SESSION 9 - Experimental flint knapping
Water and flint - "water treatment" and "fresh flint", two contradictory concepts?

The effectiveness of this procedure is very hard to prove and hasn’t been the subject of any quantitative research. On the same line of argumentation flint freshly extracted from its parent material is reputedly much easier to work, especially because of its natural water content. This characteristic is often being given as the reason for (prehistoric) flint mining, where large amounts of labour were invested to acquire ‘fresh’ material.