Preparing Seal Parts to Dry

Then things got weird

When I wrote last Friday that this past weekend would be a big change of theme for Elfshot, I meant I'd be switching to wholesale jewelry production, not that I'd be hanging up 85 feet of inflated seal intestines in my workshop to dry.

I missed some of the fun on Monday morning, so here's Lori's take to fill in the gaps between the DFO necropsy on the hooded seal and the backyard:

The soft parts of the seal in tubs

It was impossible to find an archaeologist with a pickup to help out with transport so my dad came to the rescue. He arrived the minute we finished packing up the seal and all the totes waiting in the loading bay. Dad likes to keep his truck in pristine condition (as you might remember) so I was thrilled he agreed to take on this potentially messy deed. He arrived with a tarp spread out over the box floor so all he had to do was back ‘er up to the loading bay and Eliza and I loaded the totes on board. Dad was also instrumental in getting the skeletal parts to MUN and into Eliza’s lab freezer, and later the sealskin and I back to my house. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he stuck around and allowed me to sit in his truck for a half hour while we waited for Tim to return from the wholesale show... in all my seal necropsy excitement I had gone off and forgotten my keys... No, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. A BIG THANK YOU TO DAD. XO

Cutting off sheets of fat

I did a bit more work on the cleaning the fat off the hide. The fat was still an inch or more thick in many places so it was still too early to start scraping. Officially, the fat layer was measured at 4.5 cm thick, but there were spots that were at least 6 or 7 cm thick. I was cutting off the fat in sheets. The word "gobbet" kept coming to mind as the smaller chunks of fat plopped into the blubber bucket. I'll try to figure out a way to weigh the fat today. I can't lift the container anymore.

Arm through left flipper hole

I'm still a novice when it comes to judging where the hide will be while cutting through the fat, so I found it safest to run my left hand along the outside of the hide while cutting with the knife on the inside. That way I could apply constant pressure to the skin and judge the thickness of the fat. In the photo on the left, my arm is through the hole where the seal's left front flipper was cut out. The hole around the right flipper tore and is the ragged edge on the bottom of the skin. The other small holes and nicks in the hide are accidental cuts from the skinning and blubber removal. Those holes won't matter much in the end, because I plan to cut the hide into a long thong about 3/4 of an inch wide.

The speckled pattern in the hide

I finally got a 1/4 or so of the hide down to the skin and it feels like when the whole hide is down to that level I can start scraping. That will probably be later today. The hide is spotty on the inside, so in the photo you can pretty clearly see that part of the pelt that is clean down to the skin and ready to be scraped.

Cutting the webbing around the intestines

We spent about half the day yesterday cleaning the intestines and bladder. Squeezing out the intestine contents was pretty gross; there were flaky bits coming out of the end attached to the stomach and baby-poo yellow paste coming out the opposite end. The 85 feet of intestine were sampled during the necropsy, so it was cut into three sections. There is a connector webbing that pulls the intestines into a coiled mass and that needed to be cut in dozens of places in order to stretch them out straight.

Tying off the inflated intestine

After I squeezed out each section and ran water through them we inflated them with a mattress pump so that they can dry. We hung the inflated tubes up in my workshop to dry. On the best of days, my job is a little unusual, but stringing those rubbery tubes up in the shed was weird even for me.

I'll be sitting under this all spring

I don't have an immediate plan for the intestines, but once they are dried out they will make a tough, lightweight, waterproof, translucent kind of parchment. They were used in the Arctic for windows in snow houses and waterproof clothing. There are some beautiful, light weight anoraks made from strips of intestine sewn together. Check out this site, Seal Gut Raincoats, for more info.

Hooded Seal Bladder

Finally, we inflated the bladder and hung it up to dry. The bladder was cool - the sphincter muscle is still springy and strong enough that when you pump it up it closes tightly enough that it holds the air in. Its like a balloon that seals itself when you inflate it. These things were used for floats on harpoons and water containers.

