The right hand

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Sat the ancient Arrow-maker,

In the land of the Dacotahs,

Making arrow-heads of jasper,

Arrow-heads of chalcedony.

Beautifully-finished arrow-heads and other smaller implements, fashioned of jasper, chalcedony, white quartz, and rock-crystal, are among the prized relics of many collections. The diversity of fracture in such materials must have taxed the skill of the expert workman, familiar chiefly with the regular cleavage of the obsidian, chert, or flint. But it is now known that the more delicate operations in the finishing of the flint implements were done by means of pressure with a horn or bone arrow-flaker; and not by a succession of blows with a chisel or hammer. The process has been repeatedly described by eye-witnesses. Dr. Evans quotes more than one account of methods pursued among the Eskimo, the native Mexicans, and the Shasta Indians of California. Another, and in some respects more minute account of the process, as it is in use by the Wintoon Indians, is furnished by Mr. B. B. Redding, in the American Naturalist, from his own personal observation. The material, as among the Shasta Indians, was obsidian; but the process is equally applicable to flint, the cleavage of which is nearly similar.

The artificer was Consolulu, the aged chief of the Wintoon Indians. His implements consisted of a deer-horn prong split lengthwise, four inches long and half an inch thick, with the semicircular end at right angles; two deer-horn prongs, one smaller than the other, with the ends ground down nearly to the shape of a square sharp-pointed file; and a piece of well-tanned buckskin, thick, soft, and pliable. Laying, as we are told, a lump of obsidian, about a pound in weight, in the palm of the left hand, he placed between the first and second fingers of the same hand the semi-cylindrical deer-horn implement, so that the straight side of one of the ends rested about a quarter of an inch from the edge of the block of obsidian. With a small water-worn stone in his right hand, he struck the other end of the prong, and a flake of obsidian was severed, well adapted for the arrow-head. On the buckskin, in the palm of his left hand, he laid the obsidian flake, which he held in place by the first three fingers of that hand, and then took such a position on the ground that the left elbow could rest on the left knee and obtain a firm support. Holding in his right hand the larger of the two pointed prongs, and resting his thumb on the side of his left hand to serve as a fulcrum, he brought the point of the prong about one-eighth of an inch within the edge of the flake; and then, exerting a firm downward pressure, fragment after fragment was broken off until the edge of the arrow was made straight. As all the chips came off the lower edge, the cutting edge was not yet in the centre of the side. But the Wintoon arrow-maker rubbed the side of the prong repeatedly over the sharp edge, turned over the flake, and, resuming the chipping as before, brought the cutting edge to the centre. In a similar manner, the other side and the concave base of the arrow-head were finished. The formation of indentations in the sides near the base for the retention of the tendons to bind the arrow-head securely to the shaft, apparently the most difficult process, was in reality the easiest. The point of the arrow-head was held between the thumb and finger of the left hand, while the base rested on the buckskin cushion in the palm. The point of the smaller deer-horn prong, not exceeding one-sixteenth of an inch square, was brought to bear on the part of the side where the Indian arrow-maker considered the notch should be. A sawing motion made the chips fly to right and left, and in less than a minute it was cut to the necessary depth. The other side was then completed in like manner. The entire process was accomplished, and the arrow-head finished, in about forty minutes.

This account of the process of the Wintoon arrow-maker refers, it will be seen, with a marked though probably undesigned emphasis, to the use of the right hand in all his active manipulations. Its minute details are in other respects full of interest from the light we may assume them to throw on the method pursued by the primitive implement makers of the earliest Stone Age. Dr. Evans describes and figures a class of flint tools recovered from time to time, the edges of which, blunted and worn at both ends, suggest to his experienced eye their probable use for chipping out arrow-heads and other small implements of flint, somewhat in the fashion detailed above, with the tool of deer’s horn. To those accordingly he applies the name of flaking tools, or fabricators. But whether fashioned by means of flint or horn fabricator, it is to be noted that the material to be operated upon has to be held in one hand, while the tool is dexterously manipulated with the other. Signor Craveri, whose long residence in Mexico gave him very favourable opportunities for observing the process of the native workers in obsidian, remarks that, when the Indians “wish to make an arrow or other instrument of a splinter of obsidian, they take the piece in the left hand, and hold grasped in the other a small goat’s horn. They set this piece of obsidian upon the horn, and dexterously pressing it against the point of it, while they give the horn a gentle movement from right to left, and up and down, they disengage from it frequent chips; and in this way obtain the desired form.”[1] Again, in an account communicated to Sir Charles Lyell by Mr. Cabot, of the mode of procedure of the Shasta Indian arrow-makers, after describing the detachment of a piece from the obsidian pebble with the help of an agate chisel, he thus proceeds: “Holding the piece against the anvil with thumb and finger of his left hand, he commenced a series of blows, every one of which chipped off fragments of the brittle substance.” The patient artificer worked upwards of an hour before he succeeded in producing a perfect arrow-head. His ingenious skill excited the admiration of the spectator, who adds the statement that among the Indians of California arrow-making is a distinct profession, in which few attain excellence.

[1] Translated from Gastaldi. See Evans’s Stone Implements, p. 36.

