Keith Rogan
New member
Bad,
If you kick stones around in any stream bed you'll find the type of material that local natives worked. Basically, any sort of shiny stone is what you're looking for - any stone that will chip off in leaves rather than just disintegrate. I have a lot of pieces that I've picked up here in kodiak and the favored material is a dull red stone that feels glassy. I've never tried to work it myself but you'll find worked pieces anywhere a stream mouth hits the sea - every one of those places was at least a summer fish camp if not a permanent village. Check the banks of streams near the ocean and you'll almost always find recently exposed tools and stuff like that. I found a beautiful slate ulu almost a foot wide hanging out of a stream bank once.
They used plain black slate for larger tools like big ulu's and stuff like that. They ground it down into the shape they needed rather than "knapped" it.
I haven't seen the really fine stone tools in Alaska that they have down south. The ones here are a bit crude compared to theirs. I think that's because the coastal people here used a lot of ivory, rather than stone. Probably the Athabascans in the interior have finer stone tools.
Keith
If you kick stones around in any stream bed you'll find the type of material that local natives worked. Basically, any sort of shiny stone is what you're looking for - any stone that will chip off in leaves rather than just disintegrate. I have a lot of pieces that I've picked up here in kodiak and the favored material is a dull red stone that feels glassy. I've never tried to work it myself but you'll find worked pieces anywhere a stream mouth hits the sea - every one of those places was at least a summer fish camp if not a permanent village. Check the banks of streams near the ocean and you'll almost always find recently exposed tools and stuff like that. I found a beautiful slate ulu almost a foot wide hanging out of a stream bank once.
They used plain black slate for larger tools like big ulu's and stuff like that. They ground it down into the shape they needed rather than "knapped" it.
I haven't seen the really fine stone tools in Alaska that they have down south. The ones here are a bit crude compared to theirs. I think that's because the coastal people here used a lot of ivory, rather than stone. Probably the Athabascans in the interior have finer stone tools.
Keith