prehistoric peoples - CanEHdian Stories

February 5, 2021February 5, 2021

My Stone Knife: A Note About Canadian Stone Tool Technology

Much of Canadian human history is written in stone. Stone tools, and detritus from making those tools, are often the only remaining physical evidence of the presence of the New World by First Nations peoples for thousands of years. That record goes back well over ten thousand years in some parts of the Americas.

I’m just analyzing the stone tools we found in 2018 at a prehistoric site in the Fort Vermilion region, northern Canada. I always marvel at the level of craftsmanship (or craftswomanship) these tools display.

This prehistoric biface, likely a stone knife, found in northern Alberta, Canada, was an important type of cutting tool for First Nations people for thousands of years.

Take for example this beautiful bifacially flaked quartzite knife. It still retains its edge, even though possibly made thousands of years ago. The reason is that quartzite, on the Mohs hardness scale, is about a seven (diamond being a 10), equivalent in hardness to a good steel knife blade.

Years ago, at Simon Fraser University, we learned how to make stone tools. We smashed our fingers, we bled, we cursed… Soon I began to appreciate just how hard it was to make even a simple stone tool. Such as this knife.

There’s a lot of thought, effort, and skill involved when making a stone knife. Let’s consider a few of the necessary steps.

First you need to know something about the characteristics of stone. And where to find the best ones. When it comes to stone tool making not all rocks are created equal.

Many stone tools are made by a method called direct percussion where the knapper (stone tool maker) drives flakes off a cobble or spall to thin and shape it. The best rocks for making stone tools have a cryptocrystalline (or having a microscopic crystalline) structure. These rocks fracture in predictable ways because the force created by the blow dissipates through them evenly. Quartzite, a metamorphosed sandstone, is such a rock.

Stone flakes from a northern Alberta prehistoric site, driven off a larger piece of rock. The dark rock on the left is chert (a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of cryptocrystalline crystals of quartz); in the middle is orthoquartzite (similar to quartzite) and on the far right, quartzite. These three types of rocks are found in northern Alberta. Prehistoric First Nations people made most of their stone tools from them.

I have wandered the North Saskatchewan River Valley looking looking for just the right quartzite cobble to flake. Because not all quartzites are equal either. I have yet to find quartzites of the quality of some of the prehistoric quartzite stone tools in the region.

For example, below are some average quality local quartzites. Notice how much coarser and grainy they are compared to the ones above. With these materials it is much harder to flake, thin and shape a tool. Over the years I have learned what cobbles to look for before splitting them. Those that have chatter marks (made from hitting other rocks or scoured by ice) on the cortex (outer oxidized layer) are usually better quality. And, when you strike another rock against them, the good ones ring a bit; the poor quality ones ‘clank’.

A quartzite flake (left) and a quartzite biface (right). These quartzites are coarser and grainier than the quartzite above. And therefore do not flake as well.

Once you have found good raw material, you then have to strike the piece you are working on just right to remove a flake. Again, easier said than done. If you don’t strike the piece at the proper angle with your hammer (often simply another stone), you either crush the striking platform or nothing happens because you did not create enough force to move through the rock to remove a flake.

Or, you could break and ruin the piece. That’s where more cursing and smashing of fingers usually comes in.

We refer to stone tool making as a ‘reductive’ technology. One major mistake and you have to start over. Unlike pottery-making which is an ‘additive’ technology and more forgiving if you make a mistake.

I started flintknaping obsidian (volcanic glass). Although dangerous it is relatively easy to work. After a few months I made some decent tools.

I made this small obsidian point by another flintknapping technique, known as pressure flaking. In this technique you push off the flakes to shape and thin the artifact with an antler tine. It takes special platform preparation, and proper angle to ‘push’ off the flakes. One slip and you could either drive your hand into the edge or drive the tine into your thigh. Done both.

This obsidian knife snapped in half when I tried to remove a thinning flake from the left end. Later my professor told me this is referred to as ‘end-shock’, where the force of the blow stops at some point in the object and then travels up. Snapping it in half. There was a lot of moaning after that incident.
Obsidian is easier to work than quartzite, and achieves a very sharp edge. But it is more brittle and does not maintain an edge as well as quartzite. There is always a trade-off.

Then, while excavating a prehistoric site in Edmonton, Alberta, in the early 1980s, I decided to work with local quartzite. Well, it was as if I had never flintknapped before. Quartzite, when compared to obsidian, is much harder. You really had to whack those edges (and occasionally fingers) to get anything off. And often you couldn’t control what came off.

