29 Tool Types and Techniques of Neolithic Culture

M. Manibabu Singh

Table of contents:

Introduction

Celts or axes
Shouldered tool
Adzes
Chisels
Wedges
Scrapers
Borers
Picks
Rubbing or grinding stones
Mill stones or saddle querns
Hammer stones or fabricators
Mace heads or ring stones
Neolithic tool technology

Learning outcomes

To gain knowledge about the Neolithic tools
To understand the tool technology of that time
To understand the tool typology of that time
To understand the need and functions of each type

Introduction:

With the onset of Neolithic, there occurs a change in the peoples‟ way of life characterized by a new subsistence strategy, where hunting-gathering way of Mesolithic period has shifted to food producing picking up new ideas like animal husbandry and cultivation. This last phase of prehistory, the Neolithic (Greek: ‘neo’ – new, ‘lithic’ – stone) is usually refers to the „New Stone Age‟ of human culture, marked the beginning of cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals that obviously led to the beginning of settled life and the growth of villages. This transition from foraging to agriculture that occurred independently in several regions of the world between 12,000 and 5,000 years ago is referred to as the Neolithic Revolution, the term first proposed by VG Childe. The impact of such a transition changed all aspects of human life and obviously there saw a change in the items of tool kits and their production technology.

Neolithic characterizes the appearance of a new way of making stone tools – which include very fine flaked, polished and ground stone tools and large blades. The flaking methods used seem to show that the tool makers were trying to make the most of the stone and avoid waste. The grinding made the tools sharper, polished and more effective than those in the earlier period. The ground stone tools of the period include different types of axes called „celt‟. Besides the continual element of the earlier Mesolithic blades and microlithics, there appear new tool types, such as –

Celts or axes,
Adzes,
Chisels,
Wedges,
Scrapers,
Picks,
Borers,
Grinding or Rubbing stones,
Saddle Querns or Mill stones,
Fabricators or Hammer stones,
Mace heads or Ring stones, etc.

1. CELTS or AXES

These refer to those triangular-shaped stone tools with a broad sharp cutting edge formed by beveling from both the surfaces. Obviously the broad working end is often curved with slight or prominent convexity or oblique to straight. Size may also vary from small to large ones. Usually their bodies are thick with round, beveled and square sides, giving either a cross-section of oval or lenticular. An axe usually has either a pointed, round blunt, broad thick or broad thin butt. These tools may have a chipped, ground, pecked or polished surface according to the technological stages that have gone through in the making of the tool. Obviously the following tool types may occur in a ground axe.

Edge alone ground stone axes with the absence of flaked and pecked surfaces – These implements, after flaking to shape, have had grinding applied to the cutting edge only.
Edge ground axes with flaked surfaces
Edge ground axes with pecked surfaces
Edge ground axes with flaked and pecked surfaces – Here all the three basic techniques such as flaking, pecking and grinding are used in their preparation.
Edge ground axes with flaked, pecked and polished surfaces
Fully ground axes
Ground and polished axe – These axes show fully ground and polished surfaces and show no traces of earlier workings. Sankalia attributes the polished surfaces for an intensive rubbing and the use of grease or oily substances. No extra efficiency is attributed to these tools by polishing the surfaces save perhaps that they appease the eye (Reddy, 1978:46).
Polished axe – These show fully polished surface having gone through all the stages/techniques such as flaking, pecking and grinding but could not traced the evidences due to overall polished.

2. SHOULDERED TOOL

This is another important tool type, having a broad straight cutting edge formed either by beveling from one side or both, and the opposite butt end of which is provided with a tenon, preferably advantageous for hafting purposes with a wooden shaft.

3. ADZES

Adzes are artifacts that belong to the group of ground stone industry, with the edge on the distal part of the tool. The edge is not in the plane of symmetry, giving the tool an asymmetrical profile and thus morphologically in its typology is different from axes. These are thin, triangular-shaped tools usually made on flakes, and invariably possessed leveled blade and plano-convex or rarely concavo-convex cross sections. Coghlan (1943:29) opined that an adze is “a tool for chipping or slicing away the surface of the wood. The cutting edge stands transversely, that is, at right angles to the handle. Its level is ground on the inner face only, while the entire outer face is slightly rounded”. The function of chiseling and trimming wood, used in making various wooden objects, is characterized by the use wear in the form of fine lines parallel with the longitudinal section of the tool (Semenov 1976).

