All done but the drying

Sinew lashings on red ochre
and spruce gum adhesive

 The Northern Archaic and Ice Patch darts and atlatls are all done.  They just need to dry overnight and I can photograph them and then put them in the mail tomorrow morning.  I'll share those final images here on Friday.   Between the various stages of lashing and drying I managed to get a couple copper riveted ulus finished as well.  Its a load off.  With two days left before the weekend and then travel north on Monday I have one small jewellery order that I'd like to at least attempt before I close up the workshop for July.  Fortunately the size and make-up of that order is a little bit vague, so if I can get anything done it will be better than nothing.

The hafted ice patch dart reproduction (right) and reference dart points collected from the Yukon.  There's a pretty wide range of point styles represented.  I tried to match some of the lanceolate forms in the bottom row.  You can see the ghost outline of the red ochre and spruce gum adhesive on the base of the points in the lower right corner of the photo.  The original image can be found in this article: The Archaeology of Yukon Ice Patches: New Artifacts, Observations, and Insights 

 

Slate ulus with spruce handles.  The two laying down have copper rivets securing the blades in place and the one standing up is tied together with sealskin raw hide.

A profile view of the ulu blade.   As a general rule, ulus were sharpened unifacially so that they'd have both a sharp cutting edge and a steep scraping edge for hide working.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast   

Copper Pressure Flakers

Copper Pressure Flakers

I've been making and shipping a lot of flintknapping supplies lately.  Today I was cutting up moose antler into billets and preparing a few copper tipped pressure flakers.  I need to restock my own supply of tools for upcoming workshops, but I can't seem to get get ahead of the orders.  The pressure flakers that I make are pretty simple; 6 inches of wood doweling with a two inch section of heavy copper ground wire inserted into a hole that has been drilled in one end.  The reason knappers use copper-tipped flakers is that copper can be a little easier to find than antler and it is more durable than bone or antler, so it requires less retouch and resharpening.  Copper is preferred over other metals because it is relatively soft and will grab the edge of the stone that you are working on without crushing it, as a piece of brass or iron would.

It can be tricky to find a heavy gauge copper wire in a hardware store. You are looking for something at least a 1/4 of an inch thick.  The folded length of copper wire in the top of this photo is a copper ground wire from a power pole.  I bought a bucket of these folded ground wires a few years ago from a salvage yard and have been using them ever since.  A wire the length of a power pole can be cut into a lot of 2 inch lengths.

I straighten out a few feet of wire at a time and snip off the individual pieces with a bolt cutter.

 

After that, I just tap them into the doweling, grind a fresh point onto the end and touch up  the ends of the doweling with a sander.  They're pretty simple, but they get the job done.  They're great for students to learn with.  

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper Inuit Arrows Ready to Ship

Copper Arrowhead

I finished up the Copper Inuit arrows and took them out for a few test shots with the Tuktut Nogait bow and also to take some final photos.  I don't have good targets or enough room to shoot very far in the bag yard, I just wanted to make sure that the nocks fit a sinew bowstring and that they actually flew pointy end first.  They do and nothing broke, so I'm happy.  I sent the photos to the client for approval and hopefully I can get them shipped off in teh next few days.

The arrows have copper arrowheads and rivets, antler foreshafts, pine main shafts, ptarmigan feather fletching and sinew and hide glue lashing.  The lashing holds the feathers in place and is used to reinforce the wood socket on the mainshafts so that it will not split. 

Most are a little big for the
Tuktut Nogait bow.

Four of the arrows are spoken for and the other will enter my resource collection for demonstrations.  Two will be fitted with blunts, which I intend to use for a bit of small game hunting in the near future.  The short arrow on the top is the first one that I made as part of a big Copper Inuit set a couple years back.  The client  at that time had space restrictions in their exhibit design, so the arrows had to be short.

Some of the foreshafts have barbs

This is the first time that I made full-size reproductions and I must admit, they are longer than I had anticipated, with most of the reference arrows that I found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's online reference collection measuring between 80 and 88 cm.  The foreshafts and mainshafts are all different lengths and interchangeable, so you can make a lot of different length arrows depending on how you combine them, but for the client I picked four arrows that fall within 78-88 cm.

These are my four favourites out of the set, hopefully the client will feel the same.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper Inuit Arrow Reproductions Almost Done

Copper arrowheads and
antler foreshafts

 The Copper Inuit Arrow reproductions are almost complete.  I blame the snow for them not being finished today.  If I didn't have to shovel, I think I could have got them done this afternoon.  They are very close, but I'm not going to show them assembled until everything is done.

