Stone and Bone (Utilizing Resources) Part 1

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bug Out,Bushcraft,Scouts,Scouting,Primitive,Primitive Skills.Traditional,Archery,Bone,Stone,Tools,Self Reliance,Navigation,Orienteering,Tracking,Trekking,Camping,Backpacking,Hiking,Tents,Campfire,Fire,Wool Blanket,Kit,Emergency Preparedness,Spear,Hunting,Cooking,Fishing,Game Cleaning,Meat preservation,Nature,Naturalist,Trapping,Traps,Primitive Traps,Handdrill,Bowdrill

Video Transcription

morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school what I thought I'd do today is I've had a lot of recent requests and actually had another one last night I'm asking me about bone tools bone arrowheads and things of that nature so I went out today to an area where I knew there were some deer carcasses that that were rotted away and the bones were left that's part of understanding where your resources are and being able to go back to them and I picked up several bones brought them with me today I also brought some other things with me today to kind of show you as well and what I want to go over with you real quick as part of this lesson is it's very important really unless you're going to make very crude and rudimentary bone tools you need to have an understanding of stone tools as well because stone tools will help you to create better bone tools now one thing that I want to say about bone is most of the time 98% of the time if you're going to work with bone you want to soak it in water first because it makes it much easier to abrade and mice easier to score for cutting purposes so we're looking at this today as if we didn't have any modern tools to work with and everything that we have is going to be stone and bone so the tools I'm going to show you will be some will be crude and rudimentary

but they did the job for thousands and thousands of years so bear that in mind as you watch this video and stay with me and we'll get right to it okay there's a couple things that we need as far as stone tools go to really work with any bone so before we get to the bones that I've picked up to work with and some of the things that I'm going to show you today let's go out and get a couple pieces of stone to work with four stone tools to use with our bone to make a little easier for us to make these tools that we're going to make today okay I'm walk along this creek bed and there's a couple different things that I'm looking for there's some nice big flat rocks here this one here would be really good and there's quite a few of those flat rocks here but what we're going to need we need two things we're going to need a hammer stone we're going to need an anvil

okay now a hammer stone doesn't have to be a big giant rock like this but you want it to be you know fairly good-sized rock that when you hold it in your hand you can use it for a hammer to break up bone and it's not going to you're not going to take a chance on smacking your fingers down on the anvil that you're using and your anvil is going to want some different edges on it that you can use for breaking things at different angles so let's walk around here for a few minutes and I'll pick up a couple things and I'll show them to you when I find what I want

okay this rock right here probably would be a pretty good animal stone for us it's got a couple charred edges on it we can use to break over it's got some sharp edges on it here and it's got some pretty flat areas on it right here that we can use this will not be a good sanding device at all but it'll be a good animal so we'll take this with us okay this piece of limestone right here will be a very good at braider stone because it's not real big it's flat so we can lay it on the ground and work on it and scrape on top of it it's got a really coarse rough surface on it's not quite as good as sandstone would probably be but sometimes you don't want sandstone either because it gives too much limestone is a pretty good medium for this so we're going to take this with us as a sanding device okay this would be a good large hammer stone it's kind of conical in shape I can hold it in my hand like this and break down on it and it doesn't have a sharp edge on but it's got a beveled edge right here that'll make really good clean breaks in our stone so I'm going to use this one and then I want one that's a little smaller as well for finer work and I just picked this stone up right here this would be a good dual purpose stone for me alright and again you know multi-purpose this thing is made out of granite and it's really really rough so to make a good at braiding stone but it's also the perfect little hammer stone for smaller tasks so I've double purposed this item I can use in front of brayer and for a hammer stone okay so we've picked up our primitive tool kit that we're going to use to process our bone with we've got two different hammer stones we have a multi-purpose abrading stone so we have two abrading stones we have an anvil stone alright and those are the things that we're going to use in the beginning to process our bones now you can see over here I've got a pretty good assortment of different types of bones and they are all from a deer