After months of practice I made some passable tools, like the quartzite biface below. But that took tremendous effort and many attempts. And, when you compare the thinness (a sign of quality workmanship) of my biface to the one we found in northern Alberta, it shows what an amateur I still was after all that practice.

This quartzite biface made by the author pales in comparison in workmanship to prehistoric bifaces, such as the one below. And I have seen even thinner examples in Alberta assemblages.

The northern biface on edge, showing the thin cutting edge and overall thinness of this stone tool.

My quartzite biface on edge. Not nearly as thin as the northern biface. The thicker cutting edge on my biface would not cut as well as that northern biface. And, hafting this piece onto a wood or bone handle, would have been difficult because of its thickness.

And that folks is what it takes to just make a stone knife. There are other more sophisticated stone tool making techniques that take even greater skill and are more time-consuming. Such as pecking or grinding stones to make tools.

Nephrite adze blades found in the Grande Prairie area, Alberta, Canada. This tool, which was cut from larger blocks, and the cutting edge ground down, was likely made in British Columbia and traded into Alberta. A good example of ground-stone technology. https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/0197d86f-f7e1-4726-9440-cc2765e79c6e/resource/06315117-4c8d-45b0-bcaf-80a6995e35a7/download/pre-contact-jade.pdf

The Viking Ribstones, near Viking, Alberta, Canada. An example of grinding or pecking stone technology. It took either many years, or many First Nations people, or both, to patiently grind away on these granite boulders to create these incised lines, which some people believe depict the ribs of a buffalo. https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/GetImageDetails.aspx?ObjectID=4665-0111&MediaID=127160

Today We Occasionally Use Stone Tools

Humans and their ancestors, throughout the world, made a variety of stone tools. Some of the earliest stone tools date back to over 2.58 million years ago, and were nothing more than fist-sized cobbles with some flakes removed to create a cutting edge.

In some parts of the world, people still made and used stone tools during the 20th century. Even today we are not totally out of the stone age. Nothing, not even the best steel, compares to this obsidian surgical scalpel blade (left), with an edge thickness of approximately one micron.

https://ca.images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=obsidian+scalpel+blade+images&fr=yhs-trp-001&hspart=trp&hsimp=yhs-001&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.stack.imgur.com%2FxSNCk.png#id=6&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.stack.imgur.com%2FxSNCk.png&action=click

Today, many people, including archaeologists, create beautiful tools from exotic rocks, to better understand the ancient tool-making techniques.

Some prehistoric tools, however, are almost beyond the believable, such as these Mayan ‘eccentrics‘.

Some of the finest ancient flintknapping and most beautiful ancient stone artifacts, or eccentrics, ever made come from the Mayan Civilization, northeastern Belize, central America. These objects are pieces of art. http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/2010septembertussingereccentricspage1.htm

When I see these Mayan artifacts, or the stone workmanship below, I only sigh with envy. And, as a Canadian, I refer to that often-used hockey analogy when viewing this piece. ‘Hell, I could have been that good (to make the NHL) if only I’d practiced more.’ Ya, right!

This begs the question, of course, why Indigenous people around the world eventually abandoned these techniques and traded for similar European tools? Answers to that question of Canadian history, are complex and often hotly debated.

Maybe, in a future post, I will elaborate further on that question with a work of historical fiction!

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April 30, 2020May 1, 2020

Prehistoric Lifeways: The Bison Pound

The Plains Bison. Once numbering in the millions on the Great Plains of North America, this animal furnished prehistoric peoples with food, clothing, and shelters. Trying to capture these animals took a great deal of effort and ingenuity on the part of their human pursuers.

Over the centuries humans invented many ways to capture and slaughter animals on a mass scale. In Canada the most well known methods include netting or trapping thousands of fish (fish weir) at a time, or driving the Plains bison over cliffs. In his renowned book Imagining Head-Smashed-In (University of Athabasca Press), archaeologist Jack Brink talks about the methods the Blackfoot of southern Alberta used to drive hundreds of bison over steep cliffs to their deaths.

The cliffs at Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, west of Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. Prehistoric peoples drove the bison off this ten metre high cliff located at the southern edge of the Porcupine Hills. The animals would then be butchered in the nearby camp which also had a source of water close by. The site may have been used as early as six-thousand years ago leaving a twelve metre thick bone bed beneath the cliffs.

