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Knapping Injuries - Ep 160
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On this episode, the boys talk about a recent publication in American Antiquity: The Injury Costs of Knapping by Gala et al.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/160
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Transcript
Introduction to Life Ruins Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Episode 160 of the Life Ruins Podcast, where we investigate the careers and research of those living life ruins.
Introduction to Hosts and Topic: Flint Knapping Costs
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-host, Connor Jahnen and David Howe. This week, the three of us are back together, and we are going to discuss a paper that recently just came out of
00:00:26
Speaker
American antiquity. And the title of that paper, I'm sure those in the archeology realm have seen this, is the injury costs of napping by gala at all. And napping spelled
Personal Experiences and Relevance of Flint Knapping Paper
00:00:40
Speaker
K-N-A-P-P-I-N-G, not napping as in what I was just doing before this podcast, taking a little snooze,
00:00:45
Speaker
This caught our attention because David has recently just came back from a nap-in, and the three of us have spent a fair amount of time around flint nappers during our time at the University of Wyoming. We're always napper-adjacent in some way, shape, or form.
00:01:07
Speaker
I like that. There's three primary skills of archaeology, stones, bones and pots. And when you're in departments that specifically research populations and culture prior to the development of ceramics.
00:01:23
Speaker
get a lot of stones and bones, and usually those two are pretty fucking related, especially when you're at the University of Wyoming, where you're just looking at giant furry elephants and bison that have been cut the fuck up by stone tools in one way, shape, or form.
Group Chat Insights: Diving Deeper into the Paper's Content
00:01:35
Speaker
So here we are with these papers. So Connor, are you the one that shared this article in the group chat first?
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I encountered it through some folks at work. These things get passed around through different medium people, whatever. I mean, it's always the gossip goes around. And this was given to me by Charles Koenig. And, you know, it just struck our interest because it's an interesting principle, an idea that's something that we kind of
00:02:03
Speaker
something that hasn't been talked about a crap ton in the literature. I mean, I think we all talked about it anecdotally, like different informal locations. But yeah, so it caught my attention. I send it off to you guys. And as I kind of dive deeper into it, I think we all had some questions.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah.
Critique of Paper's Authorship and Methodology
00:02:23
Speaker
Should I go ahead and read the intro? I think I'll try to take a stab at it. Yeah. And mind you, when we looked at this, the first name that popped out of this article was a good old Met and Aaron. We've talked about on this podcast a couple of times now, this was the same person that had an article
00:02:40
Speaker
what came out stating that like Clovis points couldn't kill mammoths and me and Conger tore this shit to shreds. And so when we started looking at the author list, you know, Gala at all, a lot of them are Aaron's men, Aaron's like grad students, part of these previous studies. So like I looked at this and
00:03:00
Speaker
It's like I have fucking questions because Aaron's tenure approach, quantity over quality of articles, like just fucking shotgun spread a bunch of science out there and get noticed. And yeah, I don't know.
00:03:16
Speaker
I mean, he's making a splash in archaeology because of
Abstract Reading: Survey on Flint Knapping Risks
00:03:20
Speaker
it. I mean, he's taking topics that we might not have defined or talked about in the literature and talking about them might not be in the most theoretical and deepest kind of way, but he's bringing them up, which is a good firing solution if you're going to try to be in academia, is to hit topics that are unpublished upon and do basic research on all bunch of this stuff.
00:03:43
Speaker
absolutely are finding journals that are not archeology related. Like he published something on how like bison hooves can be turned into glue and submitted that to like the journal of glue and it revolutionized their journal. Cause like that's just shit we know as archeologists, but he's been really good at like finding non archeology journals, putting in archeology content that most archeologists kind of know about, but like getting it out and hitting those pubs up. But respect, honestly, honestly. Yeah. Great. David, what's the abstract?
00:04:11
Speaker
Alright, so the abstract. For at least three million years, napping stone has been practiced by hominid societies large and small, past and present. Thus, understanding napping, nappers, and napping cultures is fundamental to anthropological research around the world. Although there is a general sense that stone napping is inherently dangerous and can lead to injury,
00:04:31
Speaker
Little is formally, specifically, or systematically known about the frequency, location, or severity of napping injuries. Toward this end, we conducted a 31-question survey of 31, 31-question survey, mind you, of modern nappers to better understand napping risks. Responses from 173 survey participants suggest that napping injuries are real and present hazard, clear and present danger. Even though a majority of modern nappers use personal- The word is persistent, not present.
Criticism of Survey and Comparisons
00:05:01
Speaker
A variety of injuries, lacerations, punctures, aches, etc., can occur on nearly any part of the body. The severity of injuries sustained by some of our participants is shocking, and nearly one quarter of the respondents reported having sought or received professional medical attention for a flint-napping related injury.
00:05:20
Speaker
or foot napping adjacent. Overall, the results of this survey suggest that there would have been likely serious, even fatal, cost to nappers in the past. Such cost may have encouraged the development of any social learning capacities possessed by hominins or delayed the learning or exposure of young infants or children to napping. You know what would make the science about all their claims better?
