carved stone balls

Whatever they were used for, carved stone balls represent some of the most fascinating objects you can see in a museum. They are predominantly a Scottish phenomenon, with a mere handful of specimens from northern Britain (Cumbria and Northumbria). There are distinct epi-centres in Orkney, Aberdeenshire and Scotland north of the Firth of Forth. The best place to see them is the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh which has a brilliant collection on display at Chambers Street.

However it  is not the distribution of these enigmatic objects which I spend a lot of my time thinking about, but the means of their manufacture and procurement (selection) of the raw materials from which they were made. Very clearly the raw materials were selected from a wide range of rock types which most closely approximates to that we might encounter on a pebble beach. That hypothesis ties-in very neatly with what we know about the production of the mace-heads with which they are contemporary.

The problem with any water-worn cobble is that they have been battered by the elements and may have internal flaws which are not visible to the naked eye but which never-the-less would signal catastrophic failure at some point if one attempted to convert them to a sphere. Using quarried material obviates this problem, but introduces another stage (quarrying) into their technical scheme. 

With a good rock specimen free from flaws and inclusions, the work to produce the sphere upon which the finished object is relatively straight-forward in terms of technique (pecking), but rather more complex in terms of finishing. I devised a method of making carved stone balls when I first began making them for my undergraduate dissertation, and that method is so successful I have not discovered a more economical alternative. But making a stone sphere without metal tools is not a simple process, requires a degree of skill and a modicum of intelligence. The decorations on the surface of the original specimens are an altogether different kettle-of-fish. Those sometimes extremely complicated designs far exceed the level of craft skill we generally observe across the range of Neolithic stone tools and can properly be described as elaborate.

The elaborate ground stone implements of Neolithic Britain and Ireland are amazing objects. It occurs to me today, as I sit with one such specimen on my desk, that only the most skillful artisans were capable of making the most elaborate specimens, and the important observation we might derive is that clearly - whatever the bulk of them were for, certain specimens were probably commissioned as particularly elaborate specimens for a reason, as opposed to being made on a whim.