“Excuse me, which level of Hell is this?”
(A rather appropriate quote about work and effort)
(Well, I’m back. It’s time to update the progress on my maul. My fingers are still intact. But a lot stiffer, sorer, and callused. I have now spent thirty hours grinding my stone maul to make the groove. Here’s what it looked like before I started.)
A Brief Recap First
I started this project in May 2021. And I’m not half finished. I started it because I like experimental archaeology – an offshoot of archaeology involving replicating activities, or objects made in the past which are often poorly recorded and understood. As archaeologists, we gain better insight into the process and techniques required to make an object. Such as this stone maul, for example.
As I mentioned before in my previous blogs there are few historical or ethnographic accounts describing stone tool technology. Even fewer on making ground stone mauls. And still fewer yet, if any, of making them out of quartzite in western North America. I chose quartzite because: 1) it’s the hardest and most durable rock we have in Alberta, Canada; and, 2) most of our prehistoric stone mauls in Alberta are made from quartzite.
Now, why would people choose such a tough material to make their stone mauls? Why go through all that trouble if a simple stone cobble held in one’s hand would probably do the same job pounding meat, grains, or berries? 1 These are only a few of the questions I asked myself as I was making this grooved stone maul.
So, I started by trying to peck the quartzite cobble with a smaller stone cobble (also quartzite). That didn’t work very well. In fact, it didn’t work at all. It was too difficult to aim the hammer-stone precisely enough and didn’t seem to remove any material. Next, I chipped off a small quartzite flake with a sharp edge from a cobble and started sawing away on the quartzite cobble I had chosen for a maul. Below is my progress after ten hours of grinding and sawing.
One thing became immediately clear. This project was going to take a long, long time. Quartzite, on the Mohs scale of hardness, is 7.0 – 7.4. Some of the hardest rocks in the world. And, after ten hours of work, I had absolutely no doubts about that fact. Nor did my hands and fingers.
Below was my progress grinding a groove on the maul. I eventually saw a groove after six hours of grinding. You can read more about my progress in my first three blogs on this website.
My Next Twenty Hours of Grinding My Maul
I have worked on the maul for thirty hours. Below are a few photographs of what the maul looks like. I can actually say now that I’m winning the battle.
Grinding Facts and Progress
In an earlier blog, I estimated that I ground the maul 67% of the time in one hour; the remainder of the time I rested and examined my work. I decided to determine how much grinding I actually did over a one-hour period by timing five hours of grinding. I tabulated the results below:
| Hour | Minutes Grinding/Sawing | % (of one hour) |
| 1 | 44 | 73.3 |
| 2 | 50 | 83.3 |
| 3 | 52 | 86.7 |
| 4 | 54 | 90 |
| 5 | 47 | 78 |
| Mean Time Grinding/Sawing | 49.4 | 82.3 |
I also calculated how many strokes per minute I took by counting five sample strokes over a one minute period. Here are the results:
| Sample Strokes per Minute | Number of Strokes |
| 1 | 148 |
| 2 | 138 |
| 3 | 140 |
| 4 | 150 |
| 5 | 146 |
| Mean Strokes per Minute | 144.4 |
The Grinding Process, or, How to Make a Very Narrow Maul Groove Wider
Initially, for the first ten hours of grinding, I used a very small, thin quartzite flake (weighing 14 grams) to establish a thin, deep, straight cut across the width of the cobble. Occasionally I placed some wet sand in the groove to gain better grinding traction (which was also more effective in removing the skin from my fingers). But once the groove was about 4mm deep, it was time to begin to widen as well as deepen it. I thought there might be two possible ways of doing this: 1) angle the grinding flake to either side of the maul groove, so that the sides of the flake rub along the sides of the maul groove; and, 2) use a larger flake with a wider edge to widen the groove. It turns out I eventually ended up doing both.
Here’s how my grinding method progressed over the next twenty hours. I did not use any sand, because I worked in the house. After knocking off a few flakes from a small orthoquartzite pebble (weighing 108 grams as opposed to the smaller quartzite flake only weighing 14 grams) to form a cutting edge, I then retouched the cutting edge, using a hammer-stone, to blunt and widen it. I used this edge for many hours. It wore down and began to conform to the size and shape of the maul groove, fitting in nicely and thereby touching not only the bottom of the groove but also the sides. As the flake wore down, it got wider, and thereby also continued to widen the groove.