00:05:41
Speaker
Science? Fucking biological and bio-archaeological examination of hominin and hunting and gathering society's fucking digits for lacerations. None of that is present. This whole article is like we sent out a survey and we're just going to look at the responses. Mind you, as we've talked about in this podcast so many goddamn times,
00:06:01
Speaker
like modern people that flint nap as a hobby are not the same as people who had to do it as part of living. So really making these comparisons is not adequate. Yeah. And I, so I think, I think taking the bio-anth approach really doing the skeletal analysis, but also you could consult the ethnic graphic record to see
00:06:23
Speaker
how folks were using stone in the past and even creating tools. I mean, that's, that's a simpler step back and not as far, but you could talk about these things in a way that is better analogy than just modern humans.
Suggestions for Scientific Improvements
00:06:36
Speaker
And there's none of that even mentioned in here. There's no archeology in this paper until the very end of it. It's all just modern day analysis of Flintnapping. Yeah. It's just a Buzzfeed article.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's just a fucking Buzzfeed article. I'm sorry. I'm getting wound up by this article the more that I like. No, I mean, I think it's great. It's a cool, it's a cool thing to read. It's just like so bizarrely like simple yet so unnecessarily processual at the same time. Like I don't, I don't know how to explain it.
00:07:07
Speaker
I like the concept because we all have stories about like a friend or the time that we fucked up while flint knapping and they took that concept but they didn't pass the baton like they pulled up all this data and there was like a part two of like we need to look at comparisons and they're just like no I mean for example there's a couple tables in here
00:07:23
Speaker
And this is where I got my first time I got pissed. Like, what is your favorite prehistoric culture replicate? Fucking canceled. And just like a list of shit. Who cares? At the end of this, like, this is a meaningless table. We don't need this. Table two. What artifact type do you prefer to produce the most? Also fucking meaningless. But I would have liked to have seen like a follow up article out of, you know, like which artifact type are you most able to
Debating Authors' Conclusions and Impact on Archaeology
00:07:47
Speaker
produce? That would have been like to at least illustrate the competency of the flint knappers that they have. Don't have that.
00:07:53
Speaker
Or better question, which ones have you broken something on, or which ones have you cut yourself on? Yeah, it's like very specific to what my favorite is. My favorite thing to produce is an arrowhead. Have ever fucking done it? No. Speaking of, it says, what is your favorite prehistoric culture to replicate? Fishtail, flakes, fulsome, general arrowheads, general bifaces, general blades, late prehistoric period. Like these things are, I mean, I guess it is hard to quantify, like,
00:08:19
Speaker
or qualify all of that. What the fuck does Plains Indian mean? There's Paleo Indian there and Folsom. There's 28 different types of things. Yeah, that's crazy. Summer is it. Put it into North American cultures. Put it into time periods. Do something that's besides the shotgun blast of 28 different things that doesn't mean anything to me. Asian Mesolithic. It's Danish Neolithic. This is so bad. Whoever came up with this table,
00:08:49
Speaker
Another thing too though that like I don't see added in here is like I just saw testicles and what are the tables that it doesn't say what stage reduction or what stage like they were at so like a giant giant spall
00:09:08
Speaker
Like it's pretty easy not to cut yourself because you're cut like taking big giant flakes off. But like the most times I've cut myself is doing very precise direct percussion on a small piece specifically usually obsidian or even pressure flaking. I've like busted the palm of my hand open. And that's not something at least that I saw on here mentioned, but more so it just quantifies the where the pain is and like tolls and I've hit the troll toll.
00:09:37
Speaker
feet,
Data Tables Handling and Perceived Shortcomings
00:09:38
Speaker
eyes, hands, nails, carpal tunnel, rear end, testicles, rear end. So I think the front part of this article, specifically these tables that we're talking about, doesn't really add a bunch or do anything for me. Table three, what is your preferred stone raw tool like stone raw material to work?
00:09:55
Speaker
Flint, but then they list like eight other different kinds of Flint's. I guess it's just like, generally, I don't remember, but it was like, what? And then first of all, who the cult? This is fucking America. You're publishing an American antiquity. It's called fucking shirt. You're like, you're public. You should know better. But I mean, these are the same people that were fucking launching modern day arrowheads from a 30 pound bow and said, you know what? Can't kill a mammoth. So whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:10:24
Speaker
What the fuck is Republican night? It's a good question. Send us an email if you know what that is or if it's real.
00:10:33
Speaker
Oh, it actually says we do not know exactly what is meant by Republican night. Our best guess is Republican River Jasper, Nebraska. It is also known as Smoky Hill. No, all those are wrong. That is definitely not Woke a Light. It's called Smoky Hill Jasper. Yeah. But I do think this this first part, these first like three tables highlights their like shotgun approach. So like 31 questions about flint knapping seems like an excessive amount. Like I think David highlighted as part of that is just it
00:11:02
Speaker
you're gathering too much data at that point.
00:11:06
Speaker
I guess, though, too, when you're interviewing a bunch of people that don't necessarily practice science, like they're going to give you long winded paragraphs of information. So like, how else would you kind of quantify all this stuff and put it into a table? Because it's like, I don't know, like, I mean, I think you could give them survey options and then other as well. I think that that would have been. Yeah, I think there's there's good questions you can ask. It just seems like this is very
00:11:35
Speaker
qualitative answers then are put into quantitative analysis, which is something that I think is hard for us to grasp. I want to know the competency of the people that submitted surveys. That's going to give me a lot more information on how to interpret the data. They did mention that. What table is that?
