Port au Choix Dorset Palaeoeskimo Reproductions

Artifact reproductions of
Middle Dorset Palaeoeskimo
cutting, scraping, and carving tools

The set of Dorset Palaeoeskimo hafted stone tools is ready to send to it's new home at Port au Choix National Historic Site.  These pieces were commissioned by Parks Canada to use in hands on interpretation.  They are made from the same wood, chert, antler, ivory, bone, and sinew available to the Dorset culture 1500 years ago.  The nephrite that I used in the burin-like tools is similar to what has been found here, but I used stone quarried in B.C.  Likewise, the reddish microblades are made from an exotic jasper.  The red and green stones give the set a bit of a holiday feel.

From left to right; A side-hafted chert microblade with sinew lashing and a wood handle and brace piece, a hafted chert endscraper with sinew lashing and wood handle, a chert knife with sinew lashing and antler handle, and a hafted nephrite burin-like tool with sinew lashing on a wood handle with a bone brace.

There are a couple extra pieces in the set shown here, but most of this will be in the mail to Port au Choix shortly.

Multiple views of the hafted endscrapers.  These are unifacial tools and they were hafted in unifacial handles.

Multiple views of side-hafted microblades.  These are extremely sharp slicing tools for use on soft organic materials.  Along with some friends, I once cut more than 330 feet of seal skin into rope using a knife like this and it is still sharp today. 

Hafted burin-like tools.  Archaeologically the brace pieces from BLT handles and the brace pieces from microblade handles look very similar, but they had slightly different functions.  Here, the back of the brace is important in supporting the back of the nephrite bit and the brace fits inside the handle to made the handle width adjustable.  I used sinew lashing to tie down the thin end of the brace, but the original artifact that I based this reproduction on used a hole and a small wood peg instead.  Another difference is that the wood handle opposite the brace is an open slot on my reproduction, but on the original artifact this is closed off below the notch of the tool.  I didn't realize that when I made the reproduction, but the notch and base of the Port au Choix BLTs are also a slightly different style than the reference artifact that I used.  I'm ok with the open slot in this instance.

Dorset knives with carved antler handles, based on artifacts found at Port au Choix.  A couple of these handles have been found and I believe that they represent a stylized polar bear.

A close-up view of the lashing on one of the scrapers.  The lashing is twisted sinew thread approximately 1 mm thick.  Sometimes it is a single thread that has been twisted and other times I twisted multiple strands together to make a longer cord. 

The twisted sinew lashing on one of the burin-like tools.  I coated the thread with hide glue and reinforced the contact surfaces between the stone tools and their handles with the same.  The hide glue hardens and protects the sinew, without changing the look of the tool. 

A sample knife, endscraper, microblade, and burin-like tool with a scale.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A Groswater knife blade

This is the last week that I have to finish up Elfshot projects before the start of the summer field season.  I'm trying to wrap up a wholesale jewelry order for The Rooms and a teaching set of reproductions for a local elementary school.  I think I can get the jewellery done before I go, but I'm not certain about the order for the school.  This little chert asymmetric Groswater Palaeoeskimo knife blade belongs to the school set.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A Dorset Palaeoeskimo Set of Reproductions

The Dorset Palaeoeskimo artifact reproductions that I'm working on for the interpretation of the archaeology sites on Dildo Island are all finished.  However, as I write this, I realize that technically there was a harpoon in this set as well, but since all I did on that was make a replacement endblade for one that was lost over the years it slipped my mind.  Oh well.  Here's most of the Dorset pieces; a small soapstone pot, a hafted and unhafted chert scraper and a hafted and unhafted chert knife.

Chert scraper with twisted sinew lashing on a wood handle.  I'm not exactly sure what type of wood I used for the handle, it was left over from a recent project.  It might have been willow.

A Dorset knife with a handle inspired by handles found at Port au Choix, Newfoundland and Labrador.  There is also a replacement blade made from a nice banded grey chert leaning against the soapstone vessel in the background.

My main influence or the scraper handle was this wood scraper handle (right) in the Button Point collection from Bylot Island.  I saw this handle at the Canadian Museum of History when I was there a couple weeks ago to look at the drums in the same collection.  Its a simple open socket, with a well defined groove for lashing.  

