Stone Age (neolithicum and before) techniques

I put this here in 'plant fibers' forum, because that is the part I find the most interesting. But part of this is about 'leather' too. And 'basketmaking' can also be in here. And probably even more, not al really about textiles or fiber arts.

A little over two years ago I started re-enacting Stone Age, for educational purpose: to show visitors of the Hunebedcentrum (centre about megalithic stone monuments in the East of the Netherlands) what crafts people living there in the Stone Age did with plant fibers. To do such demonstrations I had to dress like one of those people.
During the time I do this I made more and more 'Stone Age clothes'. The difficulty is: there are very few archaeologic finds that show techniques or materials used for clothing, accessories and other textiles. Most of those materials are long gone. Stones and ceramics remain, but fibers, leather and also most bone and wood disappear (disintegrate).
Still we want to dress 'as authentic as possible'.

In this thread I want to write about my 'search for clues on which to base my Stone Age clothing, accessories, materials and tools'.

First a photo of my 'tool kit'


The flint scrapers taken out of their pouch:


In both of these photos there's also the start of a plant-fiber project in looping technique. Probably the oldest fiber art technique (related to 'nalbinding').

Last photo this time: me in a leather dress over linen tunic and trousers (probably not authentic, but okay):

The small bags I wear at my waist band are made in the same way as the project started in the other photos. In the background there's a sort-of table with my tools, materials, etc. on it. This photo was made at the start of a very busy day, lots of visitors in the open-air museum because of the beautiful autumn weather!

Please give your reactions on the topic of this thread. Maybe you do this re-enactment too. Or you want to try such an old handicraft. Or you have questions ...

btw I hope to be able to soon post more. I just bought a new laptop that I'm going to install after writing this (with my old laptop).

Very nice! This is also an area of interest of mine, though I've done more hide tanning then textile work, so far. Still haven't made much clothing from scratch though. I enjoy watching Sally Pointer on youtube for a lot of (pre)historic textile experiments, she also works in that experimental archeology/re-enactment field.

Chris Clinton wrote:Very nice! This is also an area of interest of mine, though I've done more hide tanning then textile work, so far. Still haven't made much clothing from scratch though. I enjoy watching Sally Pointer on youtube for a lot of (pre)historic textile experiments, she also works in that experimental archeology/re-enactment field.

Hi Chris. Leather tanning is still something I'd like to learn and practice. Now and then there are courses (or one-day workshops) at the Hunebedcentrum.
Yes, Sally Pointer is my favourite. In fact it were her youtube videos that helped me start doing all this. I knew the textile techniques, but using them in a 'Stone Age fashion' was new to me.

Hi Inge, I find all sorts of historical techniques of interest. Working out was was done pre recorded history is especially fascinating, like being a detective!
If you do try skin and leather techniques I'd be interested if you are able to share successes (and failures!), I have a little stash of bunny fur in the freezer that could do with making way for food. The dogs and I found a dead baby bunny this morning too, so that is another little contribution to a hat pair of slippers or some mittens!

Nancy Reading wrote:Hi Inge, I find all sorts of historical techniques of interest. Working out was was done pre recorded history is especially fascinating, like being a detective!
If you do try skin and leather techniques I'd be interested if you are able to share successes (and failures!), I have a little stash of bunny fur in the freezer that could do with making way for food. The dogs and I found a dead baby bunny this morning too, so that is another little contribution to a hat pair of slippers or some mittens!

Hi Nancy. Yes searching for the needed information is indeed like being a detective!

That's great, that you have bunny fur you found yourself! For many years I have hardly seen any bunny in my region. It seems there was a disease that made them almost extinct. I once saw a dead hare along the cycle path, but I could not take it with me in my panniers because I was going to do my weekly shopping at the organic farm. I think having a dead animal there together with the vegetables is not a good idea ...  Now I think: maybe I should have returned there afterwards ...

Some bunnies were provided courtesy of a friend with a gun (and a bunny excess) and some thanks to the dogs who accidentally killed a couple ( a bunny and a hare) in the tree field. We're not sure how the little bunny came to be there - it was still quite warm. I suspect a bird dropped it, or we interrupted a cat perhaps.

So interesting to see you doing such an old period of recreation!
I have a Paleolithic hide scraper but it is not in the same style as the ones you have pictured.
I will try to figure out where it is stored and post some pics.
It fits so well in the hand but I never thought to actually try using it.

