The Neolithic flint mines of Spiennes are among the largest and earliest

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

flint mines which survive in north-western Europe, located close to the Walloon village of

Spiennes Spiennes ( wa, Spiene) is a town of Wallonia and a district of the municipality of Mons, located in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. It was a municipality until the fusion of the Belgian municipalities in 1977. Heritage The locality is well ...

, southeast of

Mons Mons (; German and nl, Bergen, ; Walloon and pcd, Mont) is a city and municipality of Wallonia, and the capital of the province of Hainaut, Belgium. Mons was made into a fortified city by Count Baldwin IV of Hainaut in the 12th century. T ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

. The mines were active during the mid and late Neolithic between 4,300 and 2,200 BC. Declared to be "remarkable for the diversity of technological solutions used for extraction" the site and its surroundings were inducted into the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 2000.

Description

Discovered in 1843, the first excavations were undertaken by the mining engineer

Alphonse Briart Alphonse Briart (1825–1898) was supervisor of the coal mines at Bascoup and Mariemont near Morlanwelz in the Hainaut province of Belgium, and a geologist who studied that region. During the period 1863–1896 he and Francois Cornet published a ...

and two others during railway construction in 1867, with results presented to the International Prehistoric Congress held in Brussels in 1872. Intermittent excavations have been carried out up to the present day. The Mines of Spiennes cover some of

downland Downland, chalkland, chalk downs or just downs are areas of open chalk hills, such as the North Downs. This term is used to describe the characteristic landscape in southern England where chalk is exposed at the surface. The name "downs" is deriv ...

four miles south-east of the city of Mons. The site is dotted with millions of scraps of worked flint and numerous mining pits, that

settlers have gradually turned into vertical mine shafts to depths of over . Underneath is an elaborate man-made network of caverns accessible via the many shafts. A seminal stage of human inventiveness, technological and cultural application and progress, the transition between

opencast Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock (geology), rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a Borrow pit, b ...

and

underground mining Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic via ...

for

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and start fir ...

nodules is impressively displayed and documented. Research has illustrated

techniques for the cutting of the flint and the extraction of large slabs of flint, that weighed up to hundreds of kilos. The nodules were extracted using flint picks. The stones were then

knapped Knapping is the shaping of flint, chert, obsidian, or other conchoidal fracturing stone through the process of lithic reduction to manufacture stone tools, strikers for flintlock firearms, or to produce flat-faced stones for building or facing w ...

into rough-out shapes of axes, and finally polished to achieve the final state. The rough-outs were exchanged over a wide area, about , and were often polished at their destination. Polishing strengthens the final product, making the axe- or adze-head last longer. The smooth surface also aids the cutting action by lowering friction with the wood. The axes were used initially for forest clearance during the

period, and for shaping wood for structural applications, such as timber for huts and canoes.

Conservation and access

An interpretative centre called ''SILEX'S'' opened in spring 2015. There is a museum on the surface and it is normally possible to descend into a mine.

Similar sites

The site has been compared with

Grimes Graves Grime's Graves is a large Neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk, England. It lies north east from Brandon, Suffolk in the East of England. It was worked between 2600 and 2300 BC, although production may have continued well into ...

and

Cissbury Cissbury Ring is an biological Site of Special Scientific Interest north of Worthing in West Sussex. It is owned by the National Trust and is designated a Scheduled monument for its Neolithic flint mine and Iron Age hillfort. Cissbury R ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, and

Krzemionki Krzemionki, also Krzemionki Opatowskie (, "Opatów silica-mine"), is a Neolithic and early Bronze Age complex of flint mines for the extraction of Upper Jurassic ( Oxfordian) banded flints located about eight kilometers north-east of the Polish c ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

, which are also sources of flint stone. However, different hard rocks were used for the polished

stone axe A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or che ...

s. There are several locations in Britain where fine-grained

igneous Igneous rock (derived from the Latin word ''ignis'' meaning fire), or magmatic rock, is one of the three main rock types, the others being sedimentary and metamorphic. Igneous rock is formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or ...

