Knapping Skill and Craft Specialization in Late Neolithic Flint Daggers

ABSTRACT

The Late Neolithic flint daggers of Scandinavia have long fascinated contemporary flintknappers, due to the beauty of some specimens and the presumed skill required to make them. Examination of populations of daggers in museum collections reveals differences in knapping quality. Such differences are commonly ascribed to variations in skill levels on the part of their makers, and high skill is often assumed to indicate craft specialization. The results of a systematic examination of over 500 flint daggers from southern Sweden suggest that no coherent population of daggers was made by specialists to serve as prestige items or for economic gain. Nor do calculations of dagger output support an interpretation of craft specialist production. Rather, it is suggested that the finest daggers were made by artisans who wished to challenge their own embodied flintknapping skills. In pushing the limits of their craft, their motivation was personal, rather than economic.

KEYWORDS:

• Flint daggers
• Late Neolithic
• craft specialization
• flintknapper
• skill

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carole Gillis for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Deborah Olausson researches mainly technology and technological change, focusing on the relationship between form, function, and context and the ways in which we use things, practically and symbolically. Questions about craft specialization in southern Scandinavia during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age are central and experimental work has been an important method. The importance of raw material qualities and the role played by raw material access in technological change in particular are in focus in her work.

Notes

1. Certainly, contemporary flintknapping can be described as a performance field. Whittaker (2004, p. 156) provides a fascinating description of the way in which knappers use their performance as a means to acquire status at knap-ins.

2. Note that these concepts can be equated to the terms knowledge and know-how, respectively (Apel, 2001, p. 27).

3. 85 daggers × 250 years = 21,250; 142 daggers × 250 years = 35,500.