Quartz is tangible link to our ancestors

DIGGING INTO THE PAST with Dr Murray Cook

Many of you will know that the various earliest phases of Scottish pre-history are named by the technology they used - the Stone Age when stones were used, Bronze Age with the introduction of bronze and Iron Age ... well you get the idea.

What you might not know is that during the Bronze Age they were still using stone for quick and dirty cutting tools.

Bronze was quite rare and only for the elite and tended to be used in big feasting cauldrons and for weapons, which are often works of art.

Now you might expect they were using flint, but that’s quite rare round Stirling and we don’t really get much of it, even during the Stone Age.

What they used was quartz, all of which is very hard to work and looks a bit rubbish.

The picture this week shows two pieces of quartz which date to between 2000 and 1000 BC, the one on the left is a core, ie something that tools (called blades) were struck from and the one on the right is a blade, used to scrape and cut.

I’m not sure if these can be described as beautiful or works of art but they are certainly a very tangible link to our ancestors.

These were found throughout a ring cairn, a monumental burial monument at Baston Burn between Cambusbarron and Gargunnock.

It’s the first identified example in the Forth Valley and it has an incredible vista to the north. This cairn was built on top of both Bronze Age and Stone Age activity and may have had a later house on top and it certainly had a medieval farm on top of that - a sequence running for over 6000 years.