Today I challenged myself with crafting a fishing spear/frog gig with primitive improvised stone tools. I found a large pebble for a hammer stone, a flat piece of sandstone became my anvil, and I found several angular stones which serves a scrapers and primitive saws.

I began my scoring a circular pattern around a hardwood branch 1 inch in diameter. Once the circular cut was sufficiently deep, the branch can be cleanly broken off from the rest of the tree. This took just a few minutes with a slightly sharp rock edge.

Next I used stone scrappers to remove the bark from the spear end of the hardwood branch. This took approximately 15 minutes.

Next, I began to grind one end of the hard wood stick against the sandstone anvil. The intent was to grind it into an asymmetric point similar to that of a digging stick. This proved to be exceedingly tedious, taking over an hour of hard work to complete.

Then I began splitting the asymmetric wooden spear tip with a small wedge shaped stone. Once a split got started, I switched to a larger wedge stone, and finally a twig to permanently separate the 2 prongs of the nascent fishing gig. This took about 10 minutes

Then I had to carve out pointed tips on the 2 prongs with stone "flakes". Except the stone flakes were exceptional brittle and crumbled after just a few cuts, so I went through a dozen flakes and the process took over half an our.

Finally, I had to polish the now "sharpened" tips on the stand stone, this took another 20 minutes.

The entire process from start to finish took more than 2 and a half hours.

Music is Creative Commons: Dhaka by Kevin Macleod

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