Methods of processing stone in the Stone Age. General characteristics of the Mesolithic era. Tools made from whole nodules
A superbly crafted "bay leaf" from France (depicted life-size on the left and long shot on the right) is so fragile that it could not serve any practical purpose. Its length is 28 centimeters, and its thickness is only one centimeter, and perhaps it was some kind of ritual object or even served as a proud emblem of a skilled craftsman.
Perhaps in the distant future, when the internal combustion engine becomes a funny ancient curiosity, penicillin will be considered a charlatan drug, and steel will become obsolete, archaeologists studying the 20th century will not tire of being amazed that people with such primitive and limited technology managed to live at all. not bad. In the same way, today many people, imagining their Cro-Magnon ancestors as animal-like creatures who chopped up the carcass of a mammoth with blunt stone fragments, are perplexed how such people with such tools managed to survive in the harsh conditions of the ice age.
How caricatured such a representation is becomes clear to anyone who has had a chance to hold in their hand and examine a Stone Age tool like the famous "bay leaf" depicted on the left of the page. The impeccable proportions and graceful workmanship of this flint blade prove incontrovertibly that the one who made it could not be a clumsy dumbass, and testify to remarkable technical achievements. In fact, Cro-Magnon man was a skillful and inventive toolmaker and made the greatest leap in the history of technology. In 30,000 years, he has progressed much further along the path of progress than all his predecessors in 1.3 million years, and much more than they subjugated the environment.
He was an incomparable master of stonework, and, having perfected the old methods, he made much more varied and efficient tools from flint and other suitable rocks. But, in addition, he learned to process other materials - bone, horns, tusks - that were almost never used before, and created new weapons from them, invented new techniques to use them more efficiently, as well as new household items and jewelry. He learned to make fire better and faster and applied it to new uses. Some of the dwellings he built were only a step away from real houses, they were much stronger than all the previous ones and better protected from cold, rain and wind; and when the climate changed, man was able to cope with new difficulties. Technological innovations and the development of material culture replaced physical evolution: man now more and more severed ties with his animal past. He was still dependent on nature, but she no longer controlled him. Everywhere, from the tropics to the arctic, he excelled in his relationship with nature, and on the whole his life in all geographic areas was a full life.
The improvement of stone tools was a decisive moment in the new technical achievements of Cro-Magnon man, but, ironically, no one knows the purpose of the most beautiful examples of his new skill - thin plates, like the twenty-eight-centimeter "laurel leaf", which received this name for its shape. Too thin to serve as a knife, too large and brittle to be a spearhead, this beautifully crafted piece of flint seems like a deliberate display of craftsmanship. Undoubtedly, the manufacture of an object of such harmonic proportions required a skill bordering on art, and many archaeologists believe that masterpieces like this were precisely works of art that had an aesthetic and ritual function and had no utilitarian purpose. Perhaps these were highly valued gifts passed from one person to another, from one group to another.
If such large "laurel leaves" were not made for practical use, they are a clear example of the transition of technology to a different quality - after all, smaller ordinary tools, on the model of which these masterpieces were created, had a purely practical purpose. Excavations in western Europe have yielded thousands of stone points of various sizes, and no doubt many of them could serve as excellent spear points or razor-edged knives. These were the most important weapons in the arsenal of a people who, living and hunting in the game-rich areas of Europe, depended less and less on the strength of their biceps and more and more on the strength of their intellect and the effectiveness of their weapons in the struggle for existence.
The stone blades were undeniably sharp and efficient. Modern experiments have shown that well-worked flint tips are sharper than iron ones and penetrate deeper into the animal's body. And in terms of cutting ability, flint knives are equal to steel knives or even surpass them. The only drawback of flint points and knives is their brittleness, due to which they break incomparably more often.
The most important role of these tools in the life of the Cro-Magnons led experts to the idea that large, practically useless masterpieces - and several dozen of them were found - could be ritual objects, embodiments of an ideal spearhead. There is, however, an assumption that the magnificent "bay leaf" was made by a virtuoso master simply to demonstrate his art. If so, the admiration and praise he received from family, friends, or group was well deserved. The Bay Leaf is undeniably a masterpiece, and there are only a handful of people in the modern world who are so skilled in the ancient craft that they could create something similar.
It is only natural, if perhaps a little sad, that skill, which for more than a million years was a necessary condition for human existence, has almost disappeared over the past few centuries. Some hunter-gatherer tribes, such as the Australian Aborigines, still make stone arrowheads, spearheads, and scrapers, but they increasingly prefer modern metals to stone. In an industrial society, there are some craft communities in various places, practicing the ancient art to one degree or another. For example, peasants in the Turkish village of Kakmak insert flint plates into wooden sleds that replace threshing machines - they are dragged back and forth over wheat ears. In Brandon, England, two or three craftsmen still make flints for the flintlocks used in American Revolutionary War festivities. And finally, in different countries, individual enthusiasts (mostly archaeologists) independently studied the intricacies of flint processing in order to learn more about the life of prehistoric man and to establish more precisely how he used his tools (see pp. 81-89),
Acquiring the right skill is very difficult. First of all, it is necessary to know the material - the stone from which pieces are to be beaten off, in order to then, having processed them, make one or another tool. The best stones have a uniform fine structure. As a matter of fact, the most convenient material for processing is not even stone, but glass. Glass insulators on telegraph poles in remote areas of Australia were disappearing faster than they could be replaced - local Aborigines discovered that they make excellent tools. In the end, the workers began to leave piles of insulators at the posts as a gift from the stoneworkers.
However, glass is a very brittle material and obsidian (volcanic glass) is rare in nature. In second place is flint. Its fine crystalline structure allows the master to set the desired shape for the future tool. Coarse-grained structure and various flaws make it difficult to process granites or layered stones like slate with the same confidence. If flint was not available, craftsmen used stones with the finest structure they could find, such as quartzite or basalt.
The art of processing is to know where and how to act on the stone. It is either directly hit with a stone, bone or wooden chipper, or a bone chisel is used, or it is strongly pressed at the intended point with a pointed tool, such as a process of a deer antler. But always the force of impact or pressure must be controlled with absolute precision, and the master must feel all the planes and angles of the structure of the stone he has chosen. When he acquires the necessary skill, it is already relatively easy for him to beat off or squeeze out from the stone a flake of the required size with edges as sharp as a razor.
These two properties of some types of stone - the relative ease of working and the tendency to give sharp edges when broken - became the basis of man's first technology, and for hundreds of thousands of years, the ability to use them was the measure of his technical progress. Initially, he used one of two main methods: either he beat a stone against a stone to sharpen one of them into a handaxe or striker, or he beat sharp-edged flakes from one stone and used these flakes as tools. Over time, he discovered how to break off flakes of a predetermined size and shape and how to work and retouch them, then using for specific purposes - a scraper to clean hides, a spearhead to kill animals, an ax to chop or chop wood.
