Problems of flint utilizaton within Eastern Ireland

There is an assumption that in the North East of Ireland there is an abundant supply of easily accessible flint which would have minimized problems of extraction and stone tool production for prehistoric man. Fig. la shows that cretaceous chalk with flint only outcrops in certain very specific areas and in fact it is usually covered by several hundred feet of basalt. Therefore, in an unaltered landscape and treating flint as the only source for the manufacture of stone tools, one would expect that the size of flint industries would diminsh in some form of linear relationship with distance from source and that the curation of the material (BINFORD 1977 & AMMERMAN et. al. 1978) or recycling aspect of the industry would increase. However two environmental factors upset such a simple model.