metamorphic rock Metamorphic rocks arise from the transformation of existing rock to new types of rock in a process called metamorphism. The original rock (protolith) is subjected to temperatures greater than and, often, elevated pressure of or more, causin ...

was collected from

scree Scree is a collection of broken rock fragments at the base of a cliff or other steep rocky mass that has accumulated through periodic rockfall. Landforms associated with these materials are often called talus deposits. Talus deposits typically ha ...

s or opencast mines, then roughed out locally before trading on to other parts of the country. Examples include the

Langdale axe industry The Langdale axe industry (or factory) is the name given by archaeologists to a Neolithic centre of specialised stone tool production in the Great Langdale area of the English Lake District. (For accompanying material seSupplement 1of same ...

Penmaenmawr Penmaenmawr (, ) is a town and community in Conwy County Borough, Wales, which was formerly in the parish of Dwygyfylchi and the traditional county of Caernarfonshire. It is on the North Wales coast between Conwy and Llanfairfechan and was an i ...

and

Tievebulliagh Tievebulliagh () is a mountain in the Glens of Antrim, Northern Ireland. It forms part of the watershed between Glenaan to the north and Glenballyemon to the south. It is situated about 4.4 km from Cushendall. Geology Tievebulliagh is ...

References

;Bibliography * C. Guillaume, Ph. Lipinski & A. Masson: ''Les mines de silex néolithiques de la Meuse dans le contexte européen.'' Musées de la Meuse, Sampigny 1987.
F. Gosselin: ''Un site d'exploitation du silex à Spiennes (Hainaut), au lieu-dit "Petit-Spiennes".'' Vie archéologique 22, 1986, 33-160
* F. Hubert: ''Une minière néolithique à silex au Camp-à-Cayaux de Spiennes.'' Archaeologia Belgica, 210, 1978. * F. Hubert: ''L'exploitation préhistorique du silex à Spiennes.'' Carnets du Patrimoine n°22. Ministère de la Région wallonne, Direction générale de l'Aménagement du Territoire, du Logement et du Patrimoine, Namur 1997. * R. Shepherd: ''Prehistoric Mining and Allied Industries.'' (Academic Press, London 1980). * Société de recherches préhistoriques en Hainaut: ''Minières néolithiques à Spiennes (Petit-Spiennes).'' 1997
ICOMOS evaluation
*
Hélène Collet, Philippe Lavachery, Michel Woodbury, Raw material exploitation strategies on the flint mining site of Spiennes (Hainaut, Belgium), (2016) in Journal of Lithic Studies (2016) vol. 3, nr. 2H. Collet, A. Hauzeur & J. Lech, The prehistoric flint mining complex at Spiennes on the occasion of its discovery 140 years ago, (2008) in Flint mining in Prehistoric Europe: Interpreting the archaeological records, European Association of Archaeologists, 12th Annual Meeting, Cracow, Poland, 19–24 September 2006 (BAR International Series 1891): 41-77.Hélène Collet, Mineurs illustres du Hainaut, (2012), in Les Cahiers nouveaux, no 83, septembre 2012, p. 21-25
Toussaint M., Collet H., Jadin I., Lavachery P., Pirson S., Woodbury M., Durieux J., Eloy J. & Lambermont S., 2019. Recent discoveries of human skeletons in the flint mine shafts of Spiennes: casualties or burials? In: Collet H. & Hauz eur A. (eds), 2019. Mining and Quarrying. Geological Characterisation, Knapping Processes and Distribution Networks during Pre- and Protohistoric Times. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference of the UISPP Commission on Flint Mining in Pre- and Protohistoric Times, Mons and Spiennes, 28 September – 1 October 2016. Anthropologica et Praehistorica, 128. Bruxelles, SRBAP, pp. 245-262.

External links

Image Gallery

Visit of the Neolithic Flint mines, Interpretive Centre "SILEX'S"

Spiennes Neolithic flint mines, archaeological team website

Unesco list
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