Schöningen Spear Replication Project
Please be advised that this is only a quick report to share what I learned in my first foray into stone technology. Later, I will repost a much better and more detailed report, along with testing results. But for now, enjoy.
This is my first attempt at an all stone tool project. Someone posted a link to an article about four 400,000 year old hunting spears found in Germany in 1995.
http://www.schoeningerspeere.de/ is a link to the official website. You can actually scroll along to see one of the four spears in its entirety. What I am hoping to find later is exact dimensions of the spear, particularly the diameter of the distal and proximal ends. (note, using Google, you can hit translate from the site’s German to English, not perfect, but enough to understand the site if your German is as rudimentary as mine is).
However, I had enough data to see if I could replicate one of the spears. I decided to make it about 7’ long. The archeologists feel that three of the four spears found at the site were throwing spears and not just thrusting spears.
The people who made these spears were Homo heidelbergensis, from the Middle Pleistocene period.
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoheidelbergensis.htm. These guys were the ancestors of both Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens (both us).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis.
Probably the tools I was using would have been scoffed at by a Neanderthal hunter as pretty elementary, but I like to think he would have smiled and said perhaps one day, I will evolve to his skill level
. Still being new to even the idea of using stone tools, all I had at my disposal were three large Novaculite chips, which turned out to be enough for this project, and even more than enough. Two had nice almost serrated edges, which came in handy not only for sawing grooves in the saplings, but in shaving off the bark, almost like a draw knife, and just as efficient for that purpose as my new fangled steel ones.
So, here is the sequence of events.
At 7 AM, arrived on site at my club in Deerfield, Massachusetts. I decided to wear a long skin shirt as part of this overall experience. It was still a bit chilly, and I could see my breath as I tramped through the woods in search of my prey (spear saplings).
It didn’t take long to find two sugar maple saplings I felt were the right diameter and length. I used my largest Novaculite chip to cut it down. Wearing a leather glove to protect my hand, a combination of downward and inward chopping combined with vigorous twisting had the sampling down in about 5 minutes, without raising much sweat. The skin shirt seemed to breathe easily, and kept me comfortable. After that, I debarked the sapling very easily, a task that took about 24 minutes. While I was at it, I shaved off a number of tiny pin knots.
I then repeated these tasks for a second spear.
I then tromped out of the woods and started on the other tasks. I sawed a groove around the entire diameter of the proximal (butt) end, then some twisting and it came off cleanly. This took about 3 minutes. There was a pile of stone nearby, and I abraded the end until I was satisfied with it. I also abraded a couple of larger knots, which would have been really challenging with the Novaculite chips.
The pointy end was not that difficult to do, and took about 30 minutes to complete. I sawed a groove back where I wanted the tip to begin, and then used a piece of the Novaculite almost as a drawknife, with the butt end of the spear resting on the ground. I shaved toward me and inward. It went pretty well, and I then discovered that peeling some wood from the tip down or visa versa and then applied abrasion made the job go faster. Note: the tip of the spear illustrated in the first website I posted a link to was much longer in taper, and as I refine the tips of my spears, I will strive to come closer to the original.
I repeated the above steps for the second spear.
Entire time spent in finding, harvesting, and working on the spears was about 3 hours.
And that is it for now. After I let the spears season, I plan to define and improve the pointy ends, then fire harden the tip, as well as use fire to straighten the entire spears as necessary. Some bear grease is waiting in my refrigerator to use as a finish. Then the really fun part of testing will begin. At that point, I’ll repost a better report. Even now, in their incomplete form, they really feel like serious hunting weapons, and feel good in the hand.
Of the biggest single value to me was actually getting my feet wet with stone tools. As crude as they were, they were really much more efficient than I had expected, and a lot of fun, as well. I almost felt I spanned the gulf of time between those ancient hunters who lived in what is now Germany, just a tiny bit. And this is most importantly basic training for when I start replicating Stone Aged bows, atlatls and other material artifacts using only paleo tools and techniques.
The first set of shots is harvesting the saplings, and then the rest will be shots of working the saplings into spears.
Thanks for reading,
Dane
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