Making replicas of the earliest objects made by woodturning ever found in Britain, from Whitehorse hill on Dartmoor

I like woodturning. It's a nice compliment to my carving work and there's also something that feels quite relaxing about putting the tools to the spinning timber and watching the shapes develop.

There have been a couple of commissions recently that have allowed me to do some turning and which have also been a little more challenging. Making some of the components for the instruments that are now installed in St Werburghs Community Centre meant turning larger pieces than I've worked on before. 

I was also asked by a local furniture maker called Dave Porter to turn eight discs, 60mm (2.36") wide, from European oak to decorate some furniture that he was making. It was a nice test of skill to try and make the discs as similar as possible, whilst turning them by hand. Both of us were happy with the outcome. Here they are, with one spare:

After making these commissions, I came across the story of the Whitehorse hill burial. 

This Bronze Age burial happened nearly four thousand years ago in what is now the wild, empty middle of Dartmoor national park - a place that is very important to me. This view, taken near Whitehorse hill, shows what the area looks like:

In 2001, a walker found a small, rectangular burial chamber made from stones protruding from a remanent 'hag' of peat, which had been left standing as the peat surrounding it was cut away. These small stone boxes or chambers are known as kists, cists or kistvaens.

The erosion of the peat stack had uncovered the kist and one of the stones had fallen. The rest looked like it could also fall out at some point soon, so the decision was made to open the burial and see what was inside. This was even more exciting as most kists on Dartmoor have been excavated or robbed at some point but this one, having been hidden underground in a fairly remote part of the moor, was probably intact.

Image by Cornwall Archaeological Unit, from https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/cist-whitehorse-hill.htm

In 2011, the kist was opened. Inside, well preserved by the peat (which excludes oxygen so preventing the decay of organic matter), was a bundle wrapped in an animal pelt, thought to be from a bear.

The contents of the bundle were the cremated remains of what is believed to have been a woman of high status, aged somewhere between 15 and 25 years old. The presence of a necklace and absence of weapons in the burial led researchers to think the deceased was probably female. She was buried in August or September (from the purple moorland grasses laid on the floor of the kist at the time). On top of these grasses was laid what looks like a woven belt or sash decorated with calfskin leather, then the wrapped cremation on that.

Apart from the remains, the wrapping held a woven bag made of lime bast (the fibres under the bark of a lime tree). This contained several objects: a necklace made from beads of clay, shale, amber and also a single bead of tin, a flint flake, a copper pin, a woven cattle hair band or bracelet decorated with small tin beads and two pairs of wooden discs. 

Image from https://new.devon.gov.uk/historicenvironment/latest-news/bears-and-beads-on-whitehorse-hill/

These wooden discs are the earliest examples of wood turning ever found in Britain. They could have been ornaments fitted into a leather bag or belt, but most people think that they were body ornaments, similar to modern ear expanders. They would have been worn in stretched ear piercings, or perhaps in lip, nose or cheek piercings. 

Some think that the smaller studs were perhaps the intermediate ones used as the hole was being stretched, before the larger ones were worn. Personally, I think they might have been worn at the same time as they show similar amounts of wear and were buried together.

The wooden discs were turned from tough, pale coloured spindle tree wood, a native species which still grows around the edge of the moor. At the time of the burial, this area would have been much more wooded than now. It's strange to imagine what the person who wore these wooden ornaments was like; speaking a language that we wouldn't understand in the present day but perhaps knowing some of the many stone monuments, such as the double circle at Greywethers, that still stand not far from where they were buried and that we can still visit.

Radio carbon dating from underneath the fallen stones of nearby Sittaford Tor circle returned a date of about four thousand years ago, so the circle itself is probably older than that. This means the person buried at Whitehorse Hill would have known it and probably visited it as well.

I couldn't resist having a go at recreating the discs myself! We have some idea of what Bronze Age woodturning was like, having images preserved from ancient Egypt. A note about the picture: the lathe would have been horizontal even though conventions in ancient Egyptian art mean that it's illustrated standing vertically.

Image from http://www.turningtools.co.uk/history2/history-turning2.html

These sources helped woodturner Stuart King to recreate the making of the wooden discs for a programme called 'Mystery of the Moor'.

I had to cheat a bit, as the method Stuart King used requires two people to work best and also because I don't have the appropriate reproductions of Bronze Age tools at the moment (although I'm very tempted to acquire or make some now!). It was still fun to make replicas of these objects that connect us to that ancient and mysterious time. 

