A large sheet of canvas filled with lumps of stone covers the inner courtyard of the Archaeological Building on Reuvensplaats and someone has placed a handy first-aid kit nearby. You can hear clicking and banging and something that sounds like breaking glass. Small clouds of white dust blow up.
Seven students are sitting in a circle around the sheet with the rubble in it. They are wearing safety goggles, protective gloves and sheets across their thighs. On the sheets, they have placed the pieces of flint that they are shaping, striking them with large stones.
Student Fulco Scherjon (42) remarks: “My leg will be covered in bruises soon.”
This afternoon’s session has been organised to give Archaeology Masters’ students insight into how flint tools were made in prehistoric times. A lecturer, Eduard Pop, explains: “Flint is easy to work, they could use the sharp edges to make the spearheads or knives.” Which explains the first-aid kit.
“Oh my god”, cries a girl’s voice. Surprised, Katie-Lee Flanagan (23) examines a large flake that has come off the stone. It might look easy to manufacture, she says, but it’s not. “First, I just struck the flint haphazardly, but nothing came off it. You have to really look where you’re going to hit it and turn it round to get the right angle.”
Pop continues: “Shaped flints are our most significant sources of information, preserved for a very long time and telling us about the technology used by people in prehistoric times.” Victor Klinkenberg (29), who is assisting the lecturers this afternoon, adds: “We are doing it exactly as they would have done, which helps you to understand how a piece was chipped off the stone and how much strength was needed.”
The trick is to chip off the dusty white rind from around the stone. It is called the cortex and it is not strong enough to use for tools. At the moment, the students are busy striking “spalls”, i.e. the flakes that come off at the first strike. Klinkenberg shows them how to shape them in more detail, striking a few more chips off the stone with soft, carefully aimed blows, and producing a serrated, duller edge which might be used for cleaning skinned hides.
Pop explains: “It’s like a kind of multi-tool. With a single piece, you could slit the throat of an animal, skin it and then use the stone for other things.” Klinkenberg laughs: “It’s a prehistoric Swiss Army Knife.”
In his spare time, Scherjon has tried to light fires with flint. “It was a disaster; it’s much more difficult than you would imagine. I saw someone on YouTube try to light a fire with tinder box fungus, which caught flame immediately.
“So it’s not simply how you strike the flint, but what tinder you use too. You can read everything there is to know about it, but you really only start learning when you try it yourself: what will work, what doesn’t work? We can reconstruct history and discover traces of Man’s origins with this knowledge.”