Close, but I need to trim and add a bit
 more sinew at the bottom of each feather.

The main tasks left at the start of the day were riveting the arrowheads onto the foreshafts, tying the feathers on to the main shafts and some final sanding, filing and antiquing.  Right now the ptarmigan feathers are all tied on with sinew, but there is a little bit of trimming left to do on the ends of the feathers and possibly the feathers themselves.  The fletching that I've seen on Copper Inuit arrows tends to be long and very narrow.  There are only two feathers on each arrow and they are tied at each end without being glued down the spine.

The thin copper rod is just the right
diameter  to fill the hole in the antler
foreshaft and copper arrowhead.

The riveting went alright. I used thin copper rods for the rivets that I cold hammered out of heavy copper ground wire.  I find that I need to switch between hammering and filing the rivets frequently.  The antler is easy to crack and will split if you just try to hammer the copper ends flat.

The finished rivet is hammered and ground
flush with the antler.  A bit of red wine
vinegar and miracle grow will help antique the
copper overnight.

It takes very light tapping and frequent pauses and grinding to keep the rivet head mushrooming out without creating a lot of internal pressure on the antler.  I broke the first one that I tried this afternoon because I was too impatient and tried to hammer without enough breaks to check and file the copper heads.  Eventually they all got done and I'm happy with them.  The bond on all six of the new arrowheads is nice and secure.

Whalebone blunts on antler foreshafts.
They've been glued in to place, but
I'll add a sinew or gut wrapping to
secure them before I try using them.

I also took a bit of time today to work on the blunts for small game.  I used the bird blunt from the Ivavvik National Park collection that I worked on a few years back as my inspiration.  I made mine from whalebone and am hafting them on to antler foreshafts so that they will be interchangeable with the copper tipped foreshafts.  In demos I like to mention that interchangeable foreshafts could alter the function of a projectile to suit the specific game that the hunter wanted to pursue and now I'll have an example of that to show people.  I guess the next thing I should make are some fish arrow attachments.

The mainshafts have a sinew reinforced
socket on the distal end that fit the
end of the foreshafts.  You can change the
foreshafts and if one part of your arrow
is broke or lost, you don't have to start
again from scratch.

Anyhow, I should qualify this composite blunt foreshaft design by saying that I haven't actually seen it in archaeological or ethnographic collections.  The bird blunts that I've seen are either attached directly to the main shaft or have been carved in one piece at the end of the wood arrow or as a single piece foreshaft.  I haven't found an example of a two part blunt foreshaft like this, so take it with a grain of salt. I suspect they exist, and I just can't find an example, but who knows, maybe there is some functional or ideological reason that blunts are not made this way that I'm not aware of, yet.

Regardless of the length or details of the design, all of the foreshafts have the same conical base so they will all be interchangeable on the wood mainshafts.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper arrowheads and antler foreshafts

Roughed out antler foreshafts and arrowheads

I'm still working away on those Copper Inuit arrows in the workshop this week.  I have most of the pieces roughed out, including the copper arrowheads, pine shafts and antler foreshafts.  Now, I just need to to start the fiddly work of assembling all of the pieces.  I need four arrows for the order and I'd like the foreshafts and main shafts of all the arrows to be interchangeable, but I also want each of the arrows to have their own distinct look.  I don't want them to look like four exact copies of the same thing.  I plan to add some barbs to some of the foreshafts and will probably make the arrowheads a little more individualistic. The finished arrows should be between 80 and 90 cm long, with about 20 cm of that length coming from the antler foreshaft.

I'm pretty happy with the look of the arrowheads right now, but I may shave off a few millimeters here and there to  exaggerate the differences between the points.  Each one is unique, but I think I could bring that out a bit more if some were narrower or shorter.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Harpoon Heads with Copper Endblades

Antler and copper harpoon head

So I was able to get that little harpoon head done that I promised myself I would finish yesterday.  Mostly.  I'm still fussing over the patina on the copper endblade and the rivets, but that's mostly waiting to see what sort of colour I'll get from the red wine vinegar and Miracle Gro solution.  The thing is assembled, and I can focus on other pieces.  This is reproduction #10 of 17 in the Central Arctic set that is based on Inuit artifacts in the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Its quite small - 7.7 cm long x 2.3 cm wide across the endblade

I'm still fussing with the patina

The smaller, white harpoon head is the finished one.  The larger brown head is part of a complete harpoon, so it can't be called finished until the rest of the harpoon is assembled.  You can see the original artifacts that they are based on in the CMC's online artifact catalog:

Harpoon Head IV-D-1818

Harpoon IV-D-692

This one needs a harpoon

It looks like the harpoon head from the complete harpoon might actually have a steel endblade, but for the reproduction I'll be using copper.  There is another harpoon head in this set which will have a steel endblade, so that material will be represented there.