00:11:59
Speaker
Let's see. The first participant information are napping habits. So they self-identify their napping skill ranging from novice to master, 26 of our respondents identified as novice, 29% intermediate, 52 or 30% as experienced. But what the fuck does that mean? 20% as expert and 4.62 as master.
00:12:26
Speaker
Well, that's the thing. It's all the spectrum and it's all relative. I would personally call somebody a flint knapper if they can reduce a by face down to a usable blank, I guess, but then a great flint knapper, I'd say can make clothing. I don't know. There's no, there's like consistency of it too. Being able to do it every time I think is something. Yeah.
00:12:48
Speaker
I mean, like 50% of respondents, nothing was done for educational research purposes. 36 is a hobby and 10% listed for other reasons. Yeah, I don't like that. I mean, that's the problem with like data collection. Like if your survey, like I've seen bad surveys and if you're just giving like a relative scale, which I don't know how Nicholas at all or Galette all did this. It's like, did they have definitions for those skill levels? Because if not, that's problematic.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. In my opinion, it's like I want to consider myself
Critique of Data Presentation and Analysis
00:13:19
Speaker
a novice. Like I know how to reduce a flake. Do I know how to make a stone tool? Like I could maybe make a scraper, but I have problems. I can't thin flakes yet. Yeah. And when do you, when do you like go from a novice to an intermediate? Is that because, is that the thinning flakes or, you know, how, how do you define that in a way that's replicable? Cause some of these, you go to the table five, the variety of injuries reported by respondents, like some of these I'm like,
00:13:45
Speaker
How the fuck did you do this? Like smack leg. Got it. I do that every time. Like I'm bashing. I always have bruises in my thighs. Cut wrists. Deep cut. Deep cut to fingers. Deep cuts to hit. Like what is deep cut? Nearly broken rib. How the fuck do you. Where's the genital part? Because someone talked about like what the smack. Like that's someone not.
00:14:10
Speaker
Like, to me, that's a novice. Like, some of these injuries, I could be like, that's a novice. Like, when I taught intro to archeology for CU Boulder, then we had flint knapping day. I can tell people who weren't paying the fuck attention based on their injuries, or at least people that had some sort of athletic ability in the past. Like, I've never bashed my fingers in. Like, I've never missed the rock or, like, hit my knee. Like, there's... And I've never seen an expert do that shit. Like, the worst injury I've ever got was when I was flint knapping obsidian in fucking chakos.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah. That's my worst experience too. Yeah. Got right up in there, took a step right through my foot. Yeah. I've seen people last right the hell out of their fingers before. I haven't. I mean, I'd get cuts. I would say nearly broken rib is either from like a miss swing with a billet or some kind of issue with an indirect stick or a punch. Like you just fell on it or something. I don't know.
00:15:04
Speaker
Yeah, I could see that. Same thing with these tables. Like they start big and they give you all this information and then they just keep narrowing it down. Why don't you just give me like the summarize information? I don't know what good the smash testicle does for me. Got a story about that, but that we should take into the next segment.
00:15:21
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 160. We're still here talking about Galette or all article. It's not that like they have an interesting question like that. Definitely. We are. We absolutely get injuries in the in the present when we're replicating stone tool industries. What?
00:15:39
Speaker
are those injuries like in the past is a fantastic question. There's other ways like in the segment you can probably do bioarchaeological evidence to look for these kinds of injuries in the past in some of these populations. That would give us a really good answer. The data collection, that's where this thing gets wonky where there's a clear, fun question behind this that they're trying to answer, but it doesn't seem like they're answering it. They have all this data and it seems like they don't know what to do with it.
00:16:07
Speaker
I think it was exactly one. Looking at this table right here, table five again, like it says stitches, then stitches and fingers, stitches and hands. If these were written in answers in a survey, I bet someone just said I had to get stitches and didn't specify, but someone then said nine people said I had stitches in my fingers. Like, so maybe that's like, how do you just wrangle all that data? You know,
00:16:34
Speaker
Right. And then cut tendon and fingers. Like I'd like to see if, I mean, maybe this is in the raw data, supplemental data where there's like an explanation. I like to know how they got these injuries. Like minor cuts to rear end. Did you sit on flakes? Like were you not paying attention? Like there's some of these that are like actually industry related injuries. And then there's just like fucking around and finding out injuries where they're not paying attention.
00:17:00
Speaker
especially like I want to see who of the self-reports are injuring themselves. Like is this are we getting most of this data of the injuries? Are these coming from the novices and intermediates? That's what I want to know. And that's from I'm having a hard time saying what's not a table. No, no. I just love the testicles on this very fun graphic of figure one of just a pride colored human.
00:17:29
Speaker
Like the Vitruvian body, like testicles 0.29%. It looks like that jungle frog, you know, that used to be on the cover of the Nat Geo magazine. You know what I'm talking about? No injuries to the vagina. The male dominated survey. So, you know, David, you had a story that he said you, you at least hinted to in the last segment. Yeah. This guy that was teaching me some stuff at Flint Ridge,
00:17:55
Speaker
said like someone asked me if you ever like racked yourself and he said oh yeah he said the worst pain he's ever been in he was sitting in front of like 20 to 30 people and like somebody came and sat down right in front of him and for whatever reason like he was distracted by them and he just racked himself really hard with the moose billet into the nuts
00:18:16
Speaker
And he said that he fell over so hard. He was like wincing in pain in front of like 30 people trying to do this demonstration. And he said like, never again. And I was like, how'd you recover? And he said, it took like days so I could see how testicle happens. I've hit myself on the nuts before son accident by kind of not paying attention, but also like.
