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The Patina of Flint Implements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2013

W. Allen Sturge
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Extract

In approaching the subject of the patination of flint implements, I am profoundly impressed with the very great difficulties of the subject; so much so indeed that I feel that some initial apology is called for. It requires some courage, nay, one may say temerity, to attack a series of problems that bristle with difficulties of a most formidable kind, about which nothing is known; and for a solution of which chemical and physical knowledge of a very high order, backed up by the aid of full laboratory equipment, is required. All this is wanting in my own case; but on the other hand I have a large first-hand acquaintance with the flints in question; for many years I have devoted much attention to the conditions in which patination is found, jand to its manifold varieties—it has been my constant endeavour to co-ordinate given patinations with other factors more or less ascertainable in connection with the flints. In this way I think I have arrived at conclusions which, though by ao means complete in themselves, may at any rate serve as points of departure or of support in the further investigations which are urgently required. I propose to divide my paper into three sections—(1) General considerations bearing on the study of patina, (2) The conditions under which patina is produced, (3) The changes in flint associated with the production of patina.

Type
Original Papers
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , 1912 , pp. 140 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1912

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References

page 147 note * June, 1912.

page 151 note * I cannot in this paper deal with the question of lustre. It is a large subject that would require a paper to itself.

page 154 note * The above account of the Canadian experiment was written on the strength of a recollection now nearly fifty years old of a lecture heard when I was a boy at school. My friend Mr. W. H. Burrell, of Norwich, who has kindly helped in reading the proofs for the press, questioned the accuracy of the account, and of the possibility of the expansive power of water when suddenly converted into ice having any explosive force. This led me to look up the subject, which I found dealt with by Tyndall in his “Forms of Water.” At page 121 of his Eighth Edition, 1881, he says:— “Up to the point of solidification the increase in volume is slow and gradual; while in the act of solidification it is sudden and of overwhelming strength. By this force of expansion the Florentine Academicians long ago burst a sphere of copper nearly three-quarters of an inch in thickness. By the same force Huyghens burst, in 1667, iron cannons a finger-breadth thick. Such experiments have been frequently made since. Major Williams during a severe Quebec winter filled a mortar with water and closed it by driving into its muzzle a plug of wood. Exposed to a temperature 50° F. below the freezing point of water, the metal resisted the strain, but the plug gave way, being projected to a distance of 400 feet. At Warsaw howitzer shells have been thus exploded, and you and I have shivered thick bomb-shells to fragments by placing them for half-an-hour in a freezing mixture.” My memory misled me as to the exact nature of the Canadian experiment, but the profound impression made on my youthful mind as to the explosive power of ice-formation is reinforced by reading the account as quoted by Tyndall.