Touraine - from then until now!

This blog is an attempt to show some of the vast history of Man's prescence in the Southern Touraine.... from first footfall to the present....
especially in and around le Grand Pressigny area.... with special emphasis on life at and around le Moulin de la Forge.
There will also be occasional entries about time before man was here and when the area was at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea...



Tuesday 5 May 2015

A "Swiss Army" flint... the ultimate Stone Age multi-tool.

Pauline spotted this....

The wonders of technology allow both sides to be seen at once,
... whilst looking along the berm...
our long barrow of earth from the creation of the fosse septiques and their associated filter beds.
It is therefore, totally out of context!

But the Chairman of the AMGP{#} identified it as a multi-use flint tool...

a blade...

a flat scraper [grattoir]...

a borer [perçoir]...

a rounded end scraper...

and an incurved section.

This last was apparently likely to have been used for scraping bark from branches and meat from small bones.....
Willow for headache....
meat from tendons to leave clean sinew for breaking apart by hammering....

But put together, this is a very handy thing for a mobile hunter to have with them as part of a kit...
and for the Stone Age kitchen area and craft room...
I am using this terminology quite deliberately...
they were no different from us in those respects.
Craft areas created everything from clothes to tools...
and traded them...
the original Amazon.com.

In the kitchen, anything that could be used in different ways, would have been a boon...
no going to a "drawer full of gadgets" [ie.: pile of favourite flints]...
this one would do most of what was needed.

For the hunter, out on an expedition, it would have been used as I use my trusty Swiss Army knife...
now with a wonderful ash handgrip...
carved and finished by me...
using...
no, not flint... just modern knives, files and sanders.
But I'll bet I could have done the very same with flint on the ash wood!

My Swiss Army knife... with matching blades open...
or four out of the five above!


To me this is a wonderful indicator of Man's ingenuity...
as a species we have continually strived to do better...
our inventiveness is inbred!!

Yes... this is the original Swiss Army knife...
and even Ötzi had something similar!
Even if he was Italian...
now there's a quandary for the Swiss...
your army's favourite tool was found....
in the possession of someone the from other side of the border!!



[#] Les Amis de la Musée du Grand Pressigny

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