Rhyolite Knapping for Burnside

My production knapping kit

I'm finishing up my last order of the spring before heading to Nunavut next week for field work. I'm working on a few pieces made from Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite for the gift shop run by the Burnside Heritage Foundation on Newfoundland's Eastport Peninsula.   The Beaches Site is a stones throw from the rhyolite quarry, so I'm filling half the order with side-notched Beaches style points and the other half with triangular Dorset Palaeoeskimo endblades.  It seems like all of the different aboriginal groups who lived in Newfoundland made use of rhyolite that they collected from Bloody Bay Cove.

Rhyolite has a bit more of a gritty texture to it than chert, but in Newfoundland, where most of our fine grain chert has a lot of small internal fractures, its possible to find very large, solid pieces of rhyolite.

Future necklaces and earrings

Laurie McLean, the archaeologist who found the quarry and has worked in the Burnside area for decades, hand picks the cores that I use for these reproductions.  He ensures that the rhyolite collected are not artifacts, which is no small task considering knappers have been visiting the area, testing and collecting rock for 5000 years, but its critical that we do not damage the site or collect worked cores or flakes for these reproductions.  I make the rhyolite jewellery exclusively for sale through the gift shop in the Burnside Museum, so if you'd like to own a Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite necklace or earrings, you'll need to plan a trip to the Burnside Museum on the Eastport Peninsula.  While you are in the area, take the time to do the boat tour to visit the actual quarry site and the Beaches site, its well worth your time.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Beaches Point Jewelry

Beaches rhyolite jewelry

The flintknapped rhyolite jewelry is heading out to the gift shop in the Burnside Archaeology Centre.  Given the Centre's proximity to both the Bloody Bay Cove rhyolite quarry and the Beaches site, the lead archaeologist, Laurie McLean, asked that I include some Beaches complex reproductions in the set.  The rhyolite that I use comes from Bloody Bay Cove and the cores are carefully selected by Laurie to ensure that they are not archaeological artifacts.  Each year, I'll be producing a small quantity of rhyolite jewelry exclusively for sale through the Burnside Archaeology Centre, located in the town of Burnside in beautiful Bonavista Bay.

The Beaches Site

The Beaches complex, which was named for The Beaches site, is the earliest link in the Recent Indian continuum on the Island of Newfoundland that leads to the Little Passage complex and ultimately the historic Beothuk.  The most diagnostic artifact of the Beaches complex are their side-notched projectile points.  These side-notched points tend to be larger than the later corner-notched Little Passage points and seem likely to have been used on atlatls, while the corner-notched Little Passage points represent the introduction of the bow and arrow to the Island.  In this case, the change in material culture seems to represent the introduction of a new technology, rather than the migration of a new people.
 

Bloody Bay cove rhyolite flakes at the quarry

Rhyolite is a tough stone to work.  That probably means that its durable, but I think that the biggest advantage that the Bloody Bay cove quarry had going for it was the size of the cores that could be found there.  There is lots of high quality, fine grained chert around the province, but it tends to have a lot of internal fractures and for the folks who wanted to make large stone tools the massive, solid pieces of rhyolite that can be found at Bloody Bay cove would have been one of the few options available.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Mixed Bag Monday

Here's a couple of friend's sites to check out.

Cara and Pam have their blog open for business; Visit The Grumpy Goat Gallery. I can't say it any better than they can:

We are two, funny girls who live and work in a wee, kooky cottage by the sea, in a tiny, little town in a quirky place called Newfoundland. We carve, paint, build things and run a 4 star hotel for cats. Life here can be hard and the ocean can get angry, but on sunny, calm days, the whales come out to play and it is the best place to be on earth. If you'd like to stop by our studio to have a gander at our artwork, we'd love to see you. There is a free cat with every purchase, and a complimentary lint rolling service as you depart. Can you ask for anything better than that?

Over at the Burnside Archaeology blog there is a new promotional video up. There's a couple seconds footage from the knapping demo I did out there in June and I play a tourist in the earlier video. Great job, Matthew!





As for me, I spent a bit of time working on Fibre Optics and collecting lichen on the weekend. I ended last week by adding one more artifact to the Finished pile in the Parks contract.

Broken Biface: This artifact comes Aulavik National Park. (Original on Right, Reproduction on Left) Its a fairly rough biface with one end broken off. A biface is a tool that is worked on both surfaces and gives you a sharp cutting edge. It may have been a small knife, projectile point, or endblade that broke in manufacture. It looks to be at a fairly early stage because the flake scars along the edge are so pronounced. Normally as a biface nears completion the edge gets flatter and the flake pattern gets more complex. I don't know the origin of the stone used in the original piece, but I used a piece of English Flint from Devon, England to reproduce it. The colour and texture of the stone was a very good match and the flint forms in chalk, so even the patina is very similar. I knapped the complete biface and then scored and snapped it with a tile cutter to get the break. I had some control over where the break went, but there was also a lot of luck. Some of the patina on the reproduction is the actual chalk patina from the flint and the rest is a rock dust and glue mixture that I carmelized with the blowtorch to match the colour of the patina on the artifact.

Photo Credits:
Top: Screen grab from Cara and Pam's blog
Middle Videos: Matthew Brake, Nova Media and Burnside Heritage Foundation
Bottom: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: A Day in the life at The Grumpy Goat Gallery.
Middle Video 1: Imagine, Imagine life at Burnside over the past 5000 years
Middle Video 2: Burnside Archaeology Web Video
Bottom: Side by side comparison of biface reproduction (left) and original artifact (right) from Aulavik Island National Park.