In Cro-Magnon times, another improvement appeared. Prehistoric craftsmen in Europe learned to beat off very thin stone cores, the so-called knife-shaped plates, the length of which exceeds the width at least twice, and both edges are so sharp that they sometimes had to be blunted so that the plate could be clamped in the hand. A high degree of skill is required to obtain knife blades.
The master first gives the flint nodule a roughly cylindrical shape, and then, one by one, breaks off the plates from the outer edge in the longitudinal direction, either by applying a strong squeeze or by accurately striking the upper edge of the core. The pieces that break off are equal in length to the core (usually 25-30 centimeters), but their thickness, as a rule, is several millimeters. Each new plate breaks off exactly next to the previous one - and so around the entire core until it is almost completely used. Then various tools are made from these plates. A good master can get more than 50 plates from one core, spending literally minutes on the whole operation.
This processed and drilled antler, found in Dordogne (France) and made 15 thousand years ago, belongs to the mysterious Cro-Magnon products, which modern experts call the "chief's rod" (based on the assumption that it served as a symbol of power). Later wands were decorated with intricate carvings.
The knife blade method is much more economical than the older flake method. From a given amount of flint, more blades are obtained, and in addition, the working edge of such a blade is five times longer than that of a flake. Such savings may not have been significant in areas where good flint was plentiful; for example, in England, the so-called chalk flints are very common and of various sizes - from pieces the size of a chicken egg to fifty-kilogram nodules. However, for a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in places not rich in flint, this advantage is obvious. As S. A. Semenov, a Soviet specialist, an expert on Stone Age tools, pointed out, "man, using a small amount of flint, now achieves a much greater result."
Interestingly, the knife blade tools found in the Soviet Union at Kostenki on the Don River (see pp. 49-57) were made from flint mined at least 150 kilometers away. For the hunters who lived in Kostenki, it undoubtedly made sense to chip off as many plates as possible from the nodule. The plates were beaten off right at the place of flint extraction, which also saved time and effort. If the nodule turned out to be with a defect, it could immediately be easily replaced with another; fragments broken off during the preliminary treatment of the nodule remained in place, and people returning to Kostenki with unfinished plates carried only a payload.
The knife-blade method was probably of great help to hunters who went on multi-day expeditions to areas where not only flints, but also other fine-grained rocks were almost absent. They could take with them a supply of cores or plates, so that there would be something to replace the tips of spears that broke off during an unsuccessful throw or remained in the wound of an animal that managed to escape. And the edges of the flint knives, which cut through the joints and tendons, broke off and became dull. Thanks to the knife-blade method, new tools could be made on the spot.
The ever-increasing perfection of tool-making seems to have played a decisive role in the rapid increase in diversity in the cultures of the Cro-Magnon groups. The axes of Homo erectus were about the same, whether he lived in Spain or in East Africa, and in the same way, wherever Neanderthals lived, their scrapers and knives resembled each other - sometimes so much so that it seemed as if they were made by one person. But with the advent of the Cro-Magnons, the situation changes. At the beginning of their era in the west of Europe, according to the French classification, there were two main types of tool making - Aurignacian and Perigord (named after the areas where their first specimens were found) with some variations in each. In later Cro-Magnon times, two other cultures dominate - Solutrean and Madeleine.
The people who made Aurignacian and Perigord scrapers seem to have lived at the same time or almost at the same time. This has given rise to a number of mysteries. Did each type represent a different culture? Were these people physically different from each other? Do not the differences in the stone inventory reflect the differences in climate, flora and fauna, familiar to each of these groups? Or is it just differences in style? Maybe one group in some cases made different tools - or the same tools, but in different quantities - depending on seasonal activity and certain situations.
Now it seems to be safe to assume that some variations in the manufacture of tools simply reflect the individuality or preferences of those who made them, and not differences in functionality. The craftsmen who lived in the same area and, possibly, were related to each other, developed a certain way of processing flint, and therefore the tools received a similar shape. These masters jealously kept their style and passed it on to new generations as an expression of their personality - like a signature. There is no doubt that the art, painting and decorations of Cro-Magnon man are clear evidence of growing self-expression and self-awareness. It is likely that the same tendencies were reflected in some of his tools. But no matter how individual in terms of dressing the tools included in various Cro-Magnon inventories, in terms of their intended purpose, these inventories had much in common. Each of them included many more specialized tools than those used by more ancient people. Archaeologists distinguish 60-70 types of tools in the stone inventory of some Neanderthals - scrapers that should have been held horizontally, knives with blunt backs, double-edged knives, and so on. But in the inventory of Cro-Magnons, there are more than a hundred types of them - knives for cutting meat, knives for planing wood, scrapers for bones, scrapers for skins, drills, piercers, stone saws, chisels, grinding plates and many others. Cro-Magnon man was a great innovator. Among other things, he seems to have begun attaching bone and antler handles to many of his stone tools, such as axes and knives. The handles doubled or tripled the force applied to the tool, providing a firmer grip and allowing much greater use of the arm and shoulder muscles.
One of the most important tools improved by the Cro-Magnon was the chisel. It would be very tempting to say that he invented it, but incisors have also been found in some Neanderthal implements and even Homo erectus. However, in the hands of the first modern man, the incisors gradually became better, more useful and more diverse. Nowadays, a chisel is called, for example, a tool of a sculptor, engraver, etc. In the Stone Age, it was a tool with a strong, sharply beveled edge or point, used to cut, notch and process materials such as bone, horns, wood and sometimes stone. Thus, the main difference between the chisel and the vast majority of other Stone Age tools was that it was not used to kill animals, cut meat, peel skins, or cut young trees for poles. It was intended for the manufacture of other tools and devices, that is, it had the same function as modern tool machines. With the advent of tools for making other tools, the technique of Cro-Magnon man was able to develop many times faster than before.
With the help of a cutter, many kinds of wooden devices were probably made, but only minor fragments of them have survived. Therefore, the best evidence of the effectiveness of the chisel is the tools processed by it - magnificent tools, which, like the chisel itself, testify to the remarkable achievements of the Cro-Magnon.
Three main organic materials - bone, horn and ivory - helped meet the needs of the growing material culture of the Cro-Magnons, and the chisel opened up the possibility for the most diverse of their applications. Homo erectus and Neanderthal used bones to some extent - to scrape, pierce and dig - but not nearly as extensively as Cro-Magnon. During excavations of a typical Neanderthal site, for a thousand stone tools found, there are at most 25 made of bone. In Cro-Magnon settlements, this ratio is one to one, or there are even more bone tools than stone ones.
Bone, horn and ivory were the miracle materials of the Cro-Magnon time - about the same as plastics are now. They are much stronger and harder than wood, and also less brittle and therefore more convenient for processing. They could be cut, gouged, serrated, knurled and sharpened into a variety of shapes. They could be turned into tiny devices like needles or used for heavy work: a deer antler serves as an excellent pick, any of the long bones of a mammoth's legs, split lengthwise, is an almost finished scoop that needs only a handle. Ivory can be steamed and bent, which opened up new possibilities for making tools.