That was the first step to widening the groove. Next, I started experimenting with holding the grinding flake at certain angles. I got a lot more of the pebble grinding surface on the maul walls by doing this. During the last ten hours of grinding I made the grinding process even more complicated, but also more effective. Not only did I angle my grinding flake to one side or the other (off the vertical plane), but I oriented the flake grinding edge diagonally across the groove channel and pointed it downwards. This resulted in a three-dimensional grinding action as shown in the photographs and illustration below. This technique abraded both the sides, as well as the bottom, of the groove. The front edge of the grinding flake was always fresh as you grind it down by angling it.
I think the groove is now deep and wide enough so that I can use even a bigger grinding pebble. The extra weight of the pebble and greater grinding surface should result not only in widening the groove to about 20mm (which is my ultimate goal) and 6mm – 7mm deep, but should also be more efficient because of the added weight of the grinding pebble/stone; thus requiring less effort and time.
My Pet Grinding Pebble and Other Flakes I Used
One of the major challenges of hand-grinding with a pebble or flake was finding one that fit my hand with no sharp pressure points. This is very important. Blisters can form quickly if the grinding stone doesn’t fit well. Initially, the small flakes I used hurt my hands and created blisters easily because they were relatively small. And, because of their size, it was very difficult to wrap something around them to soften the grip. When I graduated to the bigger quartzite grinding pebble shown in these photographs, I taped the portion that fits in my hand. This pebble was quite comfortable and didn’t blister or cramp my hand (well, at least not as fast) as I ground the stone maul. Not only must you look for an equally hard, or harder, material for a grinding stone, but one that is comfortable if you want to save your fingers and hands.
Below are various stages, captured with photographs, of my last grinding pebble which I used for twenty hours; and the changes it went through. I resharpened it a few times to broaden the grinding edge, so it would broaden the maul groove. The pebble is not a true quartzite, but rather an orthoquartzite (which is grainier and perhaps not as hard as quartzite).
Stone Maul Balance – Where Should the Groove Go?
I never really thought much about this until recently. But what about the balance of the maul when hafted? Where should the groove be positioned on the maul?: near the center, or more towards one end of the polls? There are pros and cons for each position. If the maul groove is too much off-center its awkward balance might create problems when lifting and swinging it; and difficulty using both ends. If the maul groove is centred, how effective is it in the lift and swing? One way to find an answer is to experiment with various types of hafting. However, if the groove is centred, and is sufficiently well balanced to lift and swing, then both polls can be used for pounding if the maul is relatively symmetrical.
There was another way to find out if the position of the groove on a maul was important: examine a sample of prehistoric stone mauls and measure where the groove was placed. In the maul samples below from Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, most of the grooves are off-center, either towards the proximal or distal poll. In the Saskatchewan sample, of the 15 examples shown, all 14 grooves are off-center, either on the proximal (n = 11) or distal (n = 4) poll. Rarely is the groove exactly centred, although a few specimens came close. And, in Gilbert Watson’s Saskatchewan sample (see below), when the groove is off-center towards the distal poll, the proximal poll is cone-shaped and thereby lighter than the distal poll. Thousands of years and thousands of maul users can’t be wrong. For whatever reason a hafted off-center maul was preferred. Presently, I can only speculate, without further experiments, why people chose this position for the groove. It likely has to do with balance (or imbalance with the weight more towards the striking end) since those mauls with grooves nearer the distal poll generally have smaller, lighter proximal polls.
If you look closely at my maul in the above photographs, the maul groove is slightly offset towards the proximal poll.
A Few Closing Thoughts
“The underlying principle behind optimizing theory is that past cultures always attempted to maximize returns while minimizing the expenditure of currency….As all humans operate under finite constraints, tool designs reflect the necessity to conserve time.” (John Darwent, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada)
As I sat hour after hour grinding away on my quartzite maul, feeling the pain and stiffness in my fingers, I often wondered why people chose quartzite to make these mauls. The answer to that question may have something to do with the effort to procure raw materials, time expenditure, and the benefits of making it from such a hard material. Archaeologists have pondered the trade-off between time and effort of making an object and the benefits acquired.3 Archaeologist, John Darwent, and others suggested four possible scenarios of the cost-benefit of making an object: 1) high cost, low benefit; 2) low cost, low benefit; 3) high cost, high benefit; and, 4) low cost, high benefit. He suggests that in terms of efficiency (benefit divided by cost), the cases can be ranked, except for instances 2 and 3 which are equivalent, as follows: 4 > 3; 2 > 1.