Local Archaeology Blogs

Here are a few spots that I'm going to get my armchair archaeology fix from this summer. Check out these Newfoundland and Labrador archaeology blogs.

Signal Hill Archaeology: From the first week in July until the first week in August, the 2009 Memorial University Archaeology Field School will be taking place on the top of Signal Hill in St. John's. This blog will be written by students, staff, and the instructor; Amanda Crompton. Amanda and I started grad school at MUN at the same time in 1996 - Look at her now, Man! Now she DRIVES the school bus! You can read about their adventures online or pop by the dig the next time you climb the hill. Be sure to bring your uncle who'll ask them if someone lost a contact.

Burnside Archaeology: Another brand new archaeology blog. 2009 marks Laurie McLean's 20th season in the Burnside area, north of Terra Nova National Park. There's an Interpretation Centre to visit and boat tours to some of the province's oldest and most spectacular archaeological sites. This is the home of the iconic Beaches site and the Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite Quarry. I love the Burnside Heritage Foundation's logo: I think its the cleverest archaeology logo I've ever seen.

Live Like Dirt: This is one of my favourite local blogs, written by Andrew Holmes, an undergraduate archaeology student at MUN. Incidentally, Andrew is taking the field school on Signal Hill this summer and he participated in my flintknapping workshop last Sunday. You can see his beer bottle point here. For a rational good time, rock and roll and weekly quizzes, Live Like Dirt is a great read.

Photo Credits & Captions: Screen grabs from the linked sites.

Rhy-O-Lite!

Its been a crazy busy weekend since last Friday's post. I've delivered two wholesale orders, including the big Korea order to the Craft Council, spent Friday afternoon to Sunday morning on the Eastport Peninsula, and Sunday afternoon demonstrating flintknapping at the Geocentre in St. John's. I couldn't manage a long run on Sunday, but I did a few minutes on the treadmill in the evening. Its going to be a slow Monday morning, but I still have a hectic week ahead, so I can't slow down too much.

The trip to Burnside was great. Its been too long since I was last out there - the rhyolite quarry is such a striking site. Its just so huge - Laurie McLean's estimates for the numbers of worked flakes and cores in the main location is in the millions. Its overwhelming. There's 5 thousand years of flintknapping piled up a meter deep covering a talus slop that is tens of metres long and dozens of metre's wide. The exposed bedrock is battered and bashed from quarrying and there are large granite hammerstones scattered throughout the mix. Its mind-boggling.

There are smaller sites and knapping episodes strewn all over the mountain, from the summit to shoreline. Each of those spots are amazing, and the density of material begins to approach manageable levels. You can see discrete knapping events. One particularily interesting site is a small rock overhang or cave. Laurie's crew found part of a biface inside the cave and associated flakes. They excavated a small pocket in the boulders on the floor of the cave and found 800 flakes and the other half of the biface. The flakes were piled up below a natural stone seat and you can imagine the knapper sitting there, perhaps in out of the rain, working a rough block of rhyolite from higher up on the mountain into a portable bifacial core. Unfortunately for him or her, but fortunately for the archaeologist, one of those big bifacial cores broke and was left behind with the flakes to tell the story.

We put a tarp down inside that pocket in the cave and I sat on that same stone seat and demonstrated for the camera how someone using local hammerstones and antler would test a raw rhyolite core, discarding waste flakes and creating a portable bifacial core that would yield useful sharp flakes for the months to come. It was an absolutely unique opportunity. The site had been excavated, and we were careful to keep my modern flakes from contaminating the archaeological record. To sit inside that cave and knap rhyolite from that mountain, in exactly the same spot that a knapper sat and used thousand's of years ago is a pretty memorable experience. I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished documentary now.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Flakes, hammerstones and a view from the summit at the Bloody Bay Rhyolite Quarry.
Middle, Left: Laurie Mclean with Matt and Greg filming at the Beaches Site.
Middle, Right: A section of a very large Rhyolite biface that we found on the surface at a site near the quarry. Its broken and this section is perhaps a 1/3 or a 1/4 of the original biface. Likely, an expended bifacial core.
Bottom: Flakes in situ. Everytime you tilt your head down at Bloody Bay cove you'll see flakes like this. Its amazing!

To the North there lies a Cove...

I'm going to the Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite quarry for a couple days on Friday.

There is a short documentary being shot on some of the archaeology that is being done by Parks Canada and the Burnside Heritage Foundation. Archaeologists Jenneth Curtis and Laurie McLean are the stars, but I've been cast in the role of "Tim the Flintknapper". Tim lurks on jagged mountain tops, and demonstrates lithic reduction techniques at all who venture too near.

I'm looking forward to it, I haven't been to the quarry since 1997. There's no other site like it on the Island. There's no other chipped stone quarry that covers as great an area or has such deep deposits - everything you see is a flake, core, or hammerstone. Nearly every precontact culture that lived in Newfoundland used stone from this quarry to make cutting and scraping tools, especially those looking for large, durable tools.

I've known about the filming for a while, but the dates for the trip just got firmed up on Monday. I've juggled my schedule a bit so that I'll have the Korea order delivered to DevonHouse before I leave town as well as an order for the Burnside Archaeology Centre's gift shop ready to take with me. I'll be back in town by lunch on Sunday.

Drop by the Johnson GEO CENTRE for the flintknapping demo on Sunday afternoon. I'm still planning to work Ramah chert, but who kows, maybe I'll have some Bloody Bay Cove rhyolite to try as well.

Photo Credits:
Top: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Middle, Bottom: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Tim
Middle: Laurie McLean at the Charlie Site (Bloody Bay Cove Quarry), 1997
Bottom: A hammerstone sitting on large rhyolite flakes and core fragments at the quarry