Photo Credits:
1-4,6-8: Lori White
5, 9: Tim Rast

Seal Processing

Sealskin in a drying frame

A surprise opportunity came up this week to do some experimental work with a hooded seal carcass. The female seal died shortly after giving birth and sadly her pup had to be euthanized. Because of the unusual circumstances the Department of Fisheries and Oceans needed to do a necropsy on the seal to determine the cause of death. After the necessary samples were taken by the biologists they donated the skeleton to the Archaeology Department at MUN for their comparative collection and down the line we were able to get some of the soft parts for experimental work. Its a sad story, but if there is a silver lining, much of the animal will be used for research and educational opportunities.

Removing the blubber

The necropsy was scheduled for 10 am this morning and unfortunately I couldn't attend because I was already booked to do the Provincial Wholesale craft show. Lori went with the MUN Biologist and Eliza Brandy (an archaeology grad student who will be processing the skeleton) to observe the procedure and collect the parts. It's a big seal. Lori and I spent the last 4 hours in the backyard removing as much of the blubber from the skin as possible. We tied it into a frame and tomorrow I'll get back at it to finish cleaning the fat off. The end goal will be to cut the hide into long thongs so that I have some air dried sealskin to experiment with for lashings and lines.

Stitching the skin into the frame

Skin in the finished frame

There are so many things that I'm curious about along the way. So far I've used metal knives to remove the bulk of the fat, but tomorrow I'll switch to stone tools. I have a lot of palaeoeskimo reproductions on hand, so I'm going to try to finish cleaning the hide using stone endscrapers. I haven't cleaned a hide like this before so there will be a big learning curve. I want to test baleen versus sinew binding on endscrapers, to see which one lasts longer or performs better. My hunch is that the baleen haft will last longer in the fatty mess than the sinew hafted tools, which will loosen as they get wet. Either way, I'm excited to try.

Rinsing off the hide

Photo Credits:
1-3,5 Lori White
4 Tim Rast

New Product! Hafted Beothuk Arrowhead Necklace

Hafted Beothuk points for necklace

This weekend marks a big change of theme for Elfshot. Its the weekend of the Provincial Craft Wholesale Show in St. John's. Craft producers from around the province set up booths at the Holiday Inn and shop owners come and place their spring orders for the upcoming tourist season. The show isn't open to the public and no one actually walks out with product in hand, but if you are a retailer and would like to see what new and innovative products are out there, then this is the place to be.

NEW PRODUCT! Hafted Beothuk Necklaces (Newfoundland Chert, Wood, Artificial Sinew, Epoxy, Red Ochre stain) $39.95 CDN tax inc.

The new product that I'm introducing this season combines two previous best sellers and adds a bit of colour. I'm making hafted Beothuk arrowheads stained with red ochre. I've made hafted necklaces in the past and the Beothuk necklaces made from Newfoundland chert have always been popular, but I haven't hafted these before because I didn't have a good colourfast method of applying the red ochre stain... until now. I know a few people who wear their Elfshot jewelry all the time and I love watching how the pieces age. I think that one of the cool thing about these hafted Beothuk necklaces is that they look old right out of the box and will only acquire more character over the years.

Reproduction Arrow, Recent Indian (Little Passage Beothuk style)

Metal Tipped Arrows made
for "Stealing Mary"

The points that I use on these necklaces are exactly the same as the points that I use on full Beothuk arrow reproductions. Technically the style of arrowhead that I use are Little Passage points. Little Passage is the name given to the Beothuk artifacts that are found in Newfoundland for the 500 years or so before European contact and trade goods start showing up in their archaeological sites. There's no doubt that the Beothuk were the people making the Little Passage arrowheads, but archaeologists tend to make a distinction between the Little Passage time period before contact and the Beothuk time period, after contact. The chipped stone arrowheads started to take second stage to hammered iron arrowheads as soon as European iron became available in the form of scavenged nails and trap parts.

Photo Credits:
1,2,4: Tim Rast
3: Eric Walsh

Good-Bye to Wapusk National Park

One last Wapusk National Park post. We packaged up the artifacts and reproductions on Monday morning and sent them off to Manitoba. Its always the case; 99% of the project will fit in a shoe box, except for one four foot long stick. But thanks to Elaine's packing and shipping prowess everything was packaged safely and arrived in Winnipeg within 24 hours.