On the basis of general morphological features, adzes can be classified into two subtypes – 1) Flat adze (Flachhacke), when width exceeds thickness; and 2) shoe-last adzes (Schuhleistenkeile) or high adzes, when thickness exceeds width.

4. CHISELS

T.G. Manby (1974) refers chisels as a series of narrow blades, clearly allied to axes in technique and raw material, are classed as chisels; they are bars of flint or stone, 75–125mm long and not more than 25mm in width. These are elongated narrow tools with thick butt ends and medium cutting edges. F.R. Allchin (1957: 329) calls them as narrow celts. R.B. Foote (1916: 200) classified them into six types on the basis of morphological features. Chisels are essentially wood working tools.

5. WEDGES

Small, triangular or quadrilateral rough pieces having pecked surfaces with ground working edges are referred to as wedges. Probably these tools might have been used for splitting wood, etc.

6. SCRAPERS

Scrapers of various types (- side, end, nose, convex, concavo-convex, round etc.) and sizes occur in association with the Neolithic pecked and ground stone industry, which might have been employed by man in scraping skins, barks of trees, etc.

7. BORERS

Like scrapers, which are mainly seen to occur during middle Palaeolithic period, borers are also occasionally found on many Neolithic sites.

8. PICKS

Picks are narrow and elongated tools with flat or slightly concave undersurface and arched upper surface. The cross section is usually rectangular. Majority of the specimens are ground all over the body. The picks can be divided into two groups – single ended picks and double ended picks. The single ended picks contain thick and snapped butt ends. The longitudinal body gradually slopes to meet the flat undersurfaces at straight cutting edge. Digging and loosening soil during the first phase of agricultural activities are some of the probable use of picks.

9. RUBBING or GRINDING STONES

The nomenclature of these tools has functional meaning that refers to its use for rubbing, pounding or grinding purposes, preferably food grains. Hence, different names have been given, such as, „mealing stones‟ (Foote 1916), „mullers‟ (Sankalia 1964). These are also referring as „domestic tools‟ (Rami Reddy 1987), and „food processing equipment‟ (Nancy 1977). A grinding stone, may be of either oblong, rectangular, oval or circular in shape – is made on are made on small, natural slabs in relation to the querns made on huge boulders. Usually any signs of flaking is absent in a grinding stone however, but are pecked all over with stone chisels to give them a flat surface and to produce dentitions for grinding. These are of commonly occurred on all the Neolithic occupation sites.

10. MILL STONES or SADDLE QUERNS

These rectangular, square or, more or less frequently round shaped boulders, occurred in many Neolithic occupation sites, were probably used for grinding and pounding grain and cereals. R.B. Foote referred these as „mealing troughs‟. Usually their surfaces were hollowed out by pecking. An abrasive tool, querns are mostly characterized by massive specimens that have a flat or slightly concave working surface that was used for milling grains, pigments, ceramics, etc. It consists of two parts, the lower (stationary) part of the quern and the upper (movable) part so called pounder. Querns could be used as universal tool for shaping the objects made from a hard material and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the quern from the grindstone.

11. HAMMER STONES or FABRICATORS

These refer to those large to medium sized rounded or cylindrical shape tools, which might have been used as hammers for secondary flaking of stone tools (Allchin 1960:86) or for pounding and powdering of food grains as well. Besides, Rami Reddy (1987:107) put forward the probable use of hammer stones with the manufacture of blade tools and in making grinding or rubbing stones, and Some particularly the cylindrical shaped ones for dressing axes and similar ground tools. On the basis of the typo-technological and functional attributes, Allchin (1957: 327) divided hammer stones into three groups – a) Spheroid or discoid hammers, b) Cylindrical hammers and c) Axe hammers (or pestles). Rami Reddy (1987:107), however, categorised axe hammers as distinct tool on an argument that „these are axes whose cutting edges due to prolonged utilization, ceased to serve the purpose of axe and therefore employed as hammers‟. He further reiterated that axe hammers „differ from the true hammers in shape and technology of the axes though functionally they are identical with hammers‟ (ibid.).

