Atlatls and Darts for Alaska and the Yukon

Chert and obisidian atlatl darts representing finds
form Ice Patches in the Yukon and Alaska's
Northern Archaic

Here's one last look at the Northern Archaic darts heading to Alaska and the Ice Patch dart that is on it's way to the Yukon.  This project began several months ago with a request from Jeffrey Rasic with the National Parks Service in Fairbanks, Alaska to make an atlatl and dart set based on artifacts from the area.  He sent me some Wiki Peak obsidian to make Northern Archaic (ca. 5000BP) dart points from and put me in touch with Greg Hare in the Yukon to help fill in the blanks with the organic part of the tools. 

 

A simple birch atlatl and the ice patch dart

The ice patch darts recovered by Hare and his colleagues over the past couple of decades served as the models for the dart shafts.  That led to adding a direct reproduction of an Ice Patch dart to the order for Hare.  Unfortunately, there haven't been any atlatls found in either area for the time periods in question, so we decided that a simple hooked stick would be the safest way to represent that part of the kit.  As the order evolved we added a lithic production sequence showing how a dart point would be made from a core of obsidian and a second Northern Archaic dart for one of Rasic's colleagues.    

This 4-stage production sequence runs from left to right, with an obsidian primary flake on the left side of the image, through to a bifacially worked blank, a finished projectile point, and the hafted point on the far right.  The small flakes between the flake, biface, and projectile point are about 1/10th of the total number of flakes removed to advance the piece to each stage.  Conifer pitch, red ochre, and sinew were used to haft the point.

The Northern Archaic darts are hafted with ptarmigan feathers.  Modified ptarmigan feathers have been found in ice patches, although it's not clear if they were used as fletching.  We decided to use ptarmigan feathers on the darts heading to Alaska because they are from non-migratory birds, which should not have any issues crossing international boundaries.

The Ice Patch dart head is hafted into it's 182 cm long birch shaft with red ochre and spruce gum.  The lashing is sinew and hide glue. 

The middle dart is the ice patch dart, fletched with duck feathers.  According to Hare, there are a couple of different fletching methods found on the ice patch darts.  Some use whole feathers with sinew passing through the rachis of the feathers.  The earlier darts use split feathers lashed in place with sinew.  I used the split feather method, but would love to try sewing the sinew through whole feathers some day.  My one regret is that the fletching is relatively short on these darts - around 15 cm long, while Greg Hare told me that at least one of the darts was found with feathers 30-35 cm long.  To find feathers that long you'd need to use birds of prey, migratory fowl, or non-local bird species, like turkeys.  These darts needed a compromise either in the species used or the size of the fletching and in this case I went with the size of the feather rather than substituting a foreign species.  But maybe turkey feathers would create a more accurate looking reproduction. Something to consider for next time.

The Northern Archaic darts were made with foreshafts with a conical insert that fits into a sinew reinforced socket on the main shaft.  The design of these forshafts is based on ice patch specimens.

All three darts have a dimple in the end to fit the pointed spur of the atlatl.

The birch atlatls are simple and nondescript. I used the length of my arm from the tip of my outstretched finger to my elbow as a guide for their lengt.

The Northern Archaic darts flank the ice patch dart in the middle.  It's hard to photograph these things because they are so long and skinny.  The ice patch dart is a one piece dart, without a foreshaft.  It's the longer of the three at a little over 185 cm long (6'1" or so).

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Archaic Darts

The two obsidian points are hafted
in foreshafts and the chert point is
in one long 182 cm long dart.

Shaping, filing, sanding, and burnishing the dart shafts for the Northern Archaic and Ice Patch reproduction darts took several hours, but they are finally ready to begin assembling.  The birch staves are a little tougher to finish than the soft woods that I'm used to working, but I think that the end product is worth the effort.  The points and feathers will go on with the help of sinew, spruce gum, and red ochre.

May was archaeology Month in Alaska.  Jeff Rasic sent me this poster. (click to enlarge)

This drawing and the artifacts that it is based on were the references for the reproductions.

I needed to knap a new point for the ice patch dart that is heading to the Yukon.  Instead of obsidian, I used chert and the style is a small lanceolate dart point.  

The point will be secured with red ochre and spruce gum and tied down with sinew.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Birch Darts and Duck Feathers

Until they are done I'm going
to keep them bundled together
 so they aren't tempted to bend.

