Flint Daggers, Copper Daggers, and Technological Innovation in Late Neolithic Scandinavia

By Dr Catherine Frieman, ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology (as published in the European Journal of Archaeology, September 2012)

In films, archaeologists are rapacious treasure hunters, dangerously obsessed with the ancient (and always mystical, dangerous and/or alien) things they excavate. While real life is obviously more prosaic, muddier and less fatal than these mass media would have you believe, some of us do become emotionally attached to the material which we study. For me, writing about flint daggers for the European Journal of Archaeology was the culmination of ten years’ fascination with these supremely crafted objects and their social and technological contexts.

While an undergraduate, I joined an excavation working on Viking sites in Denmark. I loved the middle ages and thought that my future lay in studying its remains. We had one free weekend and I used it to go to Copenhagen to visit the National Museum. Walking into the archaeology section, my eye was quickly caught by the displays of fine Neolithic and Early Bronze Age flint tools. I stared, rapt, at the glass cases full of flint daggers and spent hours reading the scant English and puzzling through the Danish on their labels. All the postcards I bought featured Neolithic flint. I was in love.

Over the next few years, I found myself coming back to the daggers again and again. Towards the end of my BA, I wrote an essay for an archaeometallurgy class about flint imitations of metal as a way to understand early metal use. The professor was bemused, having never received a paper on lithics as a response to a question about metal. During my Masters, I used them again as a case study for examining prehistoric value systems. When I started to design a doctoral project, it only seemed natural that one of the case studies should be Scandinavian flint daggers.

Within months of beginning my doctorate I found myself ensconced in a shared office at the Moesgaard museum in Aarhus, Denmark with box upon dusty box of flint daggers in front of me waiting to be recorded to answer my research questions. My doctoral project concerned the question of stone imitations of metal – a question I had first started asking years earlier as an undergraduate – and how these imitations illuminate or otherwise fit into archaeological narratives of metal adoption. Each case study was chosen to highlight a phase of metal adoption in a different region of northwest Europe using a different type of lithic material: ground stone axes from the Dutch/German Early/Middle Neolithic (ca 3500-2900 BC), flint daggers from the Scandinavian Late Neolithic (ca. 2250-1700 BC) and jet bead necklaces from the British Early Bronze Age (ca. 2300-1600 BC). On paper, the idea sounded comprehensive and exciting, in a museum with hundreds of flints in front of me, I was almost scared to turn on my digital callipers lest I make a mistake. Word to the wise: learning the recording standards and physical properties of three separate lithic materials and their putative metal counterparts is neither quick nor simple!

Facing daunting numbers of daggers (over 13,000 are known from Scandinavia!) I was forced to study only one morphological type – the so-called ‘fishtail’ daggers, but also to delimit my research by including only those pieces found in Jutland (both Danish and German) and eliminating those without a find context. In the end, I visited five other major museum collections, spending the most time at the Schleswig-Holstein Archäologische Landesmuseum in Schleswig, Germany and at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. I handled over 500 flint daggers, 333 of which were included in my thesis catalogue and discussed in this paper. Among those sadly not included is the ‘Hindsgavl dagger’, a Danish national treasure currently to be found on the reverse of all 100DKK notes. On my first visit to Copenhagen, the curator allowed me to handle, measure and record this exquisite piece with only three members of staff looking over my shoulder to be sure I did not drop it! At the time, the museum was under renovation; and I was told I was the first researcher to be able to handle the Hindsgavl dagger since the 1960s when it had been placed in a specially alarmed case.

Yet, not all the pieces were like the Hindsgavl dagger – many were broken or damaged, most had significant traces of usewear on handles, blades and base. Some were so heavily resharpened they were rounded or asymmetrical. I began to see that the traditional interpretation of these pieces as special display objects designed to look like metal and prized only or mostly for that similarity could not account for the variety, the long use-lives and the sophisticated knapping techniques to which the daggers I recorded bore witness.

Having rejected direct morphological imitation as the reason for their production and use, I began reading quite widely in the Science/Technology Studies literature for inspiration. In the course of this reading I came across the idea of boundary objects and the pieces immediately began to fall into place. While I was not convinced that Scandinavian flint daggers directly copied specific copper/bronze daggers, it was impossible to ignore the contemporaneity of flint and metal daggers across Europe during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age as well as a lack of precursors for the dagger form in Europe. Further, it chimed with the results of my work on ground stone axes and with ongoing research into the processes (technological and social) by which metal was adopted in Europe.

I saw my first fishtail dagger in August 2002, it feels appropriate that almost exactly a decade later I am able to publish the results of my own research into their origin, use and relation to metal adoption. The interpretation of flint daggers I present in my paper diverges greatly from earlier traditions of research and incorporates information from multiple modern nations and archaeological periods. The European Journal of Archaeology, with its broad chronological and geographical focus, its international readership and its history of disseminating innovative interpretations of significant archaeological material was the obvious choice when I decided to publish it.