That doesn’t look like any of the flint on my ranch. Should be more glass-like. I’ve never seen a flint artifact with a hole in it. I think that would be very hard to do without breaking the piece. My dad found thousands of arrowheads in his lifetime. Even 2 eagle arrowheads. But he has nothing that resembles that type of stone.
Flint is silica, glassy in nature, exhibiting conchoidal fracture like glass. The wear surfaces of the stone in your photos look grainy, and if so, probably not flint. Maybe it is something similar to flint, namely a weathered stone broken off from the aa (pronounced ah^ah) form of basaltic lava, which is suddenly cooled and might be similar in nature to flint.
Think of what arrowheads look like. They are most always made of flint and have very sharp edges, like broken glass does. they are shaped by carefully breaking off tiny shards of glassy flakes by pressing at a point, with a circular fracture front spreading sort of circularly away from the pressure point where initial deliberately induced breaking occurred to relieve the stress.
Your stone is interesting in that it has a cup with a hole formed at the bottom of it. That was quite likely done by design; to what usage I can't guess at this moment.
That doesn’t look like flint. Flint is smooth, chips sharply and is greasy feeling.
Unless it was carved out with flint, I have no idea why it would have flint in the name.
I’ve seen this in a nature documentary. The indentations are created by some small animal (can’t remember which) which smashes nuts or shells open on the stones, which, over long periods of time, wore away the stone. They had tons of video of this being done. Small critters of some sort. Super cool.
Wait. I take that back. It could be a firestarter, after looking more closely, it appears there is some “sharp” wear. The asymmetrical thing appears to be more in the upper area, perhaps from the shape of the overall stone. It may have been a somewhat wobbly firestarter, but ... could be what it is.
Could you take to the archaeology department at your local college and ask them?
This can indeed occur naturally, as people who wade creeks do find similar stones with the culprit still inside the depression doing its work. It looks like a creek stone that had a pebble/cobble in a depression, and over time, with water running steadily over it making the pebble/cobble wobble around in the depression, gradually abrading the surface of the depression as well as the surface of the pebble/cobble. As a result, the depression was at first enlarged as the pebble/cobble became smaller. At some point the little cobble got small and light enough that the hole it was grinding in the depression also became smaller in diameter as it got deeper. The little stone eventually bore all the way through. That isn’t to say a person who needed a mortar or more likely a butting stone wouldn’t find such a stone useful too, and picked it up to take it to their shelter to use in food prep. It just looks like a naturally holed rock more than it does the mortars I have seen. Mortars usually have regular shaped depressions, but this has a very irregular shaped depression. Nutting stones can be more irregular since the depression is just used to hold the nut, not to grind them.
more like this:
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Looks like a Ryobi without its battery pack.
I would assume it’s a fire starter.
It looks a little big for it, but I remember ages ago seeing something similar, which the museum claimed were “Paint Pots.” The Indians would put water in it, and rub it with a long thinner stone all around like using a mortal and pestle without anything to grind. The stones they chose would give off a fine powder which would mix with the water and produce paint they could use on their faces, or to mark stuff. The stones were weird, in that they could be brown, and produce vivid red paint, or be black and produce a white paint. The more they rubbed, the thicker the paint got.
It might explain the uneven wear pattern, as they would look for a good spot to rub, and wear it in over time. What is the stone like if you put a little water on it and rub it with another stone? Is it wear resistant, or does it wear finely and produce a paste?
Fire starter, by rubbing a stick with kindling in the bowl. Or by using a small bow to turn the stick.
It looks like a sink with a drain.
You seem confident it’s made of flint. To me, the pictures look more like limestone. What is it that makes you believe it’s flint?
Hunter Biden’s old crack pipe!