Afterword

Lithomania combines two of my favourite childhood activities, drawing and looking for flint artefacts. I always yearned to find a hand axe, to me an almost mythological object, man's first real tool and one which even after hundreds of thousands of years could still be casually picked up. No such luck for me though. Instead, I collected different, less ancient, artefacts. The call of the hand axe was always there, however, sometimes strong, sometimes weak.

In 1998 I needed to reassess what the concept of drawing meant to me and I made a trip to the south of Libya to visit the prehistoric rock engravings. To my amazement I found artefacts from all periods lying about everywhere in the Sahara. Hand axe fever struck again and remained strong long after I had returned home. As I found this slightly disturbing, I decided to investigate which need engendered that obsession and if there were parallels with my work as an artist. If possible, I wanted to find a way to combine the two.

There had already been periods when my work came close to archaeology. In the nineties I dug deep holes, first in my house and later in an art gallery and in a museum. These holes, literally and figuratively, helped to determine my position in time and space.

To bring to an end the quest for the elusive hand axe I decided to have one made. This ultimately turned into an entire exhibition. The ideas for this project already spinning around in my head, I was visiting friends in France when I happened to find a perfect hand axe at last. However, to me this felt no more than a casual event as, in the meantime, I had – just like King Arthur's knights of old – experienced that the quest is more important than the ultimate goal. Both the making of this book and the Lithomania exhibition form part of that quest.

In different ways people have contributed to the realisation of my project. The many encounters have brought a richness equal to that of my many years of roaming the fields, lost in visions of prehistoric man and youthful philosophical musings.

I would sincerely like to thank everybody who was involved in this project. Although I value each contribution equally, there are some people who were so vital to Lithomania that they deserve a special mention:

Frans Budé: poet and writer, dedicated to the project from the very first time we met. I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude (impossible to measure in bottles of wine) not only for his poems but also for his advice and his ceaseless efforts in producing the book.

Guido Creemers: curator of the Gallo-Roman museum in Tongeren, Belgium. His openness to ideas and his constant encouragement have helped to make the project what it is today.

Ton van Grunsven: self-taught in the techniques of prehistoric stone tool making, selflessly and enthusiastically threw himself into the experiment of cutting hand axes out of big pieces of crystal.