You line up in the drive-thru in a car you didn't build, waiting for a meal you didn't make, from an animal you didn't hunt. Even if you hunted supper yourself, chances are you did it with the products of modern metallurgy, which you may or may not understand.
It's easy to forget that the people who lived and worked along the Sturgeon River haven't always had it this easy, and they used to embrace the do-it-yourself ethos out of pure necessity.
This point isn't lost on local archeologist Kurtis Blaikie-Birkigt, a St. Albert resident and president of the Strathcona Archaeological Society. He's made an assortment of stone tools by hand, and organized a workshop at the University of Alberta on March 21 to share that experience with others looking to connect with the past.
"I love archeology and I love sharing it with other people," he said.
I joined him and course instructor Sean Lynch, along with a dozen other people including many other non-archaeologists, to see how my own skills stack up.
As it turns out, the process can be an incredibly difficult one. I, for one, consider myself very lucky I don't need to rely on my own dubious flintknapping ability to put food on my plate.
Even for a seasoned veteran like Blaike-Birkigt, it's a very difficult process that comes with many frustrations, requiring patience, persistence, an understanding of the material and a delicate hand.
"If you screw up, it's gone," he said. "The piece you took off can't be put back on, so you really have to slow down and plan your moves out."
The materials
The materials we were working with at the U of A included the relatively easy pieces of dacite, a type of volcanic rock, and obsidian, another type of volcanic rock that has a texture not unlike glass.
As difficult as they were to work with, Lynch explained there are actually no natural sources of either material in Alberta so the rocks were shipped in from Oregon.
The most common material used in Alberta was quartzite, a hard metamorphic rock, described as a kind of compressed sandstone, that is significantly trickier to work with.
"In Alberta we don't have much in the way of good material," Blaikie-Birkigt said. "The most common material in Alberta is quartzite. It's really, really hard and strong, but it's really tough to work with."
That doesn't necessarily mean Albertans wouldn't have used materials from farther afield, like the dacite and obsidian, and it's not unheard of to find these materials at archeological sites within the province.
"The presence of any obsidian in Alberta indicates either down-the-line trading or bringing the material in Alberta to use themselves," Lynch said.
J.P. Stienne, a collections manager at the Musée Heritage Museum in St. Albert, said many of the stone tools in their collection are made either from quartzite or chert, a kind of sedimentary rock common in the province.
He noted it is also quite common to find various animal remains from thousands of years ago, with many bison horns and bones included in the collection.
The process
When more modern tool-making and metal-working techniques were introduced to North America with the Europeans explorers and colonists, stone tools became less important in day-to-day life on the continent, and some of the knowledge of how to make them was lost.
Lynch said one of the main ways modern scholars know about the ancient practice of flintknapping is from Ishi, who is widely regarded as the last of the Yahi people in California.
When he emerged from the wilderness in the early 1900s, he was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California. They studied him, but he also worked with them as a research assistant. He was able to demonstrate various flintknapping techniques that have helped shape modern understanding of the practice.
Other information comes form archeological finds, including the artifacts themselves but also large deposits of shards created in the process of making a tool.
"The debris can tell you a lot about what tools they were making, and what tools they were using to shape the rock," Lynch said.
He explained the process begins by looking at the piece of rock you're working with, determining how best to use the natural shape of the stone to create the tool you're looking for, much like a sculptor imagines the finished product within the stone she's working with.
Using harder pieces of rock and softer pieces of animal bone, the tool's creator would strike at the rock, taking advantage of the natural grain of the stone and employing the principles of physics to determine where to strike the piece.
"There's a lot of physics involved, and knowing how to use that cone of force to work the material," Lynch said.
Once the rough shape of the tool is created, whether it's an axe head, a spear point or some type of projectile, you can use a smaller tool to make smaller adjustments using pressure on the tool rather than striking it.
Alexandra Burchille, an archeologist who took in the workshop, said she hadn't tried her hand at flintknapping for many years, but was looking for the chance to get back into practice. She struggled to create anything as good as what has been found from pre-contact times.
"It really makes you appreciate the work they put into the tools we've found in the field," she said.
James Cowley isn't an archeologist, but wanted to see for himself how these kinds of tools are made, and noted it seems like an easy skill to learn but would be a very difficult one to master.
"It's a lot easier than I thought it would be," he said. "It's a bit tedious, though."
Many of their attempts, much like my own, ended up broken in half in the heap of shards due to one careless strike partway through the process.
Blaikie-Birkigt explained the stone part of the tool, as difficult as it is to get right, is actually the easy part — as he struggled to create a handle using a stone blade he had fashioned that day.
"This is the first time I've worked trying to put handles on things with stone tools, and it's really hard," he said. "Working the wooden part of the tool is a lot harder than working the stone part of the tool."
Being organic, the handles themselves have decomposed and aren't typically found at most archeological sites, but considering how hard they were to make they would have been much more important, kept long after the blade it was first attached to was worn out and discarded.
The people
Not surprisingly, those who relied on this technique to put food on the fire were far more skilled at making stone tools than modern academics trying their hand at it for a lark.
Blaikie-Birkigt said the kinds of tools dug up in Alberta, predominantly made of materials such as quartzite, show a level of skill unmatched by modern practitioners.
"When we find an arrowhead made from quartzite or another coarse material that would typically have been used in Alberta, it's amazing," he said. "I don't know of anybody that can work quartzite the way the average hunter would have 5,000 years ago."
While the historical record is somewhat dicey and the exact boundaries of territories and the timelines for those boundaries are often disputed, the groups of people living in the St. Albert area 5,000 years ago may have included Cree, Blackfoot, and Stoney.
The advent of the fur trade caused some rapid changes in the area, and by the time the historic modern scholars started to ask what was happening before Europeans arrived, there wasn't anyone left to be able to explain it.
"So many things changed from when the first historic records are written down, and when the last stone-tool cultures lived before that, that it's hard to draw those lines," Blaikie-Birkigt said.
There is still great potential to find archeological sites that could shed light on how life was in Alberta thousands of years ago. While much of the province has been surveyed and developed, there are still vast tracts of boreal forest that may be hiding clues about this province's past.
But for now, there's little more than educated guesses that fill in the blanks.
"We really don't understand how people were living in this province, who was here, and what they were doing," he said.
St. Albert finds
While there's little doubt this area was occupied in one form or another thousands of years before contact with Europeans, considering the proximity to the water bodies now known as Big Lake, the Sturgeon River and the North Saskatchewan River, there hasn't been an overabundance of archeological finds from pre-contact times.
"There are some discoveries from plowed fields, surface finds, but there hasn't been a lot of archeological work in the area," Blaikie-Birkigt said.
Nonetheless, there have been discoveries of various types right within the area, whether in Lois Hole Provincial Park, elsewhere near Big Lake, or even right in St. Albert itself.
"There's been little pockets of finds, a few finds here and there we've come across over the years," Stienne said while showing off pieces in the Musée Heritage collection.
He showed two flintknapping implements, basically big rocks that would have been used to shape the tool, that someone found while digging a sewer near Big Lake. And while they're not necessarily tools themselves, there were some bison horns and even a bison leg bone that hikers in the area found.
And as evidence that a very interesting archeological find can come up anywhere if you look hard enough for it, Stienne brought out a spear point that was found in someone's backyard on Delage Crescent in Deer Ridge.
"That was found in St. Albert, in the back of somebody's garden," he said. "You never know what you might find in your backyard."
