Time, knowledge, and skill — putting this into some sort of context of life ‘in the land’.

The whole kit took less than three hours to finally pull together — though that really overlooks by far the most time-consuming aspect, the preparation of materials. In fact, preparation has two components, actually. The first is the selection of materials. The second is the actual preparation.

For example, the bow took only a few minutes to saw to the desired length using a simple rough flake of chert. Drilling the bow hole took perhaps another ten minutes, most of which was selecting and shaping the proper tool — which promptly broke as I neared the end of the task. (Disposable tools are an old invention!) But finding that bow piece in the first place took years — literally! This is only the third good bow I’ve found over twenty years of occasional looking.

The actual twisting of the bark into twine took about five minutes for each metre-long piece, and another five minutes to do the plying of the two pieces together to make the final rope. Then perhaps another ten minutes to make the additional end pieces that are added on to the ends of the rope to make it long enough to tie onto the bow efficiently. All of this assumes that the bark has been gathered and prepared to the point of actually being able to make the twine. That’s a process that occurs in another season, and another place (near the source of the fibre and near the river). It’s two half-days of rough and dirty work, one to cut and submerge the bark, and another very stinky day to take the retted bark and strip and clean it —but that produces a major supply of prepared bark. I perhaps used one percent of the material resulting from that day of earlier labour.

I’d selected the cedar rail much earlier, and cut it to rough lengths (using a modern bow saw, I admit). I pulled three good rails out of a pile of about a hundred, and discarded about a half of the three good rails because of lack of good straight grain as I cut them up into the desired length. (I could have done the full cutting using stone tools — it would have added about a half an hour to the total task.) In reality, I’d have taken more time to find a more suitable piece of wood that would’t have required as much preparation. Time spent selecting the proper material is almost always more efficient, especially if that selection takes place over time.

This socket stone is a fine example of the value of careful selection of materials. Other sockets I’ve prepared with stone tools have taken several hours of very laborious work gouging and drilling with hard stone tools to dig a deep enough socket hole. This stone with its preformed fossil hole required only about ten minutes of quite light work to enlarge the shoulders of the hole. (Interestingly, since the hole is off at one edge of this stone, I had to adapt my technique of holding the stone, shifting from centring it in my palm where I normally hold sockets, to focusing the pressure on the heel of my hand as mandated by this particular stone.)

Shaping the spindle took perhaps half an hour, divided between various abrading and sanding tasks using the piece of rough sandstone, and a perhaps five minutes of planing and another ten minutes of work with the spokeshave. Just making the spokeshave took five minutes, plus another few minutes doing occasional touch-up to the tool to adjust the curvature and smoothness of the edge.

Sawing the notch took perhaps five minutes — mostly because the tool was very good.

Shredding the cedar bark into tinder took at most a couple of minutes. Again, I had the material at hand, having found a source of the bark over the years, and simply going back to the source when I run out of stored bark.

One of the other fires kits that I’ve made using stone tools took about ten minutes work to make the hearth and spindle. For that I had carefully chosen a piece of cottonwood root that was just a fairly thin stick. I split it in half, and used one half for the hearth, and roughly shaped the other piece into a short spindle. The kit was so small as to last me only about ten fires — but it demonstrated for me how quickly a kit could be made with materials at hand.

People living ‘in the land’ would not have likely been concerned with matters of time, for many reasons, but most importantly perhaps because they distributed efforts over time. Out hunting, they might well notice a good fire bow shape, or a fine source of bark for tinder, or a particularly good socket rock. They might gather the material then and there, or they might store that knowledge in their mental map of the landscape — which map must be so much more complex than we can fully understand, mostly because we use the landscape for so few things, and therefore have such a limited narrowly-dimensional view of it.

The issues of skill and knowledge are quite difficult for us to understand as well. Selecting, modifying, and using stone tools would have been second nature to them — common sense — whereas we have to think through these steps very carefully, or risk blundering along using the limited techniques we are familiar with, instead of having ready access to a much wider range of more efficient techniques. Take the use of a flat rock to abrade the spindle. It was a student of mine, totally frustrated with slow laborious planing and spoke-shaving, who showed me that by forcefully rubbing the spindle on concrete, she could achieve much more efficient results.

For me, this whole exercise of making a fire kit using stone tools gives me what I think of as significant insights into the lifestyle of a person living ‘in the land’ — a much fuller understanding of their relationship to the environment around them. The value for me is not in producing the flame, though that’s a wonderful feeling. It’s in more directly understanding how fully our ancestors had to integrate all aspects of their existence in order to live. 

Outdoorably,

Mark Whitcombe