And besides, these materials did not have to be specially mined: they were supplied in abundance to the Cro-Magnons by the same animals that they constantly hunted. It goes without saying that all animals have bones, and many of the large herbivores - red deer, reindeer and mammoths - also possessed horns or tusks. Horns are a true gift of nature: after all, every year deer shed their antlers, so that people had only to pick them up. Since at one time the red and reindeer were especially numerous in the west of Europe, their antlers were used more widely than bone or tusks. In some treeless regions in eastern Europe and Siberia, the source of raw materials for tools was the skeletons of mammoths that died of natural causes or were driven into a trap by hunters. The average mammoth tusk reached a length of almost three meters and weighed more than forty kilograms - many tools and all kinds of devices could be made from such a quantity of raw materials.
True, bone, horns and tusks required a special tool for processing. And this is where the cutter comes in handy. Its strong, chisel-like edge easily cut and hewed bone without breaking it. To cut the bone, the master drew a deep groove along its circumference, and then with a sharp blow exactly broke it in the right place - just like today a glazier runs a diamond over glass and then breaks it off.
To make a needle, puncture or awl, it was enough to scratch two deep parallel grooves with a cutter to a softer core, after which the strip between the grooves was broken out and the desired shape was given to it (see pages 86-87). From pieces of bone, in addition, it was possible to make burnishers, scrapers, beads, bracelets, tools for digging, and many other things.
In addition to household utensils, spearheads, darts and jagged ends of harpoons were made from bone and horns, which helped the Cro-Magnons to better use the abundance of all kinds of game. Perhaps, such a number of edible herbivores have never inhabited our planet - mammoths, horses, noble and reindeer, wild boars, bison in Europe and Asia, and in Africa lived all the animals that now exist in it, and many more all sorts of others, now extinct, including the giant relatives of the buffalo, hartebeest, and zebra. As the English archaeologist Graham Clarke put it, from the Cro-Magnon point of view, these animals existed in order "to transform plants into meat, fat and raw materials such as hides, tendons, bones and horns" - and the first modern people used all their considerable ingenuity, to use these gifts of nature as fully as possible.
Archaeologists have found two striking evidence of Cro-Magnon hunting skills in Europe. Near the city of Pavlova in Czechoslovakia, the skeletal remains of more than 100 mammoths were unearthed, lying in one colossal pile, and near Solutre, in France, an even more stunning pile contained the fossils of about 10,000 wild horses lying randomly under a high cliff. Mammoth bones, apparently, were left over from animals that hunters killed in pit traps. Skilled horse hunters, who knew the terrain and the habits of their prey perfectly, perhaps rounded up and drove them to this cliff, from where the animals fell down in a panic, and this was repeated from year to year, from generation to generation.
It is very likely that the people of that era, including the ancestors of the Indians who eventually settled the plains of North America, knew how to hunt big game like no one else in the history of mankind. They certainly knew what plants these animals prefer, knew when seasonal migrations begin and how fast animals move, they knew what frightens them and what calms them. They knew where to dig pit traps and where to place bait loops. They knew how to direct animals into natural or specially constructed pens - either by frightening the herd, or skillfully and imperceptibly turning it in the right direction. Trapped animals were finished off with spears or knives and the carcasses were butchered right there on the spot. The meat was then taken to the parking lot, perhaps after pre-treatment: for example, it was already cut into narrow strips, and then smoked or dried.
These hunters undoubtedly knew the anatomy of their prey and understood the benefits of eating certain organs. Modern Eskimos of the interior of Alaska save the adrenal glands of dead caribou for young children and pregnant women. Chemical analysis of these endocrine glands showed that they are surprisingly rich in vitamin C, which is absolutely essential for humans, but is included in only a relatively small number of components of the Eskimo diet. And without overestimating the knowledge of the Cro-Magnon hunters in this respect, one can still assume that they, too, knew perfectly well which parts of the killed game were especially useful, and not just tasty.
A deep understanding of the habits and characteristics of the game, combined with a significant improvement in hunting equipment, greatly increased the amount of meat harvested. People have long had wooden spears with burnt ends or sharp stone tips. With these spears they acted exactly like lances or threw them from afar, but a spear thrown by hand is unlikely to often inflict a severe wound even on a young deer, not to mention the thick-skinned bison giants, especially if it was thrown after a fleeing animal. Cro-Magnon hunters invented a spear thrower, which helped to more accurately hit game at a noticeably greater distance.
As the finds in the French La Placard cave indicate, this device appeared at least 14 thousand years ago. Fragments of spear throwers were found there, including an oblong piece of bone with a prong at the end, very similar to a huge crochet hook. In total, about 70 spear-throwers made of deer antlers were found in the south-west of France and near Lake Constance, but in the Old World they are almost never found anywhere else - perhaps because they were made from short-lived wood and they rotted a long time ago. About 10 thousand years ago, the Indians of North and South America used wooden spear throwers. The Aztecs called them "atlatl". The Eskimos used them until very recently, and they are still used by the Australian Aborigines, who call them "woomera".
Simply put, the spear thrower is like a continuation of the human hand, lengthening it by 30-60 centimeters. One end serves as a handle, while the other has a barb or hook to hold the blunt end of the spear (see pages 28-29). The hunter raises the spear thrower over his shoulder with the prong up and puts the spear on it so that the sharp end is pointing forward and slightly up. To throw a spear, he abruptly throws his hand forward, and it breaks off the prong of the spear thrower at the top of the arc described by it with a high initial speed due to the centrifugal force that arises in this case. The hunter continues to hold the spear thrower, to the end of which may be attached a strap wrapped around his wrist. The spear flies faster than when thrown by hand, since the spear thrower lengthens the lever and the end with a tooth moves faster than the end clamped in the fingers.
Modern experiments have shown the great advantage of the spear thrower. A two-meter spear thrown by hand flies no more than 60-70 meters, and a spear thrower sends it 150 meters with such force that it kills a deer at 30 meters. This increase in range played a colossal role for the prehistoric hunter. He no longer had to sneak up close to prey, he even often had time to throw a spear before the animals notice him and take flight. Now a person could hunt alone: it was no longer required to surround the animal before hitting it with a spear. And it goes without saying that the spear thrower made hunting safer, as it allowed them to keep a respectful distance from teeth, horns and hooves. The benefits of all this are obvious: hunters who hunted game more often and were less likely to get injured themselves lived better and longer.
The first spear throwers were no doubt made of wood, like modern Australian Woomers, but soon they were made from deer antlers. These later Cro-Magnons, who are called Madeleines, decorated their spear throwers with carvings and patterns, and possibly painted them - traces of red ocher were preserved in the recesses of one, while the eyes of others were blackened. Many spear throwers amaze with the grace and expressiveness of the animals depicted on them - horses, deer, mountain goats, bison, birds and fish (see p. 98). This combination of aesthetics with utilitarianism is visible in many aspects of the life of a Cro-Magnon man. At least three spear-throwers seem to testify to Rabelaisian humor - all three depict defecating mountain goats with amazing art.