Riveting work!

I'm enjoying making all these metal pieces, especially the rivets.  Its good practice.  I've made copper riveted pieces in the past, but never so many at once and they can be tricky to make, especially in material that is softer than the rivet.  If you get impatient with hammering the rivets in a soft material, like antler or slate, the rivet can crack the piece that you are working on as it expands in the hole.  Which really sucks, because the rivets are often the final step and breaking a piece just when you think its finished can be a nightmare.  Fortunately, that didn't happen here and I've been careful to drill the rivet heads with a small dimple before hammering to help the heads expand outward.  Then I hammer them very lightly and periodically file the heads with a metal file to help remove excess metal while tapping the head into the right shape and smoothing it down against the antler.

seems small

This is quite a small harpoon head, only 7.7 cm long and 2.3 cm wide across the widest part of the endblade.  Based on the proportions in the reference photos, I made the antler harpoon head about 3.8 cm long.  Together with the large endblade it seems like a functional harpoon head, but if the antler was found on its own, it would be tempting to call it a miniature.  The reproduction that I've shown here is based on an Inuit artifact, but small harpoon heads were common amongst earlier Palaeoeskimo collections as well.  Robert Park and Pauline Mousseau published an excellent paper in 2003 called How Small Is Too Small: Dorset Culture "Miniature" Harpoon Heads, which deals with awkwardly sized harpoon heads in Palaeoeskimo sites.  They found that a lot of very small harpoon heads could have been functional.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Copper Needle and Fox Bone Necklace

Antiqued copper needle and bone necklace

Here's a look at the latest reproductions - the copper needle and the fox bone necklace are finished.  That's five pieces down and 12 to go in the Central Arctic set.  Again, if you'd like to see the original artifacts that these are based on, you can view them in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's online artifact catalog:

Needle: IV-D-330
Necklace: IV-D-371

Copper Needle, approx 7.3 x 0.3 x 0.1cm

Copper Needle:  I explained in an earlier post how I hammered and aged this copper needle reproduction.  Its been a while since I worked with the red wine vinegar and miracle gro patinating solution.  I re-learned that less is more when using it.  The patina doesn't form until the vinegar evaporates, so a light dab on the surface works much quicker than submersing the whole thing and waiting for the surrounding liquid to evaporate.  A light dab in a sunny room will start a patina in less than an hour.

Fox bone necklace on twisted sinew cord

Fox Bone Necklace:  This necklace is made up of 58 fox metacarpals and metatarsals, antiqued in tea and strung on a twisted sinew cord.  It makes a nice tinkling sound when it moves.  Other than the holes drilled through the top of the bones, there doesn't appear to be much modification done.  From the scale in the artifact photo, it looked like the bones on the necklace ranged from about 3.5 cm to 6 cm, so I selected bones to match those lengths.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A hectic week that's not quite over

Post Demo Tarp

The last half of this week has been a hodge podge of meetings and writing.  Yesterday, I had a fun morning at The Rooms doing a flintknapping demo for the grade 8 class who are doing the Open Minds program this week.  Every week throughout the school year, a different classroom full of kids in the St. John's area get to go to school in The Rooms and learn all about the Museum, Art Gallery, and Archive.  They delve behind the scenes and meet and work with different staff and guest presenters for 5 days.

Winter! I love it!

The demo went well and the kids were great, although I'm sure the flintknapping was eclipsed by the snowstorm that gave them the rest of the day off after lunch.  I'm happy to see winter finally arrive as well - its been way to warm and wet here lately.  It'll be nice to have some snow on the ground for a while.

Ulu reproductions and artifact

With the kids gone and a storm raging outside, I took my time packing up.  I had a few reproductions with me based on artifacts on permanent exhibit in the Connections Gallery in the museum, so I popped in and took a few pictures of some of the reproductions next to the original artifacts that inspired them.

