Levallios Flake

After my second season at Grimes Graves, in 1974, the director G.de G Sieveking asked for volunteers to work a small excavation he had planned in North London.

The place was in Acton, at a school,  the Haberdashers Aske School. The property was changing hands and would become the Japanese School in the new term. 

Mr Sieveking had been given permission and support to excavate part of the grounds of the school as it was known that a knapping floor was present in the area yielding an unusual style of knapping technique,  the Levallois technique. 

The flints that we were hoping to find were large and sort of triangular.

The site of our excavation was just outside the window into the head teacher's office, and as we had not been told about the circumstances of the change of hands of the property it felt slightly sacriligeous to be cutting into turf that we as children, not that long ago, would have been forbidden to walk on.

The turf was tidily cut and carefully stacked for re-laying. When that was done we were told that the finds that we could expect to find would be in the material immediately beneath the turves, 

That material was called "loess", which, we were told was Dutch for loose.

The material that we were digging through was not loose, it was the hardest soil that any of us had had the misfortune to be required to excavate. It was as hard as solid chalk, but even then chalk would have been much easier to work than this. There were a few mattocks on site, but not many, so for the four weeks of the dig we stabbed the ground with our trowels, accepting the punishment that the work did to our hands, wrists, and arms.

One of the only people equipped with a mattock was Phil Harding,  and he used it to good effect, finding the only levallois flake of the entire excavation. 

Unfortunately his find received a direct hit from the matlock, breaking into a lot of shard-like pieces.

At the time it was not lost on me that while we were digging a material called "loose", what we were actually working was anything but loose.

It was not though until recently that, in researching geology I discovered the term "overconsolidated" which is material that has been subjected to a huge mass laid over it. Indeed the mass was so great that all the molecules of air and water that had been in the material when it was laid down were compressed out of it.

The actual material here was chalky white, and was probably of the same material as that I found under the Dorset Barrow. 

While the material under the Dorset Barrow was fluffy and loose, and indeed may have been wind blown, the stuff in Acton was nearly as hard as concrete, which I take to mean that at some stage in the last million years the ice sheets from at least one ice age were laid over parts of London. 

The weight of hundreds of metres of ice may well have been enough to overconsolidate the wind blown stuff.

Piece by piece, I begin to map out where the ice sheets over Britain were, and where they were not, or where they weren't very thick anyway. 

This in an effort to better understand what happened in the ice ages, and how they shaped Britain. 

Jeffery Nicholls 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Neolithic Migration to Orkney

Image
   Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle 4/29 Blog Title:- The Story of the Neolithic Migration to Orkney  There are a large number of reports, large and small, that have been written following excavation of Neolithic sites on Orkney.   These reports include plans, sections, find reports, bone reports, dating reports, and any other data investigations that are relevant to the site.  At the end of the report, the findings are discussed, and sone tentative conclusions are drawn.  In discussing the conclusions that could reasonably be drawn from the data supplied by the work of excavation, many odd features are, very sensibly left in a kind of limbo. Better to conclude nothing than to assert something that no qualifying evidence supports. Across the mass of evidence derived from the excavations of Neolithic Orkney there are enough of these archaeological peculiarities, that if collected together, they form a pattern. The pattern does not prove the concept, but...
Read more

A Bizarre Idea

Image
  Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle 1/29 Blog Title:- The Bizarre Idea This is a view of the Pentland Firth from a settlement called Skarfskerry, on the North Coast of Caithness in Scotland. The low headland across the water is a neighbouring piece of Scottish coast and beyond that, at the horizon left of view, and almost invisible, is Orkney, an archipelago that sits beyond the northernmost coast of the Scotland. It is part of the Northern Isles group, and consists of more than 70, mostly low-lying, islands and islets of which only about 20 are inhabited. Orkney is renowned as the home of a Unesco World Heritage site. The islands were occupied over 5000 years ago by Neolithic people who created a group of settlements and monuments of a complexity and quality not surviving anywhere else in Britain at such an early date. The Pentland Firth here that separates Scotland from Orkney is a strait of water about 8 miles wide, and is famously dangerous. The average speed of water runni...
Read more

They Must Have had Boats!

Image
  Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle 3/29 Blog Title:- They Must Have Had Boats ! The persistent belief is that Neolithic people had boats. Sheridan (below) and others, have confidently detailed where the maritime trade routes went between Europe and Britain. So, it must be right, mustn't it? The map of Neolithic trade routes appears in:- "ScARF Summary Neolithic Report June 2012: Kenny Brophy & Alison Sheridan (editors) " However, the only mention of boats in that report is the following:- " Much more direct evidence is needed regarding organic artefacts and structures of all kinds: while we can see that organic resources were skilfully used, we only have a tiny snapshot of the full range of materials and uses. For example, we suspect that curragh-like boats had been used to transport the first farmers and their resources to Scotland, and that logboats had been used for onshore and inland water transport, but so far the earliest dated example of a logboat is Early...
Read more