This piece of iron pyrite (one and a half times enlarged), the oldest known "firestone", was found in a Belgian cave, where it had lain for 10,000 or more years. A deep recess in a rounded piece of pyrite appeared as a result of constant blows with flint, which struck sparks. Apparently the Cro-Magnons were the first to discover that flint and iron pyrite produced sparks hot enough to ignite tinder.
The spear itself has also changed. By this time, hunters realized that a serrated tip inflicts more severe wounds than a smooth one. Harpoon-type tips, made of bone and horns, often had several notches on one or both sides. Another improvement was dictated by the fact that a spear, even if it hit an animal, rarely killed him outright. The hunters pursued it until it weakened from loss of blood, and then they finished it off. To speed up this process, hunters began to make tips with deep grooves on both sides - these depressions, apparently, were designed to make blood flow faster and easier from the wound.
Perhaps, a mysterious device was also associated with hunting, which was given the name "commander's rod". These wands were made of horns or bone and differ markedly in length, although they rarely exceed 30 centimeters. They are Y-shaped or T-shaped, and a hole must be drilled under the "Y" fork or under the "T" crossbar. Unlike the deadly arrowheads, which are simple and jagged, their purpose remains intriguingly obscure.
Many archaeologists believe that it was ritual - that the wands, like scepters, served as a symbol of status or authority for those who had the right to carry them. Some of the wands are clearly phallic in shape and may have been attributed to some magical power. Other archaeologists offer a completely prosaic explanation and consider them to be a device for straightening arrows - if a bent arrow shaft is inserted into a hole and its ends are fixed, then, acting as a lever with the rod, you can straighten the bend, especially if the shaft is pre-steamed or soaked.
In addition, the wand could be used as a hunting weapon - a kind of sling, consisting of a handle and a piece of leather, fastened to it with straps passed through a hole. Other explanations were also offered, from the most mundane (pegs for dwellings made of skins) to playful ones (see p. 65). But while the mystery of the wands remains unsolved.
A mystery of a different kind is the question of whether the Cro-Magnons used bows and arrows. There is no clear archaeological evidence that they had such weapons, at least not if we exclude the very end of their era. Since bows are usually made of wood and tendons or intestines, it would be truly a miracle if at least one example survived from the time of the last glaciation. In Denmark, two bows dating back about 8,000 years were found, and to the southeast, excavations of reindeer hunters' sites yielded a large number of wooden arrows with stone tips made about 10,000 years ago. Small stones, possibly more than 20,000 years old, have been found in the French cave of La Colombière, with scrawled drawings that appear to depict feathered projectiles, but it is impossible to decide whether they are arrows or darts.
Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Cro-Magnon man had enough intelligence and resourcefulness to invent the bow. He knew that bent young trees straighten sharply when let go; he had leather belts, and he almost certainly knew that the dried tendons and intestines of animals are very strong and elastic. That is why many archaeologists are now convinced that some Cro-Magnon hunters used the bow even earlier than ten thousand years BC, although there is no material evidence of this.
Undoubtedly, the bow provided the Cro-Magnon hunter with enormous benefits. The spear thrower, with all its advantages, forced him to run out into the open, and in case of an unsuccessful throw, the frightened animals fled. But with a bow, he could stay in cover and, if he missed, send another arrow - and another, and another. In addition, the arrow flew faster than the spear and hit harder at greater distances. With the help of the bow, it was easier to hit running or small prey, as well as flying birds.
Perhaps, in the expansion of the diet of the Cro-Magnons and in the development of areas previously unsuitable for human habitation, the invention of various devices for catching fish played an even greater role than the spear thrower and the bow. People used to use the gifts of streams, rivers and the sea, but for some Cro-Magnons fishing has become the main occupation. Thus, for example, the archaeological material left by the hunter-gatherers who lived in the Nelson Bay cave in South Africa indicates that here, too, the improvement of tools and devices was a necessary condition for successful survival.
One of these ingenious inventions was the spear point with two curved bone teeth attached to the sides, which held the fish pierced by the point. A fish raspyalka was also used - a small bone or wooden stick about 5 centimeters, tied in the middle to a long leather strap or tendon. The fisherman threw the baited tether into the water, the fish swallowed the bait, the trap got stuck in its throat, and the fisherman pulled the prey ashore.
Somewhat later in South Africa, and perhaps in Europe, people began to fish in much greater numbers than ever before. Small, cylindrical, grooved stones found in South Africa may have been suspended as weights from nets woven from straps or plant fibers. With the help of nets, two or three fishermen could catch a whole school of fish at one time.
Perhaps the Cro-Magnons also used stone fences, which primitive tribes still use for catching fish. They would have been especially effective on rivers such as the Dordogne and the Weser in France, where on spawning days the salmon traveled upstream in one living stream. It can be assumed that during the spawning season, small groups went to the river far from the main camp to prepare salmon for everyone. The fish was probably cleaned and dried in the sun or smoked on fires right there and carried away ready for storage. In France, at Solvier, excavations unearthed a large rectangle neatly lined with small stones. Its location and shape suggest that it was used for curing fish.
The systematic exploitation of the abundant protein resources of the seas, rivers and lakes, including not only fish, but also a variety of shellfish, according to anthropologist Bernard Campbell, was of great importance, not only because it expanded the basis of the human diet, but also because it led man to the following a great step in cultural evolution - to a settled way of life. When the Cro-Magnons received such a reliable supplement to their meat and vegetable food as fish and shellfish, the need to constantly wander in search of prey began to disappear. With the nets, they obtained more food with less effort than they had before when they were just wandering hunter-gatherers, and therefore a larger number of people could live in one place without starving. In a world with a rapidly increasing population, the possibility of a transition to a settled way of life played a decisive role.
For people at the end of the ice age, the improvement of tools and methods of obtaining food was the main, but not the only concern. As they learned to take more and more of nature's gifts, they found more effective ways to protect themselves from its harshness. The manufacture of carefully tailored, tailored clothing helped them conquer the far north and opened the way to the deserted expanses of the American continent.
Cro-Magnon clothing made of skins probably resembled the national dress of the Eskimos. A shirt with tightly sewn seams to keep in body heat, trousers that can be easily tucked into boots, and something like socks, possibly fur, make you feel normal in any weather, except for the most severe cold. And outerwear, consisting of a fur jacket with a hood, mittens and fur boots, does not allow a person to freeze even in bitter cold. Some Stone Age figurines found in the Soviet Union appear to depict women dressed in furs. But even in milder climates, well-tailored clothing has clear advantages - the most ancient needles with an eye were made by the same Solutrean craftsmen who created amazing "laurel leaves".
For hunter-gatherers fighting against the icy cold of the North, even more important than warm clothing was fire. Since the time of Homo erectus, people have used it for cooking. In addition, he gave them light, warmth and protection from dangerous predators. But the Cro-Magnons found other uses for fire. To begin with, they are the first of the people who left evidence of their ability to quickly make fire in case of need. A rounded piece of iron pyrite was found in a Belgian cave. This mineral belongs to those few natural substances from which flint knocks out sparks that can ignite dry tinder - the sparks resulting from the impact of flint on flint or a simple stone on another simple stone are not hot enough. Moreover, on the surface of the Belgian pyrites there is a recess formed from numerous blows. Finding a piece of iron pyrite is far from easy, and therefore the "fire stones" were undoubtedly highly valued and the group carried them with them on all their wanderings.
