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.

Elfshot is now on Facebook and Twitter

Elfshot now has a Facebook Page. I like how Facebook is set up to handle events and since this is turning out to be an eventful year, I couldn't put off joining any longer. My regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Blog posts should also appear on Elfshot's Facebook page as links. If you use Facebook to stay in touch with the world, please consider becoming a fan of Elfshot.

Ditto for Twitterers. You can now receive tweets from ElfshotGallery. Twitter followers should receive a quick note each time I add a post to Elfshot: Sticks and Stones or information to Elfshot's Facebook page.

Finally, there's a new Printer Friendly button at the bottom of all the posts, that not only creates a clean document that you can easily print, but also a .pdf that will be easy to store.

Hmm... I thought that would take longer to explain. I guess I've got room to tell you the story of The Archaeologist, The Niece, The Uncle and The Knapper.

An archaeologist living in Labrador contacted me last September with a few photos of a very nice point that was found during one of his excavations last summer. The crew member who found it was the niece of a man who thought that a flintknapped reproduction of the point would make a fine necklace. He wanted it made as a Christmas surprise for his niece, so I made the necklace and in October when the uncle was in St. John's he picked it up. Everyone was happy. The End.

... until the Fine Craft and Design Fair, in November....

A young woman came into my booth and explained that she was an archaeology student who was a crew member working with my archaeologist friend in Labrador last summer. She described finding this one particular point and wanted to know if I could make her a reproduction as a necklace if she sent me some photos of it. I realized right away that she was the niece and that her uncle had already got her exactly the necklace she wanted, but I couldn't very well tell her that. I was stuck. I couldn't say "no" without spoiling the surprise and I couldn't say "yes" and make her another necklace knowing that she already had one on the way. So I had to say "sure, no problem" and then I spent the rest of the fair trying to come up with a way out it all. I e-mailed the archaeologist and let him know what was up and we decided that the best thing to do would be to drag my heels until after the holidays and all would be revealed on Christmas morning. Still, I dreaded having to come up with an excuse to put her off and I hoped she would forget about me. No such luck. A few days later the exact same photos that the archaeologist sent me back in September arrived in my inbox, but this time from the niece. I had to pretend that I'd never seen them before, struggle over a quote, and then fabricate an excuse why I couldn't possible knap a single arrowhead for her until 2010!

Since its 2010, I figured it would be safe to check in with her yesterday and everything worked out just fine. No one spoiled the surprise and she loved her necklace!

Photo Credits:
Top: Screen Grab from Facebook
Second: Screen Grab from Twitter
Third: S. Neilsen
Fourth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Elfshot's Facebook Group
Second: ElfshotGallery Twitter
Third: The Point at the centre of The Archaeologist, The Niece, The Uncle, and the Knapper
Fourth: The Reproduction, ready to be wired for a surprise Christmas Necklace

How does a Thule Harpoon Work?

Before Christmas, I promised that I'd describe how a Thule harpoon works. I wanted to take a few new photos of the harpoons to illustrate the different components, but we've had such mild weather that the backyard was full of green grass. This weekend, we finally got snow, so here's a few appropriately wintry shots.

Materials: From tip to base, the materials used in the harpoon are nephrite (endblade), walrus ivory (harpoon head, finger rest, and butt), whale bone (foreshaft, socket, tension piece and tension peg), spruce (main shaft), seal skin (harpoon line, lashing line), baleen (finger rest lashing), and sinew (lashings on harpoon line).

Finger Rest: A Thule hunter would probably be wearing mitts when they threw a harpoon like this, so having a finger rest at the balance point of the harpoon keeps your icy mitt from sliding along the shaft when you go to throw. In the photo on the left, the finger rest is the little sharks fin that my fingers are resting against. The finger rests were secured both by being fit into a rectangular slot in the mainshaft and tied down to the shaft. I like to use baleen lashings to secure the finger rests. The baleen are those two black bands underneath the tension piece.

Tension Piece and Tension Peg: The harpoon head is firmly held onto the foreshaft by having the first 3 feet or so of the line attached to the mainshaft. A bone or ivory tension piece was attached to the line. The tension piece has one or more holes in it that fit over a peg placed midway down the mainshaft. When the line gets wet, it will stretch, so having two holes in the tension piece gives you different settings for the tension in your line depending on the season and weather conditions. With the tension piece in place, the harpoon head can not be removed, so how does it detach when you strike your prey?

The answer is in the design of the foreshaft - its a breakaway design that is built to roll out from its socket, when the weight of the thrown harpoon hits the target. When the foreshaft bends at the socket, it creates enough slack in the line that the harpoon head can detach and toggle in the animal. At the same time the tension piece falls off the peg and the harpoon line detaches itself from the mainshaft.

