LITHIC IMPLEMENT

The object was collected from the 'Cromer Forest Bed' by the late Dr DN Riley in 1933 and is one of a group of about 30 flints from Cromer in the collection of the North Lincolnshire Museum. It is marked 'Cromer Forest Bed'. Derreck Riley is best remembered for his post-War work as an archaeological aerial photographer but was, before the War, an active field, and highly astute, fieldwalker.

Derrick Riley's fieldwork notebook records, in 1934:

I do not appear to have made any mention of my finds in Norfolk last July. I obtained a large series of implements and flakes from the pre-Chelles workshop site on Cromer beach. I found 70 artefacts in a limited time when the tide was coming up and selected 30 from these. The best was a good hand axe. I have given them all to the Scunthorpe Museum. The total weight was awful, I had to carry two large suitcases containing stones and clothes respectively with me on the journey to Scunthorpe: the combined weight was 60 or 70 pounds!

So, dispite their conchoildal fracture, these are not worked flints. There are other factors which support this interpretation: the number of pieces observed by Derrick Riley was suspicious and it notable that the scars left by recent damage (probably by wave action) were also strongly conchoidal suggesting that here we have a flint which tend to fracture in this way. These records of natural flints have been allowed to remain as a warning to others who might be tempted to record still less likely 'implements'.