Aged Dorset Harpoon

Antiqued Dorset Palaeoeskimo
Harpoon Reproduction

Here is a look at the finished Dorset Palaeoeskimo harpoon for the Clyde River order.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to antique the Dorset reproductions in this set so that they would contrast with the reproductions representing the more recent Inuit and Thule cultures.  A harpoon stained this dark would probably look a little out of place in a Dorset camp 2000 years ago, but if an archaeologist dug up a perfectly preserved one, it might look something like this, once it was conserved and put on display.

Fully assembled, the harpoon is 140 cm long.

I'm happy with the lines and colouring on this piece. It is a
good hands-on piece.  A lot of handling and time are the best
 ways to age a reproduction naturally.

The tip-fluted endblade is knapped from chert and the toggling harpoon head is antler.  The foreshaft is whalebone and the main shaft is tamarack.  The designs for all of these pieces are based on Palaeoeskimo artifacts found throughout the Eastern Arctic, although I am heavily influenced by collections from Newfoundland and Labrador - especially sites on the northern peninsula, like Port au Choix and L'Anse aux Meadows. The lanyard attached to the harpoon head is braided sinew and the harpoon line is hooded sealskin.  The lashings on the main shaft are also hooded sealskin.  For the most part the pieces are held together by friction, although hide glue is used to strengthen the bonds in several places.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Genuine Sealskin Bindings and Ice Picks

One for Parks, one for me

I'm trying to wrap up a few loose ends this week.  I have a couple small orders to finish and the L'Anse aux Meadows reproductions should be dry enough to pass them along to Parks Canada so that they can be installed in the new exhibits at the site.

wrapping the lashing

I had the first opportunity to use the hooded sealskin on the adze and harpoon reproductions last week.  I worked with the 30 foot section that we shaved a few weeks ago.  The line had been stretched and drying in the backyard since then.  I took it down and stored most of it in a rubbermaid filled with wood shavings.  I'm still not exactly sure what to do with it.  It'll take days to shave, but I don't really want to do much more with it right away.  Right now it looks like I might try storing it with the hair on and shave lengths as I need them.

I cut all of the sealskin that we shaved down the middle

Even split it was still thick enough

To make the lashings, I cut off the shaved section of thong from the rest of the line and soaked it in warm fresh water for a few hours until it got soft again.  Since I'm using it for lashings, I wanted it to be flexible and stretch a bit while I used it so that it would shrink as it dried and create a stronger bond.  When it had softened I cut it lengthwise down the middle.  If that keeps up I might be able to double the amount of usable skin in the 335 foot long thong.

Ice picks for the Groswater Harpoons

This is what the whalebone ice pick on the harpoon looks like under the lashings.  Its not based on any specific Groswater artifact.  The long tapered end is designed to fit the scarf joint on the end of the harpoon and the shape of the point is inspired by Groswater bone points from Port au Choix.  The scarf join on the harpoon shaft was very long and shallow.  If the taper was a little steeper and the scarfed section half the length, then the ice pick would look similar to a common Dorset Palaeoeskimo artifact, with an unknown, or at least, uncertain function.

Dorset Whalebone Reproduction

This is a reproduction of one of the Dorset artifacts that the ice pick reminds me of.  I made this using stone tools a couple winters ago for Patty Wells, a Ph.D. candidate at Memorial University who is studying Dorset organic tools from Port au Choix.  The form is similar to what an ice pick should be, but I still don't understand what the hole and groove would do.  The square holes are a good fit for a sealskin thong, which has a rectangular cross-section compared to other types of cordage which are round.  If they are icepicks, then the hole and the groove would be on the end under the lashing - what function would they serve? 

Using pliers to hold the end of the line

To haft the whalebone icepicks on the Groswater harpoon I did start the wrap by tucking one end of the line under itself at the point where the hole is on the Dorset artifact.  I didn't do that to try to match the Dorset artifact, it was just the most convenient place to start the wrap.  I used pliers to hold the line in place because it was so slippery, but a hole in the icepick could have done that job for me.  That doesn't really explain the groove though, unless I wanted to be really tidy, then I could have carved a groove in the pick for the line to lie flat in while I wrapped the lashing around it.  Or, more likely, if I wanted that line to run back down the length of the harpoon towards the harpoon head, then I could have carved a guide channel, threaded several feet of line through the hole, laid it in the groove and wrapped the lashing around it, so that part of the line is tied down in the groove and the rest of the length is free.  That scenario would account for all the functional elements of the Dorset artifacts.  Maybe that free line running parallel with the shaft could be used to help launch the harpoon or secure the harpoon line.  I'm not sure.  Its the sort of thing that you could come up with a dozen different ways to make it work and still never figure out the right one.  There's also no guarantee that these objects had anything to do with harpoons - they could have been hafted on to a completely different type of tool altogether.

Photo Credits:
1,3.5: Tim Rast
2,4: Lori White
6: Patty Wells

Shaving the Sealskin with Stone

Shaving the sealskin with a chert flake

On Sunday morning, we started shaving the hooded sealskin thong with stone tools.  Its an incredibly slow and labourious process.  I frequently switched to a metal knife, but Lori and Eliza were much more hardcore, sticking to obsidian and chert for the full two hours that we worked.   In the end, between the three of us, we shaved about 35 feet.  We averaged just under 6 feet per hour per person.  That seems crazy to me.  I know it was slow, but would it really take one person 55 hours of labour to shave the entire 335 foot long thong?

335 feet of sealskin is ridiculously long

It looked like a pile of giant spider legs

The thong had easy patches and hard patches to shave.  They probably correspond to areas of the seal's body.  When we cut the hide into a spiral we noticed that the skin around the neck was especially thick, while it was much thinner towards the sides and belly.  Lori felt that the difficult sections to shave were probably the neck sections of the skin.

Obsidian flakes worked well

We tried Ramah Chert, Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite, chert from Newfoundland, and obsidian.  When shaving with flakes, we found the obsidian worked the best.  Which makes sense - it creates the sharpest edge.  Unfortunately, its not a local stone, so it wouldn't have been available for any precontact culture in the Province to use.  Of the local stone, microblades of Newfoundland chert hafted in a handle were a close second to the obsidian flakes.  The mechanical advantage of the handle seemed to compensate for the slight difference in sharpness.

Here's a clip of Lori demonstrating shaving the hair with an obsidian flake:

Hafted microblades did the job

After this brief experiment, I really think that even the simplest, expedient flake tools would have been mounted in simple hafts.  Microblades certainly would have been - the difference between using a microblade pinched between your fingers and one firmly hafted in a handle is night and day.  Larger flakes could be held and used with some force and precision, but the small utilized flakes and flake scrapers that we find in sites here would be much more efficient tools with a handle.

Here's a clip of Eliza shaving the sealskin with a hafted microblade:

Scraping with a microblade

Amazingly, the same microblade that we used to cut the thong several weeks ago was still sharp enough to scrape the hair off.  Its the tool that I used most often on Sunday, along with an obsidian blade that was long enough to hold relatively comfortably.  When I'd get stuck, or hit one of those difficult patches, I'd switch to a steel knife blade in my leatherman.  Whatever tool we used, it seemed like holding the blade at close to a 90 degree angle to the skin worked the best.  The usewear builds up on the edge of the stone tools much more quickly while shaving than it did while cutting the skin.  The finer grained the stone, the more quickly the working edge became dotted with tiny chips.  The obsidian started to show signs of wear almost immediately.

Concentration required

Even though it was a slow, tedious process, it still required a good degree of concentration.  When you started shaving a new patch of skin, the middle of the thong was the easiest to shave, which left long hairs on either edge.  When you'd go back to work on the edge, I found it very easy to snag any irregularity along the edge and create small nicks in the edge of the thong.  None of us accidentally cut all the way through, but I know that I created a few weak spots in the section that I was working on.  It made me glad that we initially cut the thong a little wider than I needed it in the first place.  I wanted it wider to allow for shrinkage and to give me the chance to trim down irregularities in the cut, but it will also work to remove some of those nicks and pitting.  I think that if those cuts are left in place they will spread and tear, and I'll need to go back and trim them out.

The shaved sealskin

Despite the labour involved, I'm very happy with the results.  The black, scaled look of the shaved thong is exactly the type of finished leather that I'm looking for.  Its an authentic air-dried sealskin that I haven't been able to get from commercially tanned hides, so its going to look great on the reproductions.

Photo Credits:
1,4: Lori White
2,3,5-7: Tim Rast

Publish Post

Videos: Tim Rast

Boiling the Hooded Seal Bones

Eliza and her seal

Wow, what an exhausting weekend.  I spent two full days helping Eliza Brandy cut, boil, and threaten the meat off the hooded seal skeleton.  It was a lot of fun and I learned all kinds of weird and wonderful things about seal anatomy, but it was a very big job.  Despite the cool temperatures and drizzly weather, we had a small army of volunteers help out on Saturday and Lori came by for the full day on Sunday.

A bloody good time!

