Copper Inuit Arrows Ready to Ship

Copper Arrowhead

I finished up the Copper Inuit arrows and took them out for a few test shots with the Tuktut Nogait bow and also to take some final photos.  I don't have good targets or enough room to shoot very far in the bag yard, I just wanted to make sure that the nocks fit a sinew bowstring and that they actually flew pointy end first.  They do and nothing broke, so I'm happy.  I sent the photos to the client for approval and hopefully I can get them shipped off in teh next few days.

The arrows have copper arrowheads and rivets, antler foreshafts, pine main shafts, ptarmigan feather fletching and sinew and hide glue lashing.  The lashing holds the feathers in place and is used to reinforce the wood socket on the mainshafts so that it will not split. 

Most are a little big for the
Tuktut Nogait bow.

Four of the arrows are spoken for and the other will enter my resource collection for demonstrations.  Two will be fitted with blunts, which I intend to use for a bit of small game hunting in the near future.  The short arrow on the top is the first one that I made as part of a big Copper Inuit set a couple years back.  The client  at that time had space restrictions in their exhibit design, so the arrows had to be short.

Some of the foreshafts have barbs

This is the first time that I made full-size reproductions and I must admit, they are longer than I had anticipated, with most of the reference arrows that I found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's online reference collection measuring between 80 and 88 cm.  The foreshafts and mainshafts are all different lengths and interchangeable, so you can make a lot of different length arrows depending on how you combine them, but for the client I picked four arrows that fall within 78-88 cm.

These are my four favourites out of the set, hopefully the client will feel the same.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper Inuit Arrow Reproductions Almost Done

Copper arrowheads and
antler foreshafts

 The Copper Inuit Arrow reproductions are almost complete.  I blame the snow for them not being finished today.  If I didn't have to shovel, I think I could have got them done this afternoon.  They are very close, but I'm not going to show them assembled until everything is done.

Close, but I need to trim and add a bit
 more sinew at the bottom of each feather.

The main tasks left at the start of the day were riveting the arrowheads onto the foreshafts, tying the feathers on to the main shafts and some final sanding, filing and antiquing.  Right now the ptarmigan feathers are all tied on with sinew, but there is a little bit of trimming left to do on the ends of the feathers and possibly the feathers themselves.  The fletching that I've seen on Copper Inuit arrows tends to be long and very narrow.  There are only two feathers on each arrow and they are tied at each end without being glued down the spine.

The thin copper rod is just the right
diameter  to fill the hole in the antler
foreshaft and copper arrowhead.

The riveting went alright. I used thin copper rods for the rivets that I cold hammered out of heavy copper ground wire.  I find that I need to switch between hammering and filing the rivets frequently.  The antler is easy to crack and will split if you just try to hammer the copper ends flat.

The finished rivet is hammered and ground
flush with the antler.  A bit of red wine
vinegar and miracle grow will help antique the
copper overnight.

It takes very light tapping and frequent pauses and grinding to keep the rivet head mushrooming out without creating a lot of internal pressure on the antler.  I broke the first one that I tried this afternoon because I was too impatient and tried to hammer without enough breaks to check and file the copper heads.  Eventually they all got done and I'm happy with them.  The bond on all six of the new arrowheads is nice and secure.

Whalebone blunts on antler foreshafts.
They've been glued in to place, but
I'll add a sinew or gut wrapping to
secure them before I try using them.

I also took a bit of time today to work on the blunts for small game.  I used the bird blunt from the Ivavvik National Park collection that I worked on a few years back as my inspiration.  I made mine from whalebone and am hafting them on to antler foreshafts so that they will be interchangeable with the copper tipped foreshafts.  In demos I like to mention that interchangeable foreshafts could alter the function of a projectile to suit the specific game that the hunter wanted to pursue and now I'll have an example of that to show people.  I guess the next thing I should make are some fish arrow attachments.

The mainshafts have a sinew reinforced
socket on the distal end that fit the
end of the foreshafts.  You can change the
foreshafts and if one part of your arrow
is broke or lost, you don't have to start
again from scratch.

