Tools of Forgotten Doggerland

Is this about making, or a long form piece? Who made these categories?

The text of Maskwitches discusses tools. While this is a huge topic, which neither the game text, nor this blog has space to fully address, let’s take a little look at it.

The Mesolithic period, in which Maskwitches is set, is in part defined by what archaeologists call microlithic tools. These are composite tools made up of many small flint “bladelets” set into handles with pitch or resin. (As far as my research goes, we do not have a clear idea on why this was the case - there are a variety of theories concerning more efficient use of flint, but it’s not really a topic for which we can know the whys, because these might simply be cultural phenomena.)

In the preceding Paleolithic period (which is much, much longer span of time) people generally used larger, single-piece flint tools like hand axes.  Then, after the Mesolithic, the Neolithic period is strongly defined by the reappearance of the hand axe, often remarkably polished.

Sidebar: What even is the Mesolithic?

I realise I use some of these terms without definition. What even is the Mesolithic? These are fuzzy, artificial periods which we use as shortcuts to describe different periods of history. It is important to remember they were invented by people, and the terms have context and a history of their own.
The Mesolithic, or “middle Stone Age” is considered to run roughly from the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, to the arrival of farming. Farming spreads from what we* call the middle-east across a span of time, so the end of the mesolithic is fuzzy and location dependant. It’s roughly 5,000 years ago.
”Mesolithic” is generally used the context of Europe, with the term Epipaleolithic used for other parts of the world. Some parts of the world do not have a corresponding period.

*who even is this “we” I keep mentioning?

Finding Flints

One of the big quandaries for this Redux of Maskwitches was how was I going to make images of composite tools? It’s weird now thinking back to before I came upon the solution, and it was a major obstacle. The answer was, of course, to source… actual flint tools.

Many of the flints you will see in the book are simply genuine Mesolithic flint tools. Having realised this was the obvious answer, I found a field-walker’s collection for sale online, and I bought it.

Now, this is not without its own issues. I did my due diligence that this was actually a collection of surface finds - rather than things that were dug up, destroying the archaeological record. It wouldn’t do to make a game about a period I’m really invested in, at the cost of our knowledge of that period.  Not cool. Hopefully I asked all the right questions, and I sought advice from an archaeologist friend who, after quite rightly telling me off for buying historical artefacts on eBay, helped me with the right questions for the seller, who was very forthcoming with the right answers.

I’m satisfied that the collection was indeed surface finds, and that it comes from an area bordering a known Mesolithic flint-working site, where local mechanised ground-levelling activity has destroyed the integrity of the upper layers of the earth, scattering finds to the surface, where they can be collected by field walkers.

They were found on the Norfolk coast, which is about as close to Doggerland as you can get in the UK.

So these amazing objects appear in the book as tools of Forgotten Doggerland are real Mesolithic microliths. This still absolutely blows my mind, to be honest. I recorded an unboxing video when the flints first arrived:

But how?

So we have some flints. But how to make some composite tools? I can’t mistreat these amazing ancient objects or do anything permanent to them. They haven’t lasted 10,000 years for me to basically destroy them by permanently incorporating them into props for a game!

This took some thinking and planning, but I’ve worked very carefully making the hafts and fake pitch glue in such a way that the Mesolithic flints can be carefully pressure-fitted into entirely inert, rubbery plastic room-temperature fittings. They look glued in, but they’re are absolutely not glued at all. They’re photographed and then removed and put carefully back into their storage box.

Other tools

In addition to the real Mesolithic finds, I also have some contemporary flint tools - a couple of nice spearheads that I traded for some BEOWULF dice at a local history event, and some flint arrow heads I bought. The arrowheads are not so great but they’ll do the trick. And indeed, historical flints come in a spread of quality!

Because those are contemporary objects, I have no concerns about permanently fixing them into handles.

The handles I’m using across the board are various pieces of driftwood which I collected on a beach near Dunbar, on the coast east of Edinburgh. Again, this location borders historical Doggerland, albeit to the far north end which is a little more local to me.  The driftwood I think has a really nice visual quality, invoking worn, well-handled wood, and has a lot of nice texture that we wouldn’t find on the pine broom handles I can use for my props of early medieval spears!

Hot glue pitch

I have spoken here before about pitch, and its widespread use and utility to people in deep history. It’s an extremely versatile material - an adhesive, a filler, arguably a waterproofing agent and more. It can be thinned, and made more or less flexible by various additives. People carried around globs of it on sticks as a portable supply, which could be melted and used as needed. You’ll see some examples of this in the illustrations of tools, but it’s not explained in the text. Some things I think you should investigate for yourself, or recognise and be tickled by their inclusion.

