Native American halibut hooks

[DaleW]

I'm kind of an armchair student of Northwest Coast Native American culture and the thread about spears and frog gigs reminded me of carved halibut hooks. Halibut fish can be huge and catching one brought in a lot of prime protien. The hook design looks a lot different than a metal hook and I think wood hooks and barbs have real potential as survival food gathering tools. The one in this link http://www.carnegiemnh.org/exhibits/north-south-east-west/tlingit/04.html is made from wood, a little bit of bone and some spruce root for binding. I've seen examples of hooks made from roots with no bone too. I've seen museum exhibits with small really fine hooks too.

This link has a history of the fish hook http://www.mustad.no/abouthooks/h_history.php with examples from horn, bone, and wood. There is a mention of using juniper for fish hooks and purning the tips to harden them. Of cource I knew to do that with a wooden spear, but never considered it for making a fish hook.

It never fails to maze me how resourceful and clever "primitive" cultures could be. We talk about the "stone age" only because the stone tools are all that have survived. Those cultures used wood, bone, shell, leather, sinew, bark and all the natural materials at hand to make a living. Trade took things like sea shells into the interior of North America. Prime stone like obsidian was traded far and wide too. All these old cultures make a great study for survival techniques.

 

[mete]

That Mustad link is fascinating ! Thanks .Yes people in ancient times were a lot smarter than they're given credit for. But of course if they weren't they would not have survived !!

 

[Dr. Mudd]

Dale, you remind me of a couple of my favorite anthropology professors at FSU about 1970-72. One of them, who spent his summers in Central and South America, brought in native blowguns and taught us to make darts using native materials, and to shoot them accurately in the classroom. (We skipped the part about skewering those little frogs with X twigs and warming them over a tiny fire to make them sweat the poison out of their backs.) It was all great fun, and it's still one of my interests, but I soon realized it's almost impossible to actually make a living with a degree in anthropology, unless you get your doctorate and then teach other naive kids.