The Bison Pound

One of the few historic images of a bison pound. In this drawing, by George Back, horsemen chased bison into a wooden circular corral. In prehistoric times runners would have pursued them on foot. Hunters hid around the pound fence ready to dispatch the animals with spears, bows and arrows, or firearms. The camp was usually nearby, hidden and downwind from these nearsighted animals with an incredible sense of smell. (Library and Archives of Canada, C-33615)

The bison or antelope pound is another, lesser known method of mass killing that First Nations peoples used on the Northern Great Plains and park lands in western Canada. In her monograph, Communal Buffalo Hunting Among the Plains Indians, Eleanor Verbicky-Todd, describes a number of ingenious ways people captured these animals and disposed of them. One of those ways was the pound, or surround.

Aside from Brink’s book, this is one of the best sources written about communal bison hunting. Published by the Archaeological Survey of Alberta, it describes the various methods of communal bison hunting and other ingenious ways prehistoric peoples devised to capture this animal.

What is a Bison Pound?

Bison pounds are large corrals or surrounds, between five and six feet high, made from cut trees with an opening at one end to chase bison into. Once inside the animals couldn’t escape (because of a ramp or drop into the corral at the gate) and were then disposed of with the bow and arrow, or later with firearms. Of all the methods First Nations peoples devised to capture these enormous animals, pounding was the most difficult of all.

This drawing of an Assiniboine buffalo park or surround by Edwin Thomas Denig (from Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri. 1930:532. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology). The pound requires some key components to work. A long drive lane is spread out to funnel the animals in. A set of hills, dunes, or trees are present in front of the corral to hide it from the animals. An elevated ramp near the entrance prevents the animals from escaping. In the center of the corral there is a medicine mast (usually a striped tree) with charms attached to it by the grand-master of ceremonies. The buffalo caller.

“Success depended upon too many circumstances. The ground had to lie correctly; timber should be available; the game has to be fairly plentiful and within easy reach. Also, someone able to guide the animals in the right direction was indispensable. Under the most favourable conditions, too, the herd often escaped.” (from Robert Jefferson, 1929. “Fifty Years on the Saskatchewan.” In Canadian Northwest Historical Society Publications 1:1-160)

Diagram of the Plains Cree buffalo pound (by David Mandelbaum 1979:53. In The Plains Cree). The bottom two sketches show the gate or entrance which is a raised wood platform or earthen ramp. Once the bison jump in they can’t get back out again.

Where Does Bison Pounding Occur?

In Canada bison pounds are found on the Northern Great Plains and the park lands of the prairie provinces. But, in these areas certain key elements were required: Bison, trees (to make the corrals), suitable terrain, a large gathering basin, and lots of people (to build the pound and drive lanes, drive the animals in, dispose of them, and then butcher and process the meat).

For many years known locations of bison pounds were relatively rare in Alberta. Today most pounds occur in the park lands and northern Great Plains where there are trees and proper terrain. Such as river valleys or foothills. Without trees you can’t build the corrals and drive lanes.

In 2010 there were sixteen known pounds recorded in Alberta. Most of them occur in areas with trees and hilly terrain. Early explorers, such as David Thompson, Peter Fidler and Alexander Henry, remarked that bison pounding was a major industry in the park lands of the prairie provinces. As the demand for meat and pemmican rose during the fur trade, this industry likely became more common than during prehistoric times.

Now after hundreds or even thousands of years these features leave no mark on the surface of the land. You’ve probably driven by some pounds without even knowing it.

Suitable Terrain and Trees – Bodo, Alberta

Terrain and trees were key factors to build and operate a successful pound. Hills or barriers (e.g., trees) were required to hide the pound from the bison. Sometimes the pound was placed on a slope, helping to drive the animals down into it. On a flat surface the drive lanes were sometimes curved and a ramp was built at the entrance to hide the corral. A successful pound also required a large prairie or gathering basin for bison to graze, and then to move the animals toward the pound.

The Bodo area of east-central Alberta is just such a place. Bodo, you ask? Where is that? Well, I’ll let you look it up on a map. If you visit the area when their interpretive center is open in the summer months, you can even tour the site and occasionally partake in excavations.

