When I was a young woman, the systematic study of Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) stone tools was just taking off. At that point, experiments to replicate the objects found on excavations were crucial in distinguishing deliberately-shaped tools from natural objects which just looked as if they ought to be tools. My fellow students and I were encouraged to practice flint-knapping and we were allowed part of the college basement for practising our knapping. There were a lot of cut fingers and rude words, and I don’t like to think about the amount of silica dust we probably inhaled, but we did learn how just one small flake could tell you a lot about the tools the Stone Age people were making.

Like the prehistoric tool-makers we were trying to understand, we didn’t only use the flint found in the chalk of southeast England and across the Channel. You can use any rock or man-made substance that is fine-grained and fractures equally in all directions. I have tried glass (highly dangerous, the fine splinters go everywhere); porcelain insulators from electricity cables (works very well); Greek obsidian (lovely) and red chert, also from Greece (good but a little tough). I have a row of rocks on my mantelpiece dating from various parts of my life, which includes pieces I have knapped, or pieces knapped by others more expert than myself.

One of the most interesting pieces on my mantelpiece is a small flake of silicified sandstone. It is a handaxe trimming flake (the handaxe was a modern replica) and it has a characteristic thin, slightly curved shape. If you find these at a site, they show that someone was making the tools often referred to as “handaxes” (bifaces), even if you don’t find any handaxes. “Handaxes” are large bifacial tools which are given their final flat shape by removing a series of these very thin flakes with a bar of bone or antler. They are extremely difficult for a beginner to make, although I have seen an expert polish one off in about two minutes. I stood amazed as he did it – it usually took me half an hour to make a rather clumsy replica, and I had to plan every blow of my hammerstone. He didn’t even look, just kept chatting to us as he worked.

Making stone tools ourselves taught us not only how to classify the tools we were digging up more accurately, but also that sometimes you can infer the presence of a particular kind of Stone Age tool from the shape of the waste produced during its manufacture, even if the tool itself wasn't there. What you have found can tell you about what you haven’t found.

**Drawing of handaxe is from “Man the Primeval Savage”, Worthington G Smith 1894 fig. 151