An even more striking example of the power that Cro-Magnon man continued to acquire over fire (evidence of which was found in the Soviet Union and France), at first glance, seems completely uninteresting - these are shallow recesses in the bottom of the hearth and a groove extending from it. Such a simple innovation may have gone unnoticed more than once during earlier excavations. But, in fact, it was the first step on the way to modern blast furnaces. The fact is that the fire burns hotter if it receives more air, that is, more oxygen. The grooves and grooves of these prehistoric hearths opened the way for air to fuel, and the flames gave more heat.
The ancient inhabitants of the Russian steppes, who built such hearths, this device was absolutely necessary because of the fuel they used. Due to the lack of trees, they were forced to be content with fuel that burns very poorly under normal conditions. They burned the same miracle material that revolutionized the production of tools - bone. Although it is difficult to ignite and burns badly, since the combustible substances in it are only 25%, the heat of the bone gives enough. And the prehistoric Russian steppe people used bones as logs, which is proved by the absence of charcoal and significant amounts of bone ash in their specially blown hearths.
The hearth meant home, and the Cro-Magnon man, who changed so much, also changed the concept of home. Living in caves and under rocky sheds that had previously served as a shelter for his predecessors, he - at least in some places - seemed to be more concerned with the cleanliness of his dwelling: the garbage no longer accumulated inside, but was thrown out.
The improvements of Cro-Magnon dwellings are especially noticeable in those areas where there were no ready-made shelters. In Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Siberia, many remains of strong structures have been found in open areas. Apparently, they lived in them, although not all year round, but more or less permanently. One of the most famous of these settlements was excavated at Dolní Vestonica, in the south-central part of Czechoslovakia, and from the surviving remains it is possible to recreate an extremely curious picture of the domestic life of a man who lived in Europe 27 thousand years ago.
On a grassy hillock with sparsely scattered trees, there was a village of five huts, partly surrounded by a simple fence of mammoth bones and tusks dug into the ground, which were then overlaid with brushwood and sod. One hut stood 80 meters from the others. Four huts built side by side rested on wooden posts slightly tilted inward, dug into the ground and lined with stones for stability. The walls were skins, presumably worked and sewn, stretched over poles and fixed to the ground with stones and heavy bones.
A brook flowed down the slope not far from the huts, and the ground around was rammed with the feet of people who had lived there for generations. A large fire burned in the open space between the huts - perhaps a special fire keeper kept it alive and threw bones into it. Apparently, the fire burned constantly to scare away predators.
Inside the largest hut, about 15 meters long and about 6 meters wide, five shallow hearth pits were found in the floor. At one hearth, two long mammoth bones were dug into the ground to support a skewer. In this rather cozy environment, it is not difficult to imagine a person sitting on a boulder who makes tools - the exact movements of the master are deceptively unhurried, each blow of the bone chipper breaks off a thin plate from a cylindrical piece of flint (nucleus). From the far end of the hut comes a clear ringing sound, like a bird's trill. This woman blew into a hollow bone with two or three holes - in 25 thousand years in Dolni Vestonica they will find what we would now call a whistle.
But the most striking find was the remains of a small hut on a hillside away from the rest. The hut was cut into the slope so that it formed its back wall, the side walls were partly made of stones and clay, and the entrance faced towards the bottom of the hill.
Inside, the visitor would see a hearth, not at all like the hearths in the other huts - an earthen vault over hot coals. It was a clay kiln - one of the very first such kilns on Earth. Even then, specially composed clay dough was fired in this oven - not just clay from the bank of the stream, but mixed with crushed bone so that the heat spread over it evenly, turning the viscous mass into a new, stone-hard material. This is the first example in the history of technology of the process that was to become ubiquitous - the combination and processing of two or more different substances to obtain a new useful material that is not similar to its components, which later led to the appearance of glass, bronze, steel, nylon and others. countless materials of human use. Another 15 thousand years will pass before other people who lived in what is now Japan learn how to turn clay into vessels, however, as the finds in Dolni Vestonica show, ceramics had already been invented by this time.
When the hut with the oven was excavated in 1951, it turned out that its sooty floor was littered with fragments of ceramic figurines. Among them were the heads of animals - bears, foxes, lions. In one particularly beautiful lion's head, there is a gaping hole imitating a wound - perhaps the figurine was supposed to help some hunter inflict the same wound on a real lion. Lying on the floor were hundreds of clay pellets bearing the fingerprints of a prehistoric master (see p. 78). Perhaps he removed them from a lump of unbaked clay when he began to knead it and give it the desired shape. Hands and feet of human figurines, limbs of animals lay nearby. Perhaps they fell off during firing, or the ancient sculptor casually discarded figurines that did not satisfy him.
But much more interesting and mysterious than all these fragments and even animal figurines on the floor of the hut are human figurines found there, and especially female figurines. Unlike animals, they are not realistic. Their chest and buttocks are exorbitantly large, their arms are very conditional, and their legs converge into a point. Experts have not yet come to a unified conclusion regarding these Venuses, as they are called (see pp. 90,95-97). Were they the goddesses of the hearth and pointed feet stuck into the ground so that they stood upright, guarding the house? Were they a symbol of fruitfulness and their hypertrophied forms were supposed to ensure fertility? But be that as it may, they are beautiful, despite their grotesque proportions. They have grace and dignity, and stylized plasticity makes them related to some modern sculptures.
And whoever made them? Was he just an artisan? Or an artist? Or a shaman? One thing is certain: art and practical labor have already become inextricably fused. And this was one of the most brilliant achievements of Cro-Magnon man.
Page 1 of 8
SECTION 1. From the history of stone processing
The role of stone in the development of primitive man
The mystery of the beauty of the stone has excited people since ancient times. The stone is not in vain considered a symbol of eternity. It was he who brought to our days the immortal creations of man imprinted in him. The finds of archaeologists make it possible to learn more and more about the history of mankind, about the development of life on earth.
For primitive man, stone turned out to be the most reliable, strong and durable material. A whole era in the history of mankind is called the Stone Age, which is divided into three periods: Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.
Rounded stones (ordinary pebbles) after chipping, rough upholstery by ancient people turned into the simplest tools in the form of knives, scrapers, chopped. What was important was not the shape, size or weight of the pebble, but the hardness and strength of the stone itself. Flattened pebbles made of diorite, quartz, and silicon turned out to be the most suitable. Pebbles were beaten right on the spot with several blows until they were given the required shape. This is how the first stone processing technology was born. In the struggle for the quality of the products obtained, the production technology was improved, new operations were introduced. So, for the manufacture of low-quality hand axes, 10-30 blows were required, and for a higher one, 50-80 or more blows. When grinding an ax, a Neolithic master made 50,000 stone movements over abrasive material in 8-10 hours of work. In archeology, a special “pebble” culture has long been identified, one of the most ancient in the development of mankind.