00:18:37
Speaker
things like slip, I guess, is how it happens. Like I'm holding onto something and then it slips and it like just forces itself right there. I don't know. Or like sitting on a bucket. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just these tables. Like I like figure one, nap, ranger locations and frequencies. It's like, right. This is predominantly a digit, like you're using your hands to make stone tools. Of course you're going to see more injuries. Once again, I would like to see this figure replicated by
00:19:06
Speaker
skill level skill level. Like that's the whole purpose of this, right? Is like, how are we teaching our children, which they talk about in the discussion. It's like, but you've taken all this data, some of which are not necessarily like, like characterizing what these levels are. Like I want to know, cause of course, right. We know when I was a kid and learn how to ride a bike, you start with training wheels, you take those off and you cry. Like I crashed a couple of times, forgot the hang of it. Haven't crashed my bike. Just generally bike riding sense.
00:19:35
Speaker
right? Like I totally get while you're learning to flint nap, you're going to have injuries. That makes sense. And that's what I would have liked to seen from this is like, let's, how do we divide this data by expertise and also by frequency? Like what do all the grad students look like? What do all the, like,
00:19:55
Speaker
industrial flint knappers, what do their injuries look like or how long ago those were, right? Like taking all these different injuries, throwing them into the same pot and saying like, here's the results. It's like, okay, what if this, like the person that split their thumb open,
00:20:12
Speaker
What if that's one of the industry guys, but that happened 30 years ago? That kind of matters. When did you
Theoretical Implications and Publication Merit
00:20:18
Speaker
get these entries? At what skill proficiency did you get them? That's going to be a much more meaningful argument to talk about human behavior as it relates to stone tool production than what they've presented here. And that's kind of my issue with this article. Conceptually, this is a great article.
00:20:35
Speaker
does it belong in American antiquity? Like one of our top tier journals. I'm on the fence about that. Like this, I'm not sure if it belongs in American antiquity because it comes off as not totally baked. Like this is maybe like an over easy egg. Like some people like it, but some people need a little bit more like consistency in this because I don't know what to do with this data. To me, this very much
00:21:04
Speaker
this isn't answering anything. And that's what I have a problem with because they don't take this data meaningfully and apply it. And they don't look at archeological investigations. It's very much experimental. So maybe this could have gone in like the journal of archeological practice. Maybe, but something I was just thinking of. Nature.
00:21:26
Speaker
It's kind of a framework though, because like no one's done this before in the sense that like if you were to write a paper about like, you know, how many osteopaths or Homo habilis or Homo erecti have lacerations or cuts to their, you know, finger bones or whatever.
00:21:42
Speaker
you can then say like, well, according to modern nappers of these surveyed X percent had injuries to their finger bone. So therefore we could expect to see that much in homo erectus or more. So now there's an official American antiquity thing to reference in sight would be my, I wouldn't even cite this if I did that because like any sort of archeological data I'm going to get at this and be able to tell gender, I'm going to be able to tell age or sorry, I'm going to generally be able to tell biological sex and be able to tell age.
00:22:09
Speaker
and use those as references for how often they're doing this behavior. That's just such a weird table production of, as we've discussed, and I totally understand what you're coming from, but you don't fuck around at American Antiquity. You don't do conceptual low-hanging fruit stuff even without results that are meaningful.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's the issue with it that I, that I find it's like we surveyed, it's basically, we surveyed 163 people. This is what they said. And here's some cool figures in charts.
00:22:43
Speaker
Yeah. I do think this data needs to be out in the world and accessible to people, but I don't. I think the medium of, in terms of American antiquity, like this hard hitting journal that's supposed to talk about the cutting edge of like no pun intended of, of science and what we're learning in archeology, this doesn't fit that mold to me. Like I want this data out there. I want to be able to look at it and maybe quantify it in my own sort of way.
00:23:07
Speaker
But as it is right now, it is not something that I would use. And their theoretical implications, as you mentioned, Carlton, are not substantiated during this. It is an absolute stretch to say what they're learning from this data set is that people in the past had to significantly change their habits around flint knapping because they would die, which is part of their conclusion as part of this.
00:23:32
Speaker
Okay. So I'm looking at something now. I opened up supplemental information. So they have this information of how long you've been napping for. What age did you start napping for? What level do you consider yourself? So there we go. So they have self-reported information. How many times a week do you nap? How long do you nap per session? So like there's data is available that they could have used.
00:23:55
Speaker
I mean, I guess it's there, but yeah, it's there. So it's like we, the three of us could write a more poignant piece about this article based on their data, like everything we've just complained about. I just complained about it. I guess I could go to this.
00:24:12
Speaker
And like, this is what this data means when you'd look at it this, this way.
Practical Insights into Flint Knapping and Teaching Methods
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah. See how often do you currently end yourself? Very rarely. Only once did I require stitches. When I use steel knives, then I cut myself.