I've talked about everything in set, except for the the hafted scraper and burin. Before I get to them, here's the goggles with the original and below is a shot of all the reproductions with the original pre-Dorset artifacts from the Seahorse Gully site. The goal of this project was not to reproduce the artifacts as they appear today, but as they would have looked when they were being used by the people who made them.


Scraper: This style of scraper has a few different names, including transverse scraper and side-scraper. It seems like it would make a decent carving tool, and from looking through the images of other scrapers at the Seahorse Gully site, it seems like there were at least two working edges on the tool. They always have a rounded tip and a more or less straight, rather than concave, edge running from the tip at about a 45 degree angle. They're not quite endscrapers and their not quite side scrapers.  Both the rounded tip and the straight edge seem to have been important and no matter how worn and resharpened the tool became those two features were preserved on the working edge.

Since many of the tools from Seahorse Gully were so well worn, we decided to make two versions of this tool - one with the tip sharpened and worn down to the handle and another showing the tool at the beginning of its life, with much more of the blade exposed. Hafting two versions of the same tool allowed the opportunity to not only illustrate the evolution of the tool throughout its life, but also to show two alternative interpretations of the haft. For the worn tool I used sinew for the binding and in the "new' scraper I hafted it with baleen. There weren't any binding materials found at Seahorse Gully, and I chose to use baleen because of its association with wood handles in other palaeoeskimo sites in the Arctic and also because of the wide hafting areas on the specific artifacts in this collection. But there's no harm in showing the most likely alternative to baleen, which is sinew.

Burin: This burin was selected to be reproduced in a haft because it was preserved relatively earlier in its life, and the burin edge is still quite long and prominent. Over time, like any stone tool, a burin will be resharpened down to a nub. They're easy to identify if you know what you are looking for, but they aren't necessarily the best examples to show people how the tools would have been used. Its a chert blade in a wood handle with baleen lashings.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
1: Elaine making the box for shipping
2: Snow Goggles
3: Seahorse Gully artifacts (top row), hafted reproductions (bottom row)
4: Hafted scraper
5: Hafted burin shown in front of the artifact
6: The burin artifact next to the hafted reproduction

Harpoons, Harpoons, Harpoons

Today is the shipping day for the Wapusk order. I'm heading into The Rooms to help Elaine pack up and send off the original artifacts along with the reproductions. They go back to Park's conservation lab in Winnipeg before heading to their new home in Wapusk National Park. The pre-Dorset harpoon is the biggest and, I think, the coolest piece in the set. It was interesting to me because its a style that is similar to forms that we have in sites in Newfoundland and Labrador, but from a slightly earlier time period. Its sort of an ancestral harpoon head style to the Groswater harpoon heads and endblades that are sprinkled throughout sites in this Province.

While I had it in the house, I realized that I had good examples of harpoons and harpoon heads spanning most of the Palaeoeskimo time period and even a couple from other cultures that came before and after them. So I made a little family portrait. The 7 harpoon heads are shown in chronological order from left to right and the five in the middle are all related. The Maritime Archaic Indians also used toggling harpoon heads, but generally speaking barbed harpoons preceded toggling harpoons, so it works to start the sequence off. The general trend in the harpoon heads made by the Palaeoeskimos was towards a simpler design with more symmetry along the central axis of the harpoon. The Thule harpoon head at the end represents the introduction of a new harpoon technology into the Arctic and marks the end of the Palaeoeskimo time period. (click to enlarge the photo)

For the Wapusk harpoon, I spent a fair bit of time thinking about the foreshaft and socket. First off, I decided to build the socket in two pieces, using a sloping scarf join tied together with sealskin to lash the socket together. Its a better match for archaeological examples of Palaeoeskimo harpoons and the two piece socket is actually an easier design to make using stone tools. There was also the problem of how to use the hole in the foreshaft. The function of the hole is to keep the foreshaft from being lost, so I could either tie it to the mainshaft using a separate cord, or thread the main harpoon line through the hole. I was leaning towards using a separate cord before I started experimenting with both options, but in the end I decided to go with the main line through the hole. The advantages of using the main line seemed to outweigh the advantages of using a separate cord.

Main harpoon line through the foreshaft:

• Pro: Simpler solution - no extra materials required and all pieces of the harpoon are tied together into a single package.
  
