special Publication 11   London: Academic Press

Sarsen #1

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I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been preoccupied with preparations for a forthcoming project.   This is a piece of work that has been on the back-burner since 2010 when I completed my Masters thesis on the Stonehenge hammerstones – more on those later.

Sarsen stone is a strange and wonderful rock, and I shall write about its geology and mythology in the future.   In Britain there is a family of sarsen stones, conglomerates, that can be found in a band from Wiltshire all the way to Essex.   In Wiltshire, sarsen stone is usually made up of quartz sand in a siliceous cement.   In Hertfordshire, much larger pebbles are cemented together – known as “puddingstone”.   In Essex the stone is better known for its high iron content.

Perhaps the best-known sarsen stones are those that were used to build the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury.   Whatever form it takes, it is jolly hard stuff – but it has its uses.   For example, in Wiltshire sarsen has been used for building and street furniture, and in Hertfordshire there are objects made of puddingstone.   Visit Verulamium Museum and you’ll even see a rotary quern made of puddingstone.   So it is possible to work and use sarsen stone, and sarsen has been turned into objects throughout the past 4500 years or so.

There is a great deal to learn about how the techniques and tools of sarsen working have changed over time.   Much of our understanding of prehistoric sarsen working is theoretical; we have seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of sarsen breaking; and the skills of the modern sarsen industry were lost when new materials and techniques were adopted for road building.

I recently spent a sunny afternoon starting to prepare some tools for prehistoric sarsen working.   These tools vary depending on their purpose and have their own chaine operatoire from procurement to abandonment.   Here are some photos of an object that I made to trial some of the sarsen working tools – an axe carving in a piece of sarsen stone.

Arreton type axe and sarsen stone

Arreton type axe and sarsen stone

Axe carving in sarsen

Axe carving in sarsen

Wooden animals

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There is a long tradition of whittling or carving little wooden animals in many countries and a wonderful range of techniques is used in their manufacture.  As well as commercial production of toys such as Noah’s Arks and farmyard animals, individuals seem always have whittled little creatures for their own enjoyment and for presents.

The most amazing technique to carve animal shapes that I have come across is in the Erzgebirge region of north-eastern Germany.    Wooden rings are turned on a lathe, cutting the profile of an animal.   Once off the lathe, the ring is sliced up revealing the animal in the section.

My father carved me a small pike many years ago, which I still have on a shelf in my sitting room.   And I have a vivid memory of watching a bodger carve an owl at one of our local agricultural shows (I was perhaps eight or nine years old).   He had a short length of a fairly close-grained roundwood, about two inches in diameter and four inches long.   The owl appeared out of the wood, as though perched on a fence post.  It was all done with a knife until it came to finishing the furled wings on the owl’s back, when the bodger used a little gouge to pick out the effect of the feathers.

This past-time could even be said to go back to the Upper Palaeolithic carvings of animal forms in mammoth ivory, so beautifully displayed at the British Museum’s recent Ice Age Art exhibition.   Were these little figures models, toys, totems, signifiers of group or personal identity, art?

I was asked by one of my neighbour’s daughters to carve her a duck.   I’ve no idea why she chose a duck, but Ellie was adamant that I should make her a duck.   Being my first foray into figurative carving I was a bit nervous.   This is what came out of the little bit of ash that I used:

A duck, carved in green ash.

A duck, carved in green ash.

On seeing the duck, the older son of another neighbour asked for a whale.   Toby likes dolphins and whales.   Using the same tools – a straight knife and a spoon knife – on another ash scrap, here is the whale:

A whale, in green ash

A whale, in green ash

The photo doesn’t really show you the shape of the tail, but I’m glad I kept the bark on to suggest the whale’s scarred, barnacle-covered skin.    These are simple, plain shapes and it is interesting to see what the human eye can do to fill in the gaps and identify a form that is suggested by a few lines and planes.