The point noticeable here in reference to the accounts given by the various observers is the uniform assumption of right-handedness. Mr. Redding, Signor Craveri, and Mr. Cabot not only agree in describing the block of obsidian as held in the left hand, while the tools are employed in the right hand to fashion it into shape; but the whole language, especially in the description given by Signor Craveri, assumes right-handedness as not only the normal, but the invariable characteristic of the worker in stone. In reality, however, an ingenious investigator, Mr. F. H. Cushing of the Smithsonian Institution, while engaged in a series of tentative experiments to determine the process of working in flint and obsidian, had his attention accidentally called to the fact that the primitive implements of the Stone Age perpetuate for us a record of the use of one or the other hand in their manufacture. With the instinctive zeal of youthful enthusiasm Mr. Cushing, while still a boy on his father’s farm in Western New York, carried out a systematic series of flint workings with a view to ascertain for himself the process by which the ancient arrow-makers fashioned the flint implements that then excited his interest. After repeated failures in his attempts to chip the flint into the desired shape by striking off fragments with a stone hammer, he accidentally discovered that small flakes could be detached from the flint core with great certainty and precision by pressure with a pointed rod of bone or horn; and, as I have recently learned from him, the instrument employed by him in those experiments was the same as that which Dr. John Evans informs me he accidentally hit upon in his earliest successful efforts at flint-arrow making, viz. a tooth-brush handle. In thus employing a bone or horn flaker, the sharp edge of the flake cuts slightly into the bone; and when the latter is twisted suddenly upward, a small scale flies off at the point of pressure in a direction which can be foreseen and controlled. With this discovery the essential process of arrow-making had been mastered. Spear and arrow-heads could be flaked with the most delicate precision, with no such liability to fracture as leads to constant failure in any attempt to chip even the larger and ruder spear or axe-heads into shape. The hammer-stone only suffices for the earlier processes, including the detachment of the flake from the rough flint nodule, and trimming it roughly into the required form, preparatory to the delicate manipulation of edging, pointing, and notching the arrow-head. The thinning of the flint-blade is effected by detaching long thin scales or flakes from the surface by using the flaker like a chisel and striking it a succession of blows with a hammer-stone. The marks of this delicate surface-flaking are abundantly manifest on the highly-finished Danish knives, daggers, and large spear-heads, as well as upon most other flint implements of Europe’s Neolithic Age. The large spear and tongue-shaped implements of the drift are, on the contrary, rudely chipped, evidently by the blows of a hammer-stone; although some of the more delicately fashioned drift implements seem to indicate that the use of the flint or bone flaker was not unknown to the men of the Palæolithic Age. But the chipping-stone or hammer was in constant use at the later period; and the small hammer-stone, with indentations on its sides for the finger and thumb, and its rounded edges marked with the evidence of long use in chipping the flint nodules into the desired forms, abounds both in Europe and America, wherever the arrow-maker has carried on his primitive art. The implements in use varied with the available material. A T-shaped wooden flaker sufficed for the Aztecs in shaping the easily-worked obsidian. The jasper, chalcedony, and quartz, in like manner, yield readily to the pressure of a slender flaker of horn; whereas Mr. Cushing notes that the “tough horn-stone of Western Arctic America could not be flaked by pressure in the hand, but must be rested against some solid substance, and flaked by means of an instrument, the handle of which fitted the palm like that of an umbrella, enabling the operator to exert a pressure against the substance to be chipped nearly equal to the weight of the body.” One result of Mr. Cushing’s experiments in arrow-making was to satisfy him that the greatest difficulty was to make long narrow surface-flakes. Hence, contrary to all preconceived ideas, it is easier to form the much-prized, delicately-finished small arrow-head, with barbs and stem, than larger and seemingly ruder implements which involve much surface-flaking.

It is interesting to learn of the recovery of this lost art of the ancient arrow-makers by a series of tentative experiments independently pursued by different observers. Before Mr. Cushing’s attention had been directed to any of the descriptions of the process of modern flint-workers, now familiar to us, he aimed at placing himself in the same condition as the primitive manufacturer of Europe’s Stone Age, or of the ancient Mound Builders of North America, devoid of metallic tools, and with the flint, obsidian, jasper, or hornstone, as the most available material out of which to fashion nearly all needful implements. He set to work accordingly with no other appliances than such sticks and variously shaped stones as could be found on the banks of the streams where he sought his materials. The results realise to us, in a highly interesting way, the earliest stages in the training of the self-taught workman of the Palæolithic Age. After making various implements akin to the most rudely fashioned examples from the river-drift or the old flint pits, by means of chipping one flint or stone with another, he satisfied himself that no amount of chipping, however carefully practised, would produce surfaces like the best of those which he was trying to imitate. He accordingly assumed that there must be some other process unknown to him. By chance he tried pressure with the point of a stick, instead of chipping with a stone, and the mystery was solved. He had hit on nearly the same method already described as in use by Aztecs, Eskimos, and Red Indians; and found that he could fashion the fractured flint or obsidian into nearly any shape that he desired. As has been already noted, Mr. Cushing, like Dr. Evans, resorted subsequently to the easily available tool furnished by the handle of a tooth-brush. Having thus mastered the secret of the old flint-workers, he succeeded before long in the manufacture of well-finished arrows, spear-heads, and daggers of flint, closely resembling the products of the primitive workmen both of the Old and the New World.