A Set of Maritime Archaic Artifact Reproductions

Maritime Archaic Reproductions

Here's a look at the complete set of Maritime Archaic reproductions that includes the bird bone flute and hafted adze that I highlighted on Monday.  These reproductions will be used in conjunction with some original artifacts and interpretive materials in the Red Bay and Gros Morne areas.  The artifacts that we started with for references included stemmed points, an adze, and a plummet.  The remainder of the reproductions are primarily based on artifacts found in the Martime Archaic burials at Port au Choix.

This is an archaeology case used in a programme that I provided reproductions for a few years ago.  The pieces shown here will help build and expand on the programme.

Slate Lance for Sea Mammals

The Archaic period in Newfoundland and Labrador is a lot more complex than I usually give it credit for on this site.  Generally speaking, the Archaic period in North American archaeology is a time starting 7 or 8 thousand years ago when people seem to have settled down in different regions and developed specialized tool kits for those particular regions.  During the Archaic period in Newfoundland and Labrador people adapted to exploiting marine resources - so it was labelled the Maritime Archaic.  However, there are differences in artifact types and materials through time - the Archaic period spans at least 3 or 4 thousand years in the Province.  There are links and commonalities with Archaic sites in the Maritime Provinces and New England.

Plummets.  These are often made from Steatite (soapstone) and are carved with an incised groove at one end or around the middle. They seem like fishing gear - probably line sinkers.  They could have been used on nets, although I don't think they are found in big enough numbers and they are relatively small.  I believe there was an Honours thesis done at MUN a few years ago that looked at their distribution and form.

Toggling and barbed harpoon heads - like the this one - show up in the Maritime Archaic as part of the regional adaptation to the marine environment.  

People were buried with bird-head combs

There are differences between the Archaic sites found in the southern part of the Province, and more northerly parts of Labrador, so archaeologists have talked about a Southern Branch of Maritime Archaic and a Northern Branch or Labrador Archaic.  Dominic Lacroix is working on a Ph.D. at MUN that examines further regional differences or countries within the Maritime Archaic sites in Newfoundland.  The differences in preservation further complicate things.  We have unusually well preserved artifacts and mortuary remains for the Maritime Archaic in the southern part of the Province, but most of our information on dwellings comes from northern Labrador.  The Archaic sites are the earliest sites in the Province so they have been riding through thousands of years of sea level change which had submerged some sites and elevated others.

I guess its like anything else. The more closely you examine it the more complicated it becomes.

Throughout the Archaic timeline, triangular points were replaced with stemmed points.  The stems grew longer and then started expanding at the base until they became side notches.  That's a trend that happens during the Archaic more-or-less continent wide.

Hafted Adze, ground slate lance, barbed fish spear prong, unhafted adze, three projectile points, bird headed comb, barbed harpoon head, bird bone flute, plummets.  A person could probably have an ok start in the afterlife with a set like this.

Photo Credits:
1, 3-8: Tim Rast
2: Margaret McKeon

Maritime Archaic Flute and Adze

Hafted and unhafted adzes, flute, etc.

I'm packing up and shipping the Maritime Archaic Indian, Groswater Palaeoeskimo, and Recent Indian reproductions bound for Red Bay and Newfoundland's west coast later today.  We had nice sunny weather yesterday so I photographed the finished pieces in the backyard.  In this post, I'll talk a bit about the bird bone flute and the adzes in the set.

Goose humerus flute

For the flute, I used a goose humerus, because it was the biggest bird bone that I had on hand.  The Maritime Archaic Indians made a variety of flutes and whistles from the hollow bones of large birds including geese, gannets, swans, and eagles.  Ulnas seem to have been prefered, but other bones show up as well.  Most of the flutes and whistles that I'm aware of were found in the burials at Port au Choix.  I'm no musician, but I've talked to some people who are passionate about flutes and whistles - so hopefully they'll correct me if I get something wrong here.

blow across the top

This reproduction is a flute, meaning you blow across the opening to produce a sound.  A whistle is an instrument that you blow into the end to make noise.  The Maritime Archaic Indians made both.  In the case of a whistle, a slanted notch or hole is made somewhere midway down the shaft of the bone.  For a flute, you need to cut a small slanted notch in the end that you blow across.  You play it by blowing across the top, similar to how you make a noise blowing across a bottle mouth.  That little notch is important - it splits the air and creates the sound of the flute.  I wasn't aware of the mechanics of flutes the first time I made a Maritime Archaic bird bone flute and I though that little half hole was a crack in the bone where it broke through a finger hole.  That's not correct - it was intentionally made.  If you look carefully at the intact flutes from the province, you'll see a little notch on the end of every one.  If its missing that notch, look at the holes along the body of the instrument - one will probably have a slant edge to it, indicating that it was a whistle.

