Bird Beaks
From the Jones
Cove Site, Frenchman Bay
About 2,000 years old
Longest approx. 9 cm
If we define an artifact
as something made or used by people, then these items
are not really artifacts at all. But when they were
collected in 1928, the Abbe Museum’s curator
thought they were tools. He suggested that they might
be sewing tools, like crochet hooks.
When Dr. Richard Will examined the
collection in 2003, he immediately recognized the
bones for what they are– the beaks of ducks.
The bones are evidence for what
people were doing, of course. People hunted many kinds
of birds and duck bones are common in coastal shell
midden sites like the one from which these beaks came.
French explorer Nicholas Denys (1672)
described Native hunters sneaking up on sleeping ducks
in birchbark canoes. They hunted them at night, when
the birds rafted together by the thousands. Using
birchbark torches to frighten the birds into flight,
the hunters could then knock them down with sticks
or their paddles. He told of whole canoe loads being
taken in the night. |
