Stone Tools and the Prehistory of the Northern Isles, by Ann Clarke
Archaeopress 2006 (BAR British Series 406) 141pp, 103 b+w drawings, plates and charts, 21 tables, ISBN 1 84171 910 2 (£29)
Anyone having even a passing acquaintance with the prehistoric archaeology of
the Northern Isles will be aware that stone tools loom large in the local
material culture inventory. Ann Clarke’s monograph provides a timely and
valuable introduction to a selection of the (often unloved) ‘coarse stone
tools’ found in Orkney and Shetland, where the abundant and highly serviceable
stone resources constituted such an important commodity in many aspects of
prehistoric life. This is an expanded and updated version of Clarke’s 1995
Glasgow University MLitt thesis, benefiting considerably from the continuing
upsurge in excavation, research and publication in the intervening decade, in
much of which she has been involved as a specialist
‘Coarse stone tools’ are defined in the introductory chapter as ‘tools or other
objects … made from non-siliceous rock’, a broad and loose category which, as
the author notes, has come in some present-day usage ‘to encompass all stone
objects, except flaked flint, chert and quartz’. In fact, however, Clarke has
been relatively narrow in her focus, concentrating almost exclusively on a
restricted range of cobble and slab tools, which means that stone artefact
types such as axeheads, maceheads, beads, Shetland knives, stone weights,
lamps, bowls, querns, spindle-whorls, gaming pieces, tracked pebbles,
knocking-stones, socket-stones, loom-weights and whetstones are all excluded.
The chronological focus is Neolithic to Iron Age (i.e. up to AD 800 in northern
Scottish terms), though one detects a bias towards the Neolithic of Orkney,
understandably so in view of the author’s own involvements in this area.
Previous research is summarised in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 3 we are given an
overview of the lithic resources available in the islands and how they were
exploited. The heart of the volume is contained in the next two chapters, where
the author describes, illustrates and discusses the common (Chap. 4) and less
common (Chap. 5) artefact forms with which this volume is principally
concerned. These include such specific types as Skaill knives, ard points,
cleavers, perforated heart-shaped pieces, Knap of Howar grinders and borers,
handled clubs and sculpted objects, and less specific types such as flaked
stone bars, flaked cobbles, stone discs, hollowed stones, pounders, grinders,
and hammers.
Clarke is of course working within a long tradition of the study of these
tools, one in which somewhat confusing and idiosyncratic terminology and
subdivision has been, and to an extent still is being applied. (There are
frequent asides in this book about incompatibility between specialist reports
because of inexplicit terminology or divergent classification, e.g. pp.83, 93,
97). Perhaps erring on the side of caution, Clarke has chosen not to define
rigidly all of her named types, which are, however, at least in the case of the
common forms, situated within a framework of four major groupings: flakes,
flaked blanks, chipped laminated material, and cobble tools.
Nevertheless, there are some unresolved ambiguities here which other workers
will find frustrating, such as the precise distinctions between faceted
cobbles, pounder/grinders, hammerstones and their various subdivisions. And one
is left wondering over some descriptions, for example if or how the Orcadian
ground-end tools differ from the bevel-ended tools of the Mesolithic and later
west coast Scotland, or why none of the artefacts with pecked and dimpled
surfaces qualify as anvils?
It is Chapters 4 and 5, in particular, which are very useful and will be
required reading for any specialists attempting to come to terms with what are
often dauntingly large assemblages of worked stone from the Northern Isles. The
scale of the problem involved in such work is neatly captured by one of the
photographs in this book (illus 4.21, p.27), which shows a post-excavation
layout table carpeted with hundreds of flaked stone bars from the Bronze
Age/Iron Age site of Sumburgh on Shetland. Such a surfeit of richness has its
drawbacks not just for the specialist of course, but also for the excavator and
subsequently for the museum curator. (In this respect it perhaps comes as no
huge surprise (p.93) to learn that over three-quarters of the cobble tools from
Sumburgh are ‘lost’.)
In Chapters 6 and 7 the mainly domestic and more limited funerary sites and
contexts in which coarse stone tools have been found are examined and
comparisons made by period, by context, and by function, while in Chapter 8 the
chronological dimension to the occurrence of different artefact types is
covered, revealing in some cases a remarkable longevity of continued usage. In
a final chapter the author ambitiously considers aspects of site activity and
social change which might be deduced from a study of coarse stone tools, or at
least to which their presence is germane. For many reasons this is difficult
territory, as the author admittedly recognises. Excavations at the sites
involved have often been of limited extent, have targeted differing types of
context and have, over the years, been subject to varying recovery and
retention strategies; in many cases the author is reliant on interim accounts
for details of context and phasing; and, as already mentioned, there are
problems in view of differing tool classifications of knowing if like is always
being compared with like.
There are also interpretative issues which make the conclusions problematic.
For example, the flaked stone bars which are so common in Shetland are
considered to be possible tillage tools (p.30). This tentative functional
attribution, for which there is as yet no hard evidence, is asserted more
dogmatically in the later chapters leading to circular argument. Thus the
continued importance on Shetland of flaked stone bars from the Neolithic
through into the Iron Age is seen as demonstrating the continued importance of
cultivation. The lack of flaked stone bars (and ard points) on Orkney before
the Bronze Age, despite the palaeoenvironmental evidence for Neolithic
cultivation, is explained by the suggestion that tillage tools of bone and wood
(which have not survived) were used instead (p.121).
While the sculpted artefacts, such as the well-known ones from Quoyness and the
more recently discovered examples from Pool are accepted as part of the
Orcadian Neolithic repertoire, doubt is cast on some of the more enigmatic
stone objects found at Skara Brae (p.116). It is suggested that some of these
are much later items intruded into Late Neolithic contexts, and perhaps of
ethnographic origin.
This reader would gladly have sacrificed the somewhat repetitive later chapters
of the book for more extensive coverage in the earlier ones of a wider range of
tool types, for discussion of the use of other lithic raw materials such as
Shetland’s steatite and riebeckite felsite, and for casting the net wider in
terms of analysis of extant assemblages (e.g. from Jarlshof). It would also
have been illuminating to put the stone tools of the Northern Isles into the
context of broader studies dealing with the description, analysis and
experimental use of stone tools (e.g. Adams 2002; Beaune 1997). None of these
remarks detract from the fact, however, that Clarke has achieved a significant
milestone in her chosen field and her book will be essential for all lithic
specialists working in Scotland.
Alan Saville
National Museums of Scotland
References:
Adams, J.L., 2002. Ground Stone Analysis: a Technological Approach .
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Beaune, S.A. de, 1997. Les galets utilisés au Paléolithique supérieur.
Paris: CNRS (XXXIIe supplément à Gallia Préhistoire).
Review Submitted: June 2006
The views expressed in
this review are not necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews
Editor.
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