March is going to be busy

An Open Minds workshop at The Rooms

It's kind of a hectic month.  I still have a couple big orders to fill in the studio, but workshops and demonstrations have really piled up in my March schedule as well.  At the moment,  I have 14 workshops, one knapping demonstration and a public talk scheduled across three different provinces during the month of March.  Some of those workshops are with elementary school kids while others are with university students and members of archaeological societies in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Securing the gut hafting on an ulu
at a MUNArch workshop.

Tonight is the second MUNArch ground stone ulu workshop.  We had 10 people come out on Monday night and everyone finished a slate ulu.  This is basically the same workshop that I do with the Open Mind's students at The Rooms, but we use sinew and gut lashing instead of string and people are responsible for chipping their own blanks and cutting their own handles.  For kids, we start with sawed blanks and handles that are already cut to length.

A Little Passage
(pre-contact Beothuk) knife,
ready to glue and lash together.

In the studio I'm continuing to work on Beothuk and Intermediate period reproductions.  The Intermediate period pieces must match a specific suite of artifacts from Sheshatshiu, Labrador, while the Beothuk pieces can be a little more generic.  I'm pulling from a lot of different archaeological and historical references for the Beothuk pieces.  For example the knife on the right is based on a biface found by Ralph Pastore on Inspector Island but the handle comes from a wood handle that was photographed by James Howley for his 1915 publication, The Beothuck or Red Indians.  For the Intermediate period pieces from Sheshatshiu, I'm using ethnographic Innu artifacts to help fill in some of the blanks.

The scraper in the upper left hand corner is meant to be a reproduction of the scraper in the photo immediately below it.

The original artifacts will be shown in the display as they were found and the reproductions will illustrate how they may have appeared to the people who originally made them, complete with lashings and handles and all the missing pieces that were not preserved in the ground.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast