Ivvavik, Aulavik, and Tuktut Nogait Recap

This is the final post on the Parks Canada project and then I'll stop talking about it. It went on a few weeks longer than I expected and I blame a lot of that on the weather slowing down some of the final drying stages. The photos show the original Inuvialuit artifacts alongside the reproductions. These aren't casts - they are 1:1 reproductions made in the original materials; wood for wood, antler for antler, tin for tin, etc. All of the artifacts have Parks Canada numbers attached to them somewhere. I marked or engraved a "TR" in the same location on all of the reproductions to help distinguish them from the originals. I have one last meeting in at The Rooms this morning. Elaine Anton has been a tremendous help arranging the shipping and storage of the artifacts while I've been working on them. Today she assesses the condition of the artifacts to ensure that there was no deterioration of their condition over the summer and we'll package everything up for FedEx to pick up. Later today the artifacts go back to the conservation lab in Winnipeg and the reproductions head to the Parks Canada Office in Inuvik.

Ivvavik National Park:

Artifacts in the middle, reproductions above and below

Artifacts in the middle, reproductions left and right

Aulavik National Park:

Artifacts (bottom) Reproductions (Top)

Artifacts (bottom) Reproductions (Top)

Tuktut Nogait National Park:

Artifacts (bottom) Reproductions (Top)

Artifacts (bottom) Reproductions (Top)

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:

First: The "TR" Signature. Well, technically I snuck in a Lazy L there for my middle initial, too.

Second-Seventh: Artifact Comparisons.

Fort Garry Tobacco Tin and Quartzite, Again, Finally

I ate about six pounds of jujubes, gummy worms, and gum balls yesterday so it must have been a good birthday. Lori also topped up my chocolate covered espresso beans to help me wake up in the mornings, which is good because six pounds of jellied sugar rolling around your guts sure doesn't make you want to pop out of bed the next day. I also got a bunch of new clothes including this shirt.

I had hoped that yesterday would be the last day working on the Parks contract, but after comparing the final reproductions to the artifacts and talking to a conservator friend who works at The Rooms, I realized that almost everything was missing an important brown colour. Its all done, but the last set of artifacts could really use some more Burnt Umber, so on the way home I stopped at MF Kelly and picked up some pastel and charcoal sticks to grind up and dust on. I have one more trip today to confirm that Burnt Umber made them good and then thats it. It'll just be packing and shipping after that.

Fort Garry Tobacco Tin: Aulavik National Park. The reproduction is above the original in both photos. This was a new sort of reproduction for me so it had a bit of a learning curve. I've talked a little about the history of the tin and my approach to reproducing it in previous posts. The words that you can't quite read say "FORT GARRY SMOKING TOBACCO". Aging the paint and adding the rust were the most challenging aspects of this project. I wound up using white washes over areas of the paint to create the sun bleached look of the paint. Without the white wash the paint colours and contrast were a little too sharp. The rust/paint boundaries were still a little sharp. In the artifact there is a kind of rusty halo that creaps out around the exposed rusted metal into the adjacent paint. On my reproduction the paint/metal boundaries were too sharp until I added a final red ochre wash around the rust patches to create the fuzzy boundaries and depth that I needed.

It was possible to have a lot more control over the rust than I'd imagined. The paint did its job and prevented the muriatic acid from rusting anywhere that it touched. To guide the shape fo the rust pattern all Ihad to do was scrape off the paint in the areas that I wanted to rust. Once the muriatic acid had rusted an area I could tweak the colour by adding water, sunlight and a quick drying environment to give me brighter reds and oranges. Dabbing a bit of tea on the rust would turn it black from the tannins. The piece was constantly evolving and responding to the temperature and air around it, on dry days it would be more orange and on damp days it would be more black. To try and stabilize it at the point I wanted it, I sprayed on a clear varnish. I needed that clear finish to match the gloss of the original tin and blocking out the air should prevent future changes in the rust colour.