At the start of Saturday morning, the seal carcass was stored in sections in four big rubbermaid tubs.  The skin was off everything (except the skull and flippers) and the organs were removed, but all the meat and bones were still there.

Soaking the bones

By Sunday evening all the meat was boiled off the bones, with the exception of one or two of the flippers, and the boiled bones were sitting in the lab in detergent solutions for the next stage in the cleaning and degreasing. Ultimately the bones will be clean and white and part of the faunal collection in the Archaeology Department at Memorial University, with the exception of the skull which is going to the Biology Department and a few of the teeth which are going back to the Department of Fisheries and Ocean's to help age the animal.

A boiled femur - they're tiny!

Saturday was a pretty bloody day.  The meat had a very odd consistency.  It didn't really hold together the way beef or chicken does, you could pull it apart with your fingers.  It was like short fibres packed together, maybe a little like an artificial fire log, but wet.  One of the students, Andrew, said it reminded him of fibreglass putty.  After the meat was boiled, it turned a rich brown colour and acted a lot like clay.  You could smoosh it and smear it around with your fingers like greasy mud.  Maybe that's why Amy, who studies ceramics, was so good at cleaning around all the nooks and crannies on the vertebrae.

Hooded seal eyeball - they're huge!

Sorry the pictures are so graphic, but there were some really interesting anatomical details that I think are worth sharing.  The seal's eyes for example, were huge.  Each one was the size of a jelly-filled billiard ball.  Beneath the webbed skin, the front flipper was a lot like a human limb, with short 'arm' bones and very long, flat finger bones.

Hind flipper - a foot evolved into a paddle

But the hind flippers were pretty extraordinary, with tiny short femurs, the size of a bow-tie, and long spidery toes. The most interesting thing about the hind flipper was that the outside toes were about twice the length of the middle toe, making two powerful V-shaped paddles.  In the photo on the left, you can see the five sharp little toe-nails at the end of each digit.

Distal phalange and nail

Cleaned up, those toe bones were pretty weird looking too.  Compared to other animals, all of the limb bones were flattened and the last phalange of each finger and toe have complex little cones to hold the long sharp claws.  With enough boiling the claws came loose and slid off the bone. 

By Saturday evening we had the bulk of the meat removed and all of the bones had at least started to boil.   Sunday was a much cleaner day because we were dealing with cooked meat and gristle, not blood and skin and tendons.  We started the pots boiling in the morning and spent a couple hours working on the sealskin, which I'll talk about in more detail next time.

It looks so tidy in a picture

The goal on Sunday was to get every bone this clean

Ultimately, the skeleton will end up here.

This was a huge job, and its still not really over yet.  Eliza has a bit more boiling to do on one or two flippers and there will still be a few weeks of soaking to get rid of the final bits of tissue and grease still on the bones.  Maybe I can get her to describe the process when its all done. I'll try and get some more photos when everything is finally finished and stored with the rest of MUN's Archaeology bone collection.

Cheeky gull with something from the seal

Postscript:
We were greeted almost immediately by a gull on Sunday morning.  He had one bad leg and a pretty brazen attitude.  He wound up grabbing something out of one of the bags and took off with it.  We didn't see which bag he raided - so it could have been a rib or a piece of cartilage.  If it was a rib, Eliza wanted it back, so we took off after him.  He was accosted by a group of 4 crows along the way and we hoped that the piece would be lost in the skirmish, but he held onto it.  We decided to try rushing him the next time he set it down, but that didn't work, he just picked it up again before he flew away.  He flew straight into the middle of the pond and dropped it in the water, before coming back throughout the day to see what else he could steal.

Is Eliza dejected or plotting revenge in the last photo?

 Photo Credits:
1, 3, 7-10: Tim Rast
 2: Corey Hutchings
4,6: Elaine Anton
5: Amy St John
11,12: Lori White

Friday Fibre Optics

It's like Candy

I finally finished the fibre optic points that I need for the necklaces and earrings in this spring's wholesale orders.  It took a little longer than I expected and I still need to spend an hour or so making sure that I have enough matching pairs for all the earrings.

Stay back snow...

I was planning to go straight back out to the workshop this morning and start on all the remaining points needed for the orders, but since it started snowing here again, maybe I'll just stay inside and start wiring the fibre optic points.  I will need to do a little outside work in preparation for tomorrow's Day of Seal - you're still welcome to join us.  Despite the snow, I think tomorrow's forecast is still decent enough for the boiling and shaving.  Besides, I think the sealskin might have snow repelling properties -- look at the border of green grass between the sealskin and the snow on the ground.  Its like one of those mysterious artifacts that repels whatever is trying to swarm the hero archaeologist in the movies.