12. MACE HEADS or RING STONES

These refer to those large and thick oval stone blocks provided with a centrally-drilled hole, surfaces of which are often pecked and ground. Usually the diameter of the hole narrows down from the outer surface to the inner one. It is generally suggested that these were use as weights for digging sticks and thus has functional relationship as primitive agricultural implements.

Besides the stone tools, the sites of this period have also yielded various types of bone objects such as needles, scrapers, borers, arrowheads, pendants, bangles and earrings.

13. Neolithic Tool Technology

Neolithic technology was based around tools made of stone. Chipping, retouching, grinding and polishing were techniques developed in the Neolithic to make very fine, sharp and simply beautiful stone tools. In the Later Neolithic, stone tool design shifted to flake-based technology for everyday tools, while beautiful high-quality arrowheads, chisels, axes, daggers, maces and carved stone balls were made as trade or luxury items.

The techniques used for the making of the Neolithic celts are a composite one, and can be identified according to the fabrication stage of the tool produced. Different scholars have discussed different stages of techniques of edge-ground and polished Neolithic tools. Robert Foote (1916) observed four stages in the preparation of ground stone tools such as flaking, pecking, grinding and polishing. B. Subbarao (1949) and Sankalia (1964) also retained the four-stage preparation proposed by R.B. Foote. Rami Reddy (1978) recognized three basic techniques such as flaking, pecking and grinding employed in the preparation of edge-ground stone tools. Of the three techniques flaking was already known since Paleolithic period while pecking and grinding were introduced for the first time during Neolithic times (McCarthy 1949). F.R.Allchin (1957), on the other hand, proposed five stages such as rough (primary) flaking, fine (secondary) flaking, pecking, grinding and over-all grinding. If we consider polishing of Foote and over all grinding of Allchin are one and the same, the latter‟s second stage i.e., fine (secondary) flaking may be counted as an extra stage. Obviously, it is seen that all these techniques were not used uniformly and it all depend upon the functional requirement of the tool produced. However, Neolithic tools consist of the ground tools having smooth surfaces, and well-rounded and symmetrical shapes. In order to obtain such a surface character, it is quiet natural to go through a general flaking/trimming of a core to give a rough shape done by the percussion techniques, such as stone hammering followed by alternative and soft-hammer techniques. This stage is referred to as rough (primary) flaking and fine (secondary) flaking (Allchin 1957).

This stage is followed by the pecking which involves the pounding of the shaped specimen with a dense stone pointed hammer until the desired form is achieved to rough out uneven surfaces and scar ridges caused by the general shaping/flaking activities. After having pecked, the even surfaces of the tool still posses shallow scratch marks and dots caused by the technique. Often undertaken in conjunction with grinding, this technique was commonly used to fashion battle axes, axe hammers and axe-celts.

The next stage after pecking is the grinding which made the tools an even and smoother surface, giving the working edge a sharper end. Grinding process is done by rubbing the tool over a big stone boulder, moving it up and down. In doing so, abrasives, such as sand duly moistened with water are used. Grinding removes chipped and pecked marks, and also levels and cleans the specimen surface. Grinding may be done either only the working edge (termed as edge-grinding) or the whole body surface (termed as overall-grinding). Neolithic celts are often used as finished cutting tools after this fabrication stage.

The last stage, following grinding (edge– or overall-) is the polishing. This stage corresponds with the polishing of the finished product to achieve a smooth, fine surface. Intense vibratory rubbing by smooth fabrics or fine leafy substances duly moistened with oily substance makes the surfaces a lustrous look. It is held that Neolithic axes which are well-ground and polished were not meant for manual task like cutting and cleaving, but have some magico-religious purposes (Blinkenberg 1911, Goodrum 2002). In the same vein, Sankalia (1964) referring the Indian context, also reiterated that „they (the overall-ground axes) have been manufactured for certain specific purposes of some religious significance‟.

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REFERENCES

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