Quartzite Scraper: Tuktut Nogait National Park. The artifact is on the left and the reproduction is on the right. This is the last piece of quartzite in this contract. I don't know how many versions of this piece I made over the summer, but I destroyed most of the quartzite that Jack Cresson gave me trying to get this piece out. Basically, its a very short hard hammer flake removed from the dish shaped flake scar of a previous hard hammer flake. Its part of a cone made on the negative space made by a cone. Its another one of those really simple and really difficult pieces to make. The original artifact would have taken less than 20 seconds to make by hitting one rock with another rock twice. But trying to match those exact conditions a few hundred years later is like trying to copy a snowflake. Like I said on Wednesday, the simpler something is the harder it is to reproduce.

Photo Credits:
Top: Lori White
Second-Fourth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Comparing Fort Gary Smoking Tobacco Tins in my birthday shirt
Second: Fort Garry Tobacco Tin (bottom) and reproduction (top)
Third: Back of the Fort Garry Tobacco Tin (bottom) and reproduction (top)
Fourth: Quartzite flake scraper (left) and Reproduction (right)

Antler Reproductions and Apple Picking

We had a new addition to our backyard thanks to Wednesday's windstorm. Our neighbor's 30ft apple tree blew over into our yard, right across my path to work. St. John's was reported to have received 50 mm of rain and had wind gusts up to 122km/hour. When the tree went down it was being plastered by slush pellets and weighed down by its own leaves and apples. There was no damage done and in about 90 minutes on Thursday morning Lori and I picked 3 bags of apples and chopped up the tree and returned it to the neighbor's yard in 4 big piles. She's going to have a bit of a surprise when she gets back from Vegas!

I don't have any trips to The Rooms this week, but my plan is to have everything from the Parks job finished for my next visit. There are always things to tweak the first time I think things are finished, so realistically I'll need at least one more trip after that to really be done, but I need to wrap this job up and dedicate more time to Craft Fair preparation.

Here's a look at the latest finished Parks Canada Inuvialuit reproductions:

Composite Barbed Antler Point: Aulavik National Park. This was a one of the more complicated pieces in the job, because its a composite of two separate antler pieces and three iron rivets (plus at least a half dozen different lichen varieties) . I made the antler point and brace longer than necessary so that I could break them to the correct length and antique them. For the rivets I used sections out of a wire coat hanger, heated and hammered to create the rivet heads and then rusted with Muriatic acid. The final stage was gluing on the lichen. This is one of those pieces that I get confused on which is the artifact and which is the reproduction when they are side by side (artifact is on the left and reproduction is on the right). Barbs like that often mean fishing, but I'm not certain if that's the function of this artifact or not. I don't know a lot about the site it was found at.

Drilled Antler: Aulavik National Park. The artifact is on the left and the reproduction is on the right. This is a little antler brace piece that would probably would have functioned similarly to the small piece on the composite barbed antler. Both the original and the reproduction are made from caribou antler that has been weathered white and covered in lichen. The biggest difference is that the lichen grew on the original piece and I lifted mine from rocks near St. John's. The bright orange lichen is called jewel lichen and it grows on rocks fertilized by birds. Fortunately there are varieties that grow in Newfoundland that are a pretty good match for the jewel lichen that grows in the Arctic.

Photo Credits:
Top: Tim Rast
Second: Lori White
Third-sixth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: The new addition to our back yard
Second: Disassembling the apple tree so I could walk to work.
Third: Side by side comparison of the composite antler barbed point (original left, reproduction right)
Fourth: Side by side comparison of the composite antler barbed point (original foreground, reproduction back)
Fifth: Side by Side comparison of the drilled caribou antler artifact (original left, reproduction right)
Sixth: Side by side comparison of the drilled caribou antler artifact (original background, reproduction foreground)

Newly Completed Parks Reproductions

Here's a look at the most recent batch of completed artifact reproductions. These are some of the bigger pieces that Parks Canada is having me reproduce, so having them in the finished pile makes me feel like the work is almost over. At this point the bulk of the work is done and its coming down to some very nit-picky back and forth antiquing.