00:24:27
Speaker
That's the expert. Yeah, that's, that's, that's interesting. And this person, same person, I definitely cut myself more as I was learning to nap, but at the same time it was not the custom teach people with clubs. So like there's some, and then usually respondents are like, yes, I've hurt myself. No, of course.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yes, but mostly quarrying. So like, there's, there's additional data here that needs to be sussed out that isn't present in these tables and graphs. Something we talked about this summer, I remember it was me and Todd, Sarah Billard, me and Spencer, I don't remember. Who was that, LaPrelle? I remember Jacob actually just sitting around napping. And like, we kind of just all agreed that people, especially based on the flakes you find at Clovis sites and are there cake sites, like they,
00:25:10
Speaker
were very efficient at busting off the proper and like largest flakes possible to get to this like utilize as much as possible and not just have a bunch of debitage on the floor.
00:25:21
Speaker
That being said, people every day, men and women and probably children as well, had to know how to nap because it's a fundamental survival skill for them to make any tool. And it's something you just get really efficient at. Whereas today, modern nappers, we have so much extra stone to mess with that we have the time to like fuck up and we try to make it look artsy. Whereas for them, it's life, you know?
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so this, if they would apply this data to modern nappers in a like, uh, if we go to elementary schools, should we teach flint napping to elementary kids? Maybe that's no, maybe that's where this is applicable.
00:25:58
Speaker
But applying it to the past at this point is like, it's just, they're two different data sets. Like you're saying, like having to survive and do this every single day is different than doing this for pleasure with buddies and drinking beer, you know? That is two different types of people and two different locations. There's just, there's so many variables in that that I don't think they're really, this is not applicable to the archeological record as we understand it.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's my issue with it. It's a cool survey. There's better ways this data could have been handled, more meaningful ways and apply it to the archaeological record, but it's just not there. And the way they talk about there could have been fatal injuries, it's like, yeah. And people in the past did have medicine. These aren't primitive dumbass people that just let things get infected. We've seen this throughout the archaeological record of
00:26:52
Speaker
of group care, basic medicinal practices, knowledge about the local landscape. And also, this isn't the only way people are going to hurt themselves. There are plenty of practices in the past from hunting, gathering, exploring new landscapes that they can get hurt. This is menial compared.
00:27:08
Speaker
Now, if there's an argument in here that they talk about, you know, like, maybe this would have delayed learning for children. It's like, right. It's Connor mentioned. But where's the discussion in that on the modern ethnographic? Like, there's so much data that could come in with a simple search on Google to support, like, well, the Saan Bushman, this is when they teach their children how to flint. Now, that's what this is missing.
00:27:31
Speaker
which is fine, but this is American antiquity. And that's like, this is weird for American antiquity where it's like, there's so much missing from this to make it meaningful. This shouldn't have gone in American antiquity. Maybe they were hurting for articles. Cause I was just looking like they submitted it in November, revised it in February, it got published in March. So maybe we just missed a window where we could have just thrown anything we wanted at American antiquity and got it in. David, we could have got you published real quick.
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah, but here's the thing, like it takes a lot of work and effort to do that. And I have zero of that. So like props to them for getting it published, but also it is a little like odd of a thing to see in American antiquity. Maybe we just haven't seen.
00:28:17
Speaker
others before. Maybe there's an article about what glue dries the fastest on pottery or something. The funniest thing to me though, and this is just an American antiquity thing, but the sheer amount of citations that are in every sentence, which makes it really hard for non-academics to read any journal. But how many of them are modern?
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah. Kind of to the point of that, like all of this, like so many citations to make these statements based on like arbitrary data given by like old men. There's not a single citation for 2022. There's two citations for 2021, like six citations for 2020. And it's mostly Aaron citing himself. So they're not even citing like really current lithic manufacturer fucking literature.
00:29:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm going to be the devil's advocate and say maybe that's, that's the novelty of this paper is that there's, there's nothing that's been talked about it. So I think there is like a beauty to the novelty of it. I think the execution of citing himself, like even all the 2019 citations are mostly Aaron and his buddies. Well, it's, it's gala who wrote the paper. So, I mean, it makes sense to cite somebody cause you don't want to plagiarize stuff that's already been said by that guy. Aaron is his mentor. Aaron's his advisor.
00:29:37
Speaker
And like we've interviewed people on this podcast that have published on stone tool production within the past couple of years. Like there's this did, that's what this is like flagging to me is like, this isn't someone like there, there's recent literature on this, like on handedness. Like we had Lana on who's published and all of her friends that have talked about stone tool production as it comes to handedness. None of that's here. None of the ethno-archaeological work is in here. It's, it's met and Aaron's team just
00:30:02
Speaker
throwing out more stuff, citing themselves. And it's just like, but there's, there's so like, this could have been such a great paper.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah, in principle, I would I would agree. I mean, it's the execution that we find lacking. I think on that note, we'll take a break and we'll come back and maybe talk about something different. Who knows? We'll be right back. Welcome back to Episode 160 of Life and Remotes podcast. We have been discussing a paper by a person and we have beaten that horse dead.
00:30:35
Speaker
and given our opinions. But I wanted to ask an adjacent question to this kind of study, thinking of like modern Flintnappers and kids and getting people introduced to archaeology, etc. Like what do you think is the appropriate age and or is there an appropriate age to start teaching students, kids, like Flintnapping, experimental archaeology, things like that? Because I think they can be meaningful if you catch them at those young ages, but there is like a danger to them.
