Find Of The Month – May 2021 – A fabulous fabricator
- 6th May 2021
A flint tool
As you may have seen in our blog post for Find Of The Month – April 2021, fragile finds from the Neolithic/Early Bronze Age include tools formed from flint. This is about a flint known as a “fabricator”.
What we found
From one of the quarry sites we are working on, our archaeology team are revealing several pits. Although that doesn’t sound like much, prehistoric people would place items in them or use them to discard rubbish (broken pottery, bones and other material) for whatever reason, so archaeologists find them extremely valuable as we found assortments of patterned and decorated pottery which is a useful diagnostic of age. On the site same site we found worked and re-worked flints and this blog post gives a little of the background story to one of the flints – a fabricator.
What is a fabricator and why is it so special?
The Neolithic (or “New Stone Age”) communities of 4000-6000 years ago were largely nomadic or semi-nomadic and they needed everyday tools for everyday tasks. Flint was an ideal material for making tools whether for scraping meat off bones, scraping a skin clean or cutting, carving and forming other tools such as wooden implements.
This is an example of one such flint tool called a fabricator as told by one of our finds specialists, Rob Hedge, who uses digital art to help explain more.
 A Neolithic/Early Bronze Age flint fabricator, c4000 – 1500 BC |
 A digital sketch of a Neolithic/Early Bronze Age flint fabricator, c4000 – 1500 BC |
In summary…
Our archaeology team find a lot of fragile, wonderful small finds and these discarded fragments of utensils and tools add to the story of the early prehistoric people that created and used them. They provide a window into the world of the people and their communities that left little else in the landscape around 6000 years ago.
Our thanks to the archaeology team for finding it, and to Rob Hedge for the marvellous sketch and description of the fabricator.
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