The dominant culture calls them artifacts.
We call them tools.
In our cultures, many objects that were part of our ancestors’ daily lives are still used today, despite the ready availability of “new,” “improved,” “better” versions. Tools, utensils, weapons: From hammers and axes to mortars and pestles to bows and arrows, what were once used out of necessity still perform the same functions today, if more by cultural choice than technological constraint.
Over the years, we’ve had many replica tools and weapons in inventory, including tomahawks with refurbished 19th-Century steel blades and finely beaded handles to miniature stone-headed axes to old-fashioned stone hammers. Most are designed for ornamentation, not function. Oh, the blades are real enough — dangerously so — but the average buyer is going to hang them on a wall as art, not use them to chop wood.
The same is mostly true of the stone tools. But occasionally, one of our artists will make one that is authentic in every sense of the word. The one pictured above, the only such piece in our current inventory, is one such. From its description in the Other Artists: Traditional Weapons gallery:
In indigenous cultures, ancient tools and weapons are still used, both as an art form and ceremonially. Handcrafted the old way by a member of Taos Pueblo’s multi-talented Concha family, this traditional stone hammer is made in the same fashion and of the same materials as the people have done since the dawn of time. A branch of local wood is cut to length, split carefully at one end, and partially stripped by hand, leaving the bark in place near the bottom to ensure a good grip. A stone is selected with equal care, attention given to size, shape, weight, and balance, and then placed in the split end of the wood. Head and handle alike are then wrapped securely with wound and laced strips of dried rawhide.
Wood; stone; rawhide
$60 + shipping, handling, and insurance
And when I say “made the old way,” I mean exactly that. everything’s done entirely by hand, from the whittling of the bark off the wood to the fastening of the stone to the wrapping of the rawhide. Speaking of which, the rawhide is handled to old way, as well, and it’s both efficient and effective: Looped around the top, crisscrossed over the stone, and spiraled around the handle while the hide is still wet, it contracts as it dries, pulling the stone more deeply into the fork and holding it hard and fast.
As with modern hammers, it can be used. Used to build, or used to break. Most often, it’s probably both: So often, building something up requires breaking something first. But whether the purpose is grinding some needed material into powder or pounding fitted rungs into the frames of traditional ladders, it works.
It’s the sort of tool that’s still used for ceremonial purposes, when needed; for artistic or educational purposes, when not. But if you find yourself in the middle of a repair job and short a modern version, it’ll still hammer the nail home.
Form and function, culture and craft, parable and purpose. It’s a lot from a simple little tool that, modern materials notwithstanding, really hasn’t changed much in a millennium.
~ Aji
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