Public Demonstrations and Safety in Flint Knapping
00:31:04
Speaker
My friend's kid just graduated kindergarten and she like naps with him. She's napped with them for like two years, like just tries. She just smashes it with a billet, but she's in there.
00:31:16
Speaker
I noticed that when I did the flint knapping thing for those classes, the injuries occur when I'm not directly with a student. So like if I'm guiding an individual student, like how to hold a, hey, watch your hands. Like if I, like I imagine if like a parent to their child who's meticulously watching them to do it right, those injuries don't happen. It's like when I moved down the line and someone's not paying attention and they bash, they put their finger in between the core and the hammerstone. That's when the injuries happen, right?
00:31:43
Speaker
So I think there's also kind of like a social, like what's the situation? Like when I had a flint knapper at Helga, like walk me through how to make a Clovis point. I didn't hurt myself once because they're like, Hey, you're holding this wrong. You need to hit it right here. Like you're going to slice your hand if you do it this way. So there is that like knowledge that's being passed down in a transformative way and an educational way.
00:32:04
Speaker
versus you have 30 students and there's a bunch of hammer stones out and you're not paying attention to everyone, that's where the injuries happen. And the injuries that I've always sustained, it's like when I was fucking unsupervised and not thinking, like the Chaco incident, and most of the time I sliced my hand open, it's when I'm with obsidian.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah, like I'll get church stuck every now and then, but generally it's the obsidian that's really lacerating me. And I'm wearing the goggles, I'm wearing the gloves, like generally wearing long pants as you're supposed to do. Granted, is that did glasses and goggles exist in the past? No. So there is that danger. But generally people are wearing long pants and covered shoes.
Flint Knapping Events and Personal Involvement
00:32:41
Speaker
I imagine moccasins or something. We discussed like those Inuit snow masks, like if it was heavy,
00:32:49
Speaker
Debris like with obsidian maybe something like that or another guy and I were talking about Just long hair put your long hair in front of you You have way less likely of getting a thing flown into your eye No, but I mean no way to know but I think they were good like a modern appers who were good Just don't hurt themselves as often
00:33:07
Speaker
Yeah, I was just thinking of this like in the context. So there's this thing every year called the Wyoming Archaeology Fair, where they have a bunch of different stations and they have folks come out, kids, adults, old people, and they teach them archaeological stuff or different skills, flint knapping, ceramics. There's soapstone carving, just a variety of different things. And I was thinking, I mean, so there needs to be this ratio of like advisors, supervisors to
00:33:36
Speaker
like novices, kids going on. So I think that seems like a very important thing. You can't just like have, like you said, like 30 kids smashing rocks together without some sort of supervision. Yeah. Cause I mean, you want, you want kids that age to get inspired to do archeology and have fun doing it. Like I think that's important, but safety is also important.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, David, if you have a colleague who's teaching his kindergarten or how to do it and they're doing it safely, perfect. I mean, for archaeology students, they're learning generally in the archaeology methods course, intro to archaeology, I know there's community colleges that teach it, and sometimes even high schools in the Southwest. It all just depends on the level of the teacher, the willingness of the student to pay attention, and also the class size. I'm good at being able to show, I can show students how to make a flake. Pretty useless beyond that.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's the point, though. You just want to show them how it works and you can offer from there. But are there a bunch of kids with those napkins or is it just kind of mostly
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, like there's people who have their kids with them and then there's obviously like parents that come like to just see it and they bring their kids and a kid sat down with my friend and he sat and taught them for a bit while the dad was watching and asking questions. But I mean, it's really hard to teach everything about foot napping for five minutes with the kids sitting right now, you know, like hit this.
00:34:58
Speaker
I do want to mention something because it's relevant. When I did the bison experiment with Devin and Montana and Donny, we had stone tools that need to be re-sharpened and we relied on Devin and Donny to do that. They were our sharpeners in terms of the group dynamic because they knew how to do it and I don't recall either of them getting injured.
00:35:20
Speaker
They were the designated sharpeners while we were the cutters and the slicers. There was a point where Lana and Autumn, we would take the big hunks of meat off and they would process them by muscle group. We had this assembly line of people actively working within a stone tool environment
00:35:38
Speaker
in an archeological context, an ethnographic context, a processing a killed bison, that's a different kind of context to lithic reproduction than a nap-in or just sitting there flint knapping.
Modern Practices and Specialization in Flint Knapping
00:35:49
Speaker
Does that make sense? I don't know where I'm going with that, but other than we had two professionals that were doing it, no one was getting injured, but we weren't all flint knapping, but we were still using stone tools.
00:35:58
Speaker
I think you're hitting at a division of labor thing and that there's specialties across groups. You have to specialize in something and not everyone's going to be hitting rocks all the time. So I think that is an important thing to talk about because how many novices will be actually hitting rocks together in the past, fundamentally?
00:36:19
Speaker
or how many, like if you're like a family and I got like my three, my three young sons and my two very beefy daughters out there, am I the one making the stone tools while they're cutting? Do you know that's, that's the division of labor that Connor just hit on. Like people are going to use their strengths in those environments. And so
00:36:36
Speaker
Generally, I wasn't even using like Devin and Donny. Donny, his fidget spinner is this like, his churn cutter that he's made that has this beautiful crescent side notch in it. Then he was using that and he'd sharpen that. I was using flakes, but if my flake got fucked up or dulled, it wouldn't get fucked up. Like Devin and Donny would make me another good flake, like specifically prep a flake that was good for slicing.
