Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
axe). The ambiguity is reflected in how and where such artifacts are
found, since they were produced for so many hundreds of millennia as
to have become distributed as quasi-geologic objects. They can almost
be used as index fossils, for example, to date a sediment.
Now, Paleolithic archaeology is a complex and arcane science, so let
me here say a few words about the history of these artifacts and how
difficult they have been to interpret. Acheulean tools have become
Rorschach tests of sorts, blank slates onto which different conceptions
of antiquity and humanity have been inscribed.
Frere is often credited with having been the first to recognize the anti-
quity of ancient stone tools, but he was by no means the first to have
observed them. Stone tools of various sorts have been picked up since
time immemorial—by their original makers, of course, but also by people
from “historical” times, who often saw them as the work of fairies or
some other natural or magical agent. (The oldest image of a Paleolithic
artifact may well be the medieval French painting depicting Saint Etienne
holding a typical Acheulean flint hand axe.) Georgius Agricola and
Konrad Gesner in the sixteenth century had suggested that chipped-flint
implements were the traces left by thunderbolts; there was also the idea
that such artifacts had originally been made of iron and had converted
into stone by their long continuance in the earth.
19
Stone artifacts of
various sorts must have been picked up wherever people were curious—
prehistory may even have been “discovered” from time to time and then
forgotten—but in the absence of a well-founded belief in either human
antiquity or the possibility of fossilization, prehistoric artifacts were no
doubt not often recognized as such.
20
Ulisse Aldrovandi in his posthu-
mous 1648
Musaeum metallicum
classed stone points along with glos-
sopetrae (“tongue stones”), or what we today would recognize as sharks'
teeth; Mercatus's 1719
Metallotheca
included stone points under the
general category of ceraunia—Pliny's grouping that included belemnites.
Stone points were often confused with fossils, it being not at all obvious
where either of these had come from. Even some of the early utilitarian
explanations strike us today as quaintly comical—for example, William
Buckland's 1823 characterization of “a small flint, the edges of which
had been chipped off, as if by striking a light.”
21
If axes were projections
of woodsmen, flints here were presumed to have something to do with
the flintlock or fire lighter.
