Your Mum's Flint Thingy

These things are very difficult to explain, even though a glance shows what the hopefully proffered bit of stone is. Sometimes even I sympathise with the FLOs in their work, having to explain these things in layman's terms. Here's what I told the lady back in England who knows just that my niece has an archaeologist in the family and she keeps finding these broken stones in Suffolk fields:

Hi [Favourite Niece's boyfriend's Mum],The photos I was sent were very good and showed its features perfectly. The last flint you showed me was a bit of a puzzler, but we decided it was not an artefact. This one is more straightforward. In my opinion, it’s a broken stone, not an artefact.  This item has at least two main phases of alteration, neither of them intentionally man-made.
 1) The first was that a flint nodule with a ‘cortex’ (the thicker yellowish porous crust on the edges) was fractured to make a thinner tabular stone. There are two parallel fractures which produces this thin shape. Neither of these have been produced by flaking (percussion, deliberate or otherwise). The sixth photo (btm rt) shows what seems to be a typical thermal fracture, probably frost fracture. These tend to be concave and a small disc flakes off, these are called ‘pot-lid’ fractures. I think that’s what caused the stone to be the shape it is. (This might have happened in a glacial period [ice-age] after (say) 1 million years ago).
 2) On that fractured surface a smooth white patina has developed. This is a complex process and the rate it develops depends on a lot of factors, but is measured in thousands and tens of thousands of years rather than decades or centuries (a nice website here https://arnesaknussemm.wixsite.com/arnesaknussemm/single-post/2015/02/01/Flint ).
 3) After that, the thin stone has been broken across, and the fresh break (blackish in photos 1 and 3) is not a flake deliberately removed. It looks more like the stone has snapped (as you would a bar of chocolate). I think this is accidental damage, it could have happened when a flint was in the roots of a tree that fell over in the past, was on a road and a heavy cart drove over it  – could be any reason. But it is not something that can be used as an artefact. if somebody had wanted to use it to make a knife or scraper with, a few blows with another stone elsewhere would have done the trick. I think it is just an accidentally ‘sharp stone’ and not an archaeological artefact. Sorry.
 But it has its own story to tell. The flint itself was after all originally formed in sediments laid down under the warm Cretaceous sea 145-68 million years ago... when dinosaurs were still alive.
 You can see a lot (34000) of flint artefacts and flakes described by archaeologists on this website: https://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/q/Flint  Hope this helpsPaul

Perhaps mentioning dinosaurs might have been a mistake. Note that I did not suggest the damage was caused by ploughing or harrowing - because I do not accept that they are as damaging as the artefact hunters and their pals make out.

But is is with some misgivings I referred her to the PAS database. How actually can you tell her how to use this, and its format as a learning resource? Its just a jumble of loose bits of information and pictures, no structure that a layman would be able to do much with (easily, if they sat there four days solid, perhaps they'd get something out of it). WHY after twenty expensive years is there no 'guide' like there is to Roman coins etc? I do not believe for a second that this is because in those twenty years only about a dozen people countrywide has come forward with similar broken stones for identification. I bet in SE England, at least, there's a few every time a Finds Day is organised. So why is there no guide? Failing their unwillingness to sit down and produce a useful online text, WHY on the PAS webpage is there not a short bibliography to popular artefact identification guides, like the ones actually written for artefact hunters and published by printers like Greenlight? Why? Laziness, lack of awareness, carelessness, or what?