• Pro: The position of the hole in the foreshaft allows for tension in the line that simultaneously holds the harpoon head onto the foreshaft and helps pop it off when pressure is applied to the barb (see video below)
• Pro: The line is a good fit for the size of the hole in the foreshaft - the hole is larger than necessary if a separate cord were used.
• Pro: With the line through the foreshaft it is much more likely that the foreshaft will be pulled from the mainshaft when the prey animal tries to escape, which is consistent with their design. The bi-pointed foreshaft seems designed to slide out of the mainshaft socket just as easily as the harpoon head is designed to slide off the other end.
  

Separate Line holding the foreshaft in place:

• Pro: The foreshaft can be fixed firmly to the mainshaft.
• Con: The tapered ends of the foreshaft seem designed to slide out of the mainshaft socket, so then why would it be tied in firmly?
  
• Con: Extra cord is needed and it adds an unnecessary potential for entanglement between the main harpoon line and the extra line to secure the foreshaft.

Pre-Dorset Harpoon for Wapusk National Park: Chert endblade, walrus ivory harpoon head with baleen lashings, antler foreshaft and two part spruce main shaft with sealskin lashings and sinew and sealskin harpoon line.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
1: The Wapusk Harpoon, based on artifacts found at the Seahorse Gully site in Manitoba
2: Harpoon heads of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic
3: The mainshaft socket in two parts and the antler foreshaft
4: The assembled harpoon, showing the main line passing through the foreshaft
5: The complete harpoon
6: Video of the harpoon head toggling

Burin Spalls and Snow Goggles

This feels like kind of a déjà vu post - I know I've talked about burins and snow goggles recently, but here are a few pictures of finished pieces. The goggles are for the Wapusk order, and although the burin is based on the unifacial pre-Dorset burins from the Seahorse Gully site its actually heading to an archaeologist in the U.S. who works in Alaska. I don't think Brian would mind if I pointed out his exceptional blog documenting his work in both Alaska and the lower 48; Old Dirt - New Thoughts. He just happened to order a burin at the same time that the Wapusk artifacts came in, so for a few days I spent a lot of time making and playing around with burins.

The thing that makes his burin kind of cool is that the last three spalls all stayed in one piece and can be refit onto the tool in the handle. It gives you a pretty good idea of how the tool would have evolved and changed shape over its life. Although I removed them one after the other in one location, in the archaeological past these spalls might be removed days or weeks apart as the tool was used and worn down. The spalls are pretty distinctive little flakes - so even if you don't find a burin with them, you can be pretty sure when you find one that someone was using and re-sharpening a burin at the site.

The snow goggles are for the Wapusk order. I don't know much about their origin, although they are certainly Neoeskimo and not Palaeoeskimo. The body of the goggles are made on a spruce pole with about a 4 cm diameter. For the strap I used braided sinew. I braided a permanent loop through the lashing holes on one side of the goggles and then threaded a loop with a slip knot on the opposite side so that the length of the strap is adjustable, but can't fall off the goggles.

I think I've mentioned before that one of the cool things about wearing the goggles is that they make a slight improvement in your vision, if, like me, you need glasses. Your field of view is decreased and the glare from the snow is reduced to safe levels, but its also like looking through squinted eyes, but without the eye strain. Sometimes people ask if I wish that I'd been born in a different time and I always come back to my poor vision when I answer. I'm sure that I would have walked off a cliff or something before I got very old, so I'm happy living in a time with prescription lenses. Although if I absolutely had to go through life without high density glass lenses, I'm sure that one of the first things I'd make would be a pair of snow goggles.

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If you are looking for another dose of archaeology blogging, check out the recently published list: "The 50 Best Blogs for Archaeology Students" Its a handy guide and I'm not just saying that because Elfshot: Sticks and Stones made the list with this generous review:

"Elfshot: Sticks and Stones : This incredible, insightful blog discusses the lost utilitarian art of flintknapping to educate readers on how the process worked and its role in the formation of humanity."

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
1: Spruce Snow Goggles with Braided Sinew Strap for Wapusk National Park
2: Hafted Burin with refit Burin Spalls
3: Wearing the snow goggles
4: Another view of the snow goggles
5: Tim, enjoying vision
6: Assorted Palaeoeskimo tools drying

Building the Wapusk Harpoon

I have an Open Minds flintknapping demonstration this afternoon with a grade six class at The Rooms and then one final check with the artifacts for Wapusk National Park. Everything is built for the Wapusk order, I just want to check the pieces against the artifacts one last time before I do the final assembly and ship them.

