Change Islands Cache

Change Islands Cache Bifaces

Late last summer, a Newfoundland and Labrador couple stretching their legs at the Change Islands ferry terminal unexpectedly made a spectacular archaeological find.  In September 2010, Neil White and Marion Adams discovered a tighly packed cache of 32 large rhyolite bifaces.  The stone artifacts were buried standing on edge stacked together "like a deck of cards".  A few biface fragments were on the surface and caught Neil's eye.  He recognized that the stones were flinknapped from watching survival TV programs.  The tip of one of the points had been exposed on the surface long enough that it was spattered with paint from nearby construction. A backhoe used in the construction had stripped several inches of debris and soil over the cache and when the White's found them they were very near the surface.  Not realizing the size of the cache, the White's pulled the bifaces out of the ground one after the other.   As they slid each one out of the ground they could hear it rasping against another one still in situ.

Beautifully worked rhyolite

Neil and Marion immediately recognized the significance of what they had found and they didn't want to disturb the whole cache, but they were worried about its security if it was left partially exposed.  Neil said that the entire cache came from an area in the ground no bigger than an apple crate.  Originally, the bifaces may have been wrapped together in a leather or bark bundle, or buried in a small hole.  They decided to gather up the bifaces and contact an archaeologist.  They took the bifaces to the nearest museum - the Beothuk Interpretation Centre in Boyd's Cove.  Karen Ledrew-Day knew that this was something very special and contacted the Provincial Archaeology Office (PAO).  Ken Reynolds drove out to the Change Island's to meet the Whites, further excavate the findspot, and collect the bifaces.  Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the whole story is the selflessness of Neil White and Marion Adams, whose first thought was to report their find and donate the artifacts to the people of the Province.  They deserve a lot of credit for how they reported the find.

An awe inspiring visit

Lori and I had the opportunity to see and photograph the bifaces when Ken brought them back to the PAO for cataloguing and analysis.  We've been waiting for the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Recreation to publicly acknowledge the White's find before we mentioned the cache here.  Disappointingly, that never happened, but the cache was reported in the Provincial Archaeology Office's annual archaeology review earlier this week (Volume 9 for 2010 Field Season), so Lori and I can now share our photos of the bifaces.

For their size, they are very thin

Although they vary in size and 4 of them are wide flat platters, the 32 bifaces are remarkably uniform in style.  They are all made from the same material and are equally thin and well finished.  Everyone who sees them feels that they were all made by one person.  There are some breaks, but between the White's initial collection and Ken's subsequent excavation of the findspot, many of the missing tips and corners were found.  It appears that the bifaces were perfect, whole, and unused when they were originally cached.  These are not preforms in the midst of transport, or blanks prepared for heat treatment, but completed tools, that were never used.  If the larger bifaces were bifacial cores, then they were used up and the edges carefully finished.

The cache at the PAO

The exact age of the cache is uncertain and will be the subject of future research, however, there are a couple likely candidates.  The Maritime Archaic Indians and Recent Indians both made large bifaces from Rhyolite and could have left the cache.  Given the location of the find very close to the modern shoreline, I feel that the Recent Indians are the more likely candidates.  The shoreline in this part of Newfoundland has undergone several metres of submergence since Maritime Archaic Indian times, which means that an Archaic cache at this spot would likely be underwater, unless it was placed at an unusually high elevation.  If it is a Recent Indian cache, then the earlier Cow Head or perhaps Beaches complexes (ca. 2000-1000 BP) seem more likely than the Little Passage or Beothuk, because such large stone tools are rare in the more recent periods.

Some were very large

The source of the stone will also be more fully researched as there are several rhyolite outcrops and quarries on the Island that might have provided the stone.  When Ken was in the area, he revisited the Rhyolite outcrops and workshops at Brimstone Head, near Fogo and collected samples that are a very good visual match for the artifacts in the cache.  Its the closest known rhyolite source to the cache and seems like the most likely candidate for the rock.  Researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland are doing non-destructive testing on the bifaces to attempt to determine the source of the raw material.

The Change Islands Cache (click to enlarge)

For more information on the Change Island's Cache - check out the Provincial Archaeology Office's Archaeology Review, Volume 9 for 2010 Field Season, pg 137-140.

Here are the photos of the 32 bifaces that Lori and I took last fall.  You can click any of the images to see a larger version.  Thanks to the PAO for letting us see these unique pieces and especially to Neil White and Marion Adams for sharing this amazing find with the all the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast
Edited April 6, 2011 to correct Marion's name.

What is a Cache?

The man in orange built this fish cache

Its the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada; a harvest celebration and a time of plenty.  At this time of the year, there's more fruit and vegetables, meat and fish available than can be immediately used.   At the same time, days are noticeably shorter, and winter is on the horizon.  As long as people have been living in environments with seasons of abundance and seasons of shortage, they've had to deal with food storage.  One way of storing food is to cache it.

The lichen growth shows the age of this cache

Archaeologically, a cache is a storage feature.  They can have lots of different shapes and sizes depending on the contents being cached and the materials available to construct them.  The photos that I have are all stone caches from the Eastern Arctic and were either made by Inuit or the earlier Palaeoeskimo people.  A food or meat cache is designed to help preserve food for later use, often by creating an environment that promotes natural preservation processes like freezing, drying, or fermenting.  A good cache will also need to keep scavenging animals from eating its contents before you have a chance to return to the cache and retrieve it.  At first glance, a cache might just look like a pile of rocks, but there are actually a lot of clues that can help you figure out what it was used for and how old it might be. 

An opened cache can look like a big stone nest

Some caches are hunting caches, built by hunters at the location of a kill where meat can be stockpiled for retrieval at a later time. Marine resources, like fish, seals, walrus, and whales are cached near the coast.  Caribou caches can also be found near the coast, but they can also be found far inland or on high mountain trails.

Clean, pink rocks mean a recent cache

Some caches are associated with living sites, built near the tents or houses that people lived in and used as a kind of outdoor freezer or pantry.  In some cultures, these caches were built right into the walls of the structure and will appear as a concentration of rocks on the edge of a house or tent ring.

A long narrow kayak cache

But food isn't the only thing that people cached for later use.  They also cached equipment. Equipment caches were used to store gear from one season to the next, or to protect it from dogs or wild animals.  One of the coolest kinds of equipment caches in the Arctic are kayak caches.  These are long narrow, boat shaped caches that were used to store the one person skin boats (kayaks) from one season to the next.  The kayaks would be made from sealskin stretched over a wooden frame, so if they were left unprotected they'd be a tasty treat for foxes, wolves, and bears.

Modern camp equipment cache

People still use caches and not all of them are found again.  The photo on the left is a fairly recent Inuit cache of equipment at a campsite.  The half moon shaped object on the rock is a lamp cut and hammered out of a 45 gallon drum lid.  There are also roasting pans, a meat grinder and other domestic equipment in the cache. I've shown pictures of this cache before, and it always makes me wonder whatever happened to the people who left it and if they'll ever be back to use it again.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast