Ancestral Arts & Skills Immersion for Educators Class: Ages 18+

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In this fast moving, 2-day workshop you will learn the basics of crafting unique cultural items using only the tools and materials of the past. You will make the tools, process the materials and learn the techniques of hand making a wide variety of culturally significant items that you can use in your classrooms and teach your students how to make.

Being an educator is not required to attend this class. It is open to anyone with an interest in ancient cultures, bushcraft, primitive skills, human history, Archaeology, or our human relationship with the natural world. 

This workshop not only explores the artistic materials and products of ancient peoples but the personal, cultural and physical forces that went into everything they created. There was no “art” in these ancient cultures. Every nuance of color, pattern and design often held multiple levels of meaning and importance to the crafter as they gave life and intent to each object they made.

Much of the workshop time will be used exploring how acquire and process the natural materials that you can gather from your own local environment. You will quickly realize that many of these materials are readily available in nearby open spaces.

Participants will learn to craft all their items without the use of modern tools and equipment: no knives, scissors, paste, pots, pans, burners, markers, trays or boxes. By creating these items using only the materials and techniques of the past, it is hoped you and your students will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for past peoples and cultures.

Brushes and drawing tools

You will make and keep:

• Multiple stone and bone tools, toys and games, beads and ornaments, bone and cane whistles, a bullroarer, paints and pigments, paint brushes and other pigment application tools. You will also be given a slab of sandstone and extra materials to make more beads and ornaments for making at home after the class.
• You will also receive detailed lists of material resources and gathering tips, directions to locations to safely and legally gather, modern material equivalents and for books, website and scientific paper references.
• A variety of hard to find or make materials, finished tools and books will also be available for purchase.

Northern California Educators Immersion: – Projects:

Skills and knowledge you will gain:

• Lithic tool production for making all items in the workshop, how to make and use spalls, flakes, sandstone and cutting edges.
• Stone pecking and grinding technology.
• How to make all tools and supplies for painting and drawing, pigment selection and processing, liquid binder selection and use, paint application materials, how to make positive and negative handprints, charcoal use, discuss cave painting/rock art, motivations and realities, using fat lamps to illuminate caves and work areas.
• Cordage, rope and binders.
• Friction Fire making and use as a tool and illumination.
• Bone reduction and how best extract and use bone fragments to make tools, ornaments, projectile points, scrapers. Using antler, horn and ivory.
• Bending, straitening and splitting wood.
• Choose and modify found natural materials to create beads and ornaments.
• Animal hide processing overview and use for clothing, bags, straps, rawhide and tanning.
• Animal tendon / sinew identification, acquisition, processing and use.
• Identifying, making and using pine pitch, tar, saps and glues.
• Where to find / acquire materials used/needed for teaching these skills.
• Material storage: Containers-tubes, seashells, gourd bowls and bottles, bags, cairns.

What you will make:

• Decorated cane and bone whistles.
• String and cord.
• A Hoko Knife.
• A split willow animal effigy
• Bone tools and cultural artifacts: awls, punches, reamers and a gorge fishhook. 
• Earth Paints and a wide variety of paint application tools; brushes from 3 different materials, tubes for spraying and drawing.
• Beads and ornaments from seeds, nuts, bones, antler, teeth, stones, shells including ice age processes and techniques.
• Toys, buzzers, spinning tops.
• Games: ring and pin game, counting sticks.
• Bullroarer and discuss making flutes, clappers, rattles as well as the importance of group singing and chanting.

Overall Big Picture Themes, Ideas, Lessons

Technologies:

• Basic Stone Tools: flakes, pecking and grinding technologies.
• Friction Fire and fire mastery.
• Textiles, cordage, fiber- plant and animal.
• Operational chains /manufacturing steps.
• Splitting Wood-Cedar.
• Bending, Straightening Wood-Heat.
• Bone Working, Cutting, abrading, polishing.
• Mineralogy: tools, pigments, salt, clay, plaster.
• Environmental awareness, Gifts from the Animal People, Stone People and Plant Peoples.

Cultural Insights:

• Body and face paint, jewelry and burial red ocher use, why red?
• Overview of human complex thoughts and the beginning of abstract thought: speech, logic, symbolism in all things.
• Games as cultural lessons: ring and pin.
• Dynamics in a hunter-gatherer group: the true human success story.

Environmental Factors:

• History of pre-historic climate changes and why this matters.
• Available natural resources and modern counterparts.
• Location, seasonality, flexibility of hunter-gatherer groups.

2 – 7 hour days: $325 per person.

Overall class goals and objectives for ALL classes, camps and workshops:

1. Learn how prehistoric peoples created a multitude of art and culture items from the natural materials around them.
2. Learn how ancestral peoples made the tools and acquired the plant, animal and mineral resources to create art and culture items.
3. Learn to appreciate the relationships these ancient peoples had with the natural world around them and how they lived in balance with it.
4. Learn the STEM lessons presented from working with the tools and materials.