by Chris Fowler
One of the main aspects that had to be planned for and carefully managed throughout the mining process was waste disposal. Digging, flint extraction, and flint knapping generated vast amounts of residues which had to be dealt with. This waste could be arranged around shafts, forming spoil heaps, but it was also commonly used to refill shafts and galleries. This practice was probably aimed not just at removing material that might interfere with future mining and working, but also helped ensure against potential safety threats such as the risk of a shaft falling in, or of a collapse of roofs and walls. Such a system has been documented at Krzemionki, where abandoned spaces were filled with waste derived from newly opened excavations in the chalk (Migal 1997). More sophisticated systems have also been documented, as at Defensola, where miners built limestone walls to contain mining debris and to ease circulation in corridors and chambers (Tarantini 2005).
Ascertaining the number of people likely to have been involved in each mining event relies on the recognition of contemporaneous shafts, pits, or galleries. Although the quantity, size, and complexity of the mining structures can offer some information as to how Neolithic miners organized their labour, the lack of stratigraphic relationships between shafts and the difficulties of refitting massive amounts of stone fragments defy the possibility of identifying individual mining events.
Final products
Neolithic groups mined for flint in order to produce certain tools. Most mines aimed at the production of one principal item—most often axe rough-outs or blades—although others were also manufactured. For example, apart from the major production of axe roughouts, Jablines’ miners produced flakes and blades (Bostyn and Lanchon 1992, 184), whilst at Grime’s Graves axes, adzes, discoidal bifacial knives, flakes, and blades were produced (Lech and Longworth 2006, 419). Most stages of the lithic operative chain took place predominantly at the mine. Although some chipping floors have been identified on the surface of mining sites (e.g. Felder et al. 1998, 9; Lech and Longworth 2006), knapping activities are most frequently documented through the debris commonly found among the infills of pits, shafts, chambers, and galleries. Estimates of processed and abandoned flint are certainly impressive, such as the 15,000 tons calculated for Rijckholt (Felder et al. 1998, 68). Nonetheless, in most cases the final stages of production would take place elsewhere, either at settlements (Balcer 2002; Allard 2005) or at workshops located in the vicinity of mines (Lech 2008). These objects could then be used or circulated over relatively short distances, or up to 500km away, as suggested for Volhynian flint from the Ukraine or banded flint from Krzemionki (Lech 1997).
THE TIMES AND SCALES OF MINING
Although some scattered Palaeolithic and Mesolithic quarrying activities have been reported in Europe (e.g. Negrino et al. 2006; Oliva 2011), extensive flint mining seems to be a Neolithic phenomenon. At a continental scale, and judging from the concentration of radiocarbon dates, the peak of mining activities occurred during the fourth millennium BC. Nevertheless, some of the best-known and best-explored mines, such as Grime’s Graves (Longworth and Varndell 1996), or some of the most spectacular and recognizable products circulating in western Europe such as the long blades of the French Grand Pressigny region (Mallet et al. 2004), are mainly dated to the third millennium BC.
Mining for flint, as with any other kind of mining, required the excavation and relocation of soil, most clearly visible today in the characteristic ‘lunar’ topography of the better-preserved mines such as those from the United Kingdom (Barber et al. 1999; Saville 2005) (Fig. 26.4). Seams were most frequently accessed through individual pits, so direct stratigraphic relationships between neighbouring pits are generally absent where the surface traces are less well preserved. Mining also seems to have been an activity that was frequently spatially detached from everyday life, so that organic refuse such as bones or seeds are rarely encountered in excavations, and when present are not necessarily related to mining events. Consequently, there are problems in both establishing a detailed absolute chronology for mines and in building relative sequences. In most cases, organic residues are scarce, and unidentified long-life samples such as wood charcoal are among the most commonly dated remains. Antler picks, as for instance those dated for Grime’s Graves or Rijckholt, are rare in many other mines (e.g. Bostyn and Lanchon 1992), and, when present, not necessarily preserved well enough for dating (e.g. lack of collagen). The problem increases when we take into account the selection of dated samples: many of the published radiocarbon dates are single samples rather than series of dates; they often lack detailed contextual descriptions; and where obtained from deep mine shafts, they do not necessarily reflect the complete time-span of the mining activities at a particular site.
FIG. 26.4. Bird’s-eye view, taken from the east, of the monumental ‘lunar’ landscape at the English flint mine of Grime’s Graves. Picture taken 15 May 2004, courtesy of Peter Topping.
Put simply, there are serious limitations for both assessing the intra-site chronological span of mining activity and establishing cross-regional chronological comparisons. These limitations are critical when evaluating both the size of work teams and the amount of final product that may have circulated at any time. That said, the evidence from some of the mines with a larger series of radiocarbon dates—such as Grime’s Graves, Jablines, Krzemionki, or Wierzbica ‘Zele’—suggests that mining events were repeated through time, at some sites extending over two millennia. The size of some of the larger mining complexes, like the massive 79 hectares of mining at Krzemionki, would not be the result of an enormous mobilization of labour, but the long-term product of recurrent mining events through the centuries.
There is agreement that mining events may have followed some kind of seasonal pattern. Although the European climatic gradient should be taken into account when assuming that all miners would have chosen a similar season, the potential dangers of deep mining, such as unstable soil, would suggest milder weather as the best. Beyond that, possible information on the seasonality of flint mining events—such as slaughter patterns, migratory fauna, or pollen—has thus far only started to be systematically analysed (Topping 2011).