The end notch is important

I'm not a musician.  At all.  I was in a marching band in elementary school and they kicked me off the bugle and put me on baritone bugle because it had fewer parts in most songs and my errors were less shrill.  Then they took me off the baritone bugle and made me a flag bearer.  Still, if I blow on this flute and get the angles right I can get it to make a sound, especially if I keep my finger over the top hole and keep the bottom hole open.  The impression that I get is that smaller bones makes a more shrill noise, whereas those big wing bones from the bigger birds would create a lower, more pleasant sound.  I know that the baritone bugle was bigger than the regular bugle and it made a lower noise, so I'm guessing the same principle is at work here.

Adzes were woodworking tools

For the adze, I used a silicified slate or argillite for the bit, hardwood for the handle, sealskin for the lashing and ochre and oil, water, and egg for the pigment.  The complete adze will be there for the kids to pass around and handle, while the unhafted blade will be used in the mock dig.  For these sorts of stone tools, I like to leave traces of all the stages of manufacture in place.  Some axes, adzes, or gouges that we find in the province are perfectly finished and polished, but most have a nicely finished (and perhaps use damaged) bit end, but the rest of the body of the adze is more roughly shaped and usually show traces of chipping and pecking.  We don't find the wood handle or lashing, so that's a bit of guesswork based on other adzes from around the world.

The working bit on an Maritime Archaic Adze is usually the most heavily worked and finely finished part of the tool.  The rest of the stone would have been buried under lashings and wasn't as finely finished or polished.

Bit sits on a shelf, but doesn't butt against the back

The proximal ends of adzes are often irregular and I've sometimes wondered why they aren't more carefully finished.  It seems like they could be carefully shaped to butt up against the handle and create a more secure bond.  Robin Wood has been part of a team building a reconstruction of a Bronze Age boat and he made many of the woodworking tools used in the effort.  He noted in his bronze adzes that if the back of the bit made contact with the wood handle it would bounce loose during use. In Newfoundland, the Palaeoeskimos used antler sockets for their stone adzes to act as shock absorbers to prevent this problem, but I think that the Maritime Archaic probably just made sure that the back of their adze blades didn't make contact with the wood handle.  I've started leaving a gap between the distal end of adze blades and the wood handle in my Maritime Archaic reproductions now.

I have a lot of sealskin thong on hand, so I use it on reproductions like this.  Different sorts of leather or rawhide lacing could have been used as well as cordage made from plants or roots.  We don't get wood or leather preservation in Maritime Archaic sites in Newfoundland and Labrador, so we details of the handle and lashing are based on analogies with other adze using cultures.

A forked branch is used to make the handle.  I try not to get stuck in a rut when I make reproductions like this.  Since I 'm speculating on the style of handle, I like to change things up - maybe someday I'll accidentally make one that is correct.  For this particular adze, I left a longer knob opposite the bit end and covered the whole thing in red ochre.  I'm happy with it.  I think if I sent it back in a time machine and someone in a Maritime Archaic camp tripped over it they'd wonder who left that there and not "what the heck is that thing?"

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

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

Starting Spring Orders

Archaic Lance, Groswater reproductions

For the next couple of months I'll be working on artifact reproductions full time.  I have a few wholesale jewelry orders to fill, but most of the work will be for universities and parks to use in interpretive or educational programming.  The two big projects that I'm working on at the moment are sets of reproductions based on artifacts found in digs at Red Bay, Labrador and Cape Krusenstern, Alaska.

Groswater side-scraper needs a handle

I'll talk more about the artifacts as I finish the reproductions over the coming weeks.  Both are fun.  The artifacts for the Labrador project are mainly Archaic and Groswater Palaeoeskimo, which I'm pretty comfortable with, but there is always something new to learn or new techniques to experiment with.

