Monthly Archives: May 2014

Antler – recycling the leftovers.

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A short radio programme was broadcast recently, part of a BBC School Radio series, which dramatised the working lives of three Victorian street urchins.   Described in the accompanying Teachers’ Notes .pdf as “historically accurate fictions”, the three stories had much in common.   Children around the age of 11 years, sleeping rough at Billingsgate Fish Market, scratching a living in central London, no family to speak of, no education – straight out of Dickens or a Comic Relief appeal film.

All three children were depicted trying to make money from waste, from things that no one else wanted.   Recycling, in its multifarious forms, is big business today.   We are familiar with the current staples of kerbside collection – glass, paper, textiles and tin cans – with the bottle bank, and even, not that long ago, the rag and bone man in our streets; but we add to the modern list plastics, batteries, even mobile phones for their valuable component materials.   There are, however,  many trades and activities, based on un-wanted things of one sort or another, long lost to the British economy.

In the radio programme, Maddy described hand-collecting puer to sell by the bucket to the tanners; Jacko was catching rats in dockside grain stores to fuel Soho dog-fights; Gyp graduated from mud-larking for coals on the Thames foreshore to digging out lost household items that had been flushed into Bazalgette’s sewers.

Tanneries are especially interesting because they made use of a range of natural waste and by-products.  The animal hides to be made into leather are a by-product of butchery and knackery.   Urine could be used to help slip the hide of its hair.   Puering, to soften the hide and make it more flexible, used bird droppings or dog dung (as collected by Maddy in the radio story) before other bate became available, such as dried animal pancreas.

Tanning is the part of the leather-making process which then preserves the hide.   Vegetable tan requires tannin-rich plant material, perhaps the best known being oak bark, to make a waterproof, strong yet flexible leather.   Brain tan is used to make soft and pliable buckskin.   Animal brain oils work not by chemically preserving the hide, but by preventing the fibres in the drying skin from sticking together; buckskin is usually, but not always, smoked to give it better drying properties when it has been washed.

Brain tan is a method associated with traditional native American leather-making.   There is now only one commercial oak tannery in England.   Most leather production these days uses mineral and synthetic processes such as alum and chrome tannages.

Antler is another by-product which, along with other animal bone and horn, did for thousands of years the jobs that plastic often does now.   Combs, buttons and beads, toggles and fasteners, jewellery, pins, dice, gaming pieces, handles, bobbins, hinges and more – all manner of objects used to be made from skeletal materials.   Antlers can be broken down into a myriad of pieces and even the smallest bits can be made into something.

Which brings me to the question in hand.   Keith Pickering, who makes fabulous walking sticks, sells his antler leftovers so I have bought a batch.   Collected in Scotland, the antlers make their way to Keith’s workshop to make thumbstick “V”s and other handles.  I’m turning his offcuts into keyrings and zip-pulls to raise some money for two archaeological education charities.   The slideshow below follows my manufacturing process.   All I need to do now is make a load more!

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I usually use Harvard referencing in my blog posts to show my information sources, but this time it didn’t seem to suit the generalised commentary; so instead, here are the books on my shelves that are relevant:

Blair, J. and Ramsay, N. (eds) (1991)  English Medieval Industries   London: The Hambledon Press

MacGregor, A. (1985)  Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn   London: Croom Helm

Riggs, J. (1979-2003)  Blue Mountain Buckskin   Cave Junction: Backcountry Publishing

Woodroffe, D. (1953)  Leather Dressing, Dyeing and Finishing   Teignmouth: Quality Books

 

Sarsen #5

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Blogging about what archaeologists can learn from toolmarks left by the sharp edges of metal tools – and how ephemeral those marks can be – reminded me of one of my all-time favourite archaeological features.

Last Saturday I was in Avebury to see what a pasture to the north of the Manor House would be like for a Young Archaeologists’ Club activity.   Lovely earthworks, probably medieval, quiet and secluded without being remote, and great views out to Windmill Hill and back to the church and manor – so it’s perfect for a surveying session.

The weather was holding up.   Heading east out of the village up Green Street, I was reminded just how enclosed, protected, encircled, claustrophobic, it feels inside the prehistoric earthworks of the huge henge monument.   Green Street – the herepath on the way to Marlborough – felt faintly like an Anglo-Saxon military way as runners participating in the Marlborough Downs Challenge plodded uphill and teenagers working on their Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award splashed down.

Standing in the hollow of Green Street, the tops of trees on the slopes outside the henge seem to peep in over the top of the bank.
Looking east from Avebury; some twenty bodies are hoofing up and down the lane.

I was heading for the Valley of Stones and the open-access area of Totterdown.   Crossing the Ridgeway, the rise is broached at 236m above sea level on Overton Down and three landmarks come into view; the remains of a barrow in a cluster of wind-blown hawthorns, the Experimental Earthwork hung with more stunted trees, and another barrow crowning the south-east facing spur of the hill.   The first hint of what’s to come appears in the light scattering of grey wethers on the slope below.

The view to the east from the Ridgeway, over Overton Down.

The view to the east from the Ridgeway, over Overton Down.

Having enjoyed the best part of three hours amongst the sarsen stones in a small area around Delling, taking photos and gathering data, it was time to head back down to Avebury.   Dark downpours of freezing rain had been interspersed with bright, blowsy sun.   Sometimes it felt heavenly up on the heights – sometimes it was impossible to imagine just how the prehistoric farmers had teased life out of their cold, wet arable fields now shadowed under sheep-run pasture.

But I could hardly take the short route back and not visit this:

The polissoir - a grinding stone for polishing stone axe heads - one of a number on the Downs but the only one with this variety of toolmarks.