Hello Inge -  Love trying out techniques from the past - there is a PDF available  "Textile materials from the Stone Age,  Reconstructions" by Anne Reichert
which you may find useful.  

Dian Green wrote:So interesting to see you doing such an old period of recreation!
I have a Paleolithic hide scraper but it is not in the same style as the ones you have pictured.
I will try to figure out where it is stored and post some pics.
It fits so well in the hand but I never thought to actually try using it.

Hi Dian. My scrapers are not in a real style. They are only pieces of flint with a sharp side, fallen off when someone here made a replica of a flint tool. Some of the other 'volunteer prehistoric people' do that. And some do hide tanning, scraping, etc. I am one of the people demonstrating 'textile crafts', in my case with plant fibers, most use wool (they re-enact the Bronze Age, not the Stone Age).

Jill Dyer wrote:Hello Inge -  Love trying out techniques from the past - there is a PDF available  "Textile materials from the Stone Age,  Reconstructions" by Anne Reichert
which you may find useful.  

Yes, that's a very nice one. It was the first I found when I started searching for information online. The pictures of her replicas (reconstructions) are great!
I now try to find 'deeper' information on archeological finds that give proof of the materials, techniques and patterns (probably) used. It's a pity Anne Reichert only gives a long bibliography at the end, with books that are hard to find for someone like me (not studying archeology).

It is good to have people researching and preserving these techniques. Our long distant ancestors were much more skilled than "cave man" suggests, and every bit of progress from the neolithic onward was passed from adult to child, from one clan to another, and there are even people who suggest that they were much smarter than modern humans are!

Hi, Inge! What a fascinating subject! Thank you so much for sharing it with us! I've been interested in this Era, ever since The Earth's Children (aka the Clan of the Cave Bear series) books came out, and have done a (very) little digging into the herbalism and weapons of the time. Raising my family and working always seemed to short-circuit my interest, though, so I've never really pursued it indepth. But, you've piqued my curiosity, again, and I'm looking forward to your posts about it.

Hi Jay and Carla. Yes, those ancestors from long ago were clever people! Many things we know now are invented by them. Most of the 'everyday' things were even invented by earlier cultures than the Neolithic. Before Neolithic (New or Late Stone Age) there were Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) and Paleolithci (Old or Early Stone Age). Things like string, clothing, fire-making, use of needle-and-thread, use of wild plants for all kinds of purposes, etc., all exist since the very first humans! Some people say 'humanoids', but to me a human is a human and nothing else.

And many things and techniques we have totally forgotten / lost they knew! I think also that knowledge is useful for us. But ... how do we get it back? Mostly by experimenting, because there's nothing left of it. That's why I think Permies is a good place for this subject.

My scraper. It is always interesting to me how well it fits in the hand.
Unfortunately, I don't know where it came from as it was a gift from my boss at the time and he wasn't the most coherent about details. ( he was a bit of a character) Possibly out of the southwest USA, but he also had stuff from other parts of the world.

Dian Green wrote:My scraper. It is always interesting to me how well it fits in the hand.
Unfortunately, I don't know where it came from as it was a gift from my boss at the time and he wasn't the most coherent about details. ( he was a bit of a character) Possibly out of the southwest USA, but he also had stuff from other parts of the world.

Thank you for showing it.
This looks to me like a good scraper for tanning leather (buckskin). But I don't really know, because I did not yet do tanning. I saw others do it, but never gave it a good look. It was always on occasions when I had to demonstrate my own crafts ...

Interesting short video about the Mesolithic:


The different flint scrapers are shown in it, as well as some different aspects of daily life of hunter-gatherers.

I would hazard there isn't any "authentic" style, but rather a whole lot of them, as varied as the hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers we know about historically, but probably considerably more advanced than those whose lifestyles survived to the present (because those that outgrew the stone age were sophisticated enough to presage the age of metalworking, and here we are today).

Our stone-age ancestors weren't dumb, and certainly were creative in the same ways modern humans are. And as you say very little preserves that wasn't stone, but it stands to reason anything available that could be worked by hand got used. Neanderthal camps have revealed that they had birch-sap glue and little portable oil lamps, and lately there was discovered the remains of a shaped-log cabin that had been preserved because it had partially burned. (I have long contended that we have so little of their tech because they used a great deal of wood.)

I expect stone-age lives were full of objects made from wood, fiber, leather, and other animal products that didn't preserve, and that pretty much anything you can make (or decorate) without a gas-fired forge is fair game. Otzi was stone age, but he was not a primitive.

