Mar 10th, 2017: Grime’s Graves

[xoxoxoBruce]

Grime’s Graves is a pock marked section in Thetford Forest in Norfolk, England. I don’t know who the hell Grime is, but he’s
probably hiding from a lynch mob because there’s no graves. What is there is the remnants of over 400 holes in the earth where
flint was mined, starting at least 4500 years ago, around the same time the Druids were erecting monuments at Stonehenge and
at Avebury.

Of course we all know the purpose of flint is cutting, slashing, stabbing, skinning, maiming, and butchering, as well as lighting up
your musket or Zippo.



The flint runs in seams through the chalk strata, so every year or two they’d dig a pit more than 14 meters(46 ft) deep and
12 meters(39.4ft) across at the surface, using antlers for picks and wooden shovels. They’d dump the diggings in last years pit.
At the bottom lateral tunnels followed the flint seams because after digging that hole they wanted to grab as much flint as they
could. In the tunnels light came from lamps made by scooping out hollows in the chalk walls and filling them with animal fat or
oil and floating wicks, Must have been pungent.

It is estimated that a medium-depth shaft could have yielded as much as 60 tons of flint nodules that could have produced
as many as 10,000 polished stone axes. Extrapolation across the site suggests that Grime's Graves may have produced
around 16-18,000 tons of flint across the 433 shafts recorded to date. Mining continued at Grime’s Graves until about
1400 BC. In this later period, the pits became shallower and lacked underground galleries.

Investigating the mines they discovered the pits were also used to dispose of archaeologist’s-boner inducing neolithic rubbish,
and an occasional body.

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