Lithotheca. II.

The 1980s saw the beginnings of systematic collection in Europe of the raw materials necessary for knapped stone tools and implements, at the Hungarian National Museum first of all. This was in part due to the conference ‘Prehistoric Quarrying and the Identification of Stone Implement Materials in the Carpathian Basin’ organised by Katalin Biró, which was likewise pioneering in character. One aim was to investigate the one-time sources of these materials, and the districts which supplied them, on the basis of the stone identifiable in archaeological finds from prehistory and the Old Stone Age; another was to estimate the impact more widely of the activity of individual prehistoric communities.

The core collection came together from four parts. For the above-mentioned conference, intensive collection and field surveying were launched in the interests of a systematic cataloguing of the most important stone implement materials in Hungary, to which were added samples brought by participants from abroad. Additionally, significant numbers of artefacts had accumulated over the years in various public collections in Hungary, first and foremost at the Hungarian State Institute of Geology, as ‘by-products’ of field work, as well as in the hands of private individuals; as donations, such artefacts boosted the Lithotheca Collection significantly. Finally, samples of the materials for investigation, along with control pieces, were collected together and divided into different units. On these pieces, the archaeological finds and the geological samples used for purposes of comparison, special investigations have been performed.