I had some seasoned spindle tree wood that was suitable, and the discs finished well. After turning, I put some natural nut oil onto them, to bring out the colour of the wood and stop them getting too grubby - a beeswax finish could originally have been used but it tends to attract dirt. The larger turnings are 25mm (1") and the smaller ones 15mm (0.59") in diameter.

Here's my friend Sion wearing a pair of discs very similar to those found in the kist at Whitehorse hill, but slightly larger than the bigger ones found in the burial at 30mm (1.18") wide. He said that they are very comfortable to wear and they were also tough enough to withstand a good deal of partying last weekend!

Woodcarving and woodworking tools seen at the British Museum; from the Stone Ages to the Anglo-Saxons in Northern Europe

After writing about ancient Egyptian woodworking and tools from ancient Nubia and Mesopotamia, it's time to head north and look at Europe. I have focussed mainly on the woodworking tools that are in the collection of the British Museum.

Stone Ages

The Stone Ages in Britain ended with the arrival of settlers who knew how to use copper alloys to make tools and weapons, about 4,200 years ago. It's hard to find a lot of evidence of woodworking from the earliest known human habitation of Northern Europe. A perishable material like wood just doesn't often last for long enough. However, there are a reasonable amount of wooden objects known from the last part of the Stone Age, the Neolithic Period, including what was a raised wooden trackway through marshy ground. It was found in Somerset and is called the 'Sweet Track', dating to 5,821 years ago. The stone axe shown above was found at Ehenside tarn in Cumbria and dates to between 5,700 and 5,100 years ago. It is made from a local stone that was also traded elsewhere due to its suitability for toolmaking.

The Neolithic period saw an important change in the making of stone tools in Northern Europe. During the Mesolithic, about 7000 BCE, stones like flint were 'knapped'. Flakes were knocked off the workpiece to form sharp edges in order to make scrapers, knives, axes and other useful bladed tools. During the Neolithic, about 4000BCE, stone started to be ground to shape by using the time-consuming method of rubbing against abrasive stones, or perhaps leather with abrasive rock powder on it, using water to aid the process.

Why spend so much extra time grinding down blades? BBC television's 'Time Team' programme did an interesting experiment for an episode called 'Sussex Ups and Downs' aired in 2006. The action of a ground axe blade was tested (by cutting down a small hazel tree trunk) against a blade made by knapping. The ground blade was found to work much more efficiently, cutting far more cleanly and not becoming damaged by bits of timber getting lodged in the blade and causing fractures to form. It required less effort to use and would last much longer without becoming damaged beyond further use.

The objects in this image were put in a pit dug into a cairn (a mound of stones) and may well have been part of a burial. They were found at Ayton east field in North Yorkshire and date to the Late Neolithic, about 5,300 to 4, 500 years ago. There are three flint axe heads, a flint adze for carpentry work, five flint arrowheads, a flint knife with two flakes, an antler mace head and two boar tusk blades.

After seeing First Nations tools from the North-West Pacific coastline, it is obvious that complex woodcarvings were possible with the tools available in Europe before the discovery of copper alloys. The hard stones were shaped into sophisticated and sharp blades. I also wonder if the teeth of the native European beaver were used to make woodworking tools, as the teeth of American beavers were in the North-West Pacific before contact with Europeans. No such tools have been found in European archeological studies to my knowledge, but in her book Cedar, Hilary Stewart comments on how a split beaver tooth was one of the principal tools for making wooden bowls, spoons and ladles in the NW Pacific region, being the original 'hook' or 'crooked' knife. It strikes me that the boar's tusk blades shown above could perhaps also serve a similar function. She also notes how, when 'roughly hollowing out a cedar bowl using a maul and a bone-tipped chisel I had made, I was surprised by the blade's strength and cutting ability'. Stewart also notes the usefulness of mussel shell (Mytilus californianus) when scraping or shaving wood. However, she notes that it fractures easily when mallet blows are applied even though early ethnographers describe it being used in chisels.

Some very interesting and enigmatic stone carvings are known from the Neolithic. The carved chalk 'Folkton Drums' date from around the end of the Neolithic or the start of the use of copper, about 4,500 to 4,000 years ago. They are unique and were placed under the head and hips of a child buried in a barrow mound. Their purpose is unknown, although the chalk probably came from nearby Folkton Wold in Yorkshire.

