Böcker av Torben Bjarke Ballin

This volume offers a system for the hierarchical classification of British lithic artefacts from the Late Glacial and Holocene periods, and it is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for, for example, archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts.

Today the number of pitchstone-bearing sites in northern Britain has multiplied several times and approximately 20,300 worked pieces from c. 350 sites have been found; pitchstone artefacts have been reported from practically all parts of Scotland (apart from Shetland), as well as from northern England, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man. Most of the new locations represent excavated material with well-defined find contexts.

This book presents an investigation of two of the National Museum of Scotland's older lithic collections, the assemblages from Airhouse and Overhowden in the Scottish Borders. The Airhouse assemblage numbers 558 lithic artefacts and the Overhowden assemblage 109 lithic artefacts. They were both collected in the first part of the 20th Century from locations situated a few hundred metres from the Overhowden Henge (with which they may in some way be associated), and they both embrace a broad spectrum of Late Neolithic tools, with relatively sophisticated, or 'fancy', pieces being notably more prominent than in other collections from this period. The main background to the project is the fact that, in Scotland, several interesting Late Neolithic assemblages have been recovered or written up lately and south of the Anglo-Scottish border many Late Neolithic sites and landscapes have been investigated. As a whole, this new corpus of comparative material offers a unique opportunity to gain insight into the seemingly unusual material from Airhouse/Overhowden by placing it in a wider Late Neolithic context.