Socketed Foreshaft: The foreshaft fits into a socket on the end of the mainshaft. The socket and foreshaft were usually made from ivory or whalebone. I've used whalebone in this reproduction. Ivory sockets are pretty cool, because the base of the tusk was used and the pulp cavity of the tooth forms a natural hollow that fits over the end of the wood mainshaft. If you find the right size and shape of tusk to start with, then most of the work is done for you. If you are really lucky, the rest of the tusk can be worked into a foreshaft and harpoon head. One tusk will give you all of the ivory that you need for one harpoon.

Unlike the fixed foreshafts used by the earlier Palaeoeskimo groups, the Thule developed the socketed foreshaft so that its rigid when thrown, but bends when it impacts the prey. Kind of like the crumple zone on a car. The shape of the socket and the foreshaft prevents it from rocking forward or back, so the only way it can bend is right or left. The hunter could even determine whether the foreshaft would roll out to the right or left, by varying the placement of the lashing holes in the foreshaft and mainshaft and by adjusting the tension in the leather lashing. You can preset the foreshaft to bend whichever way you want, to take full advantage of the barbs and the toggling action of your harpoon head.

Thule vs. Palaeoeskimo Harpoons: The photo below shows the difference in size between the larger Thule harpoon reproduction and the smaller Palaeoeskimo harpoon. Both are toggling harpoons that would have been used for seal hunting, although the Thule harpoon may have also been used for larger seals and sea mammals like walrus.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First, A complete Thule Inuit Harpoon Reproduction
Second, The finger rest is there to keep your mitt from sliding when you go to throw the harpoon
Third, Note the tension in the line between the tension piece and the harpoon head in the distance
Fourth, The harpoon head in place on the foreshaft
Fifth, A side view of the foreshaft in the socket, without the harpoon head and line in place
Sixth, The foreshaft rolls out of the socket on impact, creating slack in the line
Seventh, With slack in the line, the harpoon head can detach and toggle
Eighth, Side by side comparison of a Dorset Palaeoeskimo and Thule Harpoon reproduction

Thinking Out Loud about Sinew and Workshops

This week has been kind of all over the place, while I've been slowly getting back to work and organizing myself and my workspace for the coming year. I managed to braid a 60 foot line of sinew before I ran out of material. I still have short pieces of sinew that I can use on small hafting projects, but I need a little bit more before I can get to my 70 foot goal. I'm not really sure where all 70 feet will be used, but if that's what people say to use, then that's what I'll use. I don't want to be the guy who backs his bow with 60 feet of sinew when everyone else uses 70 feet. Nobody wants to be that guy.

So, I've ordered some more materials. I need to restock my sinew. For the most part I use 3RiversArchery.Com, a traditional archery supplier for sinew and similar resources. I put in an order for rock and fibre optic glass with Neolithics as well. I'm still planning to offer some flintknapping workshops in St. John's in the coming weeks - a basic "beer bottle to arrowheads" pressure flaking class and also an "introduction to percussion" workshop, where people will work with hammerstones and antler billets. I'll need the Obsidian and English Flint that I have on order for the percussion workshop, so I can't really set the dates until it arrives. But hopefully things will work out for the 2nd or 3rd week of February.

I do have one demonstration date that I can share - February 21st at The Rooms, 2-4 PM. I'll be working Ramah Chert and demonstrating how stone tools were made - bring the kids!

Things are also in the plans for a workshop in Calgary at the beginning of March. I'll post more details on that when, and if, things get firmed up.

Photo Credits:
Top, Middle: Tim Rast
Bottom: Patty Wells

Photo Captions:
Top: 60 Feet of braided sinew.
Middle: Ramah Chert Flake Scatter
Bottom: Scraping with a stone scraper

Processing Sinew

I found a leak in the back of my workshop during the clean up on Monday, so I've been taking advantage of the unseasonably mild weather to seal it up. I siliconed the crack on the outside and I'm drying out the damp spot on the inside. That means that I haven't been able to completely reset my shed, so I can't make a big mess in it yet. In the meantime, I spent yesterday processing and braiding sinew.

I'm finally getting back to the Tuktut Nogait bow that I started over the summer. The Parks reproduction was finished, antiqued and sent off last fall, but the functional copy that I am building for myself got pushed to the sidelines as deadlines started looming. The bow is cable backed, which means that it has a cord of braided sinew running end to end and lashed around the wood. The cable backing increases the power and durability of the bow and the lashing allows bows to be scarfed and spliced together out of shorter fragments of wood, antler, horn, or baleen. I don't know exactly how much cord I'll need, but I've read 70 feet or more.

The sinew I'm using comes from some moose leg tendons that I collected a couple years ago while working on a pair of moose bone daggers. At the time I was most interested in the bones, but I set the tendons aside and let them air dry. Within a few weeks they were stiff and after a couple years they were rock hard. If I had caribou or sea mammal sinew they would be my first choice for this project, because they can be found in Tuktut Nogait National Park, where the bow was found. Still, moose isn't that bad, the yew used in the original bow would have come from moose country and the moose bone daggers that these reproductions are based on came from just down the coast in the Mackenzie Delta.