When it comes to the Mesolithic, we do need to think about almost all possessions and tools being personal, portable and carried, in what amounts to a nomadic, wandering way of life, with seasonal hunting and gathering places in which to temporarily reside along the way. In what we call a hunter gatherer way of life, ideas of property and possessions are quite different to our own sedentary, agriculture-derived existence.

But back to pitch - I’ve found that black hot glue is a good stand-in for pitch, and I’ve made really widespread use of it in many of the models and sets. And it serves the same role as pitch in setting blades into handles and hafts. Where I was able to directly apply the hot glue to contemporary flints,  a lot less planning and care was needed than when dealing with the Mesolithic tools.

Inspired by the work of various experimental archaeologists and enthusiasts, I’ve used some plant fibre string in these props, which was pulled from some deconstructed hemp rope. I’m on a promise of a lesson in making nettle fibre string from a wilderness survival expert, come nettle harvesting time, which brings me neatly to one of the most amazing gifts I’ve received as part of this wild project.

Thanks Liam

I’ve long considered Liam and his shop Black Lion Games in Edinburgh to be friends, and Liam and Steve have been long time supporters of us at Handiwork Games. We even have our own shelf in the shop! I certainly didn’t expect any further kindness, and so was bowled over when I received an actual flint hand axe as a gift from Liam, along with a mighty chunk of raw flint, a load of debitage - the bits of flint that are broken off in the process of knapping, as well as a lovely flint core - the roughly cylindrical piece of shaped flint from which smaller flint blades are struck. Again, these were carried around by people in the deep past to be used to make new blades at need.

This was such a lovely thing to send me - while I am reliably informed that Liam didn’t knap the axe himself, but he certainly polished it with his own fair hands. Amazing. And of course it will appear in the tool section of Maskwitches.

I think it’s really cool that we then have several kinds of flint tools in the book - actual Mesolithic flints, some I traded for, some I bought and some I was gifted.

The Utility of Making

In making these props, of course I’m not using anything like the same skills as those that are required to make the real tools. And I get to cheat with things like hot glue and a dremel. Along the way I have experimented with using flint blades to carve the wooden handles, and make holes in leather. And while I don’t necessarily have the time or patience to actually do it as thoroughly as one might, it’s been good to think about how these things are made.

The idea of portable tool kits being the norm, the disposability and ready availability of flint for making blades, the need for people in the past to be skilled makers, the kinds of common sense and ingenuity people express through tools, and how much time is taken up with making and maintaining tools in order to live is fascinating to me - the mixture of the need for fairly constant awareness of one’s tools, combined with the (alleged) fact that a single deer will feed ten people for a week, makes for some interesting division of time. Our modern lives run on some extremely different kinds of clock.

While a game of Maskwitches doesn’t need any kind of expertise in what ordinary people in the Mesolithic do with their time, a bit of research into the topic can really add to your game. I certainly feel l’ve learned some useful hands-on stuff in making these props. Flint blades are significantly sharper than metal blades. Even when they’re 10,000 years old. I like to think that perhaps I have accidentally nicked myself with the self same tool that someone living 10 millennia ago also bungled. Although as likely much more skilled than me, they probably didn’t.

A note on flint points in a connected world

When I began the journey into studying flint tools (and more on the idea that these are tools, not weapons, follows below) I joined various social media groups about knapping. I was keen to learn more from practitioners.

A thing I had not paused to consider soon became apparent to me. But first, some personal history. Long before I moved to the home of my forebears, Scotland, I grew up in the West Country of England, which is full of prehistoric sites. We were not so far from Stonehenge and Avebury, Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow.

The place where I lived as a child was an isolated cottage, at the edge of a former Bruderhof settlement. That’s a story for another time - but in short they were a German Anabaptist community who settled for a while in England having fled the Nazis in the 30s. Ensuing English distrust of anyone German forced them to move on again when war broke out. Their abandoned site, complete with a beautiful arts and crafts weaver’s hall, later became an approved school (which was more or less a place “delinquent” youths were punished), then a residential children’s home, one of the first experimental therapeutic homes, where my father worked, and we lived there onsite.

It was an amazing and odd place to live. In the field behind our house there were the remains of a Roman villa, its evidence visible both in aerial photographs, and the wild amounts of red Samian ware we picked up whenever the field was freshly ploughed. The villa was built on an earlier settlement, and there were also stone loom weights (looking back through misty memories, were those actually Neolithic mace heads?) and even flint arrowheads to be found if you were extremely lucky. We kept chickens, and they were very good at scratching up finds.

To me, flints were always the mysterious remnants of truly ancient, unknowable distant peoples. “Cave man” stuff to 1970s child-me.