And there's evidently a lot of interest beyond our little corner of the internet. "Primitive Technology" on Youtube has over 10 million subscribers. He makes all sorts of stuff starting with just himself and whatever he can find in the wild. (My favorite was the brick tiny-house with a tile roof, fireplace, and a sort of hypocaust, but he's also made little iron knives from rust bacteria found in streambeds. Gonna be some puzzled future-archeologists.)

I quite like your stone-age garments and toolkit. Looks functional, comfortable, and useful, what more do you want?

Rez Zircon wrote:I would hazard there isn't any "authentic" style, but rather a whole lot of them, ...I quite like your stone-age garments and toolkit. Looks functional, comfortable, and useful, what more do you want?

What more I want? I want to know all there is to know about what people during the 'stone age' made from 'perishable' materials, like wood, bone, plant and animal fibers. And about the different techniques they (could have) used. .

Yes, I'm aware only very little is found, so most of it we can't get to know from that. But there's 'experimental archaeology' too, ways to find out how they could possibly have done something, by trying out materials and techniques (and by using imagination).

LOL, yes, I understand that desire. More than discovering how they did stuff, you'll also uncover some of how they developed those methods. Reinventing stone-age tech from the ground up! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Really interesting Inge! Was buckskin- that is brain tan- used in the Netherlands? I used to do it many years ago. It's a great deal of work but the result is wonderful. I'm also a flintknapper and bow hunted for almost thirty years using only stone arrowheads. Percussion knapping- striking off material- is pretty straightforward. It's the fine pressure flaking that really takes mastery. Like most things, it's technique and finesse more than brute force  

Jay Wright wrote:Really interesting Inge! Was buckskin- that is brain tan- used in the Netherlands? I used to do it many years ago. It's a great deal of work but the result is wonderful. ...  

Hi Jay. I don't know. The information I can find on tanning leather in prehistory in the Netherlands only tells about methods using plant materials. I know about 'eek' (Dutch word, pronounce 'ake'), a product made of oak bark that was often used in Medieval and later times (windmills were involved in making it).
But all re-enactors I know talk about buckskin as the best leather to use. I'm told that if they can get a whole animal (road kill roe-deer?) they (would like to) do brain tanning.

Thank you Inge. Have you ever held real buckskin? It feels like thick, soft fabric. It smells wonderful, fresh tanned and also smoked. Oak bark tanned leather is still available from most countries- it is mostly the thick, undyed leather used for carving and emobossing and for things like saddles and heavy harness. It's a slow process which makes it expensive.
I was looking at your stone tools. I once mentioned to an archeologist that I had a piece of flint which was knapped in a cave in France sixty thousand years ago. He replied that he had a peice of flint which had been knapped in Africa one million years ago- by a different species!  

Jay Wright wrote:Thank you Inge. Have you ever held real buckskin? It feels like thick, soft fabric. It smells wonderful, fresh tanned and also smoked. Oak bark tanned leather is still available from most countries- it is mostly the thick, undyed leather used for carving and emobossing and for things like saddles and heavy harness. It's a slow process which makes it expensive.
...

Yes, I know buckskin. I understand why it is the best material for leather clothing. So I think it must have been in use here too. Back in those days there were plenty of deer-like animals around.

Inge I have tried to post a picture of an old friend of mine wearing an elk skin cloak which she braintanned and decorated with bead work and porcupine quill. It is beautiful but I can't get it to post. A lot to learn about this forum. https://forums.bowsite.com/tf/pics/00small10205653.JPG    This might work but I'm not optimistic. I used to do Peyote beadwork on braintan, with instruction from my good friend Patsy from Bastrop Texas. Patsy does colonial reenactments and is also a member of a womens only primitive skills group. If I was lost in the wilds of America, Patsy is the one I'd want with me

Jay Wright wrote:Inge I have tried to post a picture of an old friend of mine wearing an elk skin cloak which she braintanned and decorated with bead work and porcupine quill. It is beautiful but I can't get it to post. ...

Here's a tutorial on hpw to post pictures on Permies:
Post Images on Permies

Jay Wright wrote:... https://forums.bowsite.com/tf/pics/00small10205653.JPG    ...

She looks beautiful!

Jay Wright wrote:... brain tan...  

I found this video on brain tanning fur (re-enactment from Finland)