Word: flints
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Scramble Plan. Barnes broke in, appropriately, in Flint, Mich., a city that over the years has produced 11,197,000 cars. In 1947 he was called to Denver. In his first four years, he installed 30,000 traffic-direction signs along Denver streets, cut down big street-corner trees to improve visibility at intersections...
Since then, the archaeologists have dug out and recorded thousands of flint tools, bone knives, stones, antlers, shells, beads, awis and other clues with which they are recreating the world of the Stone Age hunters. Much is known but many questions may never be answered. One of the chief difficulties is that many of the flint tools and other objects, though man-made, served an unknown function. Moreover, organic material, such as reindeer skins and wood, is gone. This is preserved only under unusual circumstances--for example, if it happened to have been buried at the bottom of a lake...
From ground level to about 16 feet down, the earth beneath the Abri Pataud is a series of thin layers, like a plank of plywood. Each layer, or stratum, is half-an-inch or so thick. Many of these strata constitute "occupation layers": buried within each are flint and bone objects that accumulated as the layer slowly accumulated during geological history. Some of the layers represent a year's occupation of the Abri Pataud; others contain the relics of 10, 20 or more years. A few yield no bones or man-made objects for they were laid down while...
...excavating with a technique more precise than any ever used at a prehistoric site. They are peeling back the thin occupation layers, one by one, and recording the type and exact location of every artifact within each strata. The archaeologists thus obtain a picture of the distribution of flint tools, animal bones, and other remains, in time and space. They can study how the form of a flint knife, for example, slowly changed during thousands of years. And they can determine, for each period of pre-history, where, within the camping site, such tasks as the scraping of animal skins...
When an artifact appears, its position is measured. The object is then removed by hand--or, in the case of a fragile item, with a dental extractor--and tossed into a basket with three compartments: for bones, for flint, and for river stones and pebbles. The stones go to a geologist, the bones to a paleontologist, and the flint to an archaeologist. The pale botanist takes a sample of dirt from eastrata, which he centrifuges to recover the pollen grains of plants which grad around the rock shelter thousands years...