Repairs for The Rooms

Earlier this winter I completed a few repairs and replacement pieces of toys and games used in programming at The Rooms.  These pieces included replacement counting sticks and dice for waltes games, new artificial sinew and antler sticks for pin and cup games, and new artificial sinew on 22 rawhide buzzers.  

Wooden waltes discs with ink designs and wood counting sticks with lightly ochre stained ends.  These were replacement pieces from existing sets with missing pieces.  I didn't make the original sets, but I worked from photos and reference pieces to match the intact pieces.

Antler pin and cup games with artificial sinew cords.  The previous antler sticks were broken or lost.

Rawhide buzzers.  I replaced the worn artificial sinew and added the wood sticks to make them easier to pull.

The rawhide is very hard wearing and durable.  I made these quite a few years ago for The Rooms and even though the old cord wore out there is no wear on the discs.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Bone and Antler Games for the Canadian Museum of History

 

These Bilboquets or pin and cup games are on their way to join the Canadian Museum of History's travelling Kids Celebrate exhibition.  The pins are all antler and the cups are either long bone sections or caribou antler with the porous interior scraped hollow.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Beothuk Gaming Pieces

Beothuk game piece reproductions

Late last year, I worked on a set of bone Beothuk Game Piece reproductions.  They were a birthday present ordered by a friend for her archaeologist husband.  I made 13 pieces in total and we selected seven of the nicest pieces to make the gift set.   This old blog post discusses some of the primary sources and interpretations of how the game pieces may have been used.  The pieces are carved in bone (I primarily use caribou long bones) and decorated with incised lines on one side.  They are covered in red ochre.

Thirteen finished game piece replicas

Like anything, the more time you spend with a project, the more detail that begins to emerge.  All of the known game pieces are either diamond shaped, rectangular, or irregular.  A complete set seems to have been composed of three diamond, three rectangular, and one irregular piece. There also seems to be a different approach to the thickness of the different game pieces.  The irregular and diamond shaped pieces are quite thin and flat, and often have a slight curve to them, probably from the shape of the bone they are made from.  The rectangular pieces are much thicker and blockier.  They aren't cubes like a six-sided die, but they are not simple flat tiles like the diamond shaped pieces either.  I tried to reflect this difference in the reproductions.

Carving the designs is a multi-stage process.  The final designs are quite complex, so I don't carve them all at once.  I begin with the borders and longest lines first and then add progressively more detail in additional carving sessions.  You can see my pencil marks on the blanks in this photo.  The reproductions are sitting on a sheet of paper that is printed with the original artifacts that I used for reference.

This is the final set of game pieces for my friend's birthday.  It has three diamond shaped pieces, three rectangular pieces and one irregular piece.  I'm especially happy with how the ochre took to the bone - they really capture the look and feel of the original artifacts.  

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Provincial Historic Sites Reproductions and Games

Red Ochre stained Beothuk
knife reproduction

Last week, I delivered an order of artifact reproductions and games to the folks at Provincial Historic Sites to use in interpretive programming.  One set was a collection of Beothuk hunting tools, including a knife, scraper, deer spear, harpoon, and three arrows.  A second batch of games included rawhide buzzers, a waltes set, and pin-and-cup games.

The harpoon and deer spear (lance) are
very hard to photograph because of
their length.

Some of these pieces are new to me, including the Beothuk lance.  I used the archaeology site at Russell's Point as the reference collection for the lithics in the collection.  The knife blade, end scraper,  arrowheads, and lance head are all based on artifacts found by Bill Gilbert in his MA research at Russell's Point.  I used a metal endblade on the harpoon because I've only seen metal endblades on Beothuk examples of that implement.  It's possible that some of the lithic artifacts that we find in Beothuk sites and classify as arrowheads or triangular bifaces were used to tip harpoon heads, but no one has found one in association with a harpoon head to prove it.  Here's a link to a blog post from 2014 where I discuss the references available for Beothuk harpoons and deer spears.

Beothuk harpoon and lance reproductions

The point of this lance is based on a large bi-pointed artifact found at Russell's Point.  It's possible that it was an unhafted bifacial knife, but it was symetrical enough that it's possible that it tipped a long deer spear, similar to the long iron tipped deer spears of the later historic period.

An antler harpoon head with a steel endblade and sinew lashing.  Like all of the Beothuk reproductions that I make, it is covered in red ochre.  The harpoon head has a line attached and is designed to slip off the end of the long wooden harpoon shaft when it is stabbed into a seal.

The complete harpoon and lance.

According to historic observations and drawings by Shanawdithit, the harpoon and dear spear were very long.  The deer spears were reported to be 12 feet long, while harpoons were variously reported as 12-14 feet long.  The one shown here is 13 feet long and the deer spear is 12 feet long.  These tools are so lengthy, that I make them in two pieces with a hard raw hide socket to join them together.  The can be taken apart for transportation and storage and reassembled for interpretation.

Beothuk style chert knife in a wood handle with sinew lashing and red ochre staining.

