Flint tools and wooden bowls

Maisie Taylor, prehistory specialist

The Etton bowls
When we were excavating the causewayed enclosure at Etton in the 1980s, some fragments of wooden bowls were found. Although none of the bowls was complete there was enough surviving from at least two vessels to see the sizes and shapes. Prehistoric bowls are very unusual but Neolithic wooden bowls are extraordinarily unusual. These particular ones dated to around 3800 BC.

A detailed examination of the fragments gave lots of clues as to how the vessels might have been made. First, they were all made of the wood of the alder tree. Alder trees, now quite rare, were once very common in the fens. Alder trees are happiest growing in very wet conditions and as the Fens have been drained the alder has gradually disappeared except for riverbanks and areas that have remained wet.

Under the microscope, the wood of alder is very similar to the wood of hazel, but the two trees are quite different to look at and grow in different environments. In the Neolithic Fens, as they grew wetter and wetter, the alder trees, like the willows, must have spread into the wet areas making extensive wet woods, known as alder carr.

The main wood found in the ditch of the causewayed enclosure at Etton was alder; and in one particular segment the bases of alders that had been growing in the Neolithic were found. These had not been allowed to grow into full-sized trees but had been cut to the ground repeatedly. This process, which is known as coppicing, was practised from the Neolithic until modern times. Many native trees, when cut down, don't simply regenerate but produce lots of stems instead of one trunk. Prehistoric people were quick to realise how useful this could be, returning again and again to coppice the same plants until a solid 'stool' built up at ground level. These stools slowly accumulated more and more wood until they were bulging and rounded.

These rounded lumps of coppice stool were chosen to make the Etton bowls. Already roughly the right shape, they were hollowed out to produce a round-bottomed vessel. They were shaped, not by carving but apparently by a combination of charring and scraping. This is not a technique used by modern bowl makers and as far as we know was unique to this site.

Phil's flint scrapers
When Time Team came to dig the site at Northborough we remembered the Etton bowls and realised that this might be a good opportunity to experiment with this strange method of production. Phil was wildly excited and went into production knapping a selection of beautiful flint scrapers of an appropriate size and type for the job. He hafted one scraper and a polished flint chisel. Phil has had a theory for a long time that many flint tools must have been hafted to be completely effective. So as well as me experimenting with the burn/scrape production technique, Phil was experimenting with his hafted tools.

The third member of the cameo team was James Beatty. James is a coppicer by profession. He spends a lot of time at the Flag Fen Bronze Age centre, near Peterborough, and the beautiful wattle hurdles and fences he makes there always astound visitors to the site. James always works with coppiced hazel, so the suggestion that we would go looking for coppiced alder intrigued him.

Imagine our delight when we found an overgrown alder that had been coppiced and had good bowl-shaped bulges. Even better, the alder, (which was in the nature reserve) was rotten and dangerous, being next to a footpath, and the reserve managers were delighted that James should remove it for them. The tree was felled and off we went with several reasonable potential bowls.

Use of fire
Work on the bowls started slowly, mainly because we weren't entirely sure where to start, and partly because I have an unfailing ability to put fires out. It seemed sensible to get James to sort out the fire instead of me. He started a small charcoal fire and heaped a pile of glowing charcoals onto the surface of one of our bowl-shaped bulges of wood. Eventually he discovered that by blowing and turning the fire into the wind he could get a reasonable amount of control over the burning. The effects of the burning were not very dramatic, and after quite some time we had only burnt a slight hollow in the surface. The effects of Phil's tools, however, were quite dramatic, and the charred layer was rapidly removed and a very smooth surface left. If this was what the finished surface was going to look like, it was rather nice. The deadline for having something to show for all our work hurtled towards us as we burnt and scraped, scraped and burnt.

Phil's tools were amazing and after all our scraping, sometimes when the charred wood was really hot, the edges of the flints looked virtually as good as new. There was a nervous few minutes when the resin in the hafts melted and started to flow but even that settled down once the surplus had run out from the bindings. James knocked up a mallet for Phil; and then Phil, with undisguised glee, started using his polished flint chisel. It was most effective, and it seemed extraordinary that a flint tool could be hammered so hard and made to bite so strongly into the wood without shattering. The scrapers, and particularly the hafted scraper, were real workhorses and were simple and effective to use.

Lessons learnt
At the end of the experiment we certainly had vaguely bowl-shaped objects to show for all our work, but more importantly, we all felt that we had begun to master the technique and were keen to do more. We all learnt a great deal: the best choice of wood for the job; the way to control and exploit the charring; the behaviour and effectiveness of the flint tools; the effectiveness of the hafting; and the way it changed the tools that were hafted. We all agreed that we had to do more: more experiments with the time it takes to produce a bowl; different species of charcoal; edge-wear analysis on the flint tools; the behaviour of wood of different species; and so on and so on.

Back to Ros Ereira, Cameo Producer

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