Stocking The Rooms in time for Christmas!

I'm just back from dropping off a big Christmas restocking order for The Rooms Gift Shop here in St. John's.  The order included a few flintknapping kits and a selection of handmade reproductions of Dorset, Groswater, and Beothuk endblades and arrowheads.  Everything is made from Newfoundland chert and the knapped stone tools have been mounted as necklaces, earrings, lapel pins, and tie tacs.  For this Christmas season, The Rooms gift shop currently has the best selection of Elfshot jewelry available.  

Groswater lapel pins and Dorset earrings.

Beothuk necklaces and earrings.

Groswater earrings.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Newfoundland Harpoon and Arrow Reproductions

The pointy ends of harpoon and arrow reproductions

I completed a set of artifact reproductions based on artifacts found in Newfoundland and Labrador this week.  The set included a complete Groswater Palaeoeskimo harpoon, a Dorset harpoon head with a tip-fluted endblade, a barbed Maritime Archaic harpoon head, and a Beothuk or Little Passage style arrow.  These pieces are on their way to Nova Scotia right now and will be used by an archaeologist friend of mine in school talks.  

 

The set is intended to represent four different cultures and illustrate some of the different technologies used in the pursuit of food over time.  The complete Groswater harpoon can be used to demonstrate how a toggling harpoon works.  The small Dorset harpoon head fits onto the whalebone foreshaft on the Groswater harpoon, although it lacks an harpoon line.  The barbed Maritime Archaic harpoon head belongs to a completely different time period and cultural group so it isn't compatible with the Palaeoeskimo harpoon.  It shows a contrasting technology that would have been used for the same purpose; hunting seals.

I modeled the main shaft of the harpoon on the wooden harpoon shaft found at L'Anse aux Meadows.   

The Groswater harpoon, with it's distinctive harpoon head and endblade in place.

Ochre staining the Maritime Archaic barbed harpoon.  Unlike the Palaeoeskimo harpoon heads with a line hole centered in the middle of the harpoon head, this style of harpoon head has a single line hole positioned close to the base.  It relies on the barbs for gripping the seal and won't toggle in the wound the same as the Dorset and Groswater harpoon heads.

Another view of the Groswater harpoon head with a shelf cut on one side and lashing holes gouged through the nose to tie the plano-convex, box-based endblade in place.  The endblade is knapped from local Newfoundland chert, the harpoon head is antler, the foreshaft is whalebone, and the mainshaft is wood.  Sinew and sealskin are used to tie the various pieces together and to create the harpoon line.

 

Side views of the reproductions.  From left to right, Maritime Archaic harpoon head, Little Passage Arrow, Dorset harpoon head, and Groswater harpoon.

 

Dorset harpoon head made from antler with a tip-fluted chert endblade.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Harpoon with Spare Parts

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Harpoon Heads

This is a fun little set that I just sent off to Mount Royal University in Calgary along with the Northern Plains projectile points that I showed on Friday.  This a Groswater Palaeoeskimo harpoon with three interchangeable harpoon heads.  Two of the harpoon heads (one with a chert endblade and one self-bladed) have braided sinew lanyards and sealskin lines attached to them.  There is a third harpoon head prepared to fit the same foreshaft, ready to attach to a line when needed.  I don't think I've ever made a kit quite like this before and it really made me think about the tools in a new way.  

All three harpoon heads fit
the same whale bone foreshaft.

I think it's very likely that Groswater hunters would have carried sets of spare harpoon heads like this around with them.  Each harpoon head we find archaeologically doesn't have to equate to it's own complete harpoon.  The barbed or endbladed harpoon heads may have been used on different prey or in different conditions, but there is no reason to carry around multiple complete harpoon shafts to fit them all separately.  Similarly, there is no reason to wait until a harpoon head is damaged or lost to prepare backup parts.  I think versatile kits like this were probably much more common in the past than a single harpoon without any spare parts.

The selfbladed antler harpoon head is designed to toggle, but it also has a single barb to help secure it in the prey.

I used softwood for the main body of the harpoon and sealskin for the lines and lashing

A Newfoundland chert endblade lashed to an antler harpoon head with sinew.  The foreshaft is whalebone and the braided line threaded through the harpoon head line hole is sinew.

I suspect Groswater hunters maintained similar spare harpoon heads for inevitably lost or damaged parts or different prey or hunting conditions.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Groswater harpoon progress

Un-notched Groswater
Endblade

I have a few goals in the workshop this week and several orders that I'm trying to fill all at once, but my main focus is to get a Groswater harpoon and assorted Northern Plain's projectile points finished and in the mail by Friday.  The clock is ticking and I need the harpoon to be dry before shipping, so my priority today was working the sealskin so that the lashing can go on to the wood shaft as soon as possible so that it can dry while I work on the other unfinished pieces in the order.

