What are the parts of a Toggling Harpoon?

Here's a quick look at the parts of a Dorset Palaeoeskimo toggling harpoon and some of the tests to find a good ballistics gel seal to do harpoon experiments with.


This style of harpoon is used to attach a line to a seal. The hunter gets close enough to the seal to jab it with the harpoon, the harpoon head detaches and toggles beneath the skin of the seal. The hole where the line attaches to a toggling harpoon is near the middle of the harpoon head, so when the seal tries to escape, the harpoon head toggles, or turns sideways. A toggled harpoon head is bigger than the hole it made going in and is firmly embedded in the hunters prey. The line is used to haul the seal out of the water so that the hunter can finish it off.

That toggling action is one of the things I'm trying to illustrate with the ballistics gel seal. This particular video still doesn't show the harpoon head toggling, but I did learn a lot from it. One thing it illustrates is that the skin and fat layer of the ballistics gel seal work very well. They offer the right amount of resistance and are good approximations of the outer layers of a seal. The Dorset Palaeoeskimo harpoon heads from Newfoundland that I have modelled this harpoon on have a single line hole, and I believe that the line must have been secured to the harpoon head with a big knot of sinew on one side. On the test in the video, the sinew knot bulged out of the smooth contour of the harpoon head. It created a raised bump a couple millimetres high, but it was enough to snag on the rawhide skin. The resistance from that tiny snag was enough that the harpoon was bound up and the whalebone foreshaft broke. I learned two things. First, if I'm going to use a sinew knot to secure the line, it needs to be flush with the surface of the harpoon head and secondly, the forces involved in the experiment are great enough that things break when they go wrong. Which is also good, because examining how things break is very useful information when studying broken and discarded tools in the archaeological record.

After the foreshaft broke, I pushed the harpoon head down into the gel manually and it did toggle for me when I pulled on the line. In the photo below, you can see the gel tube suspended from the toggled harpoon head and line. The gel is still a little opaque to see everything that's going on, but you can make out a few interesting details. In the overhead shot, you can see the hole that the endblade made and the shadow of the harpoon head lying beneath the rawhide skin. In the inset shot you can see the endblade, which detached when the harpoon head toggled. It marks the depth that the toggling occurred, although the harpoon head itself squished up through the ballistics gel "fat" layer and is actually snagged just below the skin. You can see the rubbery rawhide skin flexing upward under the tension.

Photo Credits:
First, Second: Tim Rast
Video: Lori White
Third, Fourth Photo: Lori White

Photo Credits:
First: Labelled parts of a Middle Dorset Harpoon Reproduction, Elfshot 2009
Second: Showing the detached harpoon head
Third: Detail of video frame showing the sinew knot in the harpoon head line hole when it grabbed the raw hide.
Video: Testing the ballistics gel. The foreshaft breaks when the harpoon head snags on a knot in the sinew
Fourth: The harpoon head toggling in the Ballistics gel.