The soapstone pot in the background is the same one that I showed in the previous post.  Aside from a little bit of finishing carving and abrading, the main difference is the antiquing, which was done by oiling the soapstone, smearing in charcoal and scorching it in a candle flame.  I haven't quite worked out a way to add thick layers of burnt grease to a reproduction, but it's relatively simple to add a dark stain of soot to make something appear fire-kissed.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Beothuk Triangular Biface Knife Reproduction

Beothuk reproduction scrapers, knife,
and harpoon head

There were a few smaller tools included in the set of Beothuk reproductions that I recently completed for The Mary March Museum, including a hafted knife and scraper.  The scraper was a relatively simple flake scraper hafted in a nondescript wood handle with sinew and covered in red ochre.  In the photo on the right, the two tools in the left half of the frame are scrapers.  The knife next to them is based on a couple of different sources.  I used a Little Passage triangular biface from Inspector Island as the main reference for the blade and a wood handle illustrated in Howley 1915 for the handle.

The handle is based on a wood artifact illustrated in this plate from James P. Howley's 1915 book; The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland The two items labeled  #5 are a knife and knife handle.  I used the top one as my main reference for this reproduction.

Beothuk or Little Passage reproduction knife.  Chert blade, softwood handle, gut lashing, pitch glue, red ochre stain

Here are the knife and scraper with the bow and arrow included in the set.

Photo Credits:
1,3-4: Tim Rast
2: Plate from Howley 1915 from Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website

Intermediate Period Scraper and Beothuk Collection Update

The correct way to hold and
use this style of scraper.

After posting the photos of the Intermediate Period scraper reproduction on Wednesday, I've got some important feedback from folks in Labrador explaining the proper way to use the Innu style handle that I used to mount the stone endscraper.  I included a photo in that post showing two different ways to hold the scraper and they were both incorrect.  The scraper should be held vertically, with your hand holding the stem and the heavy bulb at the top to add weight to the downward scraping action.  Scott Neilsen sent me a link to a fantastic video clip showing this style of scraper in use: you can view it here, Skimming the Fat and Removing the Hair.

I carved a bit more of the bulb to
create a longer stem for holding the
scraper.

As I mentioned previously, all that was preserved at the 3000 year old archaeological site in Sheshatshiu were small end scrapers made on flakes.  The handle is an historic Innu design.  Until an Intermediate Period site with organic preservation is found, we don't know for sure what kind of handles were in use 3000 years ago.  However, if we are going to use the analogy of an historic Innu style handle for the reproduction, then I should at least show the correct way to use it.  There were several ethnographic examples that I used as inspiration for the handle.  This one on the Tipatshimuna website was my primary source for the overall shape and construction and I used the measurements for several pieces in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History to guide the handle's size, like this one and this one.  The examples in the CMH online collection range in length from 21 to 29 cm long.  The handle that I made is meant to fit a relatively small stone scraper, so I went with a 23 cm long handle which places it in the smaller range of the ethnographic examples.  My hands are a little big for this particular handle, but I carved it to fit Lori's hand.

Beothuk harpoon head, scraper, and knife lying on a
caribou skin harpoon line.  Everything is there, except for
the ochre.

In other news, I'm wrapping up a large order of Beothuk reproductions this weekend and have several other pieces in the Sheshatshiu Intermediate period collection to complete.  Its going to be a busy few days.  The Beothuk set includes a bow and arrow, harpoon, knife, scraper, and flintknapping kit.  I can draw on existing inventory for a couple of those pieces, like the bow and arrow, but the rest needed to be built from scratch.  Everything is done now except for staining them with red ochre, which is a very important step.  Hopefully on Monday I'll have some photos of the fully assembled and ochre stained Beothuk harpoon.  At 12 feet long, its one of the larger reproductions I've ever done.  Its drying on the floor downstairs, where it starts in the living room and ends in the dining room.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Recent Indian Reproductions

I found these pictures on my hard drive from 2006.  They are a Recent Indian knife and scraper reproduction.  I can't recall who the client was, but I think it was either The Rooms or the Province.