To process the tendons I spent a couple hours pounding them on a wooden anvil, with a hammerstone. The hammering cracks through the outer sheath and softens the sinew inside. I suppose it would be a little like hammering apart the plastic tips of a shoelace to get to the string inside, but on a bigger scale. As the sheath is pounded it takes on a kind of waxed paper texture and can be pulled off the stringy sinew. As you pound the sinew it starts to separate into cords which you can begin to pull apart into threads of the thickness that you want. Sort of like those cheese string snacks. After a couple hours of work the tendons went from looking like crunchy dog treats to big stringy piles of tough white thread in convenient 18 inch lengths.

I'm not sure how far the sinew will get me, but I braided 20 feet of cord last night and I still have a big pile of sinew left. Maybe I'll have enough. I haven't braided this much sinew before and keeping the cord an even thickness is a bit tricky. Its a three strand braid, and at first I was trying to make each strand a single piece of sinew 1/3 of the thickness of the finished cord, but that didn't really give me an even strand. It got thinner and thicker as I went along. Right now I'm braiding with two or three thin threads of sinew in each strand and it seems to be a little easier to keep it a regular thickness. Plus there is much more overlap between the start and finish of each piece that gets braided in, which should make a stronger cable.

Hopefully, I can get the rest of the 70+ feet braided today. My hands and mouth are kind of sore from yesterdays work. To clean up the fuzzy bits on the sinew when you pull it apart into thread you can run the thread through your mouth to dampened it down. The corners of my mouth are a little raw from all that thread. I feel like the Joker.

Photo Credits:Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First: Sinew Processing. Unprocessed moose sinew lying on the tarp. Hammerstone and wood anvil. The bigger pile on the wood anvil is the pounded sinew from an identical tendon and the smaller pile is that papery sheath that was pounded off.
Second: pounded moose sinew
Third: Side by side comparison, dried raw sinew on top, pounded sinew on the bottom
Fourth: Moose metapodial dagger reproductions.
Fifth: Pounding the sinew
Sixth: The sinew starts to pull apart
Seventh: 20 feet of braided sinew cord. only 50 more to go!

Home From the Holidays

Every winter, over Christmas and New Years, Lori and I rent a house with another couple and get away from phones and computers and responsibilities for as long as possible. Its my one real vacation each year. The origins of the trip are ancient and complex, but this is the fourth year that we've rented a house for the Holidays, although there were several seasons of practice before that at Lori's parent's cabin.

This year we stayed at Amber Retreat, a recently renovated salt-box house in Durrell, near Twillingate. (In the photo on the left, its the buff yellow house on the left.) It was a fanastic house - definitely one of our favourites! The nine nights and 10 days we spent there ran together like one long Sunday afternoon. Eating, sleeping, reading and playing games.


For me, the games are always a highlight. Uno was a popular one this year for those times after a nap or late in the evening, when you weren't alert enough for the strategy of this year's big board game. We discovered Agricola - a massive farming board game that takes place in 1670, where your goal is to build your farm and feed your family. According to Board Game Geek.com its the number one player ranked game in the world. Its just the kind of game I like. Lots of little wooden pieces to collect and spend, cards to change the rules, and every time you play it, its different. There's even a 1 person version so I can stay in tip-top shape for next season!

We popped out of our little time warp to exchange stockings on Christmas morning and drink Champagne and cheer when we saw "Durrell" flash across the screen on NTVs New Year's countdown. But every other moment it was back to our perpetual Sunday afternoon.

I guess I need to get back into work mode now. It seems like a good time to do some cleaning up. Last year, every job rolled right over top of the next from June until December and I really haven't done a good clean up in the shed for months. No one who has seen my office would believe me, but I do really like to clean and reset my workshop between each job.

Photo for Dad:

Finally, here's a farm picture that I omitted last time. I think Dad was concerned that my previous set of photos implied that he hadn't bought any new machinery since the first half of the 20th Century - so here's his Versatile Tractor.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 & 8, Lori White
Photos 2-7 & 9, Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First, Driving to Durrell
Second, Amber Retreat (buff yellow house on the left with the grey and black car parked beside it)
ThirdLori's Enchiladas!
Fourth, Agricola after a tight game - a 3-way tie - 35 points each!
Fifth, Scenic Durrell
Sixth, Christmas stocking chaos
Seventh, Lori reading on her landing
Eighth, Tim reading
Ninth, Versatile tractor, Donkey and Horse at Little Profit Ranch, Ensign, Alberta

Happy New Year!

Photo Credit: Erick Walsh

Photo Caption: Fibre Optic Jewelry from Elfshot