Hello

Moving back in time, there is now a PDF of Skertchly's remarkable 1879 
monograph "On the Manufacture of Gun-Flints". It is freely downloadable from

http://tinyurl.com/nlp5zh7

I doubt that anybody today would support Skertchly's ideas on the 
cultural continuity of flint mining stretching back  to the Palaeolithic.

However, his observations of the East Anglian gunflint makers at work 
are priceless.

Skertchly took a share in a flint mine and learned the craft himself.  
Among other details, he gives us the rate of output of flakes per day 
and the number of gunflints that could be produced per minute. There are 
pages dealing with the ethno-taxonomic categories of the gunflints, with 
informants describing how individual gunflints deviate from the ideal 
for a category. The finished products are tested by Skertchly, who 
presents the statistics of success and failure of particular gun-flints 
in igniting charges of powder.

A fascinating monograph.

Richard


On 19/12/2013 22:31, KEVIN M DONAGHY wrote:
> Dear Everyone,
> I know some of us have been hounding JV Beckum for the Witthoft paper from
> PA Archaeologist, In the meanwhile - see the below citation -  i think
> anyone interested in flint knapping and gunflints will find exceptional,
> and since it is critical may be worth reading by anyone considering reading
> the Witthoft paper, with all respects to Witthoft, whose individual
> contributions to archaeology are many. - Like Mead when she had that
> walking stick you could kill a horse with, we should be respectful of early
> research - 50 years of hindsight is an exponential differential.  How's
> that for a morning rhyme
>
> this should be available through on-line library database search - i
> sourced through academia.com
>
> Post-Medieval Archaeology 46/1 2012 - 116-142 - 'State of the Art' of
> British Gunflint Research with special focus on the early gunflint workshop
> at Dun Eistean, Lewis
> Sincerely,
> kev
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Jon Van Beckum <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
>> Greetings everyone!
>>
>> Does anyone have a pdf of John Witthoft's 1966 "A History of Gunflints"
>> article from the Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 36: 12-49 that they could
>> share?   I would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> Jon Van Beckum
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>> Jon Van Beckum
>> [log in to unmask]
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>>
>
>