I have been following Christopher Schwarz's research into early woodworking benches for some time. I admire his dedication to travel and study Medieval and Roman woodworking tools and benches to understand the history of our craft.
I have been focused during my career on the post Renaissance woodworker, so each time Christopher posts something I am fascinated by the "new" evidence he presents of "old" work.
His post today just stopped me cold. Never in my imagination did I think that Stone Age people would make something sophisticated using stone tools! It was normal to think of them throwing spears at mastodons or using rocks to crush bones or something primitive like that. But to think of them making a mortise or cutting down a large tree with a stone tool? Not possible.
Just watch this video for your self: Stone Age Woodworking
Just one question: When I need to sharpen my stone axe, do I use a water stone or an oil stone???
POSTSCRIPT: If this interests you just go to YouTube and search for "Primitive Technology."
5 comments:
Ok. This was a fantastic article. Thank you. I really hope that Lost Art Press makes a book that details this era of woodworking.
Sincerely,
Joe
I actually took a class called "Primitive Technology" as an anthropology elective. I was considering a minor but ended up with a double major in something else.
I was surprised that stone would be useful for the kind of work shown in the article. Cleaving stone can produce very sharp edges useful for skinning animals or cutting flesh but I wasn't expecting the toughness for notching wood. My guess was bone (yes, I ignored the headline on the schwartz blog). I would expect bone to be useful for gouging type tools but also to be capable of producing saws or drill implements.
If you ever encounter a beaver's freshly cut timber you'll see how clean the cuts are. It's remarkable and teeth are a lot like sharpened bone.
You don’t have to go to Europe and dig for 6000 year old tools. The Neolithic age was only 200 years ago here in the Pacific NW.
All you have to do is go to a museum in Portland, Seattle, Victoria, or Vancouver to see relatively new bone and stone carving tools from the contact period only two centuries ago. Beaver teeth made great adzes for carving the 300 foot long houses, totem poles and canoes are still around. The Portland Art museum has a gorgeous straight adze carved from elk bone. A bone tool very like the chisel in the video is at Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark overwintered.
Some of those tools made it back to the British Museum, for those on the other side of the pond.
Hello,
I'm a rather new (very new actually) follower to your blog. I look forward to reading more of your post on views and experience regarding the things you have seen and done.
As to "stone tools" and traditional modalities of all sorts, I'm actually surprised that..."your surprised?"
My ancestors (on both sides of the Pond...LOL) have been working with what many Academics today would have (and still do) call..."primitive tools."
I can assure you from passed down family knowledge and gathered skill sets within knapping and the related "indigenous life skills" that these abilities are much more than primitive. "Primitive tools"...are anything but that. Making them, let alone employing them in an efficient and productive fashion takes a great deal of skill to say the least. Dare I say, way more so than even most than what a " post Renaissance woodworker" would ever have had in many ways. Iron tools have been, without a doubt a technological milestone in human creativity. Yet many things made today of wood, could (and was) made in similar fashion thousand of years ago. Just in a different way...
Lithic and Neolithic artisan took more to their graves than modern academics have even begun to understand on all matter of skill, from animal husbandry to medicine. What I learned along the way both in family oral traditions and from the many tome now read, is that most of the "good stuff" isn't written in books, it is hidden in our blood and bones. It's also still within the many cultural traditional knowledge holders to either be relearn/discovered or garnered from these still living sources outside academia...
Thanks for this post and bringing others to LAP work in ancient woodworking traditions...
Excellent… This is my first comment on your blog! Coz I feel so cool after reading this. You are just a blessing to me and so happy to find your blog..
Keep on the good work
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