Grime's Graves: A Flint Mine From The New Stone Age
This weird -ooking landscape that is filled with craters just like the surface of the moon in the middle of Thetford Forest in Norfolk, England looks highly similar to mortar craters in Normandy and Somme from the First World War. However these craters in Norfolk have a different background story, and even though their name suggests otherwise, they're not actually graves. In reality, Grime's Graves is a huge flint mining complex from the Neolithic age that's more than 4,500 years old. In the New Stone Age, flint- a solid, mineralized version of quartz- was a precious natural resource and extremely prized due to its tendency to break into small flakes with a razor-sharp edge that was very convenient to make tools and weapons. So, flint kept on being used for many centuries even after men started to make tools out of metals.
In the area Grime's Graves located, there are more than four hundred vertical shafts dug into the natural chalk that reached seams of the flint expand underground. The biggest shafts are over 14 meters deep and 12 meters across at the surface.
The sizes are awe-inspiring considering that the miners from the New Stone Age were using antlers for picks and wooden shovels. From the bottom of the pits, sidewise galleries scattered outward along the flint seam to extract as much flint as possible. The galleries for the most part would connect with those from adjoining shafts to create a network of tunnels. New shafts were sunk each year or two, and the spoils extracted were filled into the shafts that were dug before. The wide pits were illuminated by natural daylight however in the horizontal passageways light came from tiny lamps with floating wicks that were created by scooping out hollows in the chalk walls and filling them with animal fat or oil. It's still possible to see soot marks on the roots of the galleries.
It's thought that a medium-depth shaft could have yielded up to 60 tons of flint nodules that could have produced as many as 10,000 polished stone axes. Extrapolation across the site states that Grime's Graves possibly has produced approximately 16-18,000 tons of flint across the 433 shafts recorded to date.
A picture showing Neolithic flint miners while they were working, extracting flint from the galleries at the base of the mine shaft using picks they made from red deer antlers. They were then carrying the flint to the surface.
Another picture showing a Middle Bronze Age settlement at Grime's Graves, with small fields and herds providing a mixed farming economy. It's believed that the flint mining at Grime's Graves started at probably the same time with the Druids were erecting monuments at Stonehenge and at Avebury.
There were large trade networks back then, and the Neolithic miners must have traded the flint they extracted with other communities. People kept on mining at Grime's Graves until approximately 1400 B.C. After that, the pits became shallower and they didn't have underground galleries. When bronze tools started to be used more commonly and they started to be perceived as items of status, they started to eclipse traditional flint tools. Since fewer and fewer people wanted to use flint, the mines got closed after a while.
After that, subsequent societies started to use the shafts as garbage dumps. Archeologists managed to find very precious items of prehistory in these waste dumps such as metalwork, pottery, textile, leather and woodwork, and the bones of various animals. People also used some of the shafts as burial chambers during the Iron Age. Nowadays, Grime's Graves is one of the last surviving Neolithic flint mines in the world. It's now protected by the English Heritage Trust and it's open to visitors. It's also possible to descend into one of the pits using a 9-meter ladder and explore the radiating galleries.
