Maritime Archaic Reproductions for Port au Choix

Bird headed pins made from caribou long bones
and needles made from bird bones and caribou ribs.

This is a set of reproductions that I recently completed for Port au Choix National Historic Site on Newfoundland's northern peninsula.  The set includes a hafted ground stone axe, slate lance, barbed harpoon, bird headed pins and bone needles.  Some of these are newly made and others are pieces that I've had in stock and that I've shown on this blog before.

The pins and needles have been slightly antiqued to take off the fresh white bone sheen.

 

Some of the needles have flat cross-sections and are made from bird bones and others have round cross-sections and are made from caribou ribs.  All of them have gouged eyes and they range in length from 5-11 cm.

Often when I make these pins, they are intended to be used as hair pins with sealskin barrettes.  However, the ones in this photo are intended to be used in display and public programming, so I was able to show more of the variety in the actual pins and pendants and not just the long pointy pin versions.  Many of the bird headed bone carvings at Port au Choix adorned shorter pendants, with gouged holes in the shaft opposite the bird head.  Presumably these were used as pendants or hung from clothing.

 

The larger, hafted pieces in this set include a ground slate (or argillite) axe hafted into a wooden handle. The axe head is secured with pitch in the hole in the wood which was burned out with hot coals.  The rawhide lashing is there to reinforce the handle and prevent it from splitting in use.  The harpoon in the middle has a barbed antler harpoon head with a whalebone foreshaft and spruce main shaft.  The slate lance is hafted to a wood shaft with spruce pitch glue and gut lashing.

Ground slate lance head.  The lancehead is about 22 cm long, which is on the large end of the spectrum for Port au Choix.

The harpoon is covered in red ochre. The Maritime Archaic certainly covered their bodies and tools with red ochre as part of their burial ceremony, but it is unclear if they used ochre as frequently in day-to-day life as the later (and unrelated) Beothuk.

This style of harpoon head is not designed to toggle, although the Maritime Archaic did also make toggling harpoon heads.  The barbs would have secured the harpoon head and line to the prey animal - most likely seals.

The harpoon line is braided sealskin.  The harpoon is about 72" fully assembled and the lance is about 92".  I don't know how long the main shafts of the Maritime Archaic versions of these tools would have been.  Generally the tool components are larger than the later Dorset and Groswater Pre-Inuit who lived in Newfoundland, so I tend to make the overall reproductions larger and longer as well.

 

The lance is fixed to the wood shaft.  I envision these long straight sided lances as close range piercing tools, especially for penetrating the thick blubber layers of marine mammals.  A fixed lance head could be stabbed and pulled out repeatedly.  The harpoon head, on the other hand, is designed to detach and stay in the animal with a line attached.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

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

Bone Dry

Drying out caribou bones in the lab.  Its important to dry the bones out slowly or they'll crack and crumble.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Finishing bone hair pins

Bird headed pins,
caribou bone and sealskin

In the studio, I've been finishing a small set of Maritime Archaic bone hairpin reproductions.  These are made from caribou long bones, with bark tanned sealskin barrettes.  I wind up making a few of these every year - here's a blog post from 2009 that explains a little bit more about their age and significance.  They are still a favourite reproduction for me, because they can be made and used exactly the same way that they were used 3 or 4 thousand years ago.  If I make a harpoon, its more than likely that it will be hung on a wall or used in a teaching environment.  More often than not, the arrowheads that I make end up on necklaces or earrings,  which isn't how they were used in the past, but with these bird headed pins, they are used by people today for the same purpose that they were originally designed.  I like that sense of continuity.

Some of them get red ochre stained,
while I leave others natural bone white

Around the house and yard, the spring cleaning is still going on as well.  We have a bulk garbage pick-up scheduled for tomorrow, but the pile of junk on our sidewalk isn't as impressive as I thought it might be.  We have a neighbour doing some renovations next door and in the last week, he's taken a lot of our backyard debris to the dump for us with all the building materials he's been tearing out of his house.  But at least we're getting rid of stuff one way or another.

Cutting the barrettes out of sealskin.  I don't know if the Maritime Archaic Indians would have used the pins with a barrette or if they would have just been stuck into a wound up bun of hair. 