The polissoir – a grinding stone for polishing stone axe heads – one of a number on the Downs but the only one with this variety of toolmarks.

This magnificent sarsen stone is a polissoir, just to the east of the Ridgeway at grid reference SU 1283 7150.   It’s a large version of the grindstones and honing blocks I use to sharpen my steel axe edges – but it was used in the Neolithic to put smooth surfaces onto stone axe heads.   Sarsen is a sandstone: not so finely grained that it won’t rip off material from an axe head; but nicely regular and evenly textured to work down a flaked surface.

Not every Neolithic axe head was ground and polished – and some were only partially worked –  but those that were have beautifully finished surfaces.   You get a hint of this if you touch the dished corner of the polissoir, run a finger along the grooves, and stroke the glossy surface which you can see shining in the sunlight.

This polissoir has probably lost part of its prehistoric grinding surface.   It was split by the stone cutters who used to work this area, and who removed the whole of the west side of the stone, taking some of the worn area with it.   Before being used as a grinding bench it had perhaps been a standing stone.   Excavations in 1963 revealed the remains of a pit at the northern end of the stone, interpreted as a socket in which the sarsen had once stood (Fowler 2000:66-8).

This is not the only polissoir in this area to have been one thing, then another.   For example, one of the sarsens used to construct the chambers of the West Kennet long barrow (no more than about 4km away to the south-west) bears a similar dished, glossy grinding area.   There is a portion of a polissoir, with a shallower but still glossy surface, incorporated as a block in the farmyard wall at North Farm, West Overton (just over 2km to the south).

The stone tools ground and polished on this sarsen have left their marks.   Knapped axe heads, like the flint one below made recently by Karl Lee, lost their flake scars and ridges; but in the process of becoming smooth, cut and marked the sarsen.   For such a hard, tough stone, these cuts are deep.

Flint axe head knapped by Karl Lee - Neolithic form, 20cm long.

Flint axe head knapped by Karl Lee – Neolithic form, 20cm long.

Fowler, P.J. (2000)  Landscape Plotted and Pieced   London: The Society of Antiquaries

The Elder cannibal fork – creating memories

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As the Edgcumbe cannibal fork was made in a particular way for a particular purpose, I wanted to carve an altogether different fork; partly to experiment with a different effect in the wood, partly for the practice using a different tool-set.   The task ended up doing a good deal more for me than that.

I have a few good-sized and remarkably straight pieces of what seems to be elder in the woodstore (this is the trouble with being given wood by people who don’t actually know what they’ve got – the bark looks like elder, but maybe…).   Whatever it is, the wood works nicely.   It is firm, easy to cut when green but toughening up as it dries out.   The thick, dark brown core of the heartwood, full of tannin, contrasts with the pale, creamy-coloured sapwood.

The Fijian cannibal forks are on the whole carved in a dark wood capable of taking a high polish, like the black tree fern.    The effect is sleek, rich and mysterious.   I wanted to see what I could do, to create a parti-coloured object which has a different appearance depending how it is viewed and held.

Cannibal fork in elder, April 2014
The handle of a Cannibal fork in elder, April 2014
Cannibal fork in elder, April 2014

The Elder cannibal fork* is carved from a half-log.   The heartwood is either hidden from view, or is a dark streak running the length of the object.   As the wood dries out, the colour in the fibres and cells changes – it softens in some places, stands out in others.   The sapwood/heartwood interface is more pronounced, making the transition even more dramatic.   Darker flecks in the heartwood catch the eye.  Interesting patterns made by the growth rings throughout the fork can be followed under close inspection, making the deceptively yealding-looking sapwood appear more sinewy and robust.

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Most of the work on the Edgcumbe cannibal fork was completed on the pole lathe.   This was a deliberate and specific choice – part of the suggestion that the object was a modern, European, creation and not an historic, native object from Fiji.   I did all the work on the Elder cannibal fork in hand, using an axe, drawknife and knife.   I wanted to leave a seemingly unrefined look, with all the marks left on the surface of the wood.   But I also wanted to test my skills by carving five prongs.

Fijian cannibal forks have any number of prongs, but usually from two to four.   Five is a beautiful but awkward number to work with.

It was agony.   A slow, laborious, painful process.   Cutting out five prongs left much less space to work the knife-blade; the centre section, all of which must be removed, tenaciously held in place and would only come out in a mess of broken fibres and gristly splinters; the narrowing edges of the triangular prong sections felt ever sharper as they dug more insistently into my fingers; the long prongs became bars that kept knocking the blade and my hands back as I tried to finish the surfaces; the finished points are like needles.   This fork came of out the wood unwillingly.

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I carefully placed the cuts so that one prong would consist entirely of heartwood whilst the other four were all sapwood.    The contrasting colours are a surprise.   As the tensions in the log are released and the drying cells start to contract, the fork is moving.   The heartwood prong has escaped the confines of the billet of wood and appears to have stepped back, so that the fork stands proud.   It is a handsome fork, full of spirit and character.

In the short space of time that I have known it, the fork has become a talisman.   It cut me, yet I can hardly put it down.   The fork is glossy and substantial but also made interesting to the touch by the toolmarks on the surface, yet it still bites back if I don’t take care; those sharp-edged prongs and stiletto points.   I remember every movement, from first cleaving the log to the last knife cut, that went to claim it from the wood.

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Elder: witches’ tree; lucky and unlucky; home of the goddess; Sambucus nigra; timber of the true cross; our lane guardian, lookout-post and familiar friend.

* I don’t know if the wood is elder.   But it has given me the name for this fork.

[For an entertaining read about Britain’s trees, including a nice vignette of Sambucus nigra, try Out of the Woods by Will Cohu, published by Short Books in 2007.]