Scraper? Worked or Natural?

Chauncey Gardner

Hi Folks,

I found this today when digging the garden for planting.

Do you think its worked? A scraper? if so, I'll send it off to the Natural History Museum.

Location found: About half a mile from the beach, Strandhill County Sligo.

Thanks

Chauncey Gardner

Other side:

Thanks.

slowburner

It is quite difficult to identify clear diagnostic features from the photos. It could be a modified or split flint pebble, but it could also be natural. Either scenario would be possible given the location. My instinct is that it is not natural.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Chauncey Gardner

Thanks for that Slowburner. To my untrained eye, picture two has possibly 2 deliberate chips taken out of it?

Wibbs

When I saw your second pic that was my first thought as well CG. It does look worked to my eye. Though to be fair my meso/neolithic eye is pretty gammy unless it's really obvious. If it was much larger my paleo eye might have started to dream.

Wibbs

Funny enough CG and kinda apropos of nothing, a fair few neolithics I found as a kid was fossil hunting not that far from you in Easky. Unlike yours they were all of a light sandy grey type flint, mostly blades, with one possible hammer/retoucher*, stuck in the subsoil at the cliff's edge. Lord knows what I ignored in my ignorance at the time.




*They're all in some drawer in the National Museum, though TBH I did keep one blade. So little interest was shown to me at the time, TBH I thought feck it, I'm keeping one for myself.

Chauncey Gardner

Thanks for that Wibbs. Again, I'm just trying to figure out why a small flint (?) pebble would end up like that?

It looks like its been rolled around on the beach, and then one half of it gets hacked up like that?

I'm imagining some person bringing home a rabbit for dinner and picking up a pebble and giving it a few knocks so that he/she scrape all the meat off the unfortunate rabbits bones. (The equivalent of a take away plastic fork)

If it possibly is a scraper, what tool would have been used to take the chips out of the pebble? A larger flint tool?

(I live near Carrowmore and very close to neolithic shell middens and hill forts).

Aelfric

Hi CG, it definitely appears to be worked, although it has also weathered a good bit. To my slightly more trained eye, it looks like a split pebble that was later re-worked into a scraper. Certainly, this type of more lazy use of pebbles, leaving so much cortex behind, is more indicative in my experience, of Late Bronze Age activity. I've never come across Neolithic or EBA flints on my sites that weren't very well worked, with almost all or all cortex removed.

Send it to the guys in the Irish Antiquities Division, NMI, Kildare St., and see what they say.

slowburner

Aelfric wrote: »

Hi CG, it definitely appears to be worked, although it has also weathered a good bit. To my slightly more trained eye, it looks like a split pebble that was later re-worked into a scraper. Certainly, this type of more lazy use of pebbles, leaving so much cortex behind, is more indicative in my experience, of Late Bronze Age activity. I've never come across Neolithic or EBA flints on my sites that weren't very well worked, with almost all or all cortex removed.

Send it to the guys in the Irish Antiquities Division, NMI, Kildare St., and see what they say.

Second that!

Chauncey Gardner

Thanks for that. Yes indeed I sent off same photos to by email, but I've heard nothing back. Maybe I sent email to wrong address. I"ll check that.

(I didnt want to send them an unworked pebble, so I thought I'd run it buy you guys first of all).