Welcome to The Stone Age

Imagine that you are standing on top of one of the high South Downs hills of England  – Windmill Hill, or Telegraph Hill - on a bright June Morning.  You can see for miles – to Portsmouth and the sea to the south and to Petersfield to the north.  All around you is a lush green landscape of grasslands and forest.

Now imagine that it is 8,000 years ago – in the middle of the Mesolithic age.  There are no houses, no towns, no roads.  The sea is still here but there is no Portsmouth, no Petersfield.  When night falls the only light is that of the stars; and when day breaks, the only food is the food you can gather yourself.

You and your family have walked a thousand miles from France or Spain, as you do every year, following the game herds and the summer sun.  You have little or nothing in the way of possessions, other than the animal skins you wear, and perhaps some arrows or a spear.

You live in a world that is freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. You have no home, no job, no bank account or credit cards.  You must provide your own shelter, your own food, your own clothes.  You must find water, hunt game, cut wood, raise a family, make fire, heal wounds, read the weather, navigate on your annual migrations.

In this contest with nature, you have only one asset.  It is as hard as diamond, as sharp as a razor.  It can be shaped by those who have learned how into axes that build homes, or into tiny slivers that tip an arrow. It can butcher the game you kill, scrape the hides that clothe you and shelter you. It lights the fire that warms you and cooks your food.  It is black and glossy, it shatters like glass, and it is strewn everywhere over the beaches and chalk hills of Southern England.

You are a Stone Age man or woman – and you come back to these hills year after year, as your fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers,  came before you – because of the flint that is there.

Welcome to the Museum of The Stone Age, a website that is devoted to discovering how our ancestors endured against all odds because of their highly developed survival skills – and because they learned how to use one of the most remarkable natural substances – flint, also known as chert.

By exploring the pages of this Museum, you will learn what flint is, how humans learned to use flint to make tools and weapons and how the development of lithic technology over a million years was instrumental in enabling humans to adapt, survive and colonise the entire planet.  There's a page on Microliths and why they were important to our Mesolithic ancestors and a page on how to identify flint implements you find.

For teachers of history and archaeology there's a page of useful background material for projects. And there's a What on earth is this? page to help identify mystery objects.

Above all, there are also the hundreds of detailed photographs in the Palaeolithic Gallery, the Mesolithic Gallery and the Neolithic Gallery showing the kind of flint implements from the Museum’s collection, that are commonly found the world over.

I hope you enjoy your visit and that you will come again.

         Richard Milton
                                                 Curator
                      Museum of The Stone Age  

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