All this does not say much about the labour involved or the chronological interval between each mining episode. This is partly why most archaeologists have been cautious when calculating the amount of labour committed, most frequently suggesting small-scale reiterative actions. This parsimonious hypothesis assumes practical motivations for mining, where the everyday needs for flint fuelled reiterative ‘domestic’ visits to source procurement areas. Yet certain evidence suggests that not all mining events were of such a scale, and that some most likely involved multiple groups temporarily aggregated for larger mining actions.
The radiocarbon dates from some sites hint at the size and possible amounts of time invested in at least some individual mining events. At Rijckholt (Felder et al. 1998), the excavated area covers 1526sq. m., from which prehistoric miners dug more than 60,000 cubic metres of chalk in order to extract flint nodules. Five radiocarbon dates were obtained—four from charcoal and one from deer antler—all from different parts of the galleries and distributed across a linear distance of over 60m. The fact that all five dates are statistically indistinguishable, and that the samples were randomly selected from those available, suggests they may well be dating the same mining episodes, or ones that were close in time. Equally, the set of radiocarbon dates obtained at the early Neolithic mine of Casa Montero points at the possibility that more than 4000 pits were excavated within just a few generations (Díaz-del-Río and Consuegra 2011). Similar patterns may be behind the radiocarbon dates of other mines such as Jablines, Ri, or Defensola. The future use of Bayesian modelling will inevitably transform the way scholars perceive Neolithic mining, from considering hundreds of years of small-scale extractions to sets of short-term highly active generational mining episodes.
BEYOND PRACTICAL REASONS
Moving beyond the immediate evidence recoverable from the mines them
selves, there are, as already noted, real difficulties involved in placing flint mines within their immediate social, economic, and ideological context. In many cases, we must rely on radiocarbon dating not just for a general chronological framework but to contextualize them in their variable contemporary cultural settings.
This lack of broader evidence also presents problems for understanding whether relatively local populations or aggregations of both local and distant groups carried out the mining. As for the miners themselves, it is commonly assumed they were adult males, although firm evidence is elusive. The small size of some pits, galleries, and chambers might imply the involvement of adolescents, perhaps children. Considering Neolithic life expectancy, adolescents must have had exposure to the complex set of decision making required to obtain and sort stone, as much as learning through practice the skills to manufacture stone tools. Thus, apprenticeship processes must have taken place during many mining events, and should in fact be part of the archaeological record of flint mines. Complementarily, the presence of females performing different roles during quarrying expeditions is attested in the ethnographic record (e.g. Arthur 2010; Flood 1999, 271; Herbert 1998), whilst the archaeological record has left little—but noteworthy—direct evidence of their involvement in mining expeditions, such as the Neolithic female burial at Cissbury (Barber et al. 1999, 62). Labouring at flint mines may well have been a gathering of all genders and ages performing different activities. In doing so, they learned and transmitted the knowledge and skills that would shape their identities, both as miners and as members of society.
This sense of mining as a total social event, linking the production and reproduction of Neolithic groups, would also clarify why mining itself was not purely and simply a matter of recovering good-quality raw material for tool and weapon manufacture. There are sound practical reasons, of course—buried flint seams would have been protected from the extremes of temperature, and may contain fewer flaws than shallower or exposed deposits—but adequate supplies of flint were obtained during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic mostly without mines (Field 2011), and plenty of flint continued to be obtained throughout the Neolithic and beyond without mining. Indeed, many flint-bearing regions across Europe appear to have seen no need for the digging of deep shafts or pits to obtain this raw material.
In fact, it is not uncommon for mines to be located over good-quality flint, but not always the best quality available. In other cases, many other procurement alternatives would have fitted the requirements to produce certain tools. All this suggests that not only the social action but its actual setting was of certain importance to Neolithic groups. The location of mines may have been as important as the raw material recovered from them. This could be the case for some southern English mines, such as those on the South Downs, which enjoyed prominent locations in the landscape and extensive views of the surrounding landscape in some, but not all, directions, and were consequently visible from some distance (Barber et al. 1999). There are clear similarities here with some of the non-flint stone sources exploited during the Neolithic, which often saw a preference for higher, more difficult to reach exposures rather than more accessible raw material of equal or better quality (Pétrequin et al. 2006).
Thus the gathering, the setting, and the labour invested in deep mining, combined with the additional element of danger, might have considerably increased the social value of products manufactured using mined flint, as opposed to flint recovered from more mundane, more easily accessible deposits. Considering only a few sources produce flint with outstanding aesthetic qualities (e.g. Polish banded flint), it is not unreasonable to suggest that the origin of the raw material may have been transmitted orally as flint products changed hands.
The flint mine earthworks represent the first monumental horizon of Neolithic Europe. Labouring for flint through deep mining both incorporated and transformed Neolithic groups in different places and at different times throughout the Continent. Behind the practicality of tool production was a set of historically dependent social values that made the deployment and enactment of social labour worth the effort.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to express our most sincere gratitude to Martyn Barber for his contribution to the shaping, writing, and editing of this paper. Honouring the title of the chapter, he shared the labour, but we were not persuasive enough to convince him to partner up in the authorship. Many of the ideas were produced by the Casa Montero Flint Mine Project team. We have benefited from them all, but, of course, remain responsible for any mistakes. The essay has been written in the framework of the Collaboration Agreement between the Consejería de Cultura y Deportes de la Comunidad de Madrid, the CSIC and Autopistas Madrid Sur known as Proyecto Casa Montero, and the Spanish MICINN Project HAR2009-14360-C03-02.
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