I went to Limerick, Ireland on business. To save money my company sent me Friday night so I would have the benefit of a Saturday stay-over and this placed me at "Jurys Inn" overlooking the Shannon River, for a long weekend waiting for the meeting Tuesday morning. It rained all the time, I didn't feel too well, I wanted to make a good start on an implementation of my pattern recognition algorithm, so I sat in my room drinking tea, working at the laptop, watching a bit of TV and occasionally getting up, stretching and looking out the window where there was a great view of the Shannon River. Off to my right was what looked like locks and an upper bridge; directly below was a lower more modern bridge; off to my left on the far side of the river I could make out a raised walkway along the river.

So after more than my fill of sitting alone in the room I decided to take a walk over to the walkway along the river. To my far left I could make out a place, about 150 yards downstream from the lower bridge, where a smaller brook entered the main stream. I could see a pile of small rocks and gravel over there and thought: "that's where I would look for stone tools if I can get over there". I got soaked in the process. Walked over the bridge, slipped down the embankment to the walkway, went along and then made my way carefully off the walkway down onto the muddy river bank that was exposed because the tide was out. Limerick is, I think, the top of the estuarial part of the Shannon River. Well there were stone tools all over the place. They were mixed in with old china, bedpans, styrofoam, beer bottles. Walking along there would be a treat for anyone interested in collecting historic objects. Also there was gray slimey mud on everything and I was careful to not slip again and add a layer of mud on top of my already wet clothes. So I walked around picking through the examples of stone tools. They didn't look like much: covered with mud and seaweed/algae, and I figured the bedrock around here was some kind of limestone or mudstone; so nothing too pretty for my collection. I picked up one example to bring home just for the story, but I left a couple of other well formed objects cuz I didn't want to burden myself with 10 lbs of rock in my suitcase for the return trip.

When I got home I ruined a toothbrush cleaning the sucker off and discovered that underneath the slime and staining was a lovely greenish beige dolomite, and that I had in hand a very nice paleolithic piece. Boy was I kicking myself for not collecting another that was oval. Nice Handaxes! This item is about 8 inches long and 2 inches thick at the middle. The working edge is at the lowest point in picture (a) and the highest point in picture (b). With reference to (a), the right hand fits naturally with thumb to the left and curled around the edge, the upper left corner of the tool fits between index and middle fingers. The surface is slightly smoothed, from handling, along that part of the tool.
a  b
Since getting home I looked up the geology of that area - I was right that the material was a flinty limestone (and I learned the word "dolomite" on the web). But I couldn't find any pictures and the conventional story seems to be that the earliest stone tool technology in Ireland was a micro-lith technology. The description hardly matched these items. Prior to reading about it, when I was thinking about the topography of the site where I picked up this handaxe, I figured it was late ice-age. Clearly this estuary was faster flowing back then. Clearly the boglands behind, from which issued the little side brook, was a lake back then, and clearly the reason for this site made more sense in terms of a glacial time period than the 7K years ago given for the micro-lith technology. This tool does not look like something for fishing. So I seriously wonder if these tools aren't from before 7K years ago. My first reaction was: look at the flute, shown better below (c). If you are going to look for Clovis pre-cursors, this would be a reasonable candidate. Nice huh? Now I really have to get back to Limerick and get that other piece. I didn't bring it home because it was too large to carry easily. Also I sure would like to know what the experts on Limerick archeology have to say about such tools. Do they know there are nice sites along the river? Would this be important to them?

c