These small stone objects shown below fascinate me. Over 400 have been found, mainly in northern and eastern Scotland. They come in various shapes and their use is unknown.

The Bronze Age

These bronze axes date to about 2,750 to 2,500 years ago. Two of the three below were found at Walthamstow in London and in the River Thames near the Tate Gallery, also in London. The other was found in South Yorkshire.

These axe heads were found at Petter's sports field in Surrey, England. They date to the Late Bronze Age, about 3,000 to 2,750 years ago.

The L-shaped wooden handle would fit into the socket at the back of the axehead and would be lashed on using the loop:

Image from:http://www.dorsetaonb.org.uk/assets/downloads/South_Dorset_Ridgeway/Resources/Image_bank/Replica_bronze_axe.jpg

It was interesting to see the similarities between these bronze axe heads and some found in China and Siberia shown below.

The two socketed heads on the left come from the Shang or early Western Zhou dynasties in China and date from between 3,200 and 3,002 years ago. The one on the right (note the loops) is about 3,000 to 2,800 years old and came from Southern Siberia, although it is based on a Chinese design.

There are obvious similarities between the Chinese-style bronze axehead on the right and the Northern European ones. I wonder if they show a kind of 'convergent evolution' of design, where similar requirements created similar tools, or whether they reflect a passing of ideas between cultures, perhaps by contact through ancient trade routes such as the Silk Road.

Again, a lot of wooden items from the Bronze Age must have rotted away over time. The photo below shows a wooden ladle at top left found at Flag Fen in Cambridgeshire and dating to the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,300 years ago). Around it are various bone and pottery utensils from this time until the early Iron Age (2,650 years ago) that were found in Surrey, North Yorkshire and Suffolk, England.

The Iron Age

The files, gouges and chisels in the top row came from Tiefenau in Switzerland. The tools on the left appear to have tangs ready to fit handles onto them, whereas the one on the right seems to have a ready-made handle cast as part of it. The gouge second from the right has a socket to fit a handle. No dates are given for these tools.

The adze head below them came from Lisnacrogher in County Antrim, Ireland. Below it is a circular disc cutter from King Harry Lane cemetery in St Albans, Hertfordshire, England that dates to between 2,014 and 1,064 years ago. 

In the BBC documentary 'A History of Celtic Britain: Age of Iron', Neil Oliver shows examples from a hoard of iron tools discovered near Fiskerton in Lincolnshire (the next two images are screenshots from that programme). They are thought to date to around 2,400 years ago. It is very noticeable how similar they are to tools dating from more recent times. 

Oliver holds up a file and points out that 'if someone was to show you this and say, "this is from my great-grandfather's toolbox"', you would believe them. He also shows a fragment of saw blade and notes that iron working allowed much stronger and  thinner blades than cast bronze, making more efficient tools that were relatively cheap and simple to make and repair compared to their bronze equivalents.

Roman Britain

Many of these Roman tools really are similar to modern examples. The curved blade top right is described as a 'drawknife' and came from Hod Hill in Dorset, England. It dates to the first century CE (or AD, if you prefer).  

I recognise this blade as an 'inshave'. It is used to hollow out chair seats and also by barrel-makers (coopers) for shaping the inside of barrel staves. Similar ones can be bought today from woodworking suppliers. Travelling clockwise from this blade, we come to a solid-handled punch (with a grooved face for decorating woodwork) and a broken spoon-shaped drill bit (probably used with a bow-or strap-drill according to the label), both from the 1st century CE and found at Camerton in Somerset. Bottom right is a tool suitable for use as a 'float', to remove stone in masonry work, as a coarse rasp to remove wood in carpentry or for filing horse's hooves. It also came from Hod Hill and dates to the same time as the inshave. 

The thin-bladed paring chisel on the left came from Walbrook in London and dates to the first or second century CE. It would have been hand-pushed and used for fine work. This tool has the maker's name MARTIALIS stamped onto it, a custom with tool makers that survives to this day.

