Ian Russell and Andrew Cochrane

28 - 29 February 2008 Digital Photomosaic (91 x 1.13cm) 

This photomosaic depicts a Mesolithic Axehead made from mudstone that was discovered in archaeological excavations at Lough Boora, Co. Offaly. It is dated to c. 6800 – 7000 cal BC, making it one of the earliest known  examples of human technology in Ireland. The climate was warmer and drier than today, and Mesolithic people subsisted via hunting and gathering a varied diet of wild meat, fish, plants and fruits, with their equipment mostly being made from stone, bone, wood, animal and plant materials. Diversity and mobility were the keys to Mesolithic survival. Stone tools in the Mesolithic were made through the fragmentation of larger stones. These fractured parts were then often combined with other objects, e.g. a stone axehead with a wooden shaft. 

The axehead image above is composed of 4730 'cell-images' resulting from searches for the words 'Mesolithic', 'hunter gatherer', 'technology', 'axehead' and 'mudstone', through the Google 'Image Search Engine'. In doing so, the image renders explicit some of the tensions in contemporary Mesolithic archaeology, in understanding both the macro and micro scales of life. From a distance, the photomosaic highlights how a Mesolithic axehead may look from a broad perspective. Yet as one draws closer, the cell-images illuminate the rich mosaic and mixture of people and things in the world. As a form of 'macrolithic' technology, this Mesolithic axehead would have expressed and created multiple relationships, identities and ways of being. Technology is not passive and inert, and interactions with technology in the Mesolithic may have been just as fluid and ubiquitous as today. 

This photomosaic explores the diverse dimensions of relations with people and things - technology here is not distinct from other spheres of life. As Mesolithic axeheads were made by abstracting and fracturing the things of the world, here we attempt to express, combine and mediate some of the contemporary senses of these things via digital composition.