Anyhow, I should qualify this composite blunt foreshaft design by saying that I haven't actually seen it in archaeological or ethnographic collections.  The bird blunts that I've seen are either attached directly to the main shaft or have been carved in one piece at the end of the wood arrow or as a single piece foreshaft.  I haven't found an example of a two part blunt foreshaft like this, so take it with a grain of salt. I suspect they exist, and I just can't find an example, but who knows, maybe there is some functional or ideological reason that blunts are not made this way that I'm not aware of, yet.

Regardless of the length or details of the design, all of the foreshafts have the same conical base so they will all be interchangeable on the wood mainshafts.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A Point Revenge Arrow

Point Revenge Arrow Reproduction

This is a reproduction of a Point Revenge, or pre-contact Innu arrow based on artifacts from Labrador.  The Innu people are alive and well and living in Labrador.  Archaeologically, the ancestors of the Innu left a material culture that Archaeologists call  "Point Revenge" or "late Labrador Recent Indian".  Their projectile points were corner-notched arrowheads, most commonly made from Ramah Chert.  If you want more information about the Recent Indian peoples who lived in Newfoundland and Labrador, I would refer you to these two informative blog posts from Inside Newfoundland and Labrador Archaeology:

Recent Indian Tradition: Newfoundland

Recent Indian Tradition: Labrador

Point Revenge and Little Passage reproductions

What's interesting is that the archaeological recovered stone tools left by the ancestors of the Beothuk and the Innu were almost identical even though the two groups were historically quite different.  Take this arrow for example. When I make a Little Passage or Beothuk arrow, I start with a stone point and build the rest of the arrow around it.  I base the organic components on ethnographical observed Beothuk arrows.  I followed the same steps to make this Point Revenge arrow, except I used Innu arrows as the ethnographic reference.  Even though the projectile points are identical, the reconstructed arrows wind up looking quite different.

These are links to some of the arrows that I used as references for the Innu arrows - they are in the Ethnology Collection at The Rooms here in St. John's:

http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/1110_e.php?catalogue_no=III-B-111

http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/1110_e.php?catalogue_no=III-B-112 

http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/1110_e.php?catalogue_no=III-B-113 

http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/1110_e.php?catalogue_no=III-B-114

Stone, pitch, sinew, wood

I don't know the exact origin of these arrows and some aspects of their construction seem a little rough or unusual.  I suspect that they were made by an Innu person in the last century for someone from the south who wanted to collect examples of Innu arrows.  They feel like they were made by someone who had seen arrows and knew what they should look like, but didn't necessarily have a lot of experience with their construction.  Still, I don't have any reason to doubt the general size and shape of the arrows, the number of feathers used, the decoration, or the use of pitch as an adhesive, so I used those details in my reproduction.

Point Revenge, Beothuk, Copper Inuit

Even though a Point Revenge (pre-contact Innu) and Little Passage (Pre-contact Beothuk) stone arrowhead look identical, when you reconstruct the arrows based on the ethnographically available information they wind up looking very different.  The type of wood used is different: the Innu used tamarack or spruce for arrow shafts, while the Beothuk used pine.  The length of the arrows are different; the Innu arrows are described as being 24-30" long, while the Beothuk made longer 36" arrows.  The feathers are different; the Innu used three grey or white ptarmigan feathers, while the Beothuk used two goose feathers.  The decoration is different; the Innu decorated each end of the arrow with red paint, while the Beothuk covered the entire arrow with red ochre.

The shaft flattens toward the string nock

Aside from the projectile point, the only common treatment that I could see on both arrows is the flattened shape of the arrow shaft beneath the feathers and the shallow "V" or "U" shaped string nock.  Both groups would have tied their arrowheads and feathers in place and the Innu arrows show evidence of a light coloured pitch.  I don't know whether the Beothuk used pitch or not on their arrows, so I don't know if that is another similarity or another difference.  Likewise, the Innu arrows do not have the feathers glued down along the spine, just tied at both ends.  The drawings of Beothuk arrows suggest that the feathers may have been glued down to the shaft, but I can't say for certain.