Wooden Handle: (Ivvavik National Park). This artifact (middle in both photos) has a few competing interpretations, including dog whip handle and gaff handle. My preference is gaff handle. There is a rust stained channel on one end with a squarish cross section that appears to have held an iron object, perhaps an iron spike modified into a gaff hook. There is a ghost of a cord wrapping around that channel which would have held the iron object in place. The artifact has a roughly octagonal cross-section and the end opposite the rust stained channel is burned. It looks like the rest of the gaff handle was burned away.
Probably the most challenging aspect of this reproduction was matching the ghost of the cord wrapping. On the artifact, the points where the cord touched the wood are light and the darker staining is in the gaps between the cord. So I couldn't just stain a cord and wrap it around the handle, because that would give me the opposite pattern that I needed. That would stain where the twine was, not where the twine wasn't. Instead I coated a length of twine in beeswax, twisted it to match the twist of the cord on the original artifact and then applied a water-based stain. The wax blocked the stain from penetrating the wood everywhere that the cord touched, but it could concentrate in the gaps between the twists in the cord. I put on a coat of wood conditioner before wrapping the cord and applying the stain to try to keep the stain from seeping into the wood grain too much.

Drilled Antler: (Aulavik National Park) I didn't really expect to get as close a match as this turned out to be. I've talked in other posts about all the shaping and bending that went into this piece. It was tough to create a natural looking antler surface on a piece that was almost completely modified from the original, but I'm happy with the results. There are many layers of antler dust, charcoal, rock dust, saw dust, carpenters glue, and wood stain to create the cracked weathered look. In the photo with the case, the reproduction is in the foreground and the artifact is in the background.

The main area that I wanted to leave natural antler was in the cross-section of the cut. Six holes were drilled through the antler and then it was cracked off through the holes. The best way to make that look real was to drill six holes and then crack it. I got lucky and it cracked just like the original. In the photo, the artifact is on the left and the reproduction is on the right.

Whalebone Adze Socket: (Ivvavik National Park) This is one of those reproductions where the raw material does half the work for you (artifact is in the center). There isn't any other material that looks or feels quite like whalebone. In the photo at the top of the post you can see the hole where the bit would have been inserted, probably stone. The narrowed section is the hafting area for the handle, which are often made from a section of caribou antler and tie on with skin lashings. An adze is a woodworking tool, similar to an axe, but with the blade mounted flat, like a hoe. It would also be very handy for working whalebone, which can be worked similarly to wood. There is very little antiquing here, just a bit of tea staining and then a smudge of charcoal to match a greasy black patch on the top of the original.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First: Whalebone Adze Socket (middle) and reproductions
Second: Wooden Handle (middle) and reproductions
Third: Wooden Handle (middle) and reproductions
Fourth: Staining the cord markings
Fifth: Drilled Antler reproduction (forground) and original artifact
Sixth: side by side comparison of drilled end, original artifact on the left
Seventh: Whalebone adze socket (middle) and reproductions

Scraper and Fish Hook - In the Bag!

When I got back from the Rooms yesterday there were two tow trucks and a police car parked in front of our house. Traffic was crawling along and there was a car in the street scrunched diagonally into a parked car a few doors down from us. Before hitting that parked car they'd clipped the mirror off of our neighbors car who was parked right outside our house. We got pretty lucky. Parking at The Rooms has been terrible this summer, but if I hadn't been there for a couple hours yesterday afternoon, then our car could have been the one with the missing mirror or the crumpled fender.

Here are two more finished pieces.

Flake Scraper: This is an artifact from Aulavik. (original on the right) Its made from quartzite, that was probably collected near the site from glacial till. I have a tough time getting quartzite in Newfoundland, but I was lucky to have met Jack Cresson a couple years ago and he left me a couple pieces of meta-quartzite from his neck of the woods. I believe the piece I used on this reproduction is from New Jersey. Its an excellent texture match for the artifact, which is a simple scraper made on a bifacial thinning flake. It would have been struck from a larger tool and then modified on one face to create a steep scraping edge. In the photos the flake platform is at the top of the photo and the scraper edge is at the bottom.