00:37:00
Speaker
Rather than me just whacking a core until I got something I liked. So even then, just to make a flake that was good, they could do that and I would get in there and do my thing, right? So yeah, the division of labor hitting people's specialties and not everyone's going to be a fantastic stone producer. When you're even in a hunting and gathering environment of like a band of what, like a dozen to two dozen people, you're going to have your flint knappers. You know, in part of that, you also have your hunters. You also have the people that are more skilled for other things in an actual environment where those industries are being performed. There is a division of labor.
00:37:30
Speaker
And I think that's something we had a student here at the University of Wyoming do that kind of analysis using the HRF, human relation files or whatever it is. It's an ethnographic database looking at fire and who use fire, when they use fire, what the method
00:37:46
Speaker
et cetera, and you could do the same thing with stone tool production in the past or tool production in general and really get at these kind of specifics. So is it a male dominated industry? What is the average age of someone doing this? When do they do this? And is it situational? Is it always one person napping, et cetera? I think you can do these kinds of analyses and really have something meaningful to add to our understanding in the past.
00:38:11
Speaker
I think that's something that should be explored and could be done by these colleagues to supplement this.
Cultural Dynamics at Nap-In Events
00:38:20
Speaker
David, you're the one that goes into napkins. I've never been to one. What's the socio-cultural environment of a modern-day napkin like?
00:38:28
Speaker
I just made a full video on that. I'm editing it right now and I will say it's very white. And I look for this because I just wonder, I don't see one female napper, like maybe one or two knows how to do it. I should say one who identifies as a woman.
00:38:44
Speaker
like I've seen them sit down and do it with their husband or their boyfriend that's there, but I've never seen one set up and sell napped stuff. One thing I have noticed though, almost everyone there did not know flint knapping was a thing and they found an arrowhead on their grandfather's property as a kid and were very intrigued by it and wondered how they made it.
00:39:07
Speaker
and then hit it with the rock and broke it and then realized, oh, that's how it works. And then they go and like figure it out from there. And then when Facebook came around, they were all like, oh, this is like a whole thing people do. And that's like when the napins really popped off, which I find fun because like, I mean, I think Connor and I talked about this last episode, but a few back. It's just like people have a fascination with stone tools and like, that's not going to go away, I don't think.
00:39:33
Speaker
on the social networking aspect of that too is kind of cool how that stuff spreads. Have you only done these napkins in like, uh, kind of the East coast South so far, or you do a little bit of Midwest stuff too, right? Oh, they were in Ohio. I've napped with people in Colorado based on like the people I'd know that do YouTube videos and like that Flint nap and stuff. It's all pretty much either survival people or like country guys, I would say. But I mean, I don't, I don't know every Flint napper in the world.
00:40:03
Speaker
I thought David, you asked Carlton an interesting question or group chat. Is there like an indigenous
Indigenous Perspectives and Cultural Appropriation
00:40:08
Speaker
napping group, people, societies, et cetera? Not that I know of. Not that I know of either. I had to think about that. Like I know indigenous people that do Flint nap, but like there's kind of a culture of
00:40:24
Speaker
Even at powwows, I've seen these mountain men show up and shut up stuff. My experience with them has always been not great because they state to say shit like, if it wasn't for us white people, Indians would have forgot this kind of skills. I don't know if that's the same at nap-ins, but I do have heard stories of tribes who bring in nappers. Whatever nappers they brought in and whatever context haven't been the most
00:40:48
Speaker
polite or respectful guests and kind of have, have perpetuated this, like, well, I'm teaching you your law skill type of shit. I'm like, I haven't seen a huge interest. Like I know like my tippo and people, my driver, like interested in it, but they're very wary of trying to find some white dude that's going to teach him because of that same attitude. And like, it's like, well, what, are we going to just find another dickhead? Who knows? You know, at the end of the day, it's also like, there's other shit for Indian people that need to work on.
00:41:15
Speaker
It's like one of those socioeconomic things like who can afford to go and look for rocks and then bring them on and create them when there's other. That's another thing too. Like you have to have private land that has a source on it to get rock or you have to order flat rate boxes by like a hundred dollars each to get rock.
Economic and Spiritual Dimensions of Flint Knapping
00:41:35
Speaker
Unless you just use flakes you find or bottles like glass, you know.
00:41:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's an economic angle to that, and having the time to teach yourself something like this is a significant investment. Yeah. I would love to go to these napkins and just ask nappers what their interaction has been with indigenous populations. Have you reached out to indigenous groups? What do you find fascinating? I think there's a whole other survey that I could just put a bunch of tables together and publish in American Antiquity.
00:42:03
Speaker
and do something real with that math without curating it with so fucking ever. Because that would be interesting to me. Because I actually really don't know when David asked me that question. I don't, I really don't know. But I'm actually kind of fascinated to learn, like go to NAPN and just like, you know, what's your relationship with the digital cultures? Like, how did you find this? Okay, happy, you know, like, what's, what does this look like? Yeah, it's exactly what I was asking in the video. Because a guy, I mean, let's talk about it in the video. But to get into it, last year, a guy came up and said, like,
00:42:31
Speaker
with his kids. He was indigenous and he was like, that's our heritage, like to his kids. And I kind of sat there and was like, I talked to him and I was like, Oh, I have a Pawnee friend. And it's just like, it's basically like saying like, Oh, you're English. I have a Ukrainian friend. It's like the same thing. And I sat there for like a year was like, what did he mean by that? Like, was he sad? Was he remorseful? Was he angry at me?
