Hot take: the Great Pyramid was built in 20 years but I hit 50 shards of flint from one square meter test pit in England last summer and that seems way harder

I mean, maybe it's just me, but finding 50 pieces of worked flint in a 1x1 meter grid at a site in Oxfordshire makes me wonder if ancient builders had way more people on site than we give them credit for, because how else do you organize that much work in a single lifetime - has anyone else dug up a crazy density of finds that made you rethink timelines?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai_bennett21d ago

Man, that's wild. Fifty worked flints in one square meter sounds like someone was running a full-time flint knapping factory right there. I remember a buddy of mine was digging a Roman site near St Albans and pulled a pit so jammed with broken pottery shards you could barely stick a trowel in. We joked it was the ancient equivalent of a dumpster behind a busy takeout joint. Makes you wonder if those old timelines are just guesses based on how fast we think we could work today, not how hard they actually pushed it.

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taylor30521d ago

And honestly, that's where the debate gets sticky. I've spent enough time in the field to know you can't trust those "hours per artifact" estimates they throw around in papers. If you ever dig a site with dense lithics, just count the flakes yourself for a few minutes and you'll see how quickly a skilled knapper can churn them out.