these are all red white-tailed deer bones I'm going to show you what some of these bones some of the different things that we can do to make certain objects okay now there's a lot of things that we can do with this bone one thing that you probably will not want to make out of bone will be any kind of a knife if you look at the archaeological record and you go back and you look through different museum exhibits and things like that that are online you'll see that most knives were not made of bone they were made of stone all right there are a lot of tools out there that were made of bone that are cutting type tools but they were not knives they were Arrowhead spear points harpoon points scrapers cutting devices that were made to act as a saw or a sickle and things like that but very few that I've seen ever a knife blade actually made our stone that was an archaeological item so that's not to say if they never did it that's just to say that it probably wasn't a good idea because it's not going to hold a very good edge anyway and they're better for scraping and stabbing than they are for actual cutting devices when you get to the point where you can make tools from stone like this blank right here which is set up right now at this point it's just a preform but anything can be made out of this from you know an arrowhead to a cutting blade to a hand scraper of some sort and what you do with things like that is you take your bones and this is just a deer cannon bone just like this one that's been cut off and it's been scored with a flint tool when it was wet and I've put a flint blade right here inside there and haften it on with sinew and pine pitch and now what I have is I have a cutting device and a scraping device and this would be used to process hides with or process animals okay that's the way you make a combination bone and stone tool and the stone was used more for handle type material on these kind of things ever than a blade they usually put stone in bed

in there for the blade if it was at all possible unless it was just an arrowhead or a spear point or a harpoon point or something like that that they were using for you know fishing and things like that or hunting okay there are a couple of tools that are made of bone that you're going to want to use with stone okay and they're the easiest tools to create really in a lot of ways because they're basically already there when you harvest the animal this is a tine from a set of deer antlers from a white-tailed deer this is at another time that's been cut off and a braided smooth and it is used as a flaking device for flint to pop flakes off your flint when you're doing flint knapping we've done videos on that several times there's no sense of demonstrating any of that today but obviously this is used just very similar to any type of copper flaker to pop flakes off the backside of your flint so that you can make stone tools so that's a good tool to make you start off with and then with that you'll want a couple different hammer stones and maybe a couple billets and this billet is made again from a deer antler and it's just been abraded off on the end but it's good and thick and heavy and you can use that for knocking flakes off to do percussion type flaking on your flint okay and that's the way that's used just to do light percussion flaking on a piece of Flint alright those are a couple tools you can make pretty quick pretty easy and it takes a little practice to use these things but they do work well and you can see where I've knocked a series of flakes off that side so anyway with that said those are the first couple tools that I would probably make out of a harvested deer would be things that I could use to work with stone and then at that point you need a couple different hammer stones things like this stone right here that I picked up I've had for quite a long time that I use for just a small pressure flaker or I mean a percussion flaker and I also use this for pecking this is the stone that I use when I made the device that I currently use for my bow drill or my hand drill

