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HOW TO MAKE A STONE MAUL? IS THE MYSTERY IS FINALLY SOLVED?

I’ve written four previous blogs about making a grooved stone maul. Readers should refer to those blogs for more details regarding this first part of my experiment. In this blog, with the help of my colleague, Mr. Bob Dawe, Royal Alberta Museum, I present our latest results on how to make a stone maul by pecking the groove.

For centuries First Nations Peoples, living on the Great Plains of North America, used the grooved stone maul to smash animal bones, plant matter, and wood.

“The hammers were of two sorts: one quite heavy, almost like a sledgehammer or maul, and with a short handle: the other much lighter, and with a longer, more limber handle. This last was used by men in war as a mace or war club, while the heavier hammer was used by women as an axe to break up fallen trees for firewood; as a hammer to drive tent-pines into the ground, to kill disabled animals, or break up heavy bones for the marrow they contained.” 1

Some Facts About Stone Mauls from Alberta, Canada

  • Stone mauls are the most common pecked/ground stone tool type;
  • Functioned as hammers for pounding meat, berries, deadwood, rocks…and heads;
  • 159 archaeological sites in Alberta contain stone mauls on the sites’ surfaces;
  • Stone mauls are rarely found during excavations; many are present in farmers’ collections;
  • They are as old as c.10,000 B.P. (before present) but most mauls come from the Late Prehistoric Period;
  • They are mostly found on the Canadian prairies and parklands; rarely in northern Alberta.
  • In Alberta, approximately 63% of mauls are made from quartzite. 2

I attempted to make a quartzite stone maul, similar to those used by First Nations Peoples on the Great Plains, by grinding the groove with a quartzite flake. These experiments show that it is possible to make a stone maul using this method. But it takes considerable time and effort.

Is grinding a groove using a quartzite flake the best and most efficient method of making a stone maul? Not according to my latest experiments.

My Previous Experimental Results

Grinding my quartzite stone maul with a quartzite flake. Although the grinding process works, it is slow, strenuous, and tedious. Was there another more effective way of making a grooved stone maul?

The Final Grinding Results

  • After 30 hours of grinding, I removed 19 grams (0.67oz) of material from the maul.
  • Groove maximum width was ~11mm;
  • Maul groove maximum depth was ~5mm.
The slow, steady progress of grinding a groove into the hard quartzite cobble. It took thirty hours to make a groove on only one side of the maul. I estimate it would take another thirty-fifty hours to finish the maul using this method.

IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG HERE?

I initially rejected the idea of pecking the quartzite maul groove because I believed the stone was too hard for this method to be effective. However, I decided to try it for at least one to two hours. I ended up pecking the groove for five hours. Here are the results:

Hammerstone and new quartzite maul blank in the left photograph. Hammerstone after one hour of pecking, center photograph. Pecking away on the new quartzite stone maul blank. Maul blank weight before starting = 0.991kg (2.2lbs). Hammerstone weight before starting = 290gms (0.64lbs). I did not haft the hammerstone to peck the groove for the maul. When we presented this paper at the annual Plains Archaeological Conference in Lethbridge, Alberta last fall, a colleague suggested that a hafted hammerstone worked even better for pecking the maul. In my next experiment, I will use a hafted hammerstone to peck the maul groove to determine whether this method is more efficient.

The Results from Pecking a Groove for a Maul

Pecking Versus Grinding

Pecking = 24 grams of material removed in 5 hours.

Grinding = 19 grams of material removed in 30 hours.

Pecking is more than six times more efficient than grinding the groove for a stone maul.

The Archaeological Evidence

In a small sample of prehistoric grooved mauls from Alberta and Saskatchewan, microscopic examination demonstrates the maul grooves were made by pecking, not grinding. The following slides show no smoothening or striations on the sample of stone mauls we examined. In every case, the groove texture is characterized by pitting from impacting and plucking grains from the matrix.

Conclusions

Grooved stone mauls are not ground stone tools.

    Footnotes:
  1. Grinnell, G. b. 1986:22. Blackfoot Lodge Tails; The Story of a Prairie People. Scribner, New York.[↩]
  2. All facts from: Kristine Fedyniak and Karen L. Giering. 2016. More than meat: Residue analysis results of mauls in Alberta. In: Back on the horse: Recent developments in archaeological and palaeontological research in Alberta. ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF ALBERTA OCCASIONAL PAPER No. 36.[↩]