In the meantime, here's 90 fibre optic points shaped like a Macaw.

Arranging points into mosaics helps me get through the week.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A Day of Seal Needs Your Help!

Dress like these people - they're professionals.

We are looking for volunteers, large boiling pots, and propane tanks for a fun day of Hooded Seal processing on Saturday (or Sunday, if Saturday's weather is bad) at the university campus.  Eliza Brandy, an archaeology graduate student at Memorial University of Newfoundland is boiling down the seal skeleton so that it can be used in the archaeology department's comparative faunal collection.  Lori and I will be taking our sealskin thong along (its stretched to over 335 feet now) to shave with stone tools while we are waiting for the bones to boil clean.

Please?

If you are interested in helping out, we could use your hands and the loan of large boil up pots and propane tanks for the day.  We'll get started at 10 AM on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 on the lawn behind Queen's College (next to Bitters) on the MUN Campus (map here).  There is more information and a chance to RSVP on the event's Facebook Page.

I'm excited to see the skeleton being cleaned and I'm curious about shaving the hair off the sealskin.   I tested a small area and the skin is stiff enough that the hair can be scraped off fairly easily.  It reminds me of a muskrat tail when its shaved.  I'll bring along flakes of obsidian, various Newfoundland cherts, Bloody Bay Cove Rhyolite, and Ramah Chert to test.  Which material will be your favourite?

Only 334 and a half feet to go!

You'll want to wear old clothes, and perhaps even rain gear.  The skin has dried considerably, but its still going to be greasy. I didn't get a photo of the shaved section of skin until it was raining (again), so it looks a little messier in the picture that it actually is.  The skin itself is fairly dry, but still greasy to handle, like a piece of beef jerky and the hair is still holding a fair bit of grease.

Photo Credits:
1: John Erwin
2-4: Tim Rast

Ashes and Hooded Seal Outtake

I call the little one "Bieber"

What a strange morning here.  Apparently the airport is closed because of the ash cloud drifting westward from the Iceland volcano.  I went outside to see what its like and its raining and foggy.  I couldn't smell any brimstone.  Actually the air smells really fresh - I suppose that with the water filtering through the ash its kind of like living inside a giant Brita water filter. The photo on the right shows what the air looks like this morning.  The arrowheads look like little jet planes yearning to escape into the air, but they can't because they are tied down.  Each stone represents a stranded Juno pop star, waiting to fly out of St. John's.

Recent Indian points

I'm still plugging away on the wholesale orders.  I have a batch of hafted necklaces on the stalks, ready to be trimmed, drilled, and ochred.

The hooded seal project got another nice mention on Time Machine by Heather Pringle in a post called Bravo to Archaeologists who Brave the Blogosphere.  While Working on the seal, Lori and I took a tonne of photos and videos.  Some were too weird to use right away.  Like this one of Lori inflating a 35 foot long section of seal intestine with the mattress pump.  You'll want to have the sound on to really appreciate it:

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Salty Guts and Books

Demo for the Historic Sites Association

On Wednesday evening, I did a flintknapping demonstration for the shop managers from the Heritage Shops across the island.  It was a good chance to talk to the front line staff selling my products and get feedback from them on what they like and don't like about the product.  I think the demo also helped them understand exactly how a flintknapped arrowhead is made and will help them explain the product to customers.

Today, I'm getting ready for the ground stone Family Fun Program at The Rooms, which takes place this Sunday from 2-4 pm.  Yesterday, I spent a bit of time knapping, received a couple buckets of rhyolite to use for some exclusive products for the Burnside Heritage Foundation, and hung the hooded seal guts out to dry in the sun.

Salt crystals forming on the bladder

On Wednesday, I noticed some white patches had started to form on the bladder and intestines and my first concern was mold, but they were just salt patches that formed from soaking them in salt water before inflating them.  I wiped them off with a damp rag.  While they were strung up I peeled off some of the dried connector tissue.  It was flaking off like paper at first, but in one spot it tore the intestine.

Tear in the drying intestine

The gut is more fragile than I had thought.  It looks a little like flypaper, but it seems about as strong as heavy tissue paper.  I thought it might be fragile because of something I read about drying the intestines in the warm summer sun, but I didn't expect them to tear quite this easily.  I'll have to keep that in mind for whatever project I wind up using them on.

