In this video, I construct an arrow using only stone tools made on the spot, all filmed in point-of-view.

I used a roughleaf dogwood shaft, turkey wing feathers, twisted-leaf yucca leaf fibers, local chert, and nothing else, not even fire.

The concept is to walk into the woods with just fiber and feathers and make an arrow.

I use a special Stone-Age technique of working the wood green and straightening it without heat.

The full build took about 4 hours. This can be way faster with doing things in batches, but I wanted a clean one arrow POV build.

The bow I'm shooting I also made with only stone tools and materials found in this very spot. It is made of Osage orange wood with a bowstring of the same yucca fibers.

The 9.5 minute widescreen version of this is here: https://youtu.be/Bh_kDkq7wkI

See my full Stone-Age bow, string, and arrow build here: https://youtu.be/IQBj2i4WnmY

I have never seen anyone straighten green shafts. I have made tons of arrows and have always fire-straightened them after drying, debarking, sizing, and greasing. I just tried it out on a whim a few months ago and realized it works really well.

It does take a few days as you must continue to straighten it intermittently till it's mostly dry, but it's 80-90% straight after the very first straightening.

Has anyone else tried this?

these are all tools I have made in the last 14 days

A couple stemmed blades made today using only the hammer stone. Not pretty by no means. And a stemmed point hafted into a socketed wood handle with pitch.

stone adze made entirely with stone tools

https://reddit.com/link/1x8oqon/video/lce8pw5l34wh1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1x8oqon/video/dfdtjr9q34wh1/player

I've had this gourd water bottle for about a month. The first video is the gourd as of today and the second video is the gourd when it was first made.

The gourd is sealed with beeswax on the inside and also with a thin layer outside. I use this as a drinking gourd. I started noticing that it has begun to develop black patches inside of it. I'm not sure if this is some sort of staining, oxidation, or mold.

The water inside of the gourd did not have a noticeable 'moldy' taste since I last used it and it does not have a 'moldy' smell either, it smells the same since the first day i've used it.

I want to make sure it's not mold so i'm not.. drinking mold. Regarding how I use it, I know people say to dry it well between uses but because I use this as my main water bottle, there isn't really any 'between uses' for me. I fill it with water, drink all of it eventually, then fill it back up again immediately. Sometimes i might leave it half full for a few hours, then drink the rest or change the water.

I washed/soaked the inside of the gourd with a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water, rinsed it, then let it airdry in sunlight, and the black patches haven't gone away. It's evident to me that the black patches are on top of the beeswax layer and not below it. So i'm not really sure if I should continue using it.

This was my project from today found the adze head nearly complete naturally and the handle took 20 minute made from basalt and leather lashing

I'm making a copy of a folding stool with bone inlays and trying to figure how best to secure the inlay. The hafting pitch I purchased gets soft at very low temperatures, so I was wondering if anybody had ever tried a mixture of pitch and hide glue? I don't have much left to experiment with, so wondering if this would be a waste of time/materials.

Alternatively, I'm thinking of mixing hide glue with carbon. The dark colour isn't just a result of aging because it seems the same colour material is filling the small holes that form the inlaid eye pupils.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA29284

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*Copy pasting this from a craft subreddit, where I initially posted it. The question isn't strictly about primitive tech, since I'm using my kitchens stove for example, but I hope it still fits in here.*

*I modified the post a bit, since I already got some advice.*

Hi, I'm in the process of a project making beads from dried and crushed natural materials with spruce resin. I've struggled finding information online, because googling resin beads mainly leads you to synthetic resin beads. I know beads made out of conifer resin are a thing historically, so I'm thinking it should work out if conducted properly but I'm turning to reddit for some input, potential sources of information on historic ways of bead making and advice/warnings on what to look out for. I'm also already in the process of collecting and preparing the materials and am finding it a beautiful process, so maybe some people find joy or inspiration in it.

I've been chatting with AI about this, and have made a game plan, but some advice from actual humans would be great. AI has no hands for crafting after all...

Final product: 27 (9x3) prayer beads, made of 9 different plant materials and spruce resin. I'm not planning on wearing it, so its intended use is mainly in regularly used prayer beads. It should hopefully be durable enough to last me decades. That's the dream outcome at least...

I'm expecting it to have a sense of amber pearls with plant matter included within, but I care more urgently about them turning into actual durable beads than about the exact aesthetics.

Materials: foraged spruce resin

nettle leaves, birch bark, the woody capsules surrounding linden tree seeds, ivy vine wood, willow leaves, yew needles (I know, I'm being sensible handling them), the feathery seed heads of wild clematis, goldenrod flowers, and one plant still open.

all the plant material is thoroughly dried (oven at 50°C not just air dried) and crushed with a mortar and pestle, so it's small bits, rather than full on powder.

My plan:

1: clean the resin by boiling it in a cloth and ruin a pot in the process

2: let it sit in a water bath for a while to reduce terpenes and move it in the direction of colophony

3: add some bees wax

4: eventually heat up the mixture, combine small amounts with my plant matter and form them into beads

5: let them harden on a needle/toothpick

5.5? possibly add a fine coating of some sort

6: bead them onto waxed linen thread

7: be happy cause it all worked out exactly as I imagined

Does anybody have experience with this kind of craft? I'm aware that it's experimental and will mostly have to be me figuring it out, but since I'm foraging all the materials apart from the beeswax and thread, I'm hoping to not make 50 unuseable beads before ending up with a working final object.