The traces left on the stone are studying a new direction in archaeological science - transology. Stone processing technologies are different: chipping, retouching, drilling, splitting, sawing, turning. It must be assumed that the same people who were engaged in the manufacture of stone tools combined two professions - a prospecting geologist and a stone cutter.
In the future, chipping and splitting technologies were more widely used, and flint and volcanic glass - obsidian - turned out to be the best material for this. These stones, having a relatively high hardness, have the ability, when split, to form narrow and thin plates with sharp cutting edges, which can hold such a “sharpening” for some time.
In addition to these stones, quartzite, petrified wood, siliceous tuff, clay and lime shales, granites, fine-grained sandstones and other rocks that are easily processed by impact methods have similar properties. Other stones, such as jade, although strong, are difficult to work with impacts due to their toughness.
The process of splitting resembles the splitting of firewood, when logs break off from a round saw cut of a tree. When splitting stone blanks, it was necessary to know to the subtleties the methods of the work performed (the size of the stone, the direction and force of impact). Therefore, the manufacture of flint tools is an art multiplied by strength, dexterity and accurate calculation of the impact.
The objects found by archaeologists can be attributed to jewelry, since it is difficult to imagine how plates 55 mm long, 5 mm wide and 1 mm thick could be made at that time! In archeology, such a finish of stone plates
received the name retouching (from the French word "retouch" - to correct).
Retouching the blades made it possible to make the cutting edges not smooth, but jagged. Such tools were more efficient. It is generally accepted that the Stone Age is characterized by primitive stone processing, however, in fact, the masters of the Stone Age possessed advanced technologies, such as grinding, polishing and turning.
The sense of beauty has been instilled in the soul of primitive man - the artist since ancient times. One has to wonder how at that time small holes could be drilled in stone as thick as a needle and ten times longer than its diameter. Moreover, holes were drilled not only in soft rocks, but also in hard ones, such as jasper, agate, chalcedony. It is possible that corundum or even diamond was used as the drill tip.
The ancestor of the drilling tool was a T-shaped device resembling a modern ax with a stone tip. The hole was “checked” with such a tool, sand was added to speed up the work. The hand had to press and turn the tool. Later, the tool was improved and acquired the form of a rotator, the work of which is performed with two hands: the tool is rotated with one hand and pressed with the other. The rotator has a clamping device (chuck) with which you can fix replaceable drills. Modern masters also use the rotisserie with some improvement. With a T-shaped tool in the form of an ax, rotational movements were carried out in both directions, and with a rotation only in one direction, which made it possible to increase labor productivity. The rotator became the prototype of the modern drilling machine. Quartz sand is currently used as a free abrasive: emery and corundum. In terms of abrasive qualities, emery is 3-5 times more effective than quartz. Productivity increases significantly if the sand is constantly moistened with water.
In order to cut a stone tile, the sawing was not done completely, but only partially, and then it was broken. For insurance, stone workers made cuts on both sides.
Grinding and polishing stone surfaces requires more time compared to sawing and drilling. At first, these operations were performed in a dry way. The use of wet grinding accelerated the work by 2-3 times. Such processes made it possible to produce parts with regular geometric shapes and sharp edges.
Experience in stone processing accumulated slowly. People learned to polish stone ten thousand years after rough processing. As a rule, two plates were polished at once, laying one on top of the other. Pumice stone and crushed chalk were used as powder. Smooth sections of rock or a flat stone served as grinding surfaces, from which all irregularities were cut off by the method of point picketing.
The first mirrors appeared due to the high quality of polishing pieces of obsidian and basalt. To improve the reflectivity, they were wetted with water. When polishing mirror surfaces, soft materials and leather were used.
The method of point picketing has formed into a separate technology of stone processing. With frequent blows on a round, pointed rod made of strong material, you can punch a hole, level the surface, apply a textured pattern or letters to a polished surface. In the same way, simple stone bowls, mortars, and lamps were made. The picketing method can be used both in the manufacture of small plastic arts and in the manufacture of large sculptures. The famous gigantic idols of Easter Island are hewn out of volcanic tuff and other rocks without the participation of metal by point picketing using basalt scarpels. Zakolniks, scarpels, bush hammers (tools for stonework) were originally made of hard rock, different in shape and weight: from a few tens of grams to 5-6 kilograms.
Historical research in science and technology helps us to better understand the evolution of the development of technological processes for processing materials, including various types of stone. In the Stone Age, the range of manufactured stone products reached the highest level, but with the advent of the Bronze Age, and then the Iron Age, a significant part of stone products began to be made from metal. With the advent of the atomic-space, electronic-cybernetic age, the stone has not lost its significance. Modern technologies allow it to find new uses. Now these are super-hard productive tools, and beautiful jewelry, and an indispensable durable building and facing material. From stone, artists create beautiful objects of arts and crafts in combination with various materials.
For this era, the most important and characteristic features can be considered the widespread use of the prismatic splitting technique, the virtuoso processing of bone and tusk, a diverse set of tools - about 200 different types.
Significant changes have taken place in the technique of splitting stone raw materials: the experience of many millennia has led man to create prismatic core, from which blanks were chipped off with a relatively regular shape, close to rectangular, with parallel edges. Such a workpiece is called, depending on the size, plate or plate, it allowed the most economical use of material and served as a convenient basis for the manufacture of various tools. Irregularly shaped flake blanks were still widespread, but, being chipped from prismatic cores, they become thinner and differ greatly from the flakes of earlier eras. Technics retouching in the Upper Paleolithic, it was high and very diverse, which made it possible to create working edges and blades of varying degrees of sharpness, to draw out various contours and surfaces of products.
The tools of the Upper Paleolithic change their appearance in comparison with earlier eras: they become smaller and more elegant due to a change in the shape and size of the blanks and a more advanced retouching technique. The variety of stone tools is combined with a much greater stability of the forms of products.
Among the whole variety of tools there are groups known from previous eras, but new ones appear and become widespread. In the Upper Paleolithic, there are such previously known categories as notched-toothed tools, side-scrapers, pointed-points, scrapers, and chisels. The specific gravity of some tools increases (chisels, scrapers), others, on the contrary, sharply decreases (scrapers, pointed ones), and some disappear altogether. The tools of the Upper Paleolithic are more narrowly functional than those of previous epochs.
One of the most important and most widespread tools of the Upper Paleolithic was cutter. It was designed for cutting hard materials such as bone, mammoth tusk, wood, thick leather. Traces of work with a chisel in the form of conical grooves are clearly visible on numerous items and blanks made of horn, tusk and bone from the sites of Western and Eastern Europe. However, in the inventory of some archaeological cultures of Siberia and Asia, chisels are absent; apparently, their functions were performed by other tools.
scrapers in the Upper Paleolithic were one of the most massive categories of tools. They were usually made from blades and flakes and had a convex blade treated with a special scraper retouch. The dimensions of the tools and the angle of sharpening of their blades are very diverse, due to their functional purpose. For many millennia from the Mousterian to the Iron Age, this tool was used to process hides and skins.
