NEOLITHIC LITHIC IMPLEMENT

-6500

A group of 43 worked flints, cores and waste flint fragments found in a period of 105 minutes on bare ground on the access strips in a daffodil bulb field. The scatter concentrates towards a bend in a brook with the closest approach foiled by field boundary and country lane. Back from the stream the flints peter out to nearly zero then increase to where the stream is crossed again and the 850+ scatter recorded as CORN-3A0FF2 etc on the other side. The small group recorded here as far as can be seen includes elements from The Mesolithic through to the Bronze Age and is likely another stopping place near water. There may be many paths taken through this landscape over the 5000 years or more of Prehistory represented here but humans favour certain stopping places which from the slightest of whims repeated by similar people over deep time may become memorialised in stone. Illustration 648.1 appears to be a truncated blade microlith with obliquely blunted backing and is likely Mesolithic with some blade segments also possibly(648.2-10). Knife-like flakes; probably Neolithic are 648.11,13 and 19. A bulky chert end scraper;648.15 might be Mesolithic. On a large piece of nodular flint flawed by internal fractures (648.16) a crude side scraper has been worked and may be Bronze Age. Scrapers 648.20,21 have a wide possible date. Pebble core 648.17 is likely Neolithic and probably from a local beach pebble. Exhausted chert blade core 648.18 might be from Mesolithic and according to the rough cortex was found near to its source.