Heather Armstead

Hello folks! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Sadly my apprenticeship is on hold for the foreseeable future as I was knocked off my motorbike by a lorry driver and spent most of the summer in hospital. Most of the damage is healing nicely but unfortunately I have lost the use of my (dominant) left … Read more

Scrapers often get a bum rap from archaeologists for being intensely boring – probably a result of the fact that you can’t dig a prehistoric site in most of Europe without practically falling over the things. I have a huge fondness for the little blighters though, because as a novice knapper, scrapers are where it’s … Read more

‘In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools’ – Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution …and who doesn’t enjoy a bit of ego-stroking from influential French philosophers? I was pondering where to start this series (beyond the obvious introduction post a … Read more

 So, in this first post, a quick introduction. My name is Heather Armstead and I am an archaeology student in my second year at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. I met Karl in the first week of my degree, when he came to demonstrate flintknapping for us in a soggy field in West Sussex. The … Read more