00:42:55
Speaker
Or is he just proud to teach his kids that? And I didn't know. And I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago about this, and she said, maybe don't be as defensive and wonder. I can't remember how she phrased it. But essentially, that's him processing his trauma and explaining that to another generation of children.
00:43:19
Speaker
whose heritage is now being performed by white people on the land that they used to call home. And I was like, oh, goddamn.
Challenges in Reviving Indigenous Flint Knapping Traditions
00:43:26
Speaker
And she was like, yeah, it's like that. And I was like, oh, fuck. And like, it's just weird. And this year when I went back to the nap-in, I was like, I don't see a single indigenous person. Like one guy said he had some Choctaw and then Mary's grandfather was Cherokee, but like,
00:43:41
Speaker
no one outwardly identifying as indigenous and that's their napping thing and I was just like that is a bummer. So something I miss out on and I'm wondering is like I can learn the physics and how to nap from different people but what about like the spiritual stuff behind napping or like what times of year you use certain rock or just shit like that or like what kind of spirit is in the rock like things like that or all that kind of stuff and those traditions and oral stories of napping are not taught at a
00:44:10
Speaker
a white napkin, I would say. I mean, it made me reflect when you asked that question, like looking at the different people in my community at large that are engaged in some sort of crap production, like one pipe maker. We have one traditional bow maker.
00:44:26
Speaker
We don't have any potters. We don't have any lithicists. And like we know pot, like we were farmers, you know, and we, we've just seen within the past decade, a huge resurgence of growing of ancestral crops that are using like bison, scapula hose yet. No, but we do have a lot of people that are engaged in beadwork, silversmithing and like engaged in contemporary regalia production.
00:44:51
Speaker
That's where a lot of that effort goes to now. I would find it fascinating, but part of some of those traditions, it's like our ancestral stone tools that would be used would have come out of Smokey Hill Jasper in Kansas, Hartville Uplift in Eastern Wyoming, and the Black Hills, like those where we got our stones.
00:45:11
Speaker
We're also not using the ancestral dogwood from our home. There's another part of it where it's like we're kind of displaced, so we can't actually engage in that practice because we're no longer in Nebraska and Kansas and have access to those raw materials, which are a very important part of that construction, as you were saying, or even the fletchings that we use. A lot of pony fletchings were eagle, like golden eagle feathers.
00:45:33
Speaker
Like we can't really get our hands on those anymore. And if we do, it takes like seven years from the Eagle repository. And I don't, and usually those go to regalia. Like we don't actually use those from, I guess now it'd be Turkey feathers, but like I was always fascinated in trying to make golden Eagle fudging. So there's like a whole aspect that you were hitting on David of like, well, what is, how do, how do a displaced people engage in a practice in which locality and geographic culture or cultural geography is very important to that industry?
Ethics of Selling Flint Knapping Products
00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah and you bring up the thing about like beadwork and regalia and like oh what another thing I thought of while I was there and Jacob brought this up too a while ago that he wouldn't sell points that he makes because it's appropriation in a sense and like when I was there I was like while flint knapping is and that's what I talked with that friend about was like flint knapping is a world heritage so like it's not like
00:46:23
Speaker
white people can't do it. But I wouldn't sit there and sell indigenous beadwork or like indigenous Cherokee regalia and like profit off of it. So why would I sell a Clovis point or a turkey tail or an archaic point? And I was wondering and wrestling that whole time, at what point?
00:46:41
Speaker
Is it just a craft, just like you're selling a hat or pants that doesn't necessarily have to be indigenous? At what level are you crossing a barrier into this is indigenous culture and I'm profiting off of it? Or at what level is it just you're making a point out of rock? It's hard. Yeah. I don't even know how to process that kind of stuff.
00:47:05
Speaker
You know, we've had people engaged in indigenous culture in one way, shape, or form on the show. I mean, that fuck we're archeologists. That's all we do for the most part. We've had some European folks on, but like, yeah, like if someone came up with like a level wall point or like that, those like European industries, Neanderthal and just like,
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's like a can of worms that it's, you know, the end of segment three. I don't know if we can process, but those are like really good questions for our audience to grapple with.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:47:30
Speaker
And, you know, send us an email life ruins podcast at gmail.com with your thoughts over like R is selling paleo Indian points in the Americas by non indigenous people, some form of cultural appropriation. Send us your thoughts. Let us know how, what your thoughts are on that, on that topic.
00:47:44
Speaker
And that same sort of thing, leave us a review on iTunes, buy our merch, do all the things that we tell you to do every time at this part of the episode. Yup. If you're listening on the All Shows Feed, please subscribe to our podcast individually. And yeah, with that, we're out.
00:48:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Connor, do you have a joke? Yeah, it's bad. And they're all not great. What did you say when he saw himself in 4K?
00:48:38
Speaker
HD am I That's pretty good, that's good
00:48:59
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.