flint

flint, very fine-grained quartz (q.v.), a silica mineral with minor impurities. Several varieties are included under the general term chert: jasper, chalcedony, agate (qq.v.), flint, porcelanite, and novaculite.

Silica deposits, such as flint, chert, and the abrasive tripoli, originate from radiolarian skeletons. Fossil radiolarians have been found that date to Precambrian Time (3.96 billion to 540 million years ago).

Jasper is opaque red, brown, or yellow quartz that is pigmented by admixed iron oxides. Chert and flint are finely crystallized varieties of gray to black quartz that occur as nodules or bands in sedimentary rocks.

…the first mineral used was flint, which, because of its conchoidal fracturing pattern, could be broken into sharp-edged pieces that were useful as scrapers, knives, and arrowheads. During the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age (about 8000–2000 bce), shafts up to 100 metres (330 feet) deep were sunk in soft…

Similarly, large nodules of good flint were secured by mining in Poland, Denmark, The Netherlands, England, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Sicily.

…local sources and resulted in flint mining in well-endowed locations in what are now England, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Sicily, and

…of devolution but of new flint technologies and new material forms, with a wealth of beautifully manufactured flint daggers and a conspicuous display of local craft. This constituted a distinct local Late Neolithic phase, interspersed between the Corded Ware Culture and the Bronze Age proper. The flint daggers show clear…

…that pressed a shard of flint or a piece of iron pyrite against an iron wheel with a milled edge; the wheel was rotated and sparks flew. The principle was used in the design of the flint-and-wheel cigarette lighter.

…came from a blow of flint against steel, with the sparks directed into the priming powder in the pan. This lock was an adaptation of the tinderbox used for starting fires.

…(1720) Staffordshire potter to use flint for improving the quality of earthenware mixture by making it whiter. Figures now attributed to him reveal variously toned clays, as well as colours clouded to enrich them. He quite possibly originated the popular pew groups; i.e., two or more rigidly posed, salt-glazed stoneware…

…a chance spark from striking flint against pyrites or a spark made by friction while drilling a hole in wood gave human beings the idea for producing fire is not known; but flint and pyrites, as well as fire drills, have been recovered from Neolithic sites in Europe.

…Stone Age hand tools, usually flint, shaped by flaking off small particles, or by breaking off a large flake which was then used as the tool.

…of fine-grained rock or of flint where that material was available in large nodules. In Greece and the Balkans, all over central Europe and Ukraine, and throughout the taiga, adzes were used exclusively, as in the earlier Baltic Mesolithic; in northern and western Europe axes were preferred. In the Iberian…

Flint, homogeneous and isotropic (having equal properties in all directions), is the rock of first choice for toolmaking. Reasonably well distributed over much of the world, it is an impure quartz, a form of silica, usually opaque and commonly of gray or smoky-brown colour. It…