The tools shown above and in the following two photos probably all date from the first or second century CE. Going clockwise from the top left;

A double-ended spatula found in London, probably used for spreading wax onto wax tablets,

A very well-preserved awl, for making small holes in wood or (more probably) leather, found in London. This one has an iron point, a bronze collar and a handle made from turned boxwood (Buxus sempervirens),

The paring chisel mentioned above,

A socketed carpenter's gouge found at Camerton in Somerset,

A carpenter's firmer chisel with a socket for a wooden handle, found at Smith's Wharf in London,

A firmer chisel with a solid handle, found as part of the 'Sandy Hoard' in Bedfordshire,

A solid-handled mortice chisel, with the handle battered down by hard use. Found at Hod Hill.

The adze head on the left was found at Camerton. The small hammer head on the other side of the eye hole for the handle has been burred by use.

In the centre is an adze-hammer, used by carpenters and boatbuilders and found at Bull's Wharf in London. The handle is a modern reconstruction.

The axe on the right also has a reconstructed handle. It is a kind of military axe called a dolabra, found at Hod Hill. It would have been carried by a Roman soldier in addition to his weapons and was used for felling trees and construction when on a campaign.

The pickaxe head at the top of this photo is immediately recognisable as such. It was found at Camerton and is a military-pattern tool, used by Roman soldiers for construction work. The axe head below it was also found at Camerton and would have been used to fell trees. It has a short inscription stamped into it, perhaps a maker's mark, but it is now impossible to read it.

The axe head at the bottom came from an unknown source, but represents the commonest kind of Roman axe. A weld line shows that the cutting edge was welded onto the rest of the axe head. This may have been hardened metal, to give a sharper cutting edge.

This ship's figurehead made of oak looks like a Viking one, but it was actually made earlier, during 300-400 CE. It was found in the River Schelde in Belgium and had a tenon allowing it to be removed, maybe for travelling under low bridges. It is not known if the figurehead was made by Gallo-Roman craftsmen, Germanic craftsmen who settled in the local area or by Germanic craftsmen who used the Gallo-Roman style.

The wooden objects shown below were found in various parts of Britain and illustrate some of the humbler day-to-day Roman uses of wood. They include spindles and spindle whorls, a tent peg, a wooden key for a wooden lock, a bowl and a strange object that is listed as a bobbin but which also looks a lot like a yo-yo. The board on the right was a barrel stave, which was reused to line a well near Mansion House in London. It bears two stamps of Fuscius Macrinus, who is thought to have been the cooper who made the barrel.

The Anglo-Saxons

These Anglo-Saxon woodworking tools were found at Hurbuck in County Durham and date to around 1,200 - 1,000 years ago. The curved adze at the top would be used for smoothing and shaping wood. The splendid T-shaped axe head is labelled as being used to 'fell and chop trees', although such a broad yet lightweight cutting edge would seem more suited to hewing felled timber into beams and boards. On the right is a spoon-shaped auger, used to drill holes in wood. You can see Dave Budd's reconstructions of such drills on one of my previous posts, which you can find by clicking on this link.

Woodcarving and woodworking tools seen at the British Museum; from ancient Nubia and Mesopotamia around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago

The British Museum is so full of incredible objects that a visit can be a bit overwhelming. Sometimes it is nice to just pick out a particular theme and to follow that through the galleries. On a recent visit, I took the chance to explore the history of woodcarving tools a bit further. A lot of the factual information here came from museum labels for the exhibits.

Ancient Nubia

Many sophisticated cultures developed in Nubia (along the Nile river in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) in ancient times. This copper adze blade and axe head were found at the site of the ancient city of Faras. The remains of the city are now under the waters of Lake Nasser, having been flooded following the building of the Aswan dam.

They date to around 5,000 years ago and were probably imported from Egypt, Nubia's powerful neighbour. You can find out more about ancient Egyptian woodcarving and the making of copper alloys by visiting my previous post about it.

The Kerma civilisation developed in Nubia from about 4,500 years ago. It was based around the urban centre of Kerma, which the ancient Egyptians called 'Kush'. The city was known for skilled bronze (copper alloyed with arsenic or tin)  workers. Going from left to right, this stone axe head, stone grinder and whetstone (for sharpening metal blades) date to between about 3,760 and 3,560 years ago. The whetstone was one of ten hones interred with a sacrificial burial. It has traces of red pigment on it. I wonder if that was purely ritualistic, or if these stones were used with some kind of compound such as ground ochre to improve their sharpening performance?