The Wapusk harpoon is based on pre-Dorset artifacts found at the Seahorse Gully site, near the park. There were a couple of ivory harpoon heads found at Seahorse Gully, so I worked off of those pieces to determine the harpoon material and style of the base and line hole, although the one complete harpoon head was self-bladed. A self-bladed harpoon is one that is made in one piece, without an additional stone endblade inserted into the end. Fortunately, there are other pre-Dorset sites with versions of this harpoon head designed to take endblades, so I used those sources to fill in the blanks.

One of the other references that I looked at showed an antler foreshaft that would work with this style of harpoon head and it had a fairly large hole gouged in it. This isn't uncommon for Palaeoeskimo foreshafts, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with that design. The function of the hole is probably to attach the foreshaft to the harpoon somehow so that it isn't lost while the hunter is pre-occupied with dragging the harpooned seal out of the water. A short thread might run from the hole in the foreshaft to the end of the mainshaft to tie everything in place. However, the hole in the artifact I'm using as a reference seemed to be quite large, similar in size to the line hole in the harpoon, so I'm considering running the harpoon line through the hole to see how that might work.  But then again maybe not.  These holes tend to be off to one side of the foreshaft, so maybe that's a clue that they were positioned away from the path of the harpoon line to avoid entanglement.  Its times like this that making just one reproduction doesn't seem like enough.

I'll do another post on this harpoon when its all finished and assembled. I'm learning some interesting things about the harpoon heads that were used in this Province after this opportunity to examine their predecessors from other parts of Canada's North. I'm reversing some ideas that I had about Groswater harpoon heads after seeing how this style of harpoon would have fit together.

Photo Credits:
1,3,4: Tim Rast
2: From: Pre-Dorset Settlements at the Seahorse Gully Site by David Meyer

Photo Captions:
1: Exploded view of the endblade, harpoon head, and foreshaft of the harpoon for Wapusk National Park
2: Reference drawings of the complete, self-bladed harpoon head found at Seahorse Gully
3: The ivory harpoon head and antler foreshaft
4: Side view of the open socket harpoon head and foreshaft.

St. John's Archaeology in the Sewer

Ugh... just when I thought I'd finally gotten over the jetlag, they go and cut another hour out of the day. I could have used that hour today. The end of the fiscal year is approaching and a couple of my current jobs have end of March deadlines looming. This is going to be a busy week of wrapping projects up. I don't even want to think about it until I get a cup of coffee, so here's something completely different.

There's been a massive archaeology project going on right under our noses in downtown St. John's for the past few years. You've probably seen the construction rerouting the sewer lines away from "The Bubble" in the harbour towards the new water treatment plant on the Southside Hills. Some of the hardhats on that project are worn by archaeologists monitoring the excavations. The lead archaeologist, Gerry Penney, gave an interesting talk at The Rooms a couple weeks ago about the project and The Telegram has put his illustrated talk online as a .pdf slideshow called: Under the Street: Archaeology and the Harbour Interceptor Sewer Project. There's a lot of interesting information in there about the history of St. John's. (if that link stops working, the same presentation is archived on the city's website here)

There are a couple of articles in this weekend's Telegram about the project as well. I'm not sure how long the Telegram archives their articles for, but at the moment you can read them at these links:

What lies beneath: Sewage work allows archeology team to uncover truths about downtown St. John’s

Shawnadithit graveyard found: Experts believe last Beothuk buried under Southside Road

Photo Credits:
1: Tim Rast
2: Gerry Penney

Photo Captions:
1: One of the reproductions that needs to be finished!
2: Title slide from Gerry Penney's talk

Elfshot in Words and Pictures

Over the past couple of months the Craft Division of the Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development has been working with Newfoundland and Labrador craft producers to supply them with free professional product photography by Eric Walsh and Artist's Statements and Product Descriptions by craft writer and curator, Gloria Hickey. Here are the results for Elfshot:

Elfshot

Tim Rast

Elfshot has offered flintknapped artifact reproductions and jewellery since 1997.