When I look at these photos they are kind of like looking at that optical illusion of the cake with the missing slice - sometimes they look right and sometimes they look upside down to me.. The convention in archaeology is to photograph flakes with the platform at the top, but scrapers are usually photographed with the working edge at the top. I photographed this like a flake, instead of a tool, so for archaeologists looking at this picture the flake properties are probably accentuated. It looks like a flake made into a scraper. If I would have photographed it with the scraper edge at the top I would be emphasizing the 'toolness' of the artifact over the 'flakiness' of it. If I wanted to argue that this was a lightly retouched flake quickly modified into an expedient tool, then these are the photos that I'd use. If I wanted to argue that this is a carefully made scraper, perhaps a diagnostic form, then I'd use a photo with the scraper edge at top. I wasn't thinking about all this when I took the photo, it just looked right to me to photograph it with the platform at the top, but another archaeologist could look at the same object and instinctively orient it the opposite way. Sometimes that bias creeps in unintentionally, but sometimes its used intentionally to bolster one interpretation over another.

Fish Hook: The original fish hook (middle) was found at Ivvavik National Park. I mentioned this one in an earlier post and here's a look at the finished reproductions. The two holes at the thin end are for attaching the fishing line and a metal or bone spike would have been fastened in the large hole at the bulb end. In this photo, I'm holding the object in my hand - this is how archaeologist's say "This is a very cool object and if we don't find something better I'll put this picture on the report cover."

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Photo Caption:
Top: Ventral surface of the fish hooks - original in the middle
Second: Dorsal surface of the flake scraper - original on the right
Third: Ventral surface of the flake scraper - original on the right
Fourth: Dorsal surface of the fish hooks - original in the middle

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.

Fort Garry Tobacco Tin Progress

One of the artifacts that I'm working on is a portion of a rusted tobacco tin found in Aulavik National Park. The partially visible words on the tin say 'FORT GARRY SMOKING TOBACCO'. Its a different material for me to work, but if I take it one step at a time its manageable. Fortunately biscuit tins are still made in a very similar way today as these tobacco tins were a hundred years ago.

For the reproduction, I used a section of an old cookie tin to create the blank. I used a blowtorch and soft steel brushes to strip the paint off and then had to cut and hammer a new lip to match the Fort Garry tin, but its a good match now.

Now that I have a basic tin blank, I need to transfer the design onto it. At first I looked for fonts on my computer that matched the lettering on the can, but I didn't have any luck. I guess the Fort Garry graphic design team weren't using MS Office. So instead, I photographed the tin and manually traced the letters in CorelDraw. That gives me the clean template that I can use to print and make stencils. I'll print the designs onto clear acetate and cut them out using an x-acto knife.

I found a few reference photos of antique Fort Garry tobacco tins that appear to be the same style as the artifact. That helps with filling in some of the missing lettering and colour matching. There were several different desings used over the years, but the one in the photo on the left seems to be a good match with the artifact I'm working with. According to the site, the paper tobacco tax seal on the antique tin is dated 1915. Luckily, the artifact is missing the complicated image shown on the lower half of the antique, so the part I need to print is fairly simple.

After painting, the final step will be the antiquing; cutting, bending and rusting the reproduction to match the original. Cutting and bending won't be a problem and I've collected a few recipes involving different kinds of household acids and salts to accelerate the rusting. I'll need to experiment with those now so that when the tin is painted and ready I'll know what I need to do to get the rust growing where I need it.

The metal work is a bit of a departure for me, so I've also been working on some of the lithics for the project to keep one foot in my comfort zone. Lori is off to Ottawa for the weekend and I've been doing a bit of flintknapping while she's away. There are a few more flintknapped artifacts in the Parks contract, but I've also been working on a Dorset knife for a customer who has been very patiently waiting. I hope to have these knives finished before Monday.

Photo Credits:
Top, Bottom: Tim Rast
Middle: Photo from www.worthpoint.com

Photo Captions:
Top: Fort Garry Tobacco Tin section shown with the digitized template
Middle: Antique Fort Garry Tobacco Tin
Bottom: Reproduction overlain with partial acetate stencil