Hafted endscraper.  The endscrapers at Russell's Point were primarily made on flakes and had very rounded scraping edges, especially when compared to similar Palaeoeskimo artifacts from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Wood artifacts are very rare form Beothuk archaeological sites.  There are a handful of pieces from ethnographic contexts, but things like tool handles are very hard to come by.  When I don't have archaeological references to use, I try to fill in the blanks as simply as possible.

Beothuk arrow reproductions.  Chert, sinew, pine, goose feathers, red ochre

The Beothuk reproductions together.

Raw hide buzzer game

A buzzer in action. You can do the same thing with a big button twisted on a string.  It sounds like the wind when it whirs.

Bone and antler pin and cup games.

Success!

Waltes.  This is a Mi'kmaq game.  There are many examples of this game in the Maritimes and it's becoming popular among the Mi'kmaq of Newfoundland.  The game is played with a shallow wooden bowl and six game pieces.  The game pieces are blank on one side and incised with a design on the other and the game is scored based on the combination of face-up and face-down dice when they are flipped in the bowl.  The sticks are used for scoring.  Provincial Historic Sites tried unsuccessfully to find a Mi'kmaq craftsperson in the Province to make this game set before coming to me.  It would be good to see someone from the Mi'kmaq community making these.

Photo Credits: 

1-6, 8-10, 13, 15-17: Tim Rast
7, 11, 12, 14: Lori White

Bilboquets

 The bilboquets or pin-and-cup games I showed boiling on Monday are dried and ready to ship now.  I discussed it with the client and given the way these toys are intended to be used, we decided to go with braided artificial sinew instead of real sinew.  It looks the same, but it should last a little longer, with less maintenance than real sinew.  The bone targets, pins, and cords range in size and therefore difficulty.  The pins are primarily ribs and the targets are cut from caribou long bones and whale ribs.

Set of nine bilboquets

The different sizes and hole diameters make some of the toys more challenging than others.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

You want what?

Bone pin and cup games, minus the sinew string
that will connect the two parts together.

I learned a new word from this order; bilboquet.  I've made these sort of bone pin-and-cup games before, but I've never come across the French name for them until the Canadian Museum of History requested nine such toys for a hands-on travelling exhibit called "Kids Celebrate".  I spent today roughing out the caribou and whale bone cylinders and pins in the workshop and boiling out the residual grease in them in the kitchen.  It won't take long to add the braided sinew cord to bind the pins to the cups.  I should be able to get them in the mail within the next day or two.

Boiling out the grease and marrow

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Marking Beothuk Reproductions

Pencil on bone

I'm back in the studio, working on Beothuk reproductions.  The photos in this blog post show a few bone gaming pieces and pendants roughed out and marked up for carving.  The gaming pieces are made from long bones and the pendants are cut out of caribou mandibles.  I've drawn designs on them in pencil based on actual artifacts and tomorrow I'll incise the designs so that when they are covered in red ochre the carved designs will stand out.  Most of the Beothuk designs seem to be abstract.  If they had meaning, they are forgotten.  I spend a lot of time counting lines and hatch marks to transfer the designs by hand from the artifacts to the reproductions.  The closest thing to a pattern that I've seen seems to be related to methods for filling up space on the object's surface rather than marking out something more abstract like measuring time or distance.

Adding a line midway between
two existing lines is an easy way
to evenly fill up a space.  Its
exactly the same idea as the
fractions within an inch on a ruler,
except each mark isn't exactly 1/8
or 1/16 of an inch wide - the
spacing changes depending on
how far apart you space the first
two marks.

The patterns on the objects seem to be easiest to reproduce by working from the edges inwards.  Most of the pieces have border lines incised around the edges of the piece.  Whether they are square gaming pieces or more triangular pendants, the first step is to define the outer limits of the pattern and then proceed to divide up the internal space.  The internal space is usually divided into halves and then more details are added symmetrically inside those internal divisions.  Its not always the case, but often when I count the lines covering a space they make sense if you approach the design with the goal of systematically and evenly filling up the internal space in mind.   The designs start by delineating the maximum boundaries and then subdivide the internal space again and again.  Is that a fractal?  Or maybe a reverse fractal? Kind of, I guess.   Its easier to understand what I mean if you look at the sketch on the left.  In the top row, I've drawn two lines to show the edges of the space that I want to infill with marks.  In the second row, I've added one more line half way between them which leaves three lines in total, evenly distributed in a row.  In the next line, I've added a mark in between each of the three lines to create five evenly spaced marks.  Using this method it is easy to fill up a space of any size with equally spaced lines.  In turn it leaves behind sets of the same number of marks over and over again.  I haven't done the math, but my impression is that sets of five, nine, and seventeen marks or lines show up on Beothuk carvings more often than other numbers.  More than random, at any rate.  As a variation on this, you can add two marks (instead of a single mark) between a pair at any stage, which leaves a different, but still repetitive, sequence of numbers.  When I copy a design onto a reproduction I think about how I'll copy and scale the design to fit the space and more often than not I can use a simple formula like this to get the same number of evenly spaced marks as I see on the original.  If it works on the reproduction, it makes me think that maybe similar methods were used to create the originals.