Stretching and drying sealskin for the harpoon line and lashings.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Start of the long weekend

If I had made it out to the workshop today, I would have finished these Groswater harpoon heads.  But I didn't make it to the workshop today.  I got distracted by office work, photo editing, and the first lunchtime pina coladas of the season.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Too Cool for School? Not this school...

Reproductions spanning 5000 years
 of history and multiple cultures

Believe it or not, this is a set of artifact reproductions that is on it's way to a local elementary school.  Teachers at Beachy Cove Elementary School in Portugal Cove-St. Philips put together an order this spring for a set of museum quality artifact reproductions to use in programming with their students.  Although I don't have kids, I've got to know a few teachers and students in the St. John's area through classroom visits and the Open Minds program at The Rooms.  The parents, students, and teachers from Beachy Cove are consistently remarkable.  This K-6 school now has a collection of Newfoundland and Labrador artifact reproductions on par with this Province's national and provincial historic sites and museums.  I was very proud to receive this order and I hope the students enjoy working with these pieces as much as I enjoyed making them.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Chert Arrowheads and Endblades

Local Newfoundland Chert

After three days of knapping, there are nearly 90 points in the workshop ready to be turned into necklaces, earrings, lapel pins, and tie-tacs.  Most of these Beothuk arrowheads and Dorset and Groswater Palaeoeskimo endblades will end up as jewellery for sale through the gift shop at The Rooms here in St. John's.  It's been a while since I've restocked a store with this quantity of Elfshot jewellery, so if you have been waiting for the right moment to pick something up, your chance is coming up.

The large biface in the middle is a Groswater Palaeoeskimo assymetric knife, but the rest are arrowheads and endblades.  The upper right corner is full of triangular Middle Dorset Palaeoeskimo endblades, the lower right corner is Groswater Palaeoeskimo box-based, side notched endblades and the left side contains corner notched Beothuk arrowheads.  The larger ones will be turned into necklaces and the smaller ones will be paired up into earrings.  The lonely ones left behind will become tie tacs and lapel pins.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Lithic Artifacts

In this colour plate, take the bluish tinge in the quartz microblades (A,B) with a grain of salt.  They are actually clear, but  they were photographed against a blue background which I removed and replace with plain white in photoshop.  Its misleading in the colour image, but in the black and white version of this plate that will appear in publication, its not an issue.  (A,B) stemmed quartz microblades, (C) chert micorblade core, (D,E,F) Chert microblades, (G) Distal end of a biface, which is probably from an asymmetric knife, (H-L) Stemmed and notched biface bases, (M) sideblade, (N) Asymmetric knife, (O) biface, that may be an endblade, although its is thinned at the base similar to knives, (P-S) Endscrapers - the top one (P) has slight ears, but most of the scrapers found at the site were small and traingular in outline.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Endblades

Sample of Groswater Palaeoeskimo endblades from the Peat Garden site in Bird Cove on Newfoundland's northern peninsula.  In each pair, the dorsal surface is on the left and the ventral surface is on the right.  These have a "plano-convex" or D-shaped cross section, so the dorsal surface is convex and the ventral surface is flat.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Artifacts from Peat Garden, Bird Cove, Newfoundland

Groswater Palaeoeskimo Harpoon heads from
Peat Garden at Bird Cove, Newfoundland

More than a decade ago, I co-directed an archaeology project for a couple seasons with Latonia Hartery at Bird Cove on Newfoundland's northern peninsula.  Today, I'm working on some artifact plates for a paper on one of the Groswater Palaeoeskimo sites from that project.  The publication is going to be black and white, but I like the look of the colour plates before converting them to greyscale as well, so I figured I'd pop a few up on the blog.

A) Sandstone abrader - the sort of thing used to grind the edge and faces of burin-like tools and side scrapers at the site. B) Knapped blank, ready for grinding.  What happened here?  Its perfect and big and the left it behind. C,D) Chipped and ground burin-like tools.  E,F) Chipped and ground side-scrapers.  Why are the ground facets white on the burin-like tools, but not on the side-scrapers?

Asymmetric Knives.  They start out asymmetical and that asymmetry grows as they are used and resharpened.  At Peat Garden, the Groswater Palaeoeskimo people like to finish their bifaces with stems and shallow notches for hafting.

This is the greyscale version of the colour photo at the top of the post.  The larger harpoon head (A) is nearly complete.  Its made on some sort of marine mammal bone, is self-bladed and has an open socket.  There is some damage around the base, but it appears to have terminated in a single, central spur, which is a little unusual for the Groswater harpoon heads found in the province. The smaller barbed harpoon tip (B) is made from ivory and its broken above the line hole.  The outside edge has a partial slot for a small side-blade.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Knapped Chert Earrings

Recent Indian
"Little Passage"
Points in local chert

I'm making small progress on lots of little jobs, but hopefully I'll start knocking some items off my to-do lists that are a little more substantial than replying to e-mails.  The earrings are done, and mostly carded on hang tags, although I need one more card for the last pair of earrings and I'm out of card stock, which means a trip to pick up stationary.  When I'm not knapping, I'm reading and writing.  There are a couple papers that I'm involved with nearing completion and its my turn to give some input.   I find writing academic papers very difficult.  Next to rats, putting something together for peer review is probably one of my biggest phobias.