Clearly, in terms of production time (exceedingly long) and benefit (a maul that is virtually indestructible), my quartzite maul is probably a “3”: High Cost, High Benefit. In Alberta, other materials for maul making (e.g., granite, amphibolite, basalt, sandstone, granite) exist but are less common requiring more time and effort to find them. Even though these rock types are not as hard, and therefore easier to grind, there would be less benefit, breaking more easily (as the granite maul below shows, missing part of the distal poll). Quartzite cobbles are very common in Alberta. Saskatchewan Sands and Gravels, eroding out in creek and river cuts contain naturally suitably shaped cobbles, thus not requiring any, or little shaping (and thereby reducing work and effort considerably). Once the maul is made, relatively little maintenance is required.
However, is this rather economic-oriented view of maul manufacture too simplistic? Is the choice of this tough stone, and the many hours required to fashion a maul, intended for something else? Here also, archaeologists have speculated, stating that optimization theory fails to explain why so much time and effort (or ‘surplus’) goes beyond a purely ‘functional’ point when making a stone tool. As Darwent explains, “…the most optimal decision on an economic level may not be the best choice on a social level.” In other words, a simple stone maul, made from softer materials, may be just as functional as one made of quartzite, but less prestigious at a social level. The difficulty, however, becomes knowing where to draw the line between how much work and effort is ‘functional’, as opposed to what is considered ‘surplus’. And whether the ‘benefits’ outweigh the ‘cost’.
Before signing off, my other thought about western Canadian stone mauls, concerns the scarcity of evidence of their manufacture in the archaeological record. In other words, where do old stone mauls go when they die? Or do they ever die? It seems most of them are found on the surface of cultivated fields and end up in farmers’ collections. Prehistorically, they might have been highly valued and curated, because of the effort it took to make them, and were perhaps passed down from one generation to the next. As mentioned before, we rarely find them in buried archeological contexts. And, we don’t find broken bits and pieces of mauls, such as parts of the poll hammer end or groove, in the archaeological record. 4 To my knowledge, we don’t find polished pieces of stone flake used to grind and shape the groove. This lack of evidence makes this artifact a bit of an enigma. Many questions, regarding its manufacture and use still need to be answered.
From this experiment, it’s more likely the quartzite mauls were made by grinding rather than pecking. Although, here I admit, after looking closely at the grooves (which seem more ‘grainy’ than my maul), in the Alberta maul sample, that that the grooves may have been pecked. Perhaps I was too hasty in dismissing this method. It’s something that I will test by pounding and pecking on a quartzite cobble for a greater length of time.
My colleagues and I want to acquire some independent evidence to either verify or refute whether quartzite mauls were ground and not pecked. If you look at a close-up photograph of the granite and my quartzite maul grooves, you will immediately note the difference in the degree of smoothness of the maul grooves. This difference in smoothness is partly due to the differences in grain size in both types of rocks, but perhaps also on how each groove was made; by grinding for quartzite and pecking for granite.
We plan to examine my quartzite maul groove under high magnification and note the type of wear marks left from grinding it with another quartzite rock. Then we will examine both the granite maul and other quartzite mauls in the Alberta museum collections, to see if similar marks are present on them. Hopefully, this little exercise will give us independent verification (or not) of whether prehistoric Indigenous peoples in western Canada used this method to fashion their stone mauls.
In closing, I estimate it will take another ten to fifteen hours of grinding to finish one-half of this maul (assuming that the use of a larger, heavier grinding stone speeds up the process). This figure, when added to my already thirty hours of grinding, puts us at the 40-45 hour mark for just one-half. Thus, it will probably take about 80 – 90 hours to make the entire groove and perhaps another ten hours to make the handle and haft it onto the maul. That brings us to around one hundred hours of work.
And I intend to finish at least one-half of the maul. So, there will likely be one more final blog on my progress. And hopefully, by then there will be results from looking at the maul grooves under high magnification for manufacturing wear marks.
However, I’m going to soak my hurting hands in some warm Cuban waters before I tackle the home stretch of this project.
Adiós
Footnotes:- See the article by Kristine Fedyniak and Karen L. Giering. 2017. More than meat: Residue analysis results of mauls in Alberta. Archaeological Survey of Alberta, Occasional Paper 36, regarding what types of materials people pounded with these mauls.[↩]
- Photographs of Alberta mauls are from: Kristine Fedyniak and Karen L. Giering. 2017. More than meat: Residue analysis results of mauls in Alberta. Archaeological Survey of Alberta, Occasional Paper 36.[↩]
- see John Darwent’s M.A. thesis. 1996. The Prehistoric Use of Nephrite on the British Columbia Plateau. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.[↩]
- One of my colleagues suggested that broken stone mauls were used as boiling rocks, or in sweats, virtually disintegrating, leaving no evidence behind[↩]