Roughing out a Choris biface

The Alaskan artifacts are especially interesting to me because they are related to the Eastern Arctic cultures that I'm particularly fond of, but they have their own unique twists.  The people living in the Eastern Arctic came there from the west at least a couple of different times in the past.   There are some interesting ancestral or transitional artifact styles in Alaska that help put archaeology in the Canadian Arctic into context and I'm looking forward to reproducing some of those artifacts this spring.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Soapstone repaired with Chert Bow Ties

Soapstone Vessel Fragments

 I took these photos last spring of a small display of artifacts in the Great Hall of the Archaeology Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland.  These are soapstone vessel fragments from the Dorset Palaeoeskimo collections from Red Bay, Labrador.  The thing that I love about them is the little chert bow tie, used to mend across a broken pot fragment.  If you didn't have the soapstone and you found one of these things what would you call it?  It kind of looks like a little scraper.  I know they also show up in the soapstone artifacts found at Cape Ray, Newfoundland, reported by Urve Linnamae, but beyond that I'm not sure how widely they were used. 

Knapped chert bow tie embedded into a soapstone vessel fragment

The adjoining piece is missing, but it would have a small indentation carved in it to accept the other end of the bow tie.

A lot of work went into making one of these pots and the soapstone quarry might be a long way away when they broke.  The Dorset Palaeoeskimos came up with lots of clever methods to repair them.

At other sites, I've seen repairs made using cold hammered copper staples and repair holes and grooves, presumably for tying pots back together with some kind of cordage.  But I think the chert bow ties are probably my favourite solution.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Prehistory of Craft

Today, when someone asks "what is Craft" they often mean, "what is the difference between Craft and Art"? I probably have opinions on that, but it isn't really how I think about craft. My background is in archaeology, not art, so I tend to think about craft as the way people made objects out of necessity before the industrial revolution and by choice afterward. The aspect of the Arts and Crafts movement of a century ago that appeals to me is the call to return to handmade objects, in response to mass produced, factory made items.

From an archaeologist's perspective, just about every object at every archaeological site that predates the industrial revolution was made by a craftsperson. That's how I became involved with craft. The majority of artifacts that we find at precontact sites in North America are stone tools and in an attempt to better understand crafts people working in the past, I inadvertantly became a craftsperson working in the present.

Sometimes it bugs me that flintknapping had vanished as a craft by the time folks like William Morris and other pioneers in the Arts and Crafts movement set the ball rolling for the modern craft resurgence. We started making stone tools 2.5 million years ago and for the next 2,499,000 years humans and all our ancestors used them daily, but flintknapping never gets a mention on any Arts and Crafts role calls. Wallpaper does though. Right place, right time -- congratulations wallpaper. Sorry you weren't around for the discovery of fire and the whole populating the globe thing, but congratulations just the same.

Bit of a tangent there, apologies to any printmakers working in wallpaper. Anyhow, here's a couple items I've come across recently that have some craft and archaeology overlap.

Earliest Pottery: Recently reported finds in China push back the origins of pottery by 1,000 years. The Oldest Pottery dates to 18,000 BP (before present). This is a bit of coup for China -- up until now Japan has had the oldest pottery in the world.

Earliest Venus: A very old, perhaps the oldest, venus figurine was discovered in a cave in Germany recently. The Venus of Hohle Fels is a particularily naughty bit of art carved in mammoth ivory and dates to at least 35,000 BP. Carved with stone tools in a wallpaperless cave, but I digress...

This last one might be of interest to the local textile artists. Here are a couple of images from Park's Canada's report on the underwater excavations of the 16th century Basque whaling ship at Red Bay, Labrador. They found fragments of a heddle, which is a kind of rigid loom for weaving. The Parks publication goes into much more detail on how these things were used. Its a five volume set, and the second volume is dedicated to the artifacts found in the excavation. Its very well illustrated and does a good job of explaining what the artifacts were used for and how they were made. There are lots of good photos and drawings of wood, metal, ceramic, and leather artifacts that could probably provide craftspeople with some interesting inspiration for cultural products.

Photo Credits:
Top, David Cohen
Middle Left, H. Jensen, Uni of Tubingen
Middle Right, The Mary Rose Trust/Parks Canada
Bottom, The Mary Rose Trust/D. Kappler, Parks Canada

Photo Captions:
Top, Early Chinese Pottery from Yuchanyan Cave, China
Middle Left, The Venus of Hohle Fels
Middle Right, A Heddle in use. This illustration appears in The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay, Vol 2, Edited by Robert Grenier, Marc-Andre Bernier and Willis Stevens. Parks Canada 2007.
Bottom, The heddle fragments from Red Bay, compared to a complete heddle found on the Mary Rose. Also found in The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay