Quarrying clues: exploring the symbolism of Neolithic stone extraction

The bluestone circles at Stonehenge represent one of the best-known examples of Neolithic skill in the extraction and long-distance transport of stone, but archaeologists have recorded thousands of equally awe-inspiring feats of lithic working from this period and earlier in Britain and Europe. Chris Catling reports on the Prehistoric Society’s newly published research paper Neolithic Stone Extraction, in which Peter Topping turns to ethnographic evidence to argue that stone objects did not only acquire symbolic status once they had been extracted and worked, but that quarry sites and the extraction practices themselves had important symbolic dimensions.

The four ages of prehistory are named after the dominant material from which tools were made, and of these the period popularly known as the Stone Age was by far the longest: the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages spanned periods of 1,000 to 2,000 years (40 to 80 generations), compared with the 3.5 million years (140,000 generations) of the Stone Age in its various manifestations – the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods. That is a very long time in which to develop a knowledge of the sources and properties of different kinds of stone and methods of working them to create tools, weapons, and objects of great aesthetic and symbolic appeal.

The very first stone tools were no doubt the products of natural erosive processes, collected and put to use by our most ancient Palaeolithic ancestors from riverbeds, beach material, glacial moraines, gravels, rock exposures, and upland scree. The practice of obtaining subterranean material from within caves and fissures or by digging into the earth does not begin until the Mesolithic. Fire-setting also dates from the later Mesolithic, along with the use of hammerstones to obtain specific types of stone, such as rhyolite, dolerite, quartzite, and obsidian, all used for making bifacial tools and weapons, blades, scrapers, tanged points, and microliths.

left The source of the greenstone used in the Neolithic period for making the distinctive Langdale polished axe-heads lies on the south-western flank of Pike o’ Stickle, one of three domed outcrops in Cumbria’s Langdale valley (see CA 102 and 333). The south-west-facing stone screes pouring down from the summit may look like the result of natural rock-face erosion, and there is much natural material in the scree, but it also has considerable quantities of fragments and flakes from greenstone extraction and trimming, rough-outs, and hammerstones, all resulting from Neolithic quarrying. — The source of the greenstone used in the Neolithic period for making the distinctive Langdale polished axe-heads lies on the south-western flank of Pike o’ Stickle, one of three domed outcrops in Cumbria’s Langdale valley (see CA 102 and 333). The south-west-facing stone screes pouring down from the summit may look like the result of natural rock-face erosion, and there is much natural material in the scree, but it also has considerable quantities of fragments and flakes from greenstone extraction and trimming, rough-outs, and hammerstones, all resulting from Neolithic quarrying.

Prehistoric mining

Peter Topping’s first chapter reviews all the evidence for pre-Neolithic mining and presents much evidence for deliberate open-site quarrying by indigenous hunter-gatherer- fisher communities in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. In the British Isles, later Mesolithic quarrying of the dolerite and mudstone on the southern flanks of the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire has been demonstrated by Tim Darvill and the late Geoff Wainwright. Other sites with similar carbon dates – the 6th to 5th millennium BC – include Burnetland Hill on the Scottish borders, the Isles of Arran and Rhum, the summit of Fin Cop in Derbyshire, at Mynydd Rhiw on the Lleyn Peninsula in north Wales and on nearby Bardsey Island, and at Monvoy in County Waterford.

Prehistoric mining

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