Reproductions used at The Rooms

On the work front, I've been doing a bit of writing.  I wrote a note on Andrew Qappik's November trip to Newfoundland for the Craft Council Newsletter and I'm working on a summary of the hooded seal skin experiments from last spring for the Provincial Archaeology Newsletter.  Three of the four authors for the Bird Cove Maritime Archaic Indian paper met this morning and we hashed out what needs to go into the next edit of the paper.  Hopefully we can get that wrapped up and out to review in the next few weeks.

Verdigris encrusted copper needle

I haven't done much in the workshop over the past few days, although the needle has been patinating away in its evaporating dish of red wine vinegar and Miracle Gro.  It has a good colour.  I'll give it another 24 hours or so to make sure its done reacting and then I'll scrape the crystals off and scorch it with the blowtorch.  Everything looks more antiqued after a healthy blast from the blowtorch.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Needles and bones

Copper needle in patinating solution

I had a full day in the workshop yesterday - probably the only one I'll get this week, so I was relieved to make some progress on the big Central Arctic order.  The fox bone necklace is pretty much finished, I just need to size the sinew cord and let the bones dry out a bit more.  They are damp from tea staining.  I also made a couple needles for the order - one from copper (right) and one from bird bone.  The bird bone needle is completely finished and the copper needle is sitting in a Miracle Gro and red wine vinegar solution so that it will grow a nice warm green patina.

The tea stained the cartilage rich areas most

I don't have the actual artifacts to work from for this project and the only reference photos that I are from the Canadian Museum of Civilization's artifact catalog.  I don't have permission to reproduce those images on this blog, so if you'd like to see the original artifacts, you can check them out here:

Needle IV-D-329

Needle IV-D-330

Necklace IV-D-371

hammered needle blank and copper wire

To make the copper needle, I started with a short section of heavy copper ground wire - the same stuff that I use when I make copper tipped pressure flakers.  The finished needle needed to be 7.2 cm long, 3 mm wide and 1 mm thick.  I started cold hammering a section of wire about 1 inch long (slightly shorter than the one in the photo) and that gave me a blank the correct length, but about twice as thick and wide as I needed it to be.  I used the wet grinding wheel to slowly grind it down to the correct size.  I tapped it with the hammer from time to time, partly to help thin out thick spots, but also to keep it from becoming too smooth and regular.  I used a rotary tool to drill the hole while the needle was still a little thicker than it needed to be, so that I'd have room to correct any errors in the eye's shape or placement. 

Antiquing bones in tea and copper in miracle gro and vinegar

Eventually I ground the needle down to the final dimensions.  The hammering hardens the copper and despite its small dimensions, it is surprisingly stiff.  You could certainly bend it if you tried, but its much stronger than it looks.  Its all done, except for the antiquing, which I apply by letting it sit in an evaporating bowl of red wine vinegar saturated with Miracle Gro.  The recipe I use is outlined in this blog post: Patinating Copper Experiments. 

bone needle and sinew

The client also requested a bone needle of similar dimensions.  I made it much the same as the copper needle, except I cracked it out of a hollow bird bone, rather than hammer it out of a copper wire.  This gave me a 1mm thick needle blank, which I ground into its final shape on the wet wheel and a bit of sandpaper.  I left a little more bone above the eye of the needle, because the bird bone is not as strong as the copper and the extra material will help keep the needle from splitting.  I finished it with a quick dip in a cup of hot tea to give it a bit of a warmer antiqued look than stark white bone.

Bird Bone needle with sinew thread, 7.2cm x 0.3cm x 0.1cm

Needles; copper (L), Bone (R)

The copper needle is much heavier than the bone needle, although they have nearly identical dimensions.  In the past, the bone needle would have been much quicker and easier to make, while the copper needle would be a more durable and valuable tool.

Copper shows up frequently in ethnographic and archaeological collections from the Central Arctic and this set of reproductions will have several copper endblades, arrowheads, rivets, and scrapers to show off in the upcoming weeks.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Sicco Harpoon Heads

Sicco Harpoon Head reproductions

I'm on the road for a couple of days helping out an artist visiting Newfoundland from Nunavut.  I'll post more about that when I get back, but in the mean time, here's a look at some Sicco harpoon heads that I made recently.  Two of them went to a thesis supervisor and her student to celebrate the completion of an archaeology Master's degree.

from Schledermann and McCullough 1980

Sicco harpoon heads are an early, decorated form of the Thule Type 3 harpoon head that show up in the earliest Thule sites in Nunavut and Greenland, although the name "Sicco Open Socket" originally comes from collections described at Point Barrow, Alaska (Park and Stenton 1998, McCullough 1989).  I primarily used Park and Stenton's Ancient Harpoon Heads of Nunavut, and photos and illustrations of Sicco harpoon heads found on Ellesmere Island by Peter Schledermann and Karen McCullough as references to make these reproductions.