Beothuk arrows and Innu arrows differ from each other in almost every way that an arrow can.  I think that the length of the arrows is especially significant.  The Innu arrows would be too short to make full advantage of the 6 foot long Beothuk bows and the oversized Beothuk arrows would be clumsily large in the Innu bows.

Arrows: Point Revenge/Innu (top) and Little Passage/Beothuk (bottom)

Side view of the hafted point

I'm not sure how to interpret this.  I don't know if I'm correct in assuming that all of the historic features of the arrows would have appeared on the pre-contact arrows.  Maybe the similarities in the lithic toolkits extended to all other aspects of the material culture and the Recent Indian arrows on the Island and in Labrador looked identical 1000 years ago.  Maybe they evolved along two separate lines since then from some sort of common arrow ancestor.  I'm not sure.

Ramah chert in grey and black

On this particular arrow, I used a coarse black chert.  This arrow was a paid commission and as much as I'd like to stay true to the Labrador Recent Indian preference for Ramah Chert, I still can't sell the stuff - so I went with this black chert because its comparable to the black version of Ramah Chert.  The shaft is made from tamarack, which I chose over spruce in this case because its colour gives it a slightly more antiqued look than bright white spruce.  I felt it matched the look of the ethnographic arrows a little better.  The arrow is about 27" long.  I used three strips of white feathers that I picked up on the barren grounds south of St. John's.  Ideally, these would be ptarmigan and although I don't know exactly what bird dropped them and its possible that they are ptarmigan, I kind of doubt it.  I used pitch for the glue on both the point and at each end of the feathers and tied them in place with sinew.  The pitch on the ethnographic arrows is light coloured, so I didn't add any charcoal to the gum.

Red paint; a memory of red glue?

I added red pigment to each end of the arrow shaft before tying the point and feathers on.  The Innu use bright red and blue paints on a lot of their objects.  I used red ochre mixed with oil for the base of the stain, although I did punch it up with a dash of red oil paint to brighten the ochre a bit.  The placement of the red paint seems decorative - if it has a special meaning I wouldn't want to guess what it might be.  Although, it is interesting that the red stain is applied in the same places that the arrow and feathers are tied down.  The archaeologist speaking at MUN this Friday is looking at the use of red ochre as an additive in adhesives used during the Middle Stone Age in Africa.  Ochre was used for a lot of things in Newfoundland, but I don't think that I've ever heard that it was mixed with pitch to make a better adhesive.  Still - IF it had been, then it would leave a red stain on each end of an arrow that would look very similar to the pattern of red paint on the ethnographic Innu arrows.  Its an interesting coincidence and maybe something to follow up on.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper Inuit Arrow Reproductions

Copper Inuit Arrow Reproductions

I finished these arrows this week for the Central Arctic artifact set. They are based on Copper Inuit arrows in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's collection.  You can see the original artifact they are both based on in the CMC's online catalogue:

Arrow: IV-D-75 e2

The Tuktut Nogait Bow and the new arrows - 25" and  30" long

The longer of the two is for the client, who requested a 30" arrow.  The shorter of the two is for me. I made it 25" long so that it would work with the Tuktut Nogait bow, or so I thought.  I made the bow this time last year, and this is the first arrow that I've made since then that is more-or-less the correct style and age to match the bow.

I'm happy with the antiquing

Both arrows have a copper arrowhead riveted into place with a single copper rivet.  They have identical antler foreshafts - the difference in length between the two arrows is entirely in the length of the pine main shaft.  Since the draw on my Tuktut Nogait bow reproduction is 24", I thought that a 25" arrow would be a good fit, but it turns out feeling a bit short.  The distance form the inside of the nock to the base of the arrowhead is closer to 23" so I can't get a full draw on the bow with it.

This is the 25" arrow drawn in the Tuktut Nogait bow.  The bow could be drawn a little farther, but I've run out of arrow.