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Gate Post

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

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

Palaeoeskimo Pressure Flaker First Impressions

A little blunter and worn

Here's an update on those walrus bone Palaeoeskimo pressure flakers that I made a few weeks ago.  Since then I've had several opportunities to work with them and these are my first impressions.  Generally, I've preferred the feel of the shorter of the two tools and have used it the most.  I've used them both almost exclusively for pressure flaking, although I did try using the short one as an indirect percussion punch for a half dozen or so blows. I haven't carefully kept track of the time I've spent using the flaker, but I'd estimate its somewhere around 10 hours.

This is what they looked like fresh and new.  I had a fairly sharp tip on them , but that wore off quickly.  The bone in the back is a walrus mandible that I used as the raw material for the pressure flakers.

Pitted with embedded micro-flakes

Initially I was a little concerned because the bone tip started chipping, in a way that I wasn't used to seeing with antler.  If it would have kept flaking apart like that it would have worn down to a nub in no time.  But once the fresh polished surface was worn off it seemed to stabilize into a slightly pitted, blunt working surface that seemed relatively durable.  Still, it seems to wear a little faster than antler.

Better interpretive tool than a copper flaker

I like working with the flaker tip slightly blunt.  There is a little less grinding using this sort of bone flaker than a more solid copper tipped flaker.  With a copper flaker, the edge of the stone must be continually ground or prepared so that it is sturdy enough to withstand the pressure from the hard copper tip.  With the softer bone flaker, the edge of the stone can be left a little sharper and the stone will bite into the bone to create the support for the required pressure.  I noticed when I took these photos that there are actually tiny flakes embedded in the tip of the flaker.

The same flaker.  The pitting is a combination of the natural porosity of the bone and the damage from contact with the sharp chert.

Apparently I have frog fingers

One benefit that I see from not having to work from a ground edge is that the biface will take on a thinner, flatter, sharper cross section more easily.  With the bone flaker, you can stop at any point in the process and the biface will tend to have a thin sharp edge, with edge angles and preparation that looks comparable to an artifact.  With a copper flaker, the biface you are working alternates between a blunt edge and sharp edge.  Leaving a sharp edge with a copper flaker is a conscious decision of the knapper at the final stage of the knapping process, but with the bone flaker, the objective piece never really passes through a dull stage - its always sharp.  Maybe I'm overthinking it, but there were a number of instances where I stopped and looked at the unfiinished pieces that I was working on and was taken aback by how thin and "Palaeoeskimo" looking they were, without any effort.

Bone knapped point

Secondly, I find the flake pattern left on finished tools by the bone flaker a little more authentic feeling.  It probably has to do with the different platform preparation and the way the flaker wraps itself around the sharp edge and as opposed to the narrow pressure point from the copper flaker.  I suppose I could set up an experiment that is a little more systematic to see if any of this is real or just my imagination. The point on the right isn't Palaeoeskimo in style, but I made it with the walrus bone pressure flaker.  I feel like there's something about the flake pattern that makes it look more authentic than comparable points that I've made using a copper pressure flaker.  Sometimes copper leaves a point a little too neat and tidy.

Some glue staining near the haft

As for the rest of the design of the flaker, I found that after an hour or so of constant use the sinew and hide glue binding started to become sticky in my hand.  The scarf joint never became loose, but I could feel the glue becoming rubbery and it has left discoloured marks on bone piece where it meets the wood handle.  I think when I wear these flaker tips out and replace them I'll make a nice solid baleen wrapped handle.  At this point I want to sharpen the blunt one so that its similar to the more pointed version.  I want to make smaller tools and although its still working, I feel like I need a smaller working edge for the next set of reproductions.

Photo Credits:
1-4: Tim Rast
5: Jason Prno
6-9: Tim Rast

Skulls and Bones

Fossil Hominid skull casts at Pech Merle, France

Cave Bear skull at Pech Merle Museum

This Cave Bear skull from Pech Merle is encrusted in minerals from the cave.

Cave Bear mandible, Pech Merle.

Shark Jaw, Aquarium, San Sebastien, Spain

This Bowhead Whale skeleton in the Aquarium in San Sebastien

Bowhead Whale skeleton, San Sebastien Aquarium (Click to Enlarge)

Grinning skull casts at Pech Merle.

Hominid Skull casts at Pech Merle, France

La Chapelle-aux-Saints skull cast, Musée de l'Homme de Néandertal, France 

The Old Man of La Chapelle-Aux-Saints reconstructed burial in the Musée de l'Homme de Néandertal, France

Photo Credits: Tim Rast