Upper Paleolithic stone tools:
1-3 - retouched microplates; 4, 5 - scrapers; 6.7 - tips; 8, 9 - points;
10 - prismatic core with a plate chipped from it; 11-13 - incisors;
14, 15 - notched-toothed tools; 16 - puncture
Scrapers performed one of the main operations - skinning, i.e. cleaning of skins and skin, without which they could not be used either for sewing clothes and shoes, or for roofing dwellings and making various containers (bags, bags, boilers, etc.). A wide variety of furs and skins required a corresponding number of necessary tools, which is clearly seen from archaeological materials.
In the Paleolithic, most often they worked with a scraper without a handle with movements “on oneself”, stretching the skin on the ground and fixing it with pegs or spreading it on the knee.
Production and use of Upper Paleolithic flint tools:
1 - splitting of the prismatic core; 2, 3 - work with a cutter;
4-6 - use of end scraper
The working edge of the scrapers quickly wore out, but the length of its workpiece provided the possibility of multiple adjustments. After skinning and processing with ashes, in which there is a lot of potash, the skins and skins were dried, and then squeezed out with the help of bone spatulas and polished, and cut them with knives and chisels. For sewing products made of leather and fur, small points and piercings and bone needles were used. Small points made holes in the skin, and then the tailored fragments were sewn together with the help of plant fibers, veins, thin straps, etc.
The points do not represent a single category; these various tools are united by one common feature - the presence of a sharp retouched end. Large specimens could be used for hunting weapons as spearheads, darts and arrows, but they could also be used to work with rough and thick skins of animals such as bison, rhinoceros, bear, wild horse, necessary for the construction of dwellings and for other economic purposes. . The piercers were tools with marked retouching, a relatively long and sharp stinger or several stingers. The stingers of these tools pierced the skin, the holes were then expanded with the help of checks or bone awls.
In the second half of the Upper Paleolithic, composite, or liner, guns that were undoubtedly a very important new technological achievement. On the basis of the prismatic splitting technique, a person has learned to make regular miniature plates, very thin and with cutting edges. Such a technique is called microlytic. Products, the width of which did not exceed one centimeter, and the length - five centimeters, are called microplates. A significant number of tools were made from them, mainly micropoints and quadrangular microblades with a blunt retouched edge. They served liners- components of the blade of the future product. By inserting retouched microplates into a base of wood, bone, or horn, it was possible to obtain cutting blades of considerable length and various shapes. The base of a complex shape could be carved using cutters from organic materials, which was much more convenient and easier than making such an object entirely from stone. In addition, the stone is quite fragile and with a strong blow, the tool could break. If a composite product broke down, it was possible to replace only the damaged part of the blade, and not to make it entirely anew, this way was much more economical. This technique was especially widely used in the manufacture of large spearheads with convex edges, daggers, as well as knives with concave blades, which were used in the collection of wild cereals by residents of the southern regions.
A characteristic feature of the Upper Paleolithic tool sets is a large number of combined tools - i.e. those where on one blank (flake or plate) there were two or three working blades. It is possible that this was done for convenience and speed of work. The most common combinations are a scraper and a cutter, a scraper, a cutter and a piercer.
In the era of the Upper Paleolithic, fundamentally new techniques for processing solid materials appeared - drilling, sawing and grinding, however, only drilling was widely used.
drilling was necessary to obtain a variety of holes in tools, jewelry and other household items. It was made using a bow drill, well known from ethnographic materials: a hollow bone was inserted into the bowstring, under which sand was constantly poured, and a hole was drilled when the bone rotated. When drilling smaller holes, such as needle eyes or holes in beads or shells, flint drills were used - small stone tools with a retouched sting.
Sawing it was used mainly for processing soft rocks such as marl or slate. On figurines made from these materials, traces of sawing are visible. Stone saws are insert tools; they were made from plates with a retouched serrated edge, inserted into a solid base.
grinding and polishing most often used in bone processing, but sometimes there are tools, mostly massive and, apparently, associated with woodworking, in which the blades are processed by grinding. This technique gained wider application in the Mesolithic and Neolithic.
building materials and natural stone products Today they are produced in almost all countries of the world. And there are more than a dozen technologies for its processing - and there are hundreds of types of stone-working equipment and tools. However, this was not always the case - and the first masons of antiquity faced tasks, the solution of which still amazes contemporaries to this day. It is now - in the age of lasers, high-temperature gas jets, plasma, ultrasound and CNC machines - grinding, polishing, sawing and textured processing of hard rocks seem to be commonplace. While some 200 years ago, even, and not an ordinary chipped one, was a rarity. And large-sized granite on the machine for an hour, in ancient times it was made for a week. And the way to modern technologies was very long.
Ancient world
Despite the seemingly complete lack of opportunities for modern work with stone, the ancient masters managed to lay the foundations for most technologies that still exist today. It was much more than the usual chipping of edges and primitive grinding. Already 7-8 thousand years ago, using sharpened stone drills, saws and eccentric mechanisms, our ancestors made hollow stone dishes, carved seals, amulets and tools with a shaped surface. Patterned stone carving and the manufacture of the first large-sized slabs for the construction of palaces, and in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Central America, also pyramids, spread massively. Diamond cutters (albeit rare) made it possible to perform miracles on the stone.
The apogee in the skill of processing and large-scale use of granite, basalt and other rocks was reached in ancient Rome. On the account of its engineers and builders - a thousand-kilometer network of roads, and, and houses of such scope and quality that many of their creations are still in use today.
Middle Ages
Blooms in Europe from the 7th-8th centuries manufacture of stone products for monasteries and knight's castles - due to the expansion of the geography of the extraction of raw materials and the increase in population. Stone processing begins to be applied using water, abrasive and mechanical saws.
From the 10th to the 15th century, the production of building materials was added to piece products, which led to the emergence of workshops (prototypes of future stone processing plants). Since the 14th century, the assortment has been significantly expanded - and mosaics are added to the first paving stones and slabs. For such labor-intensive and large-scale work, appropriate tools were also needed, which were wire-based wire saws, which first appeared in the Czech Republic. Soon, grinding mills in Spain, Holland and Germany were added to them - the drive for which was the transmission system of driving moment from the wheels rotated by water falling on their blades (subsequently used everywhere - up to the first paddle steamers).
Late 18th - early 20th century
Then came the turn of the industrial revolution - and mechanical, steam, hydraulic, and then electric machines led to the emergence and development of all currently existing areas of stone processing. In essence, they were distinguished from the capabilities of today's technologies only by their lower speed and not so high accuracy - despite the fact that the latter in the manufacture of crushed stone, paving stones, slabs, rubble, as well as products such as countertops, window sills and steps, in fact, does not play such a decisive role. roles.
20th - 21st century
And, finally, the last 100 years have brought ultrasonic, plasma, gas, laser and waterjet cutting and engraving of stone, which are familiar today - a thousandfold increase in speed, but not the complexity of processing, subject to cutters in the golden hands of former masters.