Toby’s little brother would like a bear…

I’m not the first…

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…to observe that photographs accompanying museum online catalogue entries often don’t show you the one thing you most want to see.   Nothing beats studying and handling the objects themselves.   A case in point are cast copper alloy artefacts.   Blades, such as Bronze Age swords and daggers, are always photographed longitudinally.   This makes it very difficult to pick out clues about the casting methods that were used to make the objects.

When I started to clean up the sword (see previous blog post) the first thing I did was to remove the pouring cup from the hilt and the little spur of bronze from the tip of the blade.   During the casting the molten metal was poured, vertically, from the crucible into the pouring cup.   When Neil Burridge made the sword mould he included a little channel continuing from the tip for about 2cm, to ensure that the molten metal ran all the way down to the bottom of the sword tip during the pour.

pouring cup scar

Pouring cup scar, May 2013

I used a hacksaw to remove the pouring cup and spur, but following some filing and grinding it is only the pouring cup scar that remains.   With more work, this too will become harder to see.   And this will finally be covered by a grip.   There is a palstave axe on display at the Corinium Museum which still has a slight visible scar.

Were blades like this sword cast from the tip or the hilt?   Having studied these objects in close detail, Neil concludes that at first they were cast from the tip; but that as the Bronze Age proceeded, casting moved to the hilt.

Whilst it is likely that in the Bronze Age waste metal was gathered up for recycling, I still have the pouring cup.

Sword pouring cup

Sword pouring cup, May 2013

Doing something new

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My current task is a new experience for me.   I have finally got round to start the finishing of a copy of a later Bronze Age sword, cast by Neil Burridge for a Young Archaeologists’ Club meeting a good while back.

The sword still had its pouring cup attached, as well as flash and casting marks.   The sword was cast vertically, through the hilt.   Not being a proficient Bronze Age metal-worker, I used a hacksaw to remove the pouring cup and a file to remove the flash, followed by some simple polishing to start to bring out the shine of the blade.   There’s a great deal more to do, to do the job properly.

bronze sword

Bronze Age sword, April 2013

On his website, Neil gives some indication of the unknowns in Bronze Age sword production.   Despite the very large volume of bronze circulating in objects such as swords, daggers, axe-heads and so on during the Middle to Late Bronze Age, and the archaeological literature that categorises all these finds and their copper alloys, it is true to say that relatively little is understood about the detail of the casters’ techniques.

Neil shows how a practitioner’s experience, built up over the years, is an essential component in understanding past practices.   It is hard enough to hacksaw, file and polish the sword blade in my workshop.   What were the Bronze Age tools used to complete these tasks?   This is but one of many questions.   I shall explore some of them in future blog posts about this sword.

More willow

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As part of the process of learning about the characteristics of willow, I carved a large scoop from some of the River Kennet wood that I used to make the bowl in my earlier blog post.

scoop madeof willow

Willow scoop, April 2013

The orange colours have been brought out by the raw cold-pressed linseed oil that I used on the wood.   It’s about 32cm long (bowl about 15 cm, handle about 17cm).   It’s all one piece of wood, carved from half a log.   The back of the scoop’s bowl was at the outside of the log.

Just like the bowl I wrote about earlier, the cleanest cuts were those across the grain.   The smoothest surface is the outside of the bowl.   The handle surface isn’t bad either, except where some fibres were lifted by the cutting edge and tore out.   Cutting parallel to the grain was very difficult to manage.   Even the thinnest of fibres lifted up on the handle, and when I tried to cut or scrape these off, others would lift in the opposite direction.

The interior of the bowl also presented problems.   This was because of the steep sides and relatively sharp angle between the sides and the base.   The willow fibres tended to lift or crush in this area.   Although the upper internal sides of the bowl are quite smooth, the lower sides and base are noticeably rougher.   The narrowness of the bowl meant that I could not place my hands correctly to get the direction of cut I really wanted with my spoon knives.   Perhaps this would have been easier if I had left-handed spoon knives as well as right-handed.

The wood is still relatively green, having been cut about this time last year.   I shall have to leave what I have left for some time before seeing how it cuts when well-seasoned.   In the meantime, perhaps I need to read about how willow is managed for making cricket bats, and whether the different British willow varieties have noticeably different qualities for wood-working.