As I've mentioned before, quartz is a tricky material to make tools of. Quartz-tool production waste is very common on prehistoric sites in most of Sweden where flint is rare.
I just thought I should share one of the least attractive entries in the inventory of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. This material was collected in 1971. I love it in all its absurdity.
31110. Botkyrka parish, Fittja farmstead 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, registered site 280Workshop find? Quartz quarry? C. 70 kg collected quartz, of which some may be worked.
Seventy kilograms!
- Log in to post comments
Tell you something, back in the 80´s we found a ploughed Roman Iron Age - Vendel Period (some early Viking Age too, I think) cemetery in Halland (Sannagård, Falkenberg). In the soil there were loads of quartz pieces, up to the size of 5 cm or so, probably originally strewn over stone settings and small mounds.
Yeah... In 2003-04, Migration Period chamber graves were excavated at Lilla Sylta in Fresta parish, Uppland. They were covered with hundreds of kgs of quartz that had been bashed into gravel. A fun job for the thralls.
And fun for the "thralls" forced to register all of it, good god...
Now, this is why we have masters students. It's good for their souls.
Bob
Reminds me of Amnon Ben-Tor, the Israeli professor who headed my first dig on a tell in the Galilee. According to his students, Yigael Yadin had once ordered ben Tor to excavate the tell's water system, a humonguous shaft in the ground filled with sterile sediment. ben Tor spent years on the task, shifting endless amounts of dirt and finding only a handful of pottery. Since then, the students maintained, he had no sympathy for bored students on digs.