But fast forward back to my newly-joined, contemporary social media flint-knapping groups, I encountered many knappers and arrowhead collectors from North America. This was an extremely different story, and if you’re reading from America, our notions of what flint arrowheads mean will likely be markedly different. Flints found in North America aren’t necessarily from thousands of years ago.

Some of the craftspeople in these groups were engaged in keeping their people’s traditions alive. Being European, I hadn’t paused to consider people knapping flint in an unbroken line from the deep past to the present, due to my own cultural associations with flint tools.

Others, who I found much less interesting, were simply collecting arrowheads without any real thought (it seemed to me at least) for who had left them behind and why. I struggled with this a little bit, and I often found myself at odds with what I felt was a disrespectfully casual way that this was discussed. Those were tools made by real people, living real lives, perhaps not that long ago. It all seemed extremely…commodified? Perhaps I’m being unfair, being a complete outsider, perhaps because of the reverence I have for even ten thousand year old artefacts as being made by people, not just another cool rock. But I didn’t like it.

Pick up a flint blade in Norfolk, UK and you know with some certainty that it’s from the deep past. That’s a very different proposition to finding flint points in North America.

These were not things I’d really had any cause to think about, and it gave me pause, and strongly reminded me of the different cultural associations we all carry around.

I did also learn a lot of really fascinating stuff about the knapping of colonial mass produced glass, and later railway glass.

(Here’s an interesting paper on that topic. I’m certainly no expert, so forgive me if it’s not the best starting point.)

And I learned about some of the traditions of so-called Clovis points, and the many identifiable styles of indigenous peoples’ flint working across history to now.

I’d like to know more, which is a burden of finding almost everything interesting. The work being done by contemporary flint knappers, both of indigenous heritage, and those who admire those traditions, is remarkable and wonderful.

Without wishing to be too general about things, it wasn’t lost on me that the practitioners from various walks of life and various backgrounds often seemed a lot more respectful than the casual collectors. I guess that perhaps it’s hard to have the dedicated mindset required to make these beautiful, delicate flint points while remaining unconcerned about the sensitivities surrounding the fate of your fellow knappers from relatively recent history.

I hope in thinking about these issues, and in making prop versions of ancient tools, a little bit of sensitivity has rubbed off on me too.

Tools not Weapons

Back to Maskwitches. It’s worth noting that there is no section on weapons in Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland.

Contemporary hunter gatherer peoples are known to have some advanced techniques of conflict resolution. People from those cultures tend to be arguably better at resolving differences than we do from so-called post-industrial western culture. There is plenty of research available to read on contemporary anthropology - which is an imperfect guide to the past, but a place to find inspiration and information to guide us.

It’s mind-blowing to think that war, even at what we gamers might call a “skirmish level”, was arguably a later invention that accompanies the rise of agriculture. Like many things, we agricultural people tend to assume a lot of things are “natural” when for the longest time people simply didn’t do those things, and they are decidedly not a given.

So while people in the deep past were people like us, with the same brains, with the same capacity for emotion as we have, culturally we have to make some big leaps of understanding.

In societies where social status is conferred by how much you provide for the community, where there are no rulers as we would recognise them, where individual poverty simply isn’t a thing, where there are very few physical boundaries or enclosures, where possessions are minimal, and ideas of wealth and organised religion are not present, alongside those deep skills in conflict resolution, we have to rethink our assumptions about interpersonal violence.

It would of course be a stretch to posit that interpersonal conflict does not exist in foraging societies, indeed that this might become violent. Conflict is a central premise of the Maskwitches setting, and the way the Maskwitches exist to help resolve such conflicts.

But the fact foraging people on the whole just don’t do war, and so weapons for their own sake do not exist. It’s a fascinating aspect of this setting. What causes armed conflict between groups is really thrown into sharp relief when we think in depth about the absence of those causes.

It is worth mentioning that hunter gatherer societies face their own brands of difficulties, and enact their own brands of human darkness, but that’s isn’t what I’m here to talk about today, and it’s a complete and sensitive topic, not well-suited to a side bar.

As an example, here’s a balanced read from anthropology magazine, “Totem”.

And so while spears and bows, knives and axes exist, in Maskwitches, they are tools for making and hunting. Not hurting other people.

I know, you might be thinking “nah, people still did loads of killin’, especially with no police around, and that’s Jon is just some kind of naive hippy, projecting his radicalism onto the past”. In response, I’d urge you to do some reading into hunter gatherer societies, and the deep history of armed conflict. By all means, don’t take my word for it. It’s interesting stuff. We don’t always know what we don’t know, and changes in material contexts are so massively influential on behaviour. Maybe “things” we accept as givens, aren’t always so. Which is what this setting is all about.

Work continues, reading continues, the synthesis of reading and making continues. Whole lot of continuing continuing round these parts.