This is the draw of the 30" arrow.  The bow is close to full draw and there is still some arrow to spare.  This one feels like a better fit.

Detachable foreshaft

Fortunately, the two part design of these arrows means that I'm not stuck with an arrow of a fixed length.  The next time I make arrows of this style I can can create longer pieces to fit each half of my short arrow and make it into two longer arrows.  Or, I could add a third section to this arrow in the middle.  One of the cool things about bows and arrows made north of the treeline is that they are designed to be spliced together out of whatever scraps of driftwood or other material might be at hand.

Two feathers tied down

The arrows are fletched with two feathers.  I'm not certain of the bird species used for the feathers on the actual artifact, but I know they were white.  I've read that owl and goose feathers were preferred.  I don't have owl feathers and the goose feathers that I use are all grey or brown, so I had to dig deep in my feather box to find these white ones.  I think they are gull feathers.  The feathers are tied to the shaft at the top and bottom with sinew, but not glued down, so there is space between the shaft and the feather.  The sinew wrapping at the nock end of the feather extends right to the base of the nock and serves double duty holding the feather in place and helping to keep the nock from splitting.  The shaft cross section changes from round to rectangular under the feathers, where the arrow is flattened and thinned towards the nock.

A wide nock for twisted sinew bowstring

Its difficult to see much feather detail in the online reference photo that I had to work from, but there are other arrow fragments belonging to the same hunting kit that this particular arrow came from, so I referred to those other arrows from time to time.  One of the other artifacts in the set was actually a single feather, which was fantastic - I could see exactly how to cut and trim the feather to match the artifact.  There was even an artifact in the kit identified as a feather trimming template - but I'm not sure how it was used.  I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does.

Antler Foreshaft

The foreshaft is made from antler, and is designed to fit into a socket in the main shaft.  Sometimes foreshafts were permanently fixed in place, but I made these ones to be interchangeable.  The sinew lashing in the area of the join between the antler and the wood is there to prevent the wood from splitting - it doesn't actually do anything to hold the foreshaft in place, which is held in place by friction.  Although, I did put a bit of hide glue in the joint of the arrow that I sent to the client, because its going on display and they'd prefer it to be permanently fixed in place.

Multi-part design

There are a lot of benefits to making arrows in separate pieces.  Otherwise unsuitable materials can be used, meaning that you can do more with less.  Before a hunt, you could swap out your foreshafts for prey specific arrowheads; broadheads for caribou, blunts for birds, barbed bone points or harpoon heads for fish, etc.  During a hunt, the foreshaft will stay embedded in the prey and the mainshaft can be reloaded with a new foreshaft and re-used.  After a hunt, when its time to repair broken arrows, you don't have to replace entire arrows because one part is damaged and you can mix and match the undamaged components so that you are still able to hunt while you work on repairing or replacing the damaged pieces.

Copper Inuit Reproduction Arrows

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Baleen Braces for the Tuktut Nogait Bow

I posted some photos of the Tuktut Nogait reproduction bow on a forum dedicated to recreating ancient technology, called Palaeoplanet. The feedback there was very useful. One question was whether or not there were any splints or braces under the lashing on the bend in the limb. There wasn't, but there should have been, so I added some. They don't change the appearance of the bow, but they make a marked difference in performance.

The original bow was in two pieces with a splice in one limb, so I assumed that there would be lashing at that point, and possibly a brace piece, although no additional bow parts were found with the Tuktut Nogait bow. The bow is flat across the back and most of the limb has a curved belly, creating a D-shaped cross section, except at the knee in the limb, where the splice would be lashed onto the rest of the limb. At that point the limb has a rectangular cross section for about 4 inches, which is the area that I wrapped the lashings around. The same spot on the complete limb had a similar rectangular cross section, which seemed to mark the position of the tight lashing. I added the lashings thinking that it might help strengthen the limb, but also so that the bow would look more like I imagined the original would have looked.