In both tools, the stone blade is held in the wood handle with hide glue and rawhide.  Each piece is covered in Red Ochre.

The scraper is a thin, flake scraper and the style of the handle is loosely based on northern scrapers.  To the best of my knowledge there has never been a Recent Indian scraper handle found for a stone endscraper in an archaeological site in Newfoundland.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Terra Nova National Park Reproductions

Bank Site reproductions

These four Recent Indian arrows and Dorset Palaeoeskimo knives are heading to Terra Nova National Park, here in Newfoundland and Labrador.  They are based on artifacts found by Jenneth Curtis at the Bank Site during recent excavations in the park.  They'll be used as part of the interpretation of the site for visitors.

The reproduction points

The Globe and Mail has a nice photo of some of the Bank Site Recent Indian points in a piece showcasing artifacts from Parks'  archaeological sites across the country.  The photo in the Globe article focuses on the exotic material from the site.  According to the caption, 14 Ramah Chert projectile points were found at the site, which is a pretty high number, considering the quarry at Ramah Bay is a 1000 km away in northern Labrador.  The people who used these little arrowheads at the Bank Site are most likely the ancestors of the Beothuk, who lived at the Bank site between 1000 and 500 years ago.  Even though the points are small, I could match the neck width on most of the them and still fit them on the long, Beothuk style arrows.  Others were too narrow across the hafting area, and assuming that they would have been hafted in a similar fashion, they would have fit on smaller arrows, perhaps from a child's bow.

Fletched with two goose feathers

Other chert and rhyolite artifacts were found at the site, including stone that likely came from the Bloody Bay Cove rhyolite quarry, which lies just north of the Park boundary.  I used a combination of rhyolite and chert for the points in this set and hafted them in shafts that match the description of Beothuk arrows, made several centuries later. I made the pine shafts an arm length long, fletched them with goose feathers and sinew lashing and covered them in red ochre.

The arrows are about a yard long, or the distance from the centre of the chest to the tip of an outstretched finger; the draw length on the long bows used by the Beothuk and, presumably, their ancestors.

The reproductions and reference material

The little knife belongs to a different, earlier culture; the Dorset Palaeoeskimo.  I've made several of these lately, but this is the only one based on a specific artifact.  The original knife was made from rhyolite, which I matched with non-archaeological rhyolite from Bloody Bay Cove.  The Dorset occasionally ground their artifacts, especially in the southern and eastern areas of Newfoundland and this little knife has a ground facet in the centre.  I found that the rhyolite ground a little easier than chert and periodically grinding the surface made working the stone easier.  I find the rhyolite particularly tough to pressure flake, but grinding the surface would help see me through some trouble spots.  It may have played a similar function to the Palaeoeskimo knapper who made the original knife.

Dorset Palaeoeskimo knife; chipped and ground rhyolite blade from Bloody Bay Cove in an antler handle.  The handle is based on artifacts from Port au Choix, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

L'Anse Aux Meadows Dorset Palaeoeskimo Knife

Reproduction, artifact, and pressure flaker

Here's a look at the finished Dorset Palaeoeskimo knife reproduction that is based on an original stone artifact that was found at L'Anse aux Meadows by archaeologists in the mid-1970s.  It dates to about 1500 years ago, give or take a century or two.  I showed a couple images in the last post of how this knife would have looked when it was new and here it is after a bit of retouching using a pressure flaker, to resharpen it along the working edges.  The antler tool in the photo is the pressure flaker that I used to remove the tiny chips of stone along the edge to rework the shape.

L'Anse Aux Meadows knife

These knives are quite diagnostic of the Dorset Palaeoeskimo in Newfoundland and Labrador, meaning that they are frequently found at their sites and that they are different from the knives used by other stone tool using cultures in the Province.  They have an asymmetry to the blade, which becomes more noticeable throughout their life as they are used and resharpened along one edge more than the other.  The side-notches tend to be narrow and relatively low along the edge, which allows a larger portion of the stone to be exposed out of the handle as a useful cutting blade.  This is a development from stemmed knives and points that earlier Palaeoeskimo cultures used.  A stemmed knife requires a larger percentage of the stone to be buried in the handle to create a secure haft, which means you lose all that cutting edge.  You can see what I mean on the reproductions of the Saqqaq knives from Greenland.