Recent Indian, Groswater Palaeoeskimo and Dorset Palaeoeskimo reproduction earrings.  The jewellery has become a smaller part of my business, but its still important.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Frankenpoon

Chert, antler, whalebone

If Frankenstein worked in whalebone, sealskin, and chert instead of corpses, he might have pieced together a harpoon like this.  This composite design harpoon intentionally melds together stylistic forms from the Eastern Arctic and Newfoundland and Labrador into one piece with many different parts.  

At this stage the endblade is done and the antler harpoon head is blocked out, according to the reference drawing by the client.

With a little more work done on it, the endblade and harpoon head remind me of those kid's flip books with the split pages where you mix and match the pictures so you can see a giraffe's head on a lion's body with a peacock's tail.  The tip of the harpoon is Middle Dorset, with a tip fluted endblade, although the endblade base is not a Dorset style.  The mid section of the toggling harpoon head, where the endblade meets the harpoon head, is modeled on Groswater Palaeoeskimo artifacts, but the base of the harpoon head, with the double line holes and symmetrical basal spurs is Late Dorset in design.  By the time its all done there will be some Thule Inuit design elements and Beothuk aspects built into the mix.

This one's for Steve.  There's my signature "TR" in the lower right corner - just for you.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Dorswater* Endblade

Groswater endblade, Dorsal view

Have you ever asked yourself, "Could plano-convex box-based Groswater Palaeoeskimo endblades have been tip-fluted?"  I mean, who hasn't?  Maybe you were thinking that the reason we never, or practically never, find tip-fluted Groswater endblades is that there is some mechanical limit that makes it impossible to knap such a thing.

Well, there isn't.

Ventral face with a WHAAAAT?

 If the people who knapped the distinctive Groswater endblades had wanted to, they could have tip-fluted them just fine.  So scratch that one off the list, here's a reproduction of a tip-fluted Groswater endblade that proves the point.  The reason or reasons that Groswater endblades are not tip-fluted is not a function of the other unusual properties of the endblades - that they have a plano-convex or "D" shaped cross-section and a squared box base.  There must have been other reason(s) for the design.

This unusual endblade will tip the one-of-a-kind harpoon reproduction that I'm working on for an archaeologist who wants a single piece that represents all of the various cultures and sites that he's worked on. I haven't initialled it yet, but I promise to sign it.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

*not a real culture

Wrapping up the Week

Bird combs, ready to ochre

Today, I'm working on the last of the reproductions bound for teaching kits and a mock dig at Red Bay, Labrador.  Its primarily Groswater Palaeoeskimo and Maritime Archaic Indian reproductions, although there is one Recent Indian arrow in the mix.  The arrow is done and all of the Groswater reproductions are finished, except for the lashings and line on a harpoon.  

Grinding the ochre

The Maritime Archaic pieces are all finished, except for the ochre.  I think I'll ochre all the archaic artifacts reproductions this time. I still don't know if things like adzes or projectile points would have been covered in ochre when they were in day-to-day use, but it does help make the reproductions look cool.  It also creates a talking point for interpreters.  My pet theory is that ochre and grease on tools in this damp part of the world was a waterproofing agent that would help prolong the life of the objects that they coated.

Patty and Bjarne and whalebone

It would be simple enough to test a theory like that, I just need to get organized enough to come up with an experiment and do it.  Perhaps what I need to do is plan some purely experimental time into my yearly workshop schedule, rather than try to tack the experiments on to regular Elfshot work.  I alluded in Wednesday's post that I wanted to get a little more organized about the experimental archaeology side of the job. While Bjarne Grønnow was in town earlier this week for Patty Well's Ph.D. defense (passed with distinction - congratulations!) I had a chance to hang out while the two of them and Priscilla Renouf went through some of the organic Dorset artifacts from Port au Choix. There's a place for making reproductions and playing around with them to see how they work and what their limits are, but Bjarne encouraged a little more systematic and rigourous approach to experimenting with reproductions.  Hopefully, more on that later.

Groswater harpoon assembly

Anyhow, for now, I'm wrapping up one order in the workshop and moving full time into the Cape Krusenstern reproductions next week. I'll probably post a few more shots of the reproductions bound for Red Bay once everything is assembled, stained, and dried.  There are one or two pieces in there that I have never made before, so it was fun for me.

Burning blubber inside a Choris pot for Cape Krusenstern.  I want to stain the inside of the pot  with grease as much as possible before breaking it apart into sherds.  A big hole blew out in the side above the flame not long after this photo. Oh well, it has to come apart somehow.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast