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Flint

A black or gray, massive, hard, somewhat impure variety of chalcedony, breaking with a conchoidal fracture. Also known as firestone or flintstone.

A dense, fine-grained stone; a form of silica; naturally occurs in the form of nodules; usually gray, brown, black, or otherwise dark in color, but nodules and other chunks tend to weather white or light shades from the surface inward.

Flint is relatively hard and rather easy to sculpture into a certain form. It was widely used during the Stone Age, thats why this time is called Stone Age. The Flint was rather common in certain areas, especially where layers of Cretaceous chalk exist in northern Europe and southern Great Britain. The flint is a concretion which was formed by ground water processes in certain layers. The nodules have different sizes, up to half a meter in diameter.

On the other hand, good flint of a high quality was found only at certain places. It was collected at this places, hewn into bars and traded with remote areas.

Broken “flints,” as the nodules are called, are used in cobble size, either whole or split (knapped) in mortared walls, esp. in England.

Flint is a kind of stone which occurs naturally in many places in China, Western Asia, North Africa, and Europe. Flint is easier to knapp (to shape) than a lot of other kinds of stone, and it will hold a sharp edge longer, so most of the tools that were made in the Stone Age were made out of flint. It's not as good as obsidian, but it was easier to get.

There are two ways of knapping flint. The older way was to take a rock and knock off bits until you had a sharp edge, and use that as a tool. That was easy and quick to do, but it took a lot of flint for each tool.

People who had trouble getting enough flint for everyone thought of a better way: take a rock and knock off bigger flakes, and make each one of those flakes have a sharp edge. Then you can get twenty or more tools out of the same rock that made only one tool before.

If you can get flint, you can try knapping it yourself. It's not hard to make the first kind of tool, but it is a lot harder to make the second kind.

Flint was used all the time for building houses or streets. There are medieval flint mines, which are not called so as these quarries were used to quarry any kind of rocks usefull for buildings.

Today flint is not any more valuable, but still it is mined. The mines of today are much different to both the Medieval and the Neolithic ones. It is mined in huge amounts, preferably in rather fine grains which do not need much processing. They are used as a hard component of concrete, and so they must be rather small. And there are many other uses for quartz like producing quartz based computer chips. But the quartz used for this is typically fine quartz sand, not the nodules from the Cretaceous chalk.

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