Side view of knife edge and socket

The handles for these knives were organic so they are much less likely to be preserved than the lithics, but there are a few examples.  There are two examples of stylized polar bear handles made from antler and found at Port au Choix, and at least one in the wood collection from Avyalik Island.  The handle I used on this artifact is based on the simpler Avyalik Island artifact, although I had to make the lip and notching area a little narrower to match this specific artifact.  I secured it using sinew and hide glue.  I think sinew is a good candidate for hafting this kind of knife, because its strong and fine and could create a secure bond through the narrow side-notches.  Sometimes when stone tools are resharpened in their hafts the handle gets in the way and they are easier to sharpen in one direction than the other, so the edge will move away from the middle or develop a twist.  This was the case with the pre-Dorset knife from Seahorse Gully, but it wasn't the case with the L'Anse aux Meadows knife.  The edge of the blade was kept straight and followed the midline of the blade.  This was certainly the intent of the Dorset knapper who resharpened the blade and was probably made possible by the relatively short handle which could be flipped and held in any direction without making things awkward during resharpening.


Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Wapusk Knife and Endblade

Here's a look at the first of the completed Palaeoeskimo tools for Wapusk National Park. The goal with this project is to match the original artifacts, but not as they appear today, rather as they would have appeared when they were complete tools, with all the missing pieces. If some of the blog photos look a little cleaner lately, its because Elaine got this awesome new photo box for the Archaeology and Ethnology Lab at The Rooms.

Pre-Dorset Asymmetric Knife: Chert, spruce, hide glue and baleen. I've only seen a tiny sample of the artifacts from the Seahorse Gully site, and my attention has been focused on hafting them, which is fortunate because the tools are so well worn and used that the hafting area is pretty much all that remains in most cases. The working area of the tool was sharpened and re-sharpened right down to the handle. This knife has a bit of length left to it, but even it has been vigourously resharpened. Asymmetric knives get their name because the lateral margins or cutting edges of the tool are asymmetrical, often they'll have a slightly dogleg or banana-shape to them.

This knife was resharpened repeatedly while it was in its haft. When a stone tool gets dull it can be resharpened by chipping off a new series of flakes along the dull edge, making it slightly smaller. When a tool has a handle on it, it becomes a little awkward to hold when it comes to resharpening, because the handle starts to get in your way. On each edge, you wind up only removing flakes from one face of the knife. When you flip it over to sharpen the opposite edge, the flakes you take off on that side will be on the opposite face. Over time the knife gets narrower and the edge starts to twist away from the centreline.

You can tell that this was a well-used knife. The black line in the photo is meant to show the shape of the S-twist that developed from resharpening. By the end I was starting to get a little frustrated with knapping that twisting edge, wondering how much thinner I had to make it. I wish I would have taken a photo of the wide flat knife that I started with before wittling it down to this twisty little snake. The original artifact never broke, but it was just plain worn out in the end.

In contrast to the flat, lense-shaped knife, which was thinned at the base for hafting, there is also this endblade (artifact left, reproduction right). These things don't come with labels when they are found and its up to archaeologist's to try to work out what they are and how they are used. I'll talk more about this endblade when I have the finished harpoon built around it, but there are a few things about the artifact that make me think it would be hafted as a harpoon head and not a knife.

1. It has left/right symmetry. Unlike the knife blade which has a slight curve to it, this artifact is more-or-less equal sided triangle, leading to the tip.
2. It has a D-shaped or Plano-convex cross section. Plano-convex is just science talk for flat on one side and curved on the other. In the photo, the artifact is on top and the reproduction is below. In this case, that flat side is the important bit, because it is there to sit flush against the harpoon head. A knife will have a lens shaped x-section, curved on both sides. That's the case with the hafted knife, even though that lens shape has developed a twist through resharpening.
3. It has a flat box-base, not thinned like the knife This is kind of risky claim, because the flat base is actually cracked off, which usually implies that part of the tool is missing. However, in this case I think the crack was there from the start and the endblade was built around that break, which is how I knapped the reproduction. Other tools at the site seem to have been built on flakes that would require very little modification in the hafting area. Its almost like they would see the haft in the stone first an then build the tool around it. That's certainly what I'm having to do with the reproductions, so I guess it makes sense if that was how the pre-Dorset approach their tool making at Seahorse Gully as well.

