A prehistoric stone tool does not begin with the tool. It begins with somebody knowing where to find the right stone. FlintSource.NET has spent a quarter-century documenting those source locations with the sort of detail normally produced by somebody who has stood there, picked up the material and taken notes.
The site marked its 25th anniversary in 2024 and dates its beginning to December 30, 1999. Its subject is archaeological raw material: flint, chert, hornstone, quartzite, radiolarite, obsidian and related stone sources.
That sounds narrow until you open an entry.
A typical page may identify the geological formation, give latitude and longitude, describe cortex and color, show field photographs, document sample numbers and photograph actual flakes or nodules. Entries for Nordic flint around Denmark, for example, include GPS coordinates, source photographs and individual samples measured in millimeters. The Calais page contains the kind of field note only an old specialist site would preserve: do not blindly follow one coordinate to the second in fog, darkness or poor visibility because the sample point was on the edge of a cliff and part of it may have fallen into the sea since 2002.
That is much more useful than a generic encyclopedia paragraph about flint.
The website still advertises itself as best viewed in Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6+, which is a fairly effective carbon date for its design. Yet the actual database remains intelligible because the structure is simple: source name, geology, locality, coordinates, photographs, sampling information and references.
For archaeology, material provenance matters because raw stone can connect an artifact to trade, movement or a geological source. FlintSource does not magically answer those questions, but it preserves field observations that can help researchers compare materials and locations.
For webmasters, it is another example of durable specialist publishing. The visual design is old. The data model is obvious. The content survives because pages were built around stable facts instead of a stream of posts that immediately disappeared off the front page.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes plenty of this kind of specialist knowledge: things modern search can technically find but rarely explains this well.
FlintSource is still online, still searchable, and still capable of making a rock on the ground feel like a research problem.