Notes on a Stone Tool
An excavation on the airfield of Manston in 1987 revealed a Beaker burial. The skeleton was dated to 2,000+/- BC recalibrated. With it were found the Beaker, a jet button and a flint knife. The finds were at grid reference TR351652 and were reported by D. Perkins and A. Gibson in Arch. Cant. CVIIJ for 1990.
In the course of re-listing of certain finds in Thanet, the flint knife was re-examined. There has been much recording of Beaker burials and the 'Beaker Burial Kit'. The most common items in Western Europe are the pot itself, wrist guard, a jet button, a knife (pressure flaked flint or copper dagger) and pressure flaked tanged and barbed arrowheads. Other flint tools or pieces are found but these appear not to exhibit special characteristics.
The Manston knife is a blade blank 80mm long as shown in Perkins and Gibson's note, with very fine re-touch all round. The tool is patinated with miscible chalk, which can be produced by leakage as well as exposure. Here it was associated with the dated burial, yet typologically the blade looked much older. Reference to D. L. Clarke's book Beaker Pottery of Great Britain and Ireland (1970) showed illustrations of associated flints for Britain (excluding tanged and barbed arrowheads). 32 out of over 1,000 Beaker burials the most common were 12 pressure flaked daggers from 129 to 180mm long; the remainder were heterogeneous flakes and blades. A couple of blades were 78 and 80mm long, with re-touch on one and one and a quarter sides only. These had been taken to be piano-convex knives as had been the Manston knife. Unfortunately, the flint drawings are not that fine, leaving the lithic technology unclear; Clarke does not apparently purport to be a flint, as opposed to beaker, specialist. Recourse was made to Wainwright and Longworth's Durrington Walls publication of 1971, generally held to be authoritative on later New Stone Age flints. At page 175, two piano-convex knives are illustrated and it is immediately obvious that these are pressure flaked (dating from the later Neolithic: Cl4 dates 2,000 BC +/-); the Manston knife is not.
So what are we dealing with? It is possible but unlikely that the association is accidental. Much more likely is that the man who was subsequently accorded a Beaker burial found an attractive blank blade (typologically more like 5th or 4th Millennium BC) and decided to use, or reuse it as a tool; according it very fine re-touch all round, of a type consistent with his own era. Such re-use of tools, notably blade blanks, has been observed by Francois Bordes. This explanation has at least the merit of avoiding an apparently anomalous association. The knife can be seen with the jet button at Margate Museum.
G. Corti,
Thanet Archaeological Society.