Passing through more than thirty thousand years of history, the poems of "Bone Antler Stone" are a panorama of Europe from the painted caves of Chauvet and Lascaux to contact with Greece and Rome. The changing spiritual and material lives of the earliest Europeans are vividly imagined through their artwork, burials, architecture, and their interaction with the landscape, the seasons, and one another.
This book is for anyone who has looked at artifacts from the Northwest Coast in a museum and wondered: "How were these made?" "What was their function?" "How were they used?" Hilary Stewart lifts artifacts out of their isolation in a glass case and puts them into the context of the life of early native people on the coast. Archaeological excavations, or "digs, " have unearthed an array of ancient artifacts. While items made of perishable materials such as wood, bark and hide usually decayed over time, many objects of stone, bone, antler and shell have been found. In clear, easy to read text and over 1000 illustrations and 50 photos, Hilary Stewart depicts a wide range of artifacts. These tools, weapons, hunting and fishing gear, household and ceremonial items and ornaments reveal much about a people's way of life: how they fed, clothed, adorned and housed themselves; their technologies, skills and art; their trading and travelling patterns.
Cultures in the Midwest such as the Mississippian and Oneota crafted projectiles from raw materials ranging from local stone to exotic materials, bone and antler. This thesis is a study of differences in the nature of raw materials, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. Methods were employed to measure time invested in manufacturing and hafting each projectile point, as well as how each point performed when used against a target. As a result, this thesis was able to better understand the properties of each type, possibly determining the use of each. In general, stone points had the lowest cost of time to create, however, organic points required less skill. In terms of performance, the wounds caused by lithic points and distal phalanges are suitable for harvesting medium and large game, while antler tine points are effective against both medium and small game.
The finest North American Indian artifacts were made of organic materials, and luckily many survive. Materials used include the most common, bone, plus antler, shell, fur, ivory, and horn. Artifact classes range from projectile points and awls to fishhooks, gorgets, beads, and more. Collectors today value such pieces because of their artistic beauty and rarity. Most of them were destroyed by natural processes over the centuries, so those that remain are treasured. Lar Hothem, author of the bestselling five-volume series Indian Artifacts of the Midwest, has once again produced a fantastic book for Indian artifacts collectors. Each artifact includes information on type or class, material, size, find-location, and (in most cases) an estimated value. Background information is included about these artifacts, including finds made throughout North America. Advertisements from early dealers are listed, as well as recent auction results. This book opens the window to a fascinating world of study and collecting. 2006 values.
A holistic understanding of worked bone and the ways it shapes and is shaped by the humans who made and used it comes from integrating multiple perspectives.
Artifacts linked to projectile technologies traditionally have provided the foundations for time-space systematics and cultural-historic frameworks in archaeological research having to do with foragers. With the shift in archae ological research objectives to processual interpretations, projectile technolo gies continue to receive marked attention, but with an emphasis on the implications of variability in such areas as design, function, and material as they relate to the broader questions of human adaptation. The reason that this particular domain of foraging technology persists as an important focus of research, I think, comes in three parts. A projectile technology was a crucial part of most foragers' strategies for survival, it was functionally spe cific, and it generally was fabricated from durable materials likely to be detected archaeologically. Being fundamental to meat acquisition and the principal source of calo ries, projectile technologies were typically afforded greater time-investment, formal modification, and elaboration of attributes than others. Moreover, such technologies tend to display greater standardization because of con straints on size, morphology, and weight that are inherent to the delivery system. The elaboration of attributes and standardization of form gives pro jectile technologies time-and space-sensitivity that is greater than most other foraging technologies. And such sensitivity is immensely valuable in archae ological research.
Tracing the magical roots of "hoodoo" back to West Africa, the author provides a history of this nature-based healing tradition and offers practical advice on how to apply hoodoo magic to everyday life.
The papers in this volume were originally collected for a symposium entitled Recent Developments in Bone Tool Studies, organized for the 69th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in Montreal (Canada) on April 2nd, 2004. The objective of the symposium was to illustrate how recent developments in approaches, methods and techniques in worked bone studies can contribute to our understanding of basic problems encountered in archaeological research, with case studies from Europe and North America essentially, but also from Latin America and Oceania.