I have to leave now for a few days, but I'll set up a couple pre-scheduled posts that continue this train of thought. I'm going to Alberta to teach a flintknapping workshop on making and hafting Palaeoeskimo stone tools, so its a bit of a working holiday. There's so much variety in the handles and tools that have been found preserved in the Arctic that there are probably analogs there that could be used for stone tools in lots of other parts of the world, so you don't have to be a Palaeoeskimo enthusiast to get something out of the session. The workshop is in Calgary, so I'll have a chance to spend a few day with family as well. I'm sure I'll have pictures when I get back.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
1: New mini-photo studio in the Archaeology Lab at The Rooms
2: The finished Wapusk Assymetric knife reproduction shown above the original
3: The knife in the handle
4: A look down the end of the Wapusk knife and the reproduction at the twist that developed from re-sharpening.
5: Wapusk Endblade: Arifact left, Reproduction right
6: Wapusk Endblade, looking at the broken box base: Artifact top, reproduction bottom
7: Palaeoeskimo tools ready to be hafted

Working with the Wapusk Artifacts

I'm working on the reproductions for Wapusk National Park. I have the paper patterns that I printed from photos that I took on the first visit, but its always good to compare the reproductions to the originals. No matter how many reference photos that I have, there's nothing like comparing the pieces side by side. In the photo on the right, the reproduction endblade is in the middle and is flanked on the left by the artifact and on the right by my paper pattern.

One way that I can compare the reproduction to the artifact is to try fitting the handles on the original artifacts. In the photo to the left the blade in the handle is the artifact. The reproduction is below and I can see that it needs a bit more resharpening before it is an exact match for the dimensions of the artifact. If the reproduction handle is good, then it should fit the original artifact just as snugly as it fits the reproduction blade. In some ways, I make a handle that fits the artifact and then a reproduction that fits the handle. I've mentioned before how the people who made these tools would have a different perspective on them than us. For them, the stone blade would be the temporary, disposable part and the handle would be the curated and reused part of the tool. Retooling the same handle with multiple blades would help create a more uniform toolkit over time. I can use that same idea to help make a more accurate reproduction. The handle is new, but by refitting first the artifact and then the reproduction I have a continuous chain from the old to the new version.

The side-by-side comparisons are also useful because I can use the artifact as the pattern and copy exactly the angles and dimensions that I need directly onto the reproduction. These marks are very useful and if I can get back into the shed and work the piece quickly enough after The Rooms visit, then I can still visualize the modifications that need to make and remember how the artifact sits next to the reproduction.

The snow goggles are a pretty cool piece of technology and are relatively simple to make. Snow goggles are a very old form of sunglasses, that cut the glare reflected off of ice and snow to help protect the wearer from snow blindness. Matching the exact dimensions of the artifact slows the build down a bit, but if you were to make a pair for yourself they'd be pretty quick and easy. They are made from a softwood tree trunk, with a diameter of about 40 cm * - which is pretty much the thickness of an old Christmas tree. The inside is scooped out to fit around your nose and eyes and the outside is bevelled to match. If I were making a pair for myself to wear, I'd probably do most of the work on the inside of the goggles first so that it fits comfortably on my face, and then work the outside last. They won't fit over glasses, but if you are like me and squinting your eyes helps you see a little more clearly with your prescription glasses off, snow goggles create a similar effect. You won't get 20/20 vision, but things are a little less blurry when you look through the eye slits.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
1: Wapusk endblade comparison
2: Wapusk knife comparison, artifact is in the handle and the reproduction blade is below
3: Side-by-side with the Wapusk Snow Goggles
4: Snow goggles, ready for the next round of modifications

*Edit: January 23, 2013. 40cm? What the?  I'm going to guess that I meant 4cm or 40mm.

