Getting a Handle on the Past:
An Arctic Bow Drill
Object Analysis and Report for Anthropology of Museums
by Ally Mitchem
After several years at two different colleges, I’m good at research. I can find my way around online journals like a pro. You have an object in museum collections you’d like to know more about? Great, tell me who collected it and when and I’ll be back in a little while with all of the information I’ve found. Except, that’s not always the best strategy.
Last month, my class went into the Arctic collections in the Penn Museum’s American Section to survey materials collected from arctic expeditions. The Keeper, Bill Wierzbowski, brought a selection of objects into the Collections Study Room for a closer look. This is a great exercise for us as students, to get a sense of what we need to look for when examining objects, and a chance to actually discover something new. I was gearing myself up for a massive research project, imagining tracing the acquisition of an artifact through various museum records, like an academic super sleuth, but I had overlooked an important step.
Getting ahead of myself, I had forgotten to actually stop and look at the object first. So, as per the instructions of our teacher, before googling anything or even touching the artifact, I sat down to look. The photograph gives you an idea of the artifact as I first saw it.
On the most basic level, this is a bow drill (86-35-364). I knew this going in, because I had seen them before. As I would later learn, this is one of the items we know relatively little about. It came to the Museum in 1986 from the George Vaux III and Henry Vaux Jr., prominent Philadelphia collectors, but the records of which native group it came from aren’t known. It’s not clear how this drill came to be in a private collection, and the Museum’s Registrar’s Office has no further information.
The Penn Museum has a large collection of bow drills, and a number of the Arctic ones are made of walrus tusk ivory, with incised animal imagery. Many of these drills utilize not just wood and rawhide, but metal introduced to the area by trade. This bow drill appears to be the only one in collections containing jadeite (rarely found in Arctic tools), so it clearly signals access to jadeite, either from deposits in the region or through trade. Bow drill technology is common among Arctic and other North American Indigenous peoples, used to drill shells, soft metals, and, in some cases, stone.
While I wasn’t exactly sure where every piece fit, I knew that the purpose of this object, practically speaking, was to bore holes in other materials. Right, got it. The accessions card identified the materials: wood, ivory, rawhide, metal, and some kind of stone. The kit included two apparently interchangeable spindles to use with the same stabilizer and bow. Upon further investigation, it became clear that one of the drill bits was metal, an old nail, adapted to fit its wooden handle. This is interesting, because bow drills are ancient Native technology, but nails were only introduced after European contact. The other drill has a stone (jadeite) bit, representing both an older method of drill-making, and a practical means of drilling a different hole.
A similarly etched bow drill—identified as Iñupiaq from the Seward Peninsula, Alaska—is housed at the National Museum of Natural History. The Penn Museum has another example from Indian Point, Siberia. A Smithsonian Institution website—Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge—provides information about the use of this tool:
“The traditional drill was a wooden spindle wrapped in a turn of leather cord and twirled by the back and forth motion of an ivory bow. The upper end of the spindle was held by a mouthpiece inset with a cupped bearing of smooth stone. Craftsmen kept sets of spindles with different sized bits made from stone or iron. Drill bows were engraved with life scenes, like this these showing hunting and dog sledding.”
The most notable details of the bow are the carvings on the ivory. If you look closely, you can make out shapes and figures: people hunting, and animals being hunted…whales, caribou, maybe a snow goose. These animals make sense, they’re native to the Arctic where this was made. What is interesting, though, is that this object does not seem to be made for hunting, or for rituals associated with preparing for hunting. Why the intense emphasis on the act of successfully predating on an animal? If you look more closely, these are not depictions of people getting ready to hunt, they are in the midst of the act of killing their prey.
The whale, which is being pursued by a beautifully detailed canoe (look at those tiny paddles) has a harpoon in its back. The caribou has an arrow about to pierce its back. Whoever was carving this was not simply playing around with images, accidentally ending up with a hunt. This bow drill is imbued with powerful iconography, and clear intent. It is beautiful, in a very simple, but very powerful way. Staring at it for a while, you can imagine it becoming animated and moving, the people chasing down their prey, dogs pulling a sled across the snow, a hunt in full action.
And yet, this is not the part of the drill that captivated me most. The stabilizer for the drill is attached to the bow with a rawhide strip that looks to be loosely tied. How convenient would it be to be able to untie it when you needed to use it, then attach it back while you stored it? The wooden mouthpiece and stabilizer itself is fascinating.
It is carefully carved, all in one piece. There’s metal attached to the bottom to hold the drill. At first I couldn’t tell if it was metal or stone, due to how dark it was, but it felt very cold through the nitrile glove in a way that the jadeite did not. My favorite observation is this: it is designed to be held in the mouth, but on one side, there is a worn down section in the precise shape of a thumb or a finger, where the person using it would put pressure to hold it steady. This was the smallest and most amazing detail—an actual mark left by someone using this. This left me with an overwhelming sense that I was not the only person to have held this tool, that it is not simply a part of an exhibit, and that museums do more than simply show you interesting objects…they show you things other human beings have created with their hands.
Sources:
Arctic Studies Center. Website: Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Martin, Paul S. 1934. The Bow-Drill in North America. American Anthropologist, 36(1), 94-97.