However, from a bow making perspective, that is just adding useless weight to the limb for no reason. I dug a bit more and found some excellent analogs for the Tuktut Nogait bow in Karen McCullough's The Ruin Islanders. These bows are much earlier than I imagined the Tuktut Nogait bow to be, but they are such good matches in the shape of the limbs and nocks that it made me rethink the reproduction I was working on. The Ruin Island bows were found on Ellesmere Island, well above the tree line and a long way from Tuktut Nogait National Park, but there are many similarities. The Ruin Island bows made heavy use of baleen, in fact some of the smaller bows are entirely made from baleen. Others combined wood and baleen, using baleen as brace pieces on the back of the bow in the knees, which is exactly where the bow makers on Palaeoplanet suggested my bow might need reinforcement. If the braces on the Tuktut Nogait bow were originally baleen then differences in preservation might explain why they were not found along with the wood components, even though the wood part of the bow seems designed to fit them.

The baleen braces were quick and easy to make, I just cut ovals out of baleen using the scroll saw and sanded down the edges to a smooth taper around the edge. I boiled them and bent them into a slight curve that would fit the recurve of the bow and lashed them into place. Interestingly, the 71 feet of braided sinew that I've been using for the cable fit perfectly this time. Every other time that I've wrapped the cable I had 18-24 inches left over. I thought that the cord might be stretching when I wrapped it, but I measured it again this time and its still 71 feet long. I also weighed everything while it was apart.

Here are the specs:

• Wood, yew (50"): 223 g
• Braided sinew, (71'): 104 g
• Baleen braces, (4 1/2"): 10 g x 2
• Sinew bowstring, 2-ply, (49"): 12 g
• Sealskin cable lashing on grip (18"): 3 g

• Total Weight: 362 g

I lashed the baleen in place as firmly as I could and restrung the cable very tightly. The bow has settled back into its usual shape, but at first it was almost braced backwards from the tension in the cable. I haven't been able to shoot it yet, because the snow around here is too deep right now and I'd lose the arrows, but I like how it feels with the braces and tighter cable. The knees of the limbs no longer feel like the weakest point in the limb, they feel like the strongest. The draw weight of the bow also shot up. It now draws about 34 pounds at 24" without any twists in the cable - which was the draw weight of the bow without braces after 3 cable twists (the lines overlap in the graph below). Now, with two twists in the cable, it has a draw weight of 36 pounds at 24", shown on the graph in orange, which is the highest I've seen yet.

I can't wait for some of this snow to go and try shooting it. Although to be honest, its still tough to draw to 24 inches without the string popping off the nocks. The next time I take the cable off, I'll probably steam and bend the recurves a little more and see if that helps change the string angle a bit.

The Ruin Island bows seem to have had identical nocks to the Tuktut Nogait bow and the angle of the recurve in the complete bows looks to be quite extreme. Incidentally, the house features where the majority of the Ruin Island bows were found were radiocarbon dated between 580 and 1120 years old. These bows have much more in common with the Tuktut Nogait bow than any of the ethnographic bows that I've seen from the area and make me wonder if the Tuktut Nogait bow isn't older than expected.

Photo Credits:
1-4, 7-10: Tim Rast
5,6,11: From The Ruin Islanders by Karen McCullough

Photo Captions:
First: lashing in a baleen brace
Second: Tuktut Nogait bow drawn to 22" with baleen braces in place
Third: Braced bow showing the lashed in baleen
Fourth: Braced bow with baleen in place
Fifth: Ruin Island phase bows
Sixth: Ruin Island baleen brace pieces (middle row and bottom), sinew twisters (top)
Seventh: Baleen braces for the Tuktut Nogait bow
Eighth: The braces in place
Ninth: Tying down the cable - that's tight!
Tenth: Graph of draw weights of the Tuktut Nogait bow with various settings
Eleventh: Ruin Island Phase bow limb fragments

Bow Strings and Cables

If you bend a bow too far and the angle that the string meets the tip of the bow exceeds 90 degrees, then the string is likely to slide off and the bow will fly forward until it hits something, like a solid oak chair or your dining room wall (photo). For that reason, the Tuktut Nogait bow has a maximum draw of 24 inches. If the bow is drawn farther than that,

then the string slides off the end.
Its possible to make nocks that will hold a string on so that the string angle can exceed 90 degrees, and there are bows made in the Arctic with flaring or T-shaped nocks that were probably designed for just that purpose, but the Tuktut Nogait bow didn't appear to have that style of string nock.

