Entries by Lasse van den Dikkenberg

ARCHON Summer School for Experimental Archaeology

From the 21-23 August ARCHON organised a summer school for experimental archaeology. The summer school was organised in collaboration with the Putting Life into Late Neolithic Houses Project. The summer school was held in three different locations, aimed to highlight three major aspects of experimental archaeological research. On the first day a symposium was held […]

Recycling flint axes – new scientific study published

This month the Dutch government installed a 15 cent deposit on tin cans to encourage people to recycle their cans. Recycling is however not a recent invention, it has been around since early prehistory. During the Vlaardingen Culture phase (3400-2500 BC) flint axes were often recycled to make other tools such as scrapers and flint […]

Workshop Scraping Seal Skins

On the 22nd of October 2022 we hosted a hide-working workshop for the volunteers of Masamuda. The workshop was aimed to gain insight into hide-working traces on Vlaardingen Culture (VLC) scrapers. On the VLC site of Hekelingen III several scrapers were found with hide working traces which potentially could be linked to the scraping of […]

How to finish your axes? Experiments with the final stages of the production of polished flint axes

Vlaardingen Culture sites often yield large quantities of polished axe fragments, and occasionally even complete axes are found. Microscopic analysis of these axes and notably these axe fragments indicated that there were marked differences in the production traces which could be observed. This came as a surprise because all these axes were imported from far […]

Kill your Darlings, Making and Breaking Flint Buren Axes

By: Lasse van den Dikkenberg   This post will deal with Buren axes, flint axes which were imported during the Vlaardingen Culture period (3400-2500 BC). The post is based on an experiment conducted by Diederik Pomstra whom reconstructed several Buren axes. These axes were then re-used as a source of flint for the creation of […]