This is Bodo, Alberta, southeast of Provost, near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. The area contains all the key elements to make a good pound. Treed sand hills (above left) to build and hide the pound. And a large gathering basin where bison would come to graze and drink water from the nearby creek. The photograph at the bottom shows the treed Bodo sand dunes, surrounded by vast grasslands. A perfect spot for an ambush.

Surprise and Ambush – Hardisty, Alberta

The Hardisty bison pound site is a short distance east of the Battle River and would have provided people with wood, water and the terrain necessary to drive bison successfully into a well concealed pound.

When you drive east on Highway 13 and arrive at Hardisty, Alberta and then cross the Battle River, you will see a series of oil bunkers on the right side of the highway. In the Battle River Valley below them lies the Hardisty bison pound. The site was found when the oil companies wanted to construct their pipelines through the valley corridor. What was uncovered and hidden for so many years, surprised many people.

The Hardisty site is remarkable in many ways. It wasn’t discovered until relatively recently, although it was near a major central Alberta highway and the community of Hardisty. It contains a very thick bone bed which represents use between 900 – 1,100 years ago, and then approximately 7,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest known pound sites in western Canada. It also contained an adjoining camping and processing area.

Archaeological deposits and artifacts from the Hardisty site. Top left: a bone pit. Right: prehistoric projectile points. Bottom left: pottery shards. (Photograph courtesy of FMA Consultants)

Paskapoo Slopes, Calgary, Alberta

North facing Paskapoo Slopes, looking south from the north side of the Bow River. The numbered sites represent prehistoric campsites, kill sites, and one major pound (EgPn-362). (Photograph courtesy of Lifeways of Canada)

Nestled on the Paskapoo slopes, in the heart of Calgary, Alberta, are a series of prehistoric campsites, kill sites, and a major buffalo pound site, hidden for thousands of years in plain view.

Bone bed of bison pound being excavated by archaeologists, Lifeways of Canada. Archaeologists collect all the bones and artifacts and then reconstruct what portions of the animals were used and what was left behind. (Photographs courtesy of Lifeways of Canada).

Illustrations of the Hardisty pound site (above left) and the Paskapoo pound site (below right), redrawn from Lifeways of Canada and FMA Consultants, showing the shape of the drive lanes, the pound and the slope of the land. Note in both sites the drive lanes may have curved somewhat near the gate and corral. Possibly to better conceal the gate and the pound from the bison.

A Time for Ceremony, Cooperation and Feasting

Communal large game hunting, such as the operation and construction of a bison pound, took a great deal of skill, organization, cooperation of many people, and sound execution to successfully lure the animals into the corrals. Pounding was accompanied by ceremonies to bring in the animals, and feasting when the animals were caught. Often the pounds did not work and then the process started over again.

What the Paskapoo Slopes pound and processing area might have looked like. (Drawing, courtesy of Lifeways of Canada).

Bison pounds in Alberta date back as far as seven-thousand years, and possibly earlier. These are only a few of many pounds that likely occur in Alberta. Others have yet to be found. Numerous pounds are also present in southern Saskatchewan (near Estuary and Gull Lake) where I grew up. As a young boy I used to roam the river hills where Miry Creek flowed into the South Saskatchewan River. There might have been a pound near there as well.

I’ll leave you with one last perhaps more realistic description of an Assiniboine bison pound near Fort George, Alberta, described by North West Company trader, Duncan M’Gillivray, in 1794. Not a pretty picture:

“On arriving at the camp our noses were assailed by an offensive smell which would have proved fatal to more delicate organs: It proceeded from the Carcases in the Pound and the mangled limbs of Buffaloes scattered among the Lodges, but another substance which shall be nameless contributed the most considerable part of this diabolical odour. In the afternoon were were gratified by the seeing the Buffalo enter the Pound; they were conducted thither by two small fences beginning on each side of the door and extending wider the farther they advance in the Plain: from behind these the Indians Waved their robes as the Buffaloes were passing to direct their course straight towards the Pound, which was so well constructed on the declivity of a small hill that it was invisible till you arrived at the gate. The poor animals were scarce enclosed, when showers of arrows were discharged at them as they rushed round the Pound making furious attempts to revenge themselves on their foes, till at length being overcome with wounds & loss of blood they were compelled to yield to their oppressors and many of them were cut to pieces before the last remainder of life had forsook them. Of all the methods which the Indians have devised for the destruction of this useful animal, – the Pound is the most successful.” (from the diary of Duncan M’Gillivray, November 23, 1794, near the Vermilion River, Alberta.