excuse me my bow-drill bearing block that we made the grease lamp out of Ipek that hole out with this okay so that's why I use that for nuts in my stone and bone tool kit now I've got several other tools that I've made over here and one of the things that you're going to want to fashion quickly will probably be some type of a needle okay and when you do that you need to be able to drill holes in your needle the only way you're going to drill holes in bone is by using a stone tool for the most part unless you burn it in there and this is a drill point that I've made out of flint it's thicker on the backside and an arrowhead would be it looks very similar to an arrowhead but it is actually a drill point and what you do with that is I've got a piece of just regular Bush honeysuckle here about the length of a normal hand drill and it's got a pith inside of it so I can split that open and then half this point inside that we can use this for a drill to bear down on our bone and drill it just like we would drill a hand drill just like this to drill holes in bone to make holes for needles and things like that so what we're going to work on first is we're going to make a needle okay so the first thing I need obviously like I said is I need a drill now I just took this down here and hit with a hammer stone and broke it actually broke a little further than I wanted to but that's okay it's split and you can see there's a hollow pith in there where it's died and all I'm going to do is I'm going to slide this down inside just like this and I'm going to half that in there whichever way it looks like it fits the best now I can use cordage for this or I can use whatever I want to use I happen to have brought some gut material out here today and all this is is the sliced pieces of gut from a deer's intestine is what this is okay and what I'm going to do with that is I'm going to take it over here I'm going to soak it with send you or anything like this gut when it dries up it's hard you want to soak it in water to make it pliable that way when you stretch it over your device for hafting and it dries it will shrink and tighten up on the device so we're going to leave these two pieces over here on our anvil for a minute and I'm going to take this gut over to the creek that works in every side I'm going to wet it down and then we'll use this but I'm gonna let sit in there for a couple minutes we'll talk about something else while I do that okay so you can see what I've done here is I've just put that roll of gut material and a little pool behind the log here where I won't float away on me while we're making a blank for our needle and we'll come back and work on that grab this out and we'll half that drill point on so we can draw our hole okay so what we're going to do first of all then is we want to take one of these pieces of bone it doesn't really matter which one we want to get some shards off of it that we can use to make our needle whip and all we do is we set it on our hammerstone and split it you can see how that breaks out just like that so we'll split this down fairly haphazardly here until we get a piece like that shard right there that we're going to use to make a needle out of okay I'll set these other shards aside because we can use them for something down the road just off of our animal now we need to decide how big we want our needle this is pretty thick we probably don't need it that big so I'm just going to take it over here and put it on an angle snap it off just like that then I'll start to sand this thing down to the shape that I want and for that I would love to soak this thing for about three hours to do that because you can see when you do this well that bones are shattered so we had a broken spot inside that bone that's okay so we can still use that for a neat amount a big deal but you can see when you abrade this on sandstone it takes a good long time to get an abraded edge now if you do this when the bone is wet the bone will work a lot better for you when it's wet then it will when it's dry like this that's why I say you should always soak that bone for awhile now these tools are not going to be anything fancy and if I think this abrasion stone is not going to be good enough and it's acting like it's not hard enough at this point but it may be okay I'll go get something else that's the beauty of working with stone it's everywhere it's free so you can always find the piece that you want to use that was not quite as hard as I want it to be for abrading purposes so I'm going to go try to find a better abrading stone and I'll get back with you alright so I've got another piece of stone here and it's going to work a whole lot better and what you're going to do is you're going to grind this down to get it the shape you want it round it up a little bit and get it pointed and then we'll take this edge we'll get it flattened out I'll round it off so that we can drill a hole in it and that's the way that process works now I've got another piece of bone here that I picked up the same time that's already a shard and it's a lot smaller now it's a little bit flexible but that's okay because I'm going to make a needle out of it anyway so it's the same process I go through and I sharpen the end of it up so I've got a good sharp point now if I was going to use this for something other than cloth if I was going to try to put this through leather I would want it all first and we'll talk about making it all and I'll show you some needles that I've made in the past as well that are boned like this that have been working when they were wet and they come out a whole lot better when they're wet but this one right here the small shard right here isn't too bad other than the fact that it's a little bit flexible but it may still be a little bit damp from being on the ground - now maybe part of the reason it's so flexible so I've got it tore it's pretty sharp on the point now I got to drill a hole in this still okay so let's lay this piece down beside our other shard so you can see what we got to work with here and we're gonna have to haft

our drill point to finish this process up and making a needle okay now you can see that this stuff is very pliable when it's wet so we're going to take our split stick here and put our drill point back in it where we want it and position it in the right spot so that when we close it down its centered for the most part and you may have to turn in a different direction to get it to do that depending on your stone because your piece of stone is not going to be perfect by any means now drill points like this usually we're fairly long and you can adjust it depending on how deep or wide you want your hole or if you have to resharpen but for now I think what I've got right there is going to work and I'm gonna just tighten it down around there a couple times come back down here just like I would wrap an arrowhead very much the same methodology but when I get back around to the back side here I'm really going to wrap wrap down tight on that because I don't want that thing moving inside this shaft and once it dries like I said this is going to shrink okay when it shrinks around the shaft it will really constrict that point in there and I got to keep an eye on that and make sure that when I hold it up the drill with it it's gonna be straight it looks like at this point it is