"When I came up with the name Elfshot I felt more comfortable drawing from European folklore than from native cultures. My credibility as a flintknapper comes from my being an archaeologist."
Tim Rast

When people in Europe would find flint arrowheads in days gone by they called them "elfshot" supposing fairies made them. Today, without modern shortcuts or power tools, Tim Rast flintknaps artifact reproductions just as the originals would have been made hundred and thousands of years ago. Only his initials "TR" distinguish his authentic reproduction knives and harpoons from the originals. Being a professional archaeologist and based in Newfoundland, Tim Rast is blessed with ready access to artifact collections and a wealth of raw materials. He uses stone, wood, moose and caribou parts, sealskin, whalebone and baleen collected from Newfoundland's woods and beaches. Most of Rast's jewellery designs are based on the flintknapped arrowhead. It is a simple but mesmerizing interplay of rounded curves and sharp lines, a shape with contemporary appeal that over millions of years is hard-wired in our species. When making jewellery, Rast grinds the razor sharp edge off the arrowhead to make them safe to wear and handle.

Product description:

In addition to artifact reproductions and special commissions, Elfshot's product line includes flintknapped pendants, brooches, earrings and tie-tacks. Popular materials range from Newfoundland chert to dazzling Fibre Optic Glass, in a variety of complementary wire wraps. Kits for beginner knappers provide easy to follow instructions and tools that can be used to recycle consumer glass into jewellery.

Photo Credits: Eric Walsh
Text: Gloria Hickey

Flintknapping Workshop in Calgary

I'm back in St. John's now. My trip to Alberta was quick, but busy. I had a chance to see some family and visit with friends from university and high school that I hadn't seen in years. The flintknapping workshop on March 6th worked out really well. There were two full day workshops run at the same time, Jason Roe had over 20 people in the beginners class and I had 10 people in the advanced class. We used a couple classrooms in the Archaeology Department at the University of Calgary, which is where I did my undergrad so it felt really familiar coming home.

There was a big lunch provided and snacks and coffee throughout the day. I was really impressed with how well organized the workshops were and everything went off without a hitch. In this lunchtime photo, Pete is using one of the knives made just that morning to skin a pack of Viva Puffs. No one was in danger of going hungry in this group of knappers and toolmakers.

For the workshop, I brought spruce branches with me from some of those Christmas trees that I scavanged off the street a few weeks ago and I collected a few straight willow branches on the drive into Calgary from the farm. Using the green wood we made some simple split branch handles for flakes, so everyone had their first hafted tool within the first hour of the workshop. Here's a link to a good write up on this style of haft, sometimes called a "Hoko Knife". After that first project people worked at their own pace for the rest of the day and used sinew, raw hide, hide glue and artificial sinew to haft more of their work. I was really impressed with everyone. There were some knappers there who had 10 years experience and came with a bucket full of rock and tools. I don't know what the final finished tool count was, but I think people averaged 2 or 3 hafted tools each. The tools in the photo on the left were made by 3 or 4 different people.

Some members of this group have been knapping together for years, and they've had several different guest instructors over that time. One of the tests they give to the new guys (like me) is to give them a biface and then challenge them to flute it. Fluted points aren't something that I'm particularily good at, but fortunately the preforms they gave me were obsidian and only a couple inches long so they were within my comfort zone. I made the mistake of fluting the first one while no one was watching, so they made me a second one and I had to do it again. They turned out ok, although I could only get the flute to work on one side of the first point and for some reason the second flute on the second point split down the middle, so there is a ridge running down the middle of the flake scar so it looks like two side by side fluting flakes. However, the main thing is they didn't break, which was the important criteria for passing the test.

Photo Credits:
1,5: Autumn Whiteway
2-4, 6: Tim Rast


Photo Captions:
1: Talking about sinew and hide glue
2: Butchering Viva Puffs with a Hoko Knife
3: Brand new obsidian tools
4: Processing sinew
5: That's Bill in the white shirt - he kept me honest throughout the workshop, brought a tonne of sinew and hide glue for everyone to use and made the preforms for me to flute.
6: The obsidian fluted point that earned me a passing grade.