For the bow string, I made a 2 ply cord of twisted sinew. The sinew fibres are separated into very fine silky threads that are twisted together while wet into a thread that is about 1/8th of an inch thick. This thread is made a little over twice as long as the finished string needs to be. I let that thread dry over night and then looped it in the middle and twisted it into a simple two ply cord. While that was drying I twisted the two ends together to create a second loop at the opposite end of the cord and let it dry under tension.

The end result is a continuous loop of sinew thread which has been twisted into a cord. As it dries it shrinks and everything sticks to itself. I didn't cut any loose threads off, instead I smoothed down any loose ends with warm water and hide glue. The final length of the bow string can be adjusted by twisting or untwisting it, although it can never be untwisted completely.

To add tension to the cord backing of the bow a sinew twister is used. The antler sinew twister is slid through the middle of the cord bundle and used as a wrench to twist the cord into a cable. To hold tension in the cable, I tied a leather lashing through the middle of the cable around the handle of the bow before removing the sinew twister. While the bow is strung, I can put two full twists in the cable, however, if I unstring the bow I can twist the cable three times.

The sinew twister is also handy to use when twisting the bow string and you can slide the string right off the twister onto the bow just like slipping on a shoe with a shoe horn. The tension in the bow string and the tension in the cable backing make a big difference in the performance of the bow.

I shot the bow with some store bought arrows yesterday. The first attempts were with the sinew cord untwisted and the bow string just tight enough to brace the bow (bracing the bow means stringing it so that the wood is flexed and it has the classic D-shaped profile). The arrows were travelling about 50 paces. I unstrung the bow and added a half dozen twists to the bowstring to make it shorter and added a couple full rotations of tension to the cable. With those two little changes the bow started shooting arrows 85 paces.

Tuktut Nogait Bow

from top; the original Inuvialuit artifact, with the Parks Canada reproduction sitting behind it.

The unstrung bow with the cable backing on (Western Yew, 50 inches, 127 cm long).

The braced bow.

The bow at full draw - 24 inches.

The effects of the cable backing are shown in the graph below. This time I was testing the draw weight of the bow by drawing the bow using a fish scale, and recording how many pounds were needed to pull it to 12 inches, 14 inches, 16 inches, etc. The red line shows the draw weight of the bow with no twist in the cable and the green line shows the draw weight of the bow with two twists in the cable. In both tests the tension in the bow string was the same. Without twists in the cable the draw weight of the bow at 24 inches is 28 pounds, with two twists in the cable the draw weight of the bow at 24 inches is 32 pounds - a 14% increase. The 3 twist test was done this morning, so the tension in the bow string might be different, but the results are consistent with the first two tests, this time it draws 34 pounds at 24 inches - a 21% increase. At the moment, 3 twists is pretty much the maximum tension that I can get in the cable.

Its a fun bow to play with because it has so many little ways to adjust it. I'll need to make some reproduction arrows to experiment with. Partly for authenticity and partly because the sinew bow string is thicker than commercial bow string and the little plastic nocks on the store bought arrows don't fit on it properly, so they break a lot.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First: The bow string at 90 degree angle to the limb - any farther and the string slips off.
Second: Holes in the wall and a dent in the chair from the bow flying across the room when the string slipped off.
Third: 2 ply sinew bowstring loop
Fourth: drying the twisted sinew bow string with tension
Fifth: Sinew twister in the braided sinew cable
Sixth: Tying down the cable using leather lashing
Seventh: Composite photo of the Elfshot reproductions and the original Tuktut Nogait bow
Eighth: Graph showing the effect of cable tension on bow draw weight
Ninth: Wrapping the sinew backing. 70 feet of braided sinew was used.