 I spent the better part of the day working on the birch dart shafts.  The split birch was fairly straight, with even grain and hardly any knots.  I've tried to match the dimensions of the ice patch darts as closely as possible and the resulting shafts seem strong with a nice whip to them.  Currently the shafts are about 2 metres long, but I'll most likely trim them down to 150-180 cm.  Two of them will have detachable foreshafts and one will be all one piece.  I have an extra shaft on the go in case something goes wrong with the three that I need for the order.  If all of the darts survive, I should have an extra one for my own collection.

The dart staying in Canada
gets duck feathers.  The ones
crossing international boundaries
are getting ptarmigan.

The proximal end of the darts is very narrow - about 7mm wide and they taper gradually for a little less than a metre and then they have a more-or-less constant diameter around 1.3 - 1.5cm.  This makes a very flexible dart with a good bit of weight towards the distal end.  Combined with a largish stone projectile point and ptarmigan or duck feathers for fletching these should be very efficient projectiles.  The three I'm making are for display and teaching purposes, but it would sure be fun to try playing with these.  If anyone has tried throwing these darts, I'd love to hear from you.

I removed another couple of
millimetres in diameter after this
photo was taken.  These darts
a lot of spring to them.

I've taken some liberties with the process.  I harvested and split the birch trunk by hand and I've been working the shafts with hand tools, but they've had metal blades and I've used an electric disc sander for a lot of the shaping.  If I was making these entirely with a stone and bone tool kit, I think I would have kept splitting the wood to get smaller and smaller diameter splits until I had something close to the right diameter for the dart shafts.  The final shaping could be done with a stone scraper or flake.  It seems like the birch would be fairly cooperative with this type or reduction.  It can be little stringy if you aren't careful with the splitting, but the grain is nice and straight and the resulting staves should also be nice and straight.   The bends in the wood are pretty minor and I used a heat gun to straighten the wood several times as I worked it down.  So far it seems to be taking the new shape well enough.  I don't anticipate any bending problems.

These ducks don't migrate and they
obviously don't need these feathers
anymore, so I'm taking them.
Thanks ducks.

For references on the dart shafts and feathers, I've relied on Yukon ice patch finds.  There are lots of good references, but these two have been especially useful:

ARCTIC VOL. 65, SUPPL. 1 (2012) P. 118–135 The Archaeology of Yukon Ice Patches: New Artifacts, Observations, and Insights P. GREGORY HARE, CHRISTIAN D. THOMAS, TIMOTHY N. TOPPER, and RUTH M. GOTTHARDT

ARCTICVOL. 58, NO. 1 (MARCH 2005) P. 38–43 Identification of Ancient Feather Fragments Found in Melting Alpine Ice Patches in Southern YukonCARLA J. DOVE, P. GREGORY HARE, and MARCY HEACKER 

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Dart Planning and Planing

I started planing down the split birch staves for the Western Arctic atlatl darts and realized I still didn't quite have a clear picture in my mind of what I was aiming for so I paused to do a bit more planning.  A few weeks ago, Greg Hare sent me the measurements for four ice patch dart shafts.  The shafts range in length from 149 to 220 cm.  I traced out the dart diameters on a long piece of brown paper. It helped a lot.  Hopefully I can get into the workshop tomorrow and finish whittling down the birch. 

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

How long have rocks been around?

I got some really tough questions from the Beavers and Cubs on Monday night. First we had to establish that a flintknapper wasn't a kidnapper who takes flint. Most of the kids were Beavers, so they were between 5 and 7 and they needed some help understanding that things used to be different in the past. Usually I start a demo explaining what makes a good rock for making stone tools, but for this age they needed a little more background and had questions like "why did people make tools out of stone?" or "why didn't they just buy them with money?". The next time I work with kids this age, I'll need to remember to start at the beginning.

One of the tough questions I got at the end was "How long have rocks been around?". I think the question was asking what people made their tools from before rocks were around, so the answer was that rocks were always here. They were here before people came to Newfoundland and they were even around before the dinosaurs - which is about as old as you can imagine. I was grasping for a better answer - something that would acknowledge that rocks are as old as the earth or some kind of absolute number. Eventually I remembered that I had seen the oldest rock in the world recently. It was in the airport in Yellowknife and it was at least 3.9 Billion years old. I couldn't recall the name - "Acasta Gneiss" - but it came from the Northwest Territories and it dates between 3.9 and 4.1 Billion years old.

Unfortunately for the Yellowknife airport display (and the Smithsonian who hauled a 4 tonne boulder of this stuff down to Washington in 2003) researchers in Northern Quebec have apparently trumped the Acasta Gneiss with some 4.28Billion year old rock from the Quebec shore of Hudson's Bay.

I still like the Yellowknife airport though - they saved my darts for me while Canadian North lost the rest of my luggage.

