Curious spear-head

[fearn]

Hi Jake,

I agree about the lack of data on Arctic metallurgy. I'd read about the knives created from the Old Woman meteorite for years. Finding a picture of one of those knives has so far proved very difficult.

As for the forging technique, I'd put in several possibly contradictory thoughts.

One is that the spearhead may not have been a trade good at all, but it might instead have been scavenged from a wreck.

A second thought is that, while such forging is considered too tedious now, I'm not sure it would have been a century or more ago, when the spear was first forged.

A third thought is that I'm not convinced the spearhead was locally forged, because forming a socket is a little tricky, and I don't know of anyone north of Japan who was doing that type of forging on spearheads (this is probably my ignorance speaking). If the spearhead had a tang, I could easily believe it was of local manufacture.

This gets back to the question of the decorations. They're probably our best clue at the moment.

Best,

F