This chert hafted stone knife is from Alaska. The knife is from the northern Bering Strait, and was likely made and used in the late 19th Century.
See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.
The hafted knife in this model was used for skinning and butchering rather than wood or ivory carving. Nelson observed several similar hafted stone knives still in use on Hotham Inlet near Kotzebue, ca. 1877-1881. The knives were carried handle-upward in a wooden sheath strapped to the outside of the right thigh just below the hip, or suspended from the waist belt. This knife was made from a glossy high-quality blue-grey chert by expert bifacial percussion flaking followed by extensive resharpening using a pressure technique. Nelson describes flaked-stone tools made from ‘bluish flint’ from Kigiktanik and Big Lake, and this tool is likely from that region. A stem was flaked onto one end of the biface for hafting. The stem was placed into a cut-away section of the tapered, carefully-shaped wood handle. The cut-away section was carved to match the profile of the stone, enhancing the fit. The stone is held in place by a wrapping of willow or perhaps spruce root—both of these materials were observed by Nelson in hafting other types of tools, including stone spearpoints. The distal end of the willow root was secured by threading it through a double-piercing in the wood handle at the base of the lashing. The knife handle was carved away to lower the profile of the finished lashing. The top of the carved-away section is a steep shelf to prevent the lashing from sliding over the end of the handle. No hafting glue or mastic was used to secure the stone.
Flaked stone and ground stone cutting tools were both used by Indigenous people across the coastal Arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere. In Alaska and Canada, these tools continued to be used into the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Stone tools made by grinding sharp edges on flat pieces of slate are common across the Arctic, including slate spearpoints and knives of various shapes and sizes. They are particularly abundant in northern Scandinavia and the northwest and northeast coastal regions of North America. These slate tool manufacturing centres are aspects of he ‘Circumpolar Stone Age’ culture proposed by the famous Norwegian archaeologist Gutorm Gjessing in 1944. Gjessing speculated that the similarity of the slate tools across this vast region, along with other technological and cultural traits, suggested that the groups were in contact around the circumpolar Arctic coastline. Subsequent research—including detailed radiocarbon dating—refuted many of his suggestion, although his ideas still serve as a springboard for Arctic researchers. A consensus has emerged that the maritime adaptation of Arctic groups resulted in technological convergences and that north-south contacts with inland groups, living on the northward-draining rivers—or, in some regions, contact with coastal groups farther south—played a more significant role in cultural development than circumpolar contacts. According to this explanation, the convergence on ground slate tools was due to the material’s superiority in certain respects to flaked-stone tools for processing sea mammals and large fish, combined with the common slate outcrops in northern regions. Despite this, recent ancient DNA analyses have demonstrated movements of people across the Bering Strait and eastward at about ca. 5000 BP, and again at about 2200 BP, showing that circumpolar contact was occurring in prehistory.
A common slate tool in these assemblages is the edge-ground knife. These are usually flat, rectangular, and relatively thin pieces of slate with a sharp straight or curved edge ground bifacially on one margin. Versions of this type of tool are found in slate industries across the circumpolar region. In the Mesolithic period of the Republic of Karelia in northwestern Russia, ca. 8000-8400 BP, slate knives and daggers were found in male graves at Oleneostrovski Mogilnik. They were made from non-local slate and probably functioned as social markers. Slate knives proliferated in the Late Stone Age of northern Norway by ca. 5600 BP, and emerged in the Maritime Archaic in northeast Canada by 3500 BP. Edge-ground slate knives appear about 5000 BP in the Ocean Bay tradition of Kodiak Island in Alaska and similar knives were in use by ca. 3500-4500 BP by Charles Culture people in southern British Columbia. Slate knives were made alongside stemmed and notched slate spearpoints in many of these regions. Flaked stone tools were also part of these toolkits.
From 1877-1881 the American ethnologist Edward Nelson recorded in detail the traditional tools and technology of Inuit people living on the Alaska side of the Bering Strait, publishing the book The Eskimo about Bering Strait in 1900. He made his observations while employed by the US Army Signal Corps; men with scientific training, including Nelson and the naturalist John Muir, were selected by the Signal Corp to make observations in these remote regions. Nelson observed that stone tools were largely replaced by iron tools obtained by the Inuit from Russian traders, although stone—particularly slate—was still widely used for some tasks, such as processing fish and scraping hides. Iron crooked knives were used for most wood, bone, and ivory carving, replacing stone flakes, although stone drills were sometimes used for making holes. Hafted adzes made from nephrite and other hard stones were still in use, but were being rapidly replaced by iron. Flaked stone points were used for thrusting spears (lances) and arrow points, and were made and/or resharpened by pressure flaking using a distinctive composite pistol-gripped tool (here is a 3D model of an Iñupiaq or Yupik pressure-flaking tool).
Slate ulus were eventually replaced by metal ulus when metal became widely available, although metal was initially resisted. The Russian naval officer and explorer Lavrenty Zagoskin made ethnographic observations on the Yukon River delta in 1842-1844, and noted that the local people considered metal knives as ‘unclean’ because they came from the Europeans; they would not used them to butcher beluga whales. A similar observation was made by Nelson over 30 years later in the northern Bering Strait—metal was not used to butcher walrus or whales, partially explaining the persistence of stone skinning and butchering knives in that region. The slate element of ulu knives was largely replaced by steel by the 1900s, although the overall design of the tool was retained, with elaborations occurring in the handles. The steel blades were cut from saw blades. Ulus continue to be made by First Nations people, and have become important symbols for Arctic traditional culture. They are presented as awards for outstanding achievements: the gold, silver and bronze medals awarded to athletes in the Arctic Winter Games are shaped like an ulu.
