Abstract
MANY surmises have been offered as to how our prehistoric ancestors could have manufactured stone arrow heads before the uses of bronze or iron were known. Sir John Lubbock, Mr. John Evans, and other writers have suggested that the observations of travellers as to the mode pursued by savage nations in similar work might possibly lead to some correct conclusions. Acting on this hint Mr.B. B. Redding had published an account of the manufacture as practised by the Cloud River Indians. Prior to the close of the Modoc war the Wintoons or Cloud River Indians were without firearms. Up to that time the few settlers who resided about the base of Mount Shasta made it a rule to permit no Wintoon to carry a gun. As there are no agricultural lands and no mines on the Cloud River the Wintoons were left in almost undisputed possession of their prolific hunting-grounds and to the inexhaustible supplies of salmon and trout with which that river abounds. They had but little contact with the Americans until a station was established on their river by the United States Government for the taking of salmon eggs for distribution. Even to this day very few of them have guns, and their principal reliance in the chase is upon their primitive but powerful bow and arrows with stone heads. The stone arrow head maker is still a man of great importance in the tribe, and one of the best of these undertook to make, in; Mr. Redding's presence, a stone arrow head, using only such tools and implements for this purpose as were in use by the Indians before their contact with the white man. Promptly at the time appointed the old man, Consolulu, appeared, grey-haired, and though between sixty-eight and seventy-two he was still erect and vigorous. He brought, tied upon a deer's skin, a piece of obsidian weighing about a pound, a fragment of a deer's horn, split from a prong lengthwise, about four inches in length and half an inch in diameter and ground off squarely at the ends; this left each end a semicircle, besides two deer prongs with the points ground down into the shape of a square sharp pointed file, one of these being much smaller than the other. He had also with him some pieces of iron wire tied to wooden handles and ground into the same shapes. These, he said, he used nowadays in preference to the deer prongs, simply because they did not require such constant sharpening. Holding the piece of obsidian in the hollow of his left hand, he placed between the first and second fingers of the same hand the split piece of deer's horn first described, the straight edge of the split horn resting against One-fourth of an inch of the edge of the obsidian, this being about the thicknes of the he desired to split off, then with a small round water-Worn stone which he had picked up, and which weighed perhaps a pound, he with his right hand struck the other end of the split deer's horn a sharp blow. The first attempt resulted in failure; a flake was split off, but it was at the same time shattered to fragments. The next blow was successful, a perfect flake was obtained, and a third was equally so. Now squatting on the ground, sitting on his left foot, his right leg extended in tailor-like fashion, he placed in the palm of his left hand a piece of thick, well tanned buckskin; it was thick but soft and pliable; on this he laid the obsidian flake, holding it firmly in its plate by the first three fingers of the same hand; the elbow was steadied on the left knee. In hirright hand he took the larger of the two deer prongs and commenced to reduce one edge of the circular form of the flake to a straight line with the thumb of the right hand resting on the edge of the left hand as a fulcrum. The point of the deer prong would be made to rest on about an eighth of an inch or less of the edge of the flake, then with a firm pressure of the point a conchoidal fragment would be broken out, almost always of the size desired. This operation Was repeated until in a few moments, the flake was reduced to a straight line on one edge; by rubbing this on the side of the deer horn the sharp edge was worn down. Next, the flake was turned end for end and the chipping renewed; when completed care was taken that the cutting edge was left in the centre. It was now plain that the straight edge thus made was to be one side of the long isosceles triangle, the form of the arrowheads which is used by the tribe. The other was formed in the same manner and next the base. The chipping but of the slot by which the arrow head is firmly bound By deer tendon to the shaft was the simplest and most rapid portion of the work, It had taken forty minutes to split the two flakes from the obsidian mass and to form one of them into the arrow head. The detailed account of this most interesting process will be found, with illustrations, in the November number of the American Naturalist.
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Stone Arrow Heads . Nature 21, 613–614 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/021613a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/021613a0