so now I'm just going to make a little tag here and wrap over it a couple of times and that's what I'm going to use to tighten this thing down and hold it in place you've seen this method it's the same method it's used for wrapping anything basically it'll pull the end of that up inside there so it disappears but when it shrinks and dries it'll really tighten it down my cutting device here and cut this off my cutting tool down the side pull it up through there get my teeth on this thing pull it up there nice and tight and I can trim off my tags if I wanted to but right now I'll just leave them on there and tuck them up inside this shaft a little bit will be a big deal for demonstration purposes so work don't have to be real pretty right now at this point this has to be functional I'm just gonna wrap my tag in back the slit a couple of times to get rid of it so it's not sticking out there and flopping okay so there's our drill now we need to do is we need to drill a hole in our needle so to do that we want to put this on our anvil on a fairly flat surface now remember that once you drill through this you're going to be drilling rock on rock okay so you have to be careful of what you're doing because you actually want to drill this from both sides so you get it centered where you want it and you start to work your drill and you just kind of keep working it back and forth until you're getting the hole that you want and you have to be careful at first because right now you're just trying to create a hole and you've got to be careful that your drill doesn't slide off of there and break on the rock so you can just turn it gently by hand a few times just like this pushing down on it until you get your hole started and then you can drill it just like that and you can see a dent we're starting to get where our drill is and I didn't take me very long to get it to do that I mean a few seconds is all that tough and I'm going to drill about halfway through this side

just like that and I'm going to go to the other side and do the same thing again

and if you if you're drill if your bone is wet okay your drill will go through it a lot easier and it won't dull your drill as fast right now my drill is dulling very quickly on this bone because this bone is dry that's why I say most of the time when you work with bone you want to if possible at all work with it wet so I'm going to start my hole by using the pressure down on the drill

and I want to try something keep my eye on it because once I get through both sides I don't want it I don't want this drill hitting rock you have to take care of your stone tools just like you too your metal tools okay you see how I move like that that means I'm going through and now I'll just take the drill in my hand and work it through and just feel it from both sides until I get what I want okay I can feel the drill touching my fingers now at this point I would probably sharpen this drill or use another small handheld drill point which I don't have with me to clean this hole out but I'll go ahead and now you can see what we've got we have a hole alright so now we have a usable needle now we can put cordage through and we can use this needle for a lot of things now I'll show you a couple blanks over here that I have and a couple needles that I've made other than this one I've got a piece of bamboo tubing right here that I keep my bone needles in and there's two bone needles in here there's one short one there's one long one they don't look much different than that one and there's holes in both of them and those are the needles that I carry with me in my primitive kit and now I will add this needle to that because it's ready to be used as well I'll put them in my bamboo container and all I've done was cut a piece of bamboo off and left a note on the bottom there so it's hollow I've got another piece of bamboo off right the node to make a cork and it just sets down inside there just like that all right now we don't want to lose this drill obviously so we're going to save this in our primitive kit now that we made it now I've got a couple other blanks here I've made out of bone this one is just made out of a piece of deer bone as well and it's a bigger it's almost teardrop-shaped needle in this type of needle and it doesn't have a hole drilled in it yet either we could drill a hole in it but I don't want to take video time up doing that but this type of needle would be used for making like grass mats or oil baskets and things of that nature where you can use a bigger needle to slide through layers of things and you're not trying to pierce holes you're trying to slide through layers that's what this type of needle would be for and then you could use a bigger one like that and these can also be used I've got a couple other ones and here's another one right here that could be used for the same thing but this one's been left square on the back so that it can be made into an arrowhead if I choose to do that because I can do either one with these and that's part of conserving your resources not making this stuff or finalizing this stuff this would be like a blank and these would be carried in a paleo kit as a blank there would be a couple finished objects carried as well but many blanks would be carried like this so that they could be used for different things so I can use these for arrowheads or I can use these for needles or you know gig points and things of that nature for fishing but depending on how I finish these is going to depend on what they're used for

so that's part of conserving your resources even with your primitive kit you