Early Mesopotamia

These tools date from about 8,000 to about 6,200 years ago, to the early days of farming and of the development of towns and villages. The copper chisel in the centre was found at Tell Arpachiyah, in what was Northern Mesopotamia and is now near Mosul in Iraq. It is one of the earliest copper tools ever found. The tool to the left is a bone awl from the same place, set into bitumen. Between them is a sickle blade, also set in bitumen. Behind is a worked stone hoe blade and on the right, a stone mace head. In northern Mesopotamia, flint and metal were used for tools whereas in the south, pottery was generally used.

Ancient Sumerian

The Sumerian city of Ur was located at the site of what is now Tell al-Muqayyar in southern Iraq. At its peak, it was very powerful and wealthy. Some believe that Abraham (Abram or Ibrahim), the great prophet of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths, may have been born here about 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered a large cemetery area here dating to the Early Dynastic III period, about 4,600 to 4,300 years ago. Many of the stunning treasures excavated from this area are now in the British Museum. The copper used to make many of the tools probably came from Oman. 

These copper alloy chisels all have a flattened, triangular-shaped end away from the cutting edge. It doesn't look like a useful shape to be struck with a mallet or held in the hand, so I wonder if that end would have been held in some kind of handle? If that was the case, the shape wouldn't have been easy to drive into a wooden handle (like modern square- or round- sectioned tangs), so maybe that had a slot cut into it and was then bound together with the blade held inside? Perhaps the blade was simply wrapped in leather or another material to make a handle? I don't know of any evidence for this, by the way.

The chisel blade furthest on the right has an original engraving in cuneiform script on it.

The image below shows whetstones and chisel blades found in the tomb of Puabi, a very powerful and wealthy Sumerian woman. The beautifully-shaped honing stones on the right were found being worn by several of Puabi's male attendants buried with her.

The chisels are, according to the exhibit label, 'made of base gold with the surface artificially enriched'. Gold seems a strange choice for practical cutting tools. It is quite soft and so doesn't usually hold a cutting edge well. Perhaps, like the model tools found in the grave of the Egyptian king Khasekhemwy, these were meant as representations of (rather than working examples of) actual tools.

Several adzes were found in the Ur cemetery area. Unlike many ancient adzes the blades have a socket for the handle attached, rather than being lashed to the wooden handle like the adze blade shown above.

You may have noticed that two of the copper alloy adze blades have an animal's leg design engraved into them. Many tools and containers in these 'royal' graves have the same mark. No one is sure if it was the emblem of the royal house, the emblem of the manufacturers or something else.

The graceful-looking adze head in the central picture above is a replica of one in the collection of the University Museum in Philadelphia. The original is made of gold: another non-working representation of an actual tool? The objects shown with it are a gold spear head, a cluster of arrow heads corroded together and a whetstone.

The axe heads shown below illustrate something that is worth considering when looking at these objects.

The one on the right is made of silver - perhaps another mainly ceremonial representation. These objects probably came from the tombs of very wealthy and powerful people. It is hard to say whether these axes were just for use by guards and, if so, would they have looked considerably different to those used by craftspeople? During these times, there doesn't generally seem to have been the large differences in axe head shape according to the job required from it that can be seen in later axes, for example from the Anglo-Saxon times in Britain. However, perhaps the specialist craftsperson's hewing axes just weren't preserved in any graves?

Akkadian Ur and Canaan

From 4,300 to 4,150 years ago, the city of Ur was ruled by the Akkadians who succeeded the previous Sumerian rulers. The adze head below comes from the late Early Dynasty III or Akkadian periods. The handle is modern.

Notice the axe head shown bottom-right in the collection above. It is very different in shape to the earlier ones. This 'fenestrated' shape ('fenestrated' because of the 'windows' in the axehead) developed between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago, in the area around what is now called the Levant. The Canaanite axes below show this form with complete sockets for a handle. These windows meant that the whole axe was lighter in use. I wonder if this development was confined to military axes, given that the lighter weight would also benefit other people using them. Would these heads have been too vulnerable to distortion by twisting or side-to-side movements if embedded in timber? It's hard to say without any practical testing.

Ancient Babylonian

A hoard of 86 copper alloy and bronze tools and farming implements was found at Kutalla (what is now Tell Sifr in Iraq). They are about 4000 years old. Some were in a good, usable state although others were damaged. Axe heads (note: not of the fenestrated type), a chisel and a saw can all be seen amongst other tools. It is thought that they were held originally in a big agricultural establishment, where it would be customary to check the total weight of items issued and returned at the end of each season.