As economic activity became more complex, man began to feel the need for more advanced tools with carefully finished blades. Their manufacture required new techniques in stone processing. About eight thousand years ago, people mastered the technique of sawing, drilling and grinding. These discoveries were so important that they caused a real revolution in the development of society, called the Neolithic revolution.
A person learned to saw when he noticed that a serrated knife cuts better than a smooth one. As you know, the action of the saw is based on the fact that its cutters, or teeth, when the strip moves, consistently penetrate the material and remove a layer of a certain depth in it. It turns out like a system of knives. The oldest primitive saw that has come down to us was entirely made of flint. Working on it required great physical effort, but it made it possible to successfully cope with sawing wood and bone.
At the end of the Mesolithic, in a number of places in the Middle East, the process of establishing a manufacturing economy (agriculture and cattle breeding) began. In other areas, the transition from an appropriating economy to a productive one, from hunting to agriculture and cattle breeding began to take place during the Neolithic, Eneolithic and Bronze Ages.
The Neolithic, the New Stone Age, got its name because of the widespread introduction of new methods of processing large stone tools - grinding, drilling and sawing. These techniques allowed a person to move on to the processing of new, harder types of stone: jade, jadeite, jasper, basalt, diorite, etc., which began to serve as the raw material for creating large stone axes, adzes, chisels, pickles, hoes.
The blank for the future tool was made either in the old way - by chipping, or using a new method - sawing. The necessary geometric shape of the workpiece was created, which was then polished. Dry and wet grinding of stone tools was used. According to S. A. Semenov, it took 2.5-3 hours to make a polished ax from hard rocks of slate, 10-15 hours to make it from jade when grinding the working edge, and 20-25 hours to polish the entire ax.
Adze (A) and chisel (B) from polished stone of the Neolithic period (IV millennium BC)
The first polished tools appeared in the Mesolithic, but it was in the Neolithic that they became widespread. Polished guns were even more effective.
If the flint plates of lined tools were connected to the handle with the help of bitumen, it was impossible to fasten large-stone tools with a wooden or bone handle in this way. I had to find a new way - drilling holes. Even during the Upper Paleolithic, beads and pendants made of stone with holes appeared. Holes of a larger diameter in stone objects began to be punched, but at the same time holes of a biconical shape were obtained, inconvenient for mounting a stone tool on a wooden handle. Cylindrical holes were required for a tight connection. The mastering of the technique of drilling cylindrical holes dates back to the Neolithic period, when tubular bones or bamboo trunks began to be used for these purposes. Quartz sand served as an abrasive. The production of rigid-compound tools began.
The use of sawing, drilling, grinding made it possible to achieve a certain shape, cleanliness of the surface of the tool. Work with polished tools reduced the resistance of the material of the workpiece, which led to an increase in labor productivity.
Reconstruction of methods for drilling stone of the Neolithic period (according to S. A. Semenov) 1 - one-handed drilling (without a handle); 2-3 - drill with handles; 4 - two-handed drilling (drill on a rod); 5 - Mbowambov drill (New Guinea)
New techniques for making an ax increased the efficiency of its use. It was difficult to work on wood with Upper Paleolithic axes, made by double-sided upholstering of stone nodule, fastened with a wooden handle with straps, it was difficult to work on wood, since the blow of such an ax did not chop the tree, but macerated it. With polished stone axes, rigidly fastened to a wooden handle by means of drilled cylindrical holes, they began to chop wood, hollow out boats, and build dwellings. Polished axes were of great economic importance among the tribes that occupied the forest regions: without such a tool, the transition to agriculture would have been impossible in these regions.
ancient builders
Sawing stone took even more time and effort. It developed gradually, but only in the Neolithic era this technique became widespread. The saw was usually a toothed flint blade, under which quartz sand moistened with water was sprinkled. Sawing was rarely through. Usually the craftsman only made a deep cut, and then with a calculated blow of a wooden mallet he broke the stone into two parts. Thanks to sawing, the correct geometric shapes of products became available to people, which was very important in the manufacture of tools.
Simultaneously with sawing, the technique of drilling stone developed. This technique was very important in the manufacture of composite instruments. People have long noticed that the most comfortable and durable axes are obtained when the handle is tightly hammered into the hole of the ax itself, and not tied to it. But how to make the right hole in solid stone? The answer to this important question has been hidden from man for many millennia. As in the case of sawing, the ancient masters first mastered the drilling of soft materials.
Primitive Flint Saw
In ancient times, when a person needed to make a hole in a tree or bone, he resorted to knocking out. At least, this was the way some primitive peoples made holes until recently. It is possible that during this operation, rotating a stone punch in the hole, the ancient master discovered that drilling requires much less effort. Drilling also had the important advantage that it made it possible to make a hole in hard and brittle materials. The first drill, apparently, was an ordinary stick, to the end of which a stone point was attached. The master simply rolled it between the palms.
A significant shift in drilling occurred after the bow method was invented in the Neolithic era, in which the rotation of the drill was achieved by turning the bow. With one hand, the master shook the bow, and with the other he pressed the drill from above. Then the stone drill began to be replaced with a hollow animal bone of large diameter. Inside it, quartz sand was poured, which played the role of an abrasive. It was a fundamental and very important improvement that greatly expanded the possibilities of drilling. In the course of work, the sand gradually woke up from the cavity of the drill under the edges of the crown and slowly abraded the drilled stone. Since the success of drilling largely depended on the force of pressure, later artificial weighting agents began to be used.
When sawing and drilling were supplemented by grinding, the ancient man completely mastered the entire technology of stone processing. From now on, nothing was impossible for him - he could give the product any desired shape, and at the same time, the edges always remained smooth and even. The essential difference between stone grinding and other processing methods was that it was possible to remove the material in very small and even layers, and simultaneously from the entire surface of the workpiece. Thanks to this, it became possible to create tools of regular geometric shapes with a smooth surface. Grinding made it possible to process material of any shape, structure and hardness.
Stone drilling device with beam drive and weight
In the early stages, the workpiece, apparently, was simply polished on a rough stone. Then, quartz sand was poured between the workpiece and the grinding stone. This significantly speeded up the processing. Finally, the process of wet grinding was mastered, when the grinding plate was plentifully and often poured with water. Thus, the grinding time of even a very hard workpiece was reduced to several hours (for example, according to Semenov's observations, it took up to 25 hours of continuous work to make a polished ax from jade). For final finishing and polishing, the ancient craftsmen in some places used a very fine pumice powder, which was applied with a piece of leather.
Grinding and pointing stone tools
The art of polishing reached such a height that in some places the production of stone mirrors, quite suitable for use, was practiced (in Hawaii, such mirrors were made from basalt, in pre-Columbian Mexico, from obsidian). Grinding and polishing were the last links in a long chain of stone processing history.
Cutting stone with a scraper cutter
New processing techniques allowed a person to master harder types of stone: jade, jadeite, jasper, basalt, diorite, etc. These materials were more suitable for making tools that used impact force (such as axes) than brittle flint. In addition, flint was completely unsuitable for drilling and was difficult to grind.