 There's a passage in Arctic Clothing of North America - Alaska, Canada, Greenland that explains what's going on:

stretched gut

85 feet of seal intestine out to dry

Women prepared the intestine by washing and soaking it for several days, scraping the inner and outer surfaces, then stretching and inflating the intestine and letting it dry....  The drying process was accomplished in one of two ways.  In the northern regions, especially on St. Lawrence Island, the intestine was allowed to dry in cold, dark, windy weather for a considerable amount of time. This would cause the intestine to turn white. Intestine prepared in this manner was often referred to as 'bleached gut' or 'winter gut', and was very flexible and durable.  The intestine tubing was then cut lengthwise and opened out to form long narrow bands. These bands of intestine were then stitched together horizontally or vertically to create a parka....  In Southwestern Alaska... Preparation of the intestine was the same as in the northern region, but because of the less harsh weather with more daylight and warmer temperatures the intestine turned yellow in colour, and was thus referred to as 'summer gut'.  When dry the summer gut parka was less flexible and would tear easily.  But when wet, the gut would become soft and flexible and conform to the wearer's body.

Seal gut parka in Homer, Alaska

It sounds like I'm making 'summer gut'.  There are a few interesting images around the web of gut parka's.  Heather Pringle wrote about our work with the intestines last week and has a few nice images on her blog: What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage.   And Travis Shinabarger has an amazing flickr photostream of seal gut parkas in museums in Alaska.

Disclosure:  I try to reference the books that I quote on this blog by linking to a site with more information on that particular book.  Often that ends up being a bookseller like Chapters or Amazon.  This week I enrolled in the Amazon Associates program, so in future blog posts, if you follow a link to a book that I reference and wind up purchasing it, then I get a percentage (6%, I think) of the purchase price for the referral.

When I'm writing a new post there is a little window next to the editor that lets me search Amazon and make easy links in the blog.  They can be normal looking text links like this to the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 5: Arctic, individual photos, or text boxes with an image (below).  I'll probably use all three from time to time, so I just wanted readers to be aware of this change.

Photo Credits:
1: Andrea MacDonald
2-5: Tim Rast
6: Travis Shinabarger
7,8: images from Amazon.com

Blood, Blubber, and Oil

Winding the thong to stretch

I'm really trying to get back into a normal spring work routine again after last week's seal excitement. I did make a brief visit to the workshop yesterday, but mostly I've been getting caught up on e-mails and paperwork. There have also been a few small seal related projects on the side. I've mentioned the skin, intestines, and bladder, but I'm also saving some of the blood, blubber, and oil.

Seal Blood Cube Trays

Blood: Seal blood makes a good glue and this is my first chance to work with it. I tried it briefly on the endscrapers when they came loose in the handles, but I don't believe I let the glue set long enough to really give it a chance. In an attempt to preserve it, I've filled two mini-ice cube trays with about a cup of blood. This should give me good portion control so that I can thaw out as much or as little as I need.

Seal blood glue drying

I'm especially interested in seeing how it works with baleen. Hide glue works great with sinew and dries invisibly, but on baleen it creates a messy coating. I hope the darker blood glue will stick as well and create a more cohesive appearance.

Frozen seal fat

Blubber: We saved a few ziploc bags full of the fat and put them in the freezer. I want to use it for soapstone lamps, so we separated it into sandwich bag sized portions that can be thawed out as we need them.
I'll take a big bag into The Rooms on Sunday so that they can have it on hand for the lamps that I've made for them in the past.

Palaeoeskimo soapstone lamp reproduction

Bagging blubber

Oil: I didn't think about collecting the oil until it was almost too late. I had planned to render some of the fat into oil, but for some reason it didn't occur to me until after the scraping was over to just collect some of the liquid oil that we spent 3 days pressing out of the skin. I bottled a small amount to experiment with as a base for mixing red ochre paint. Right now, my favourite red ochre paint recipe uses linseed oil, eggs, and water. I'd like to try substituting seal, caribou, and fish oil for the linseed oil.

Hooded seal oil

The Beothuk mixed their red ochre with caribou grease and Newfoundlanders made big buckets of red paint for their buildings out of seal oil and ochre. I want to start experimenting with seal oil paint on some of my reproductions.

The bladder is drying nicely

Right now everything is collected, bottled or bagged, frozen or drying and I just need to keep and eye on it all over the next few days and weeks. The intestines and bladder are starting to go translucent and have turned from pink to amber. The skin is still greasy, but its getting dryer to the touch.

Today, I need to work on knapping Recent Indian arrowheads for necklaces and this evening I have a demonstration for the staff who work in all the Historic Sites Association's Heritage Shops at National Parks around the province. I think I'll take in reproductions that we used on the seal. They've been cleaned up, but I think they'll still be identifiable by scent.

Photo Credits:
1,6: John Erwin
2-5,7,8: Tim Rast