Walrus Ivory and antler

The Sicco harpoon heads were a new form to me, so I decided to make them in a variety of sizes and materials just to get the hang of them.  They have a bit of a complex shape, with an asymmetric spur, open socket and lashing slots, so in addition to printing 1:1 paper patterns of the harpoon heads, I also sculpted a 3D model in modelling clay to help me visualize some of the specific angles and shapes that are peculiar to this style of harpoon head.  According to Park and Stenton, Sicco's range in size from 7-15 cm and are primarily made from ivory and sometimes antler or bone.  The largest one that I made is made from walrus ivory and is 13.4 cm long.  The other two are antler and are 9.3 cm and 7.8 cm long.

Sicco on foreshaft

Despite the range in size, all three seem big enough to be functional and all fit securely on the same foreshaft.  Its necessary to loop sinew or baleen through the lashing slots to close the open socket to use the harpoon head.  The smallest one, fit with an endblade and sinew lashings to close the open socket fits snuggly on a whalebone foreshaft and could easily have been used for seal hunting.

Antiqued and assembled

One of the defining characteristics of the Sicco harpoon heads is the presence of incised line decorations.  The lines seemed to accentuate the natural contours of the harpoon head.  To me, the finished effect is kind of like air brushed muscles on a superhero costume, highlighting and streamlining the design.  The large ivory harpoon head was left pristine white and the larger antler piece was antiqued in tea.  Those are the two pieces done for the supervisor and her student.  Before I sent them off, I experimented a bit with endblades.

Ground slate endblades

I wanted to try making a ground slate and copper endblade for each of them.  The Sicco harpoon heads found on Ellesmere Island by Schledermann and McCullough have an endblade slot width of 1.5 mm - 2.2mm.  This is really quite thin; for comparison, a penny is 1.5 mm thick.    It turned out to be too thin for the ground slate endblade on the largest harpoon head.  Those endblades broke while I was trying to fit them.  I could get slate endblades thin enough to fit on the two smaller harpoon heads, but they felt very fragile.  At that thickness, metal endblades seem like a much safer option.

Slate endblades less than 2mm thick cracked while fitting them into the narrow endblade slot

Hammered copper rod needs to be trimmed

To make the copper endblades, I used sections of the same heavy copper ground wire that I use for pressure flakers.  The wire wasn't big enough to make a passable endblade for the largest harpoon head so I'll have to get some bigger lumps of copper to try hammering the next time I make one of these large Thule harpoon heads.  I did get a couple nice endblades that fit the smaller harpoon heads, with comparable dimensions to copper endblades found with the Ellesmere Island Sicco harpoon heads.  I hammered the rough shape out on an anvil and ground the edges to give the endblade its final shape and sharpness.

Antler Sicco with copper endblade

I need to start using more copper and iron in my Thule reproductions.  Metal use and the quest for new sources of copper and iron is an important part of the story of the spread of the Thule culture across the Arctic.  Meteoritic iron and Norse copper in Greenland seem to have been a powerful draw that helped pull the early Thule pioneers quickly eastward into the Canadian Arctic and Greenland from Alaska.

Sicco Harpoon Head Reproduction: antler, sinew, copper ($175 Cdn, tax inc)

References:
McCullough, Karen M.
1989 The Ruin Islanders: Early Thule Pioneers in the Eastern High Arctic. Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series Paper 141, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa-Hull.

Park, Robert W. and Douglas R. Stenton
1998 Ancient Harpoon Heads of Nunavut: An Illustrated Guide.  Parks Canada, Ottawa

Schledermann, Peter and Karen McCullough
1980 Western Elements in the Early Thule Culture of the Eastern High Arctic. Arctic 33 ( 4): 833-841

Photo Credits:
1, 3-10: Tim Rast
2: Screen capture from Western Elements in the Early Thule Culture of the Eastern High Arctic by Scheldermann and McCullough, 1980