Getting a Handle on Lithics

I'm working on a set of Palaeoeskimo tools. I have all the stone knapped and now I'm working on the wood handles. Its kind of funny - from our modern point of view it seems like the stone part of the tool lasts forever, while the organic handle, whether they be wood, bone, antler, ivory or whatever, vanished long ago. But for the original user it was actually the other way around. The stone is the disposable bit and once it was broken or resharpened down to a nub it was tossed and forgotten. The handle might be with you for years and years. From the users point of view, the stone tip is temporary and a carefully curated handle might last forever.

That has to be part of the reason that archaeological cultures stayed stable for so long. If you owned a knife for 10 years and had to replace the stone blade every 6 months, then for that single handle there are 20 more-or-less identical stone blades lost in the ground somewhere. Multiply that by everyone in your group and the incentive to be innovative and experimental in your tool design almost vanishes. From the user's point of view they've owned one knife that had to have a new blade added 20 times. From the archaeologist's point of view, this same scenario looks like 20 different knives. Believe it or not, with stone technology its actually much easier and quicker to knap a new stone tool to precisely fit a particular handle than to carve out a new handle. Its easier and less time consuming to chip your stone tool to fit your handle than it is to carve your handle to fit your stone.

The handles I'm working on now are based primarily on Saqqaq tools from Greenland and a few Palaeoeskimo wooden handles from Northern Labrador . The simplest ones are for the endscrapers and side scrapers. They have a shallow dish shaped depression in one end that accepts the scraper. Scrapers are unifacial tools, meaning that they are knapped on only one side. The flat side of the scraper faces away from the handle. I remember when I first heard about thumbnail scrapers I didn't realize they would have been hafted, because I'd never seen a scraper handle preserved. I thought you pinched them between your fingers. Trying to scrape a hide or stick with a scraper pinched between your fingers would be like trying to shave with a razor blade pinched between your thumb and forefinger.

At the Saqqaq site, there were a bunch of cool wood knife handles found - some with the stone blades and lashing material (usually baleen) still in tact. Unlike the unifacial scrapers, the knives were bifacial, or knapped on both surfaces. Conceptually the handles for the bifaces are the same as the scraper handles, with a dish shaped depression to accept the knapped stem of the tool, except that since the tool is knapped on both surfaces, it needs a handle for each face. The two halves of the handle form a kind of two piece mold around the stone knife and are bound together by baleen. This style of handle seems to work best with bifaces with long stems. On a two inch knife, almost an inch of the blade is hidden inside the handle.

Palaeoeskimo collections from Avayalik Island in northern Labrador also contain wood handles in a lot of different forms. Many of them are one piece wooden handles with a carved slot to accept a biface. They have a narrow lashing groove and are designed for notched bifaces. The Middle Dorset Palaeoeskimo collections from this site are about 1600 years old, compared to the 3900-3100 year old Saqqaq site. Hafting bifaces like this with side notches leaves a lot more of the stone blade exposed. It seems like a more efficient way to get more of a working edge on the same sized biface. A two inch knife hafted through side notches would only have an half inch or so hidden in the handle.

Hopefully on Monday I'll have some photos of the finished pieces with the sinew and baleen lashings all in place.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First: Assorted Palaeoeskimo bifaces and unifaces with their handles in progress
Second: A Saqqaq side scraper reproduction in progress on a page from Grønnow, Bjarne 1994, Qeqertasussuk -- the Archaeology of a Frozen Saqqaq Site in Disko Bugt, west Greenland. In Threads of Arctic Prehistory, edited by David Morrison an Jean-Luc Pilon, Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series Paper 149.
Third: A pair of theSaqqaq style side scrapers and their handles
Fourth: The reproductions I'm working on and two of the references I'm using; Threads of Arctic Prehistory and the September 1980 volume of Arctic Vol. 33, Number 3.
Fifth: Assorted end and side scrapers with their handles
Sixth: Saqqaq style hafts - single piece for unifaces and two pieces for bifaces
Seventh: Avayalik Island style handle on a Groswater Palaeoeskimo knife reproduction.