On these tiles, the patterns might look random or complex at first, but at least some of the designs seem to be based on sequences of numbers that are easy to explain if the carver set out to systematically fill the space quickly and evenly with marks or dashes.  For example - the tile with the "H" in the middle has a border on the right side with seventeen diagonal dashes in it.  Its very easy to place seventeen evenly spaced dashes into a given area simply by adding lines in the gaps between previous lines (see the drawing above.)  The gaming piece in the upper left corder with the grid on it is even easier.  It has two sets of nine lines running across it, which can be drawn by adding parallel lines between two lines three times in a row and then crossing it at 90 degrees with one set of five lines running lengthwise (which can be made by adding a line between two lines twice).  

There may be meaning behind these symbols and designs, but I really get the feeling when I make them that they are the result of creatively applying some very simple rules 1) define the edges of the design, 2) divide it down the middle 3) fill in each half symetrically with evenly spaced lines, dashes, and triangles.  No two pieces are ever the same, but they all seem to be made following the same design principles.  

Does any of this make sense?  I feel like I've taken a very simple idea and explained it in the most complicated way possible.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Home

In the 1930s and early '40s my father was given a different board game every Christmas from his godmother.    A couple years ago when I was home I brought three that I can remember playing with as a kid and had a friend of mine frame them.  They are hanging together in the basement.

Chutes and Ladders

Chutes and Ladders, Parcheesi, Steeple Chase 

 

Detail from Chutes and Ladders.

Photo Credits. Tim Rast
Framing by Janet Davis

Home From the Holidays

Every winter, over Christmas and New Years, Lori and I rent a house with another couple and get away from phones and computers and responsibilities for as long as possible. Its my one real vacation each year. The origins of the trip are ancient and complex, but this is the fourth year that we've rented a house for the Holidays, although there were several seasons of practice before that at Lori's parent's cabin.

This year we stayed at Amber Retreat, a recently renovated salt-box house in Durrell, near Twillingate. (In the photo on the left, its the buff yellow house on the left.) It was a fanastic house - definitely one of our favourites! The nine nights and 10 days we spent there ran together like one long Sunday afternoon. Eating, sleeping, reading and playing games.


For me, the games are always a highlight. Uno was a popular one this year for those times after a nap or late in the evening, when you weren't alert enough for the strategy of this year's big board game. We discovered Agricola - a massive farming board game that takes place in 1670, where your goal is to build your farm and feed your family. According to Board Game Geek.com its the number one player ranked game in the world. Its just the kind of game I like. Lots of little wooden pieces to collect and spend, cards to change the rules, and every time you play it, its different. There's even a 1 person version so I can stay in tip-top shape for next season!

We popped out of our little time warp to exchange stockings on Christmas morning and drink Champagne and cheer when we saw "Durrell" flash across the screen on NTVs New Year's countdown. But every other moment it was back to our perpetual Sunday afternoon.

I guess I need to get back into work mode now. It seems like a good time to do some cleaning up. Last year, every job rolled right over top of the next from June until December and I really haven't done a good clean up in the shed for months. No one who has seen my office would believe me, but I do really like to clean and reset my workshop between each job.

Photo for Dad:

Finally, here's a farm picture that I omitted last time. I think Dad was concerned that my previous set of photos implied that he hadn't bought any new machinery since the first half of the 20th Century - so here's his Versatile Tractor.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 & 8, Lori White
Photos 2-7 & 9, Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First, Driving to Durrell
Second, Amber Retreat (buff yellow house on the left with the grey and black car parked beside it)
ThirdLori's Enchiladas!
Fourth, Agricola after a tight game - a 3-way tie - 35 points each!
Fifth, Scenic Durrell
Sixth, Christmas stocking chaos
Seventh, Lori reading on her landing
Eighth, Tim reading
Ninth, Versatile tractor, Donkey and Horse at Little Profit Ranch, Ensign, Alberta

Beothuk Gaming Pieces

I'm off playing boardgames with my friends today, so here's a look at some games I made in 2005 for the Province. The game pieces are based on originals that were recovered over 100 years ago. Howley, in his book The Beothuks or Red Indians, illustrates two groups of these game pieces from two different sites and in each group he shows 3 diamond shaped pieces, 3 rectangular pieces and one irregular piece (here and here), implying that they were found and used in sets of seven. The bone tiles are decorated on one side, blank on the other and covered in red ochre.

The string of beads are pipestem fragments, with two large bone discs tied on either end. The orginal artifacts these are based on were found alongside Beothuk gaming pieces in a burial on Swan Island. Ingeborg Marshall suggests in a History and Ethnography of the Beothuk that the beads were used as counters with the bone dice.

Similar dice games were played throughout northeastern North America and they often involved tossing the bone tiles or dice in a bowl and using some kind of counters to track the player's scores or wagers, based on whether they landed marked side up or down. I based the design of the bowl on an unfinished birch bowl that was found with Mary March when she was captured. The original is on display in The Rooms.

We don't know what the rules were - but if you found these under the tree on Christmas day and the dog ate the instructions - what sort of game would you make up?

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions: Elfshot Reproductions of Beothuk gaming pieces, bowls, and pipestem beaded strings, all covered in red ochre.