Last summer, Lori and I were working in Nunavut and during our week off we flew to Calgary instead of St. John's. We didn't go through security at the start of our flight in Iqaluit, because the plane made a couple stops in the north. Before we could fly into an airport in the south we had to deplane and go through security in Yellowknife. I wasn't thinking and so I had my darts in my pocket. The security guard did everything he could to keep from taking them away from me, but he couldn't let me get back on the plane with them and I didn't know anyone in Yellowknife to hold them for me. I'd be flying back through Yellowknife in a week and he offered to hang onto them for me, so he gave me his info and put my darts in an envelope and put them in his pocket.

A week later we were flying back through Yellowknife and I tried to find the guard, but he wasn't working that shift, so I lost my darts. By that point, the darts weren't a big deal, because Canadian North had lost my checked luggage which had all my field gear and Lori's camera in it. I had to repurchase all my gear on my week off so that I could go back to work, so losing a set of darts on top of that was a pretty minor loss. It turned out that we couldn't fly into Iqaluit that day because of fog, so our Calgary-Edmonton-Yellowknife-Rankin Inlet-Iqaluit flight paused at Rankin Inlet and took us back to Yellowknife, for the night. Which meant I had another shot at getting my darts back - this time the guard was in the airport and he still had my darts in his glove box. So he ran out to his car and got them for me. The irony is that if I would have packed them correctly on the trip south they would have been lost with all my other gear, so my minor loss turned into a major victory!

The rest of the trip was a blur - we wound up going back to Edmonton and Calgary and then flying to Ottawa, overnight there, and then back to Iqaluit the next day.

Photo Credits:
Top, Bottom: Lori White
Middle: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Scenes from the Yellowknife airport, summer 2008.

My Favourite Dartboard

I'm going out to play darts with a bunch of friends this afternoon. I'm especially looking forward to it today because a friend of mine from Texas is in town and I haven't seen him in years. In 2002, I worked for Chris while he was doing his MA fieldwork in Labrador. He was excavating at archaeological sites at Snack Cove near Cartwright, Labrador.

It was an important year for me. From 1999 to 2001 I was involved with a large community archaeology project at Bird Cove on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula. It was my first big archaeology job coming out of grad school -- I was initially a crew chief and then one of two project co-directors. Days before we were supposed to go into the field for the 2002 field season we learned that we wouldn't be getting our ACOA funding for the year. Basically, I was out of a job.

I had started Elfshot in 1997 and while Bird Cove kept me busy from the spring to the fall, there was still a downtime in January-March that Elfshot fit into nicely. By 2002 I knew that I was turning down Elfshot jobs and that I might be able to expand the business beyond those 3 months, but I had no idea if there would be enough demand to fill up 12 months of the year.

When Chris' Snack Cove project came up I jumped at the opportunity to work in Labrador and the remote location and small crew meant plenty of time to ponder the future. We played a lot of darts. I'm in the habit of taking darts into the field with me, but we didn't have a dartboard. We stayed in an old wooden cabin with a few run down fishing stages around it. In one of the buildings I found an old wooden barrel lid and working from memory we turned it into a dartboard. The 8, 14, 15, & 16 were in the wrong places and you had to throw the darts really hard to make them stick, but we got a lot of use out of it.

By the end of the summer I'd decided to give Elfshot a go full time and its kept me steadily employed, contract to contract and order to order, for the past 7 years. I wasn't happy about losing the ACOA funding at the time, but without that shake-up, I wouldn't have gotten the push I needed to make a go of Elfshot as a craft business.

I was at a Craft Council Shop committee meeting yesterday afternoon and one of the things we were discussing was ways to deal with the downturn in the economy. Newfoundland seems to be in a bit of a bubble, the brunt of the recession hasn't really hit us yet, in fact, the shop sales in December 2008 were the highest on record. It was amazing, but we can't expect to stay unaffected forever.

If there is a silver lining to this downturn, I wonder if we will see a surge in new craft producers? It took losing my job for me to make the entrepreneurial leap and go to work for myself fulltime. I'd wager that there are other people who may be going through exactly that same thing right now. Its a scary decision to make, but if it works it can be very liberating. When you are your own boss you can put the numbers on the dart board in any order you choose.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast
Photo Captions:
Top Right, Groswater Palaeoeskimo endblade in situ, Snack Cove, Labrador
Left, A foggy day in Snack Cove. The building in the picture is where I found the barrel lid.
Middle Right, My Favourite Dartboard
Bottom Right, Arctic Cotton, Labrador