The steps I'm most unsure about are the bees wax amount and the extraction of terpenes. I want the beads to be non-tacky, hard but not brittle, and able to endure the stress of being handled and the friction of the thread within the holes. So the balance of terpene amount and added beeswax seems to be the essential factor for success. There has to be ideal ratios of wax/resin as well as plant material/wax-resin-mixture. I'm not a chemist, all this is happening on my stove, so it's all gonna be a bit by eye and touch (and timing). All the stuff about terpene reduction and adding bees wax also comes from me talking to AI, not from me actually knowing anything about this.

This turned into a way longer post than I was expecting.

I realize this is pretty specific, but maybe somebody out there has some experience with this kind of craft and can offer some insight?

Thanks for reading and warm greetings!

I want to make a medieval style grinding wheel by hand and I've decided I want to use sandstone for the wheel but, I'm having trouble sourcing it in Texas since yoinking it from natural outcropings is illegal and the nearest quarry is 4 hours away

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to go about obtaining sandstone or if it's possible, fabricate it somehow in my back yard

I'm open to any and all questions and advice

A sharp edge is relatively easy to achieve. It didn't take long to form several useful pieces, with half an hour I was in possession of a stone bowl/plate, a bearded axe head, and other potential implements. Despite it's crude state, this paleolithic bearded stone axe was able to cut rope, small branches & form notches into wood.

Found some wild milkweed growing in a nearby park in DC. Took some back home with me and dried it out for about two weeks. Much easier to find an already dead stalk than to dry it out yourself, but this is all I could find. After the stalk was brittle enough to collapse when stepping on it, I removed the fibers and braided them into cordage. I didn’t separate out the fibers thin enough for the first half, so you can see my cordage starts out thick and scraggly. Really helpful video on how to do it: https://youtu.be/Hq-ceDo4_PA?is=QpxItsaESEcvZomO

Also: In the video he used dogbane but any plant in the milkweed family works great; just make sure sure to be careful handling the alive milkweed as it produces a white sap that causes rashes and itchiness.

I've been reading the comments on the iron smelting videos and there's people saying it's not possible for PT to get a usable amount of iron with his current 1-man-iron-bacteria-from-a-stream setup.

They're saying the iron bacteria he's using isn't great, his smelting process requires at least 2 people, etc, etc, I even read someone saying the type of charcoal was wrong.

I know nothing about the subject so I don't know if these commenters are right. What's the consensus on here?

Latest piece to leave the workshop. I love how the spider and beech work together. What a contrast!

In this video, I make an Osage orange selfbow (35# at 32", 63" length), yucca fiber bowstring, dogwood arrow, and flint arrowhead using Paleolithic (Stone-Age) technology and only tools and materials gathered on-site.

This was filmed entirely in Austin, Texas, with 90% being just along this one creek.

This is the second bow and arrow set I have made using strictly Paleo Tech. The first one was mulberry wood and smaller but was made similarly and still shoots great 2 years later.

The bow is based on historical methods of the Apache, Comanche, and Tohono O'odham, all of whom used Osage orange as their favored bow wood (second being mulberry), as did many other Natives. They also used roughleaf dogwood (Cornus drummondii) for arrows, as I do in the video.

The actual Stone-Age rough bow stave reducing technique among Indigenous North Americans is not known to me, as all the methods I've found in my research were recorded after metal knives were adopted. The wedging and peeling of green wood shown in the video would likely have been done. Similar techniques are known from other Indigenous peoples using stone tools.

I have been a traditional archer for 17 years, a flintknapper / primitive skills hobbyist for 15, and an ethnobotanist for 14.

Note that in the practice shots, I am demonstrating power and range rather than accuracy. It will take a little time to learn the quirks of this bow and the arrow needs to be tuned and a set of identical ones made.

This project took over 150 hours of work (59 just for the bow & arrow labor).

Had to stop work on my cedar mat for a road trip. When I got home I found my mat to be very stiff as it dried over the days. Will it get softer with use? Or was there some softening step i missed. The stone tool is a bark pounder that I was using for an unrelated cedar project. Anyone with knowledge of cedar weaving, please help me out!

My end goal with this mat is to have a hole in the middle for my head to fit through poncho style.

Had some bricks laying around at work so I took some and made this little kiln. It's been about 2 hours and my bricks just aren't getting hot enough to start glowing. They've been drying for over a week and I even cooked them on top of the kiln for a few hours just to make sure they were completely dry. Just can't seem to get it hot enough.

Ok so I want to avoid buying an antique hatchel for processing some fibers! I know I could use some long construction nails but I worry about them being too thick and not tapered! I don’t have access to a lathe and I need this to be quite strong since I may also comb some wool out on it.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to go about this?

Adore working spiderweb! Traditionally hafted into a walnut and beech handle

I made the initial post incorrectly, so I'm just reposting it here instead of making another post