Thread: Merry Christmas to YOU ALL!!!

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

I don't have any whale or seal blubber = maybe they don't smell.
I expect that the others will. At -40C, who cares?
Was not the tallow/fat from sheep used for cheap candles in medieval times?
I have heard the spatter mess from candles referred to as "candle grease."

I watched a guy load a soapstone lamp with finely chopped blubber. With a thick wick, he got some of it to melt.
Then he rigged up about 6" wick, horizontally with several peaks, to make 3" long fire for light & heat! Promptly
set a kettle of snow over that. Said it was -25F outside the igloo and +30F inside.

I reclaimed more beeswax candle stump mess last evening. I'll load one lamp as a reference with beeswax
and use it to fool with moss/lichen/cottongrass as wick material.

Birds. I do Cornish Game hens, 2 at a time, in the smoker, 275F with apple wood smoke for the first hour.
Nobody ever spits that out.

Yes tallow fat from sheep, blubber from whales ; they used all kinds of 'stuff' back THEN in medevil times but that was THEN this is NOW.
And of course the fact that you are a dude maybe is a huge factor in contributing to this.

We live in Canada. We have wood. Wood burns great AND SMELLS NICE!
In the area that I mainly live in this house, there's a woodstove so it heats the entire house . The wood itself smells nice enough but I add a pot of water and throw in some essential oils like lavender , vanilla bean Rosemary etc.,
At Christmas I had cinnamon sticks, pine cones and stuff for a seasonal scent.
image.jpg
I think woman are generally more fussy about house scents than most men are perhaps.

Anyway Happt New Year Brian!

P.s. Not sure how to add pics with this mobile version . Not sure how to get the standard version back either lol
Got it!

Happy New Year to all.

There are no trees in Canada's arctic district. Any drift wood found is far too valuable to burn.
There are lots of little shrubby things that you can identify as birch and willow. If those are dug up (aka killed),
you'd soon learn that most growth is underground that there are hundreds of growth rings in the woody parts of the root system.

The "oil lamps" are paleo projects as experiments. Nobody objects to what I do in my house.
which is 2 x 1200 sqft and fully finished, even a walk-in cold room. The bear fat jar is in there, some place!

Likely run the lamps on the stove in the upstairs kitchen (I have 2 kitchens) with the range hood running for stink.
Besides the central heating furnace and duct system, I like to use a wood pellet stove for heat.
Expecting to burn 10,000 lbs or so again this winter.

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

Happy New Year to all.

There are no trees in Canada's arctic district. Any drift wood found is far too valuable to burn.
There are lots of little shrubby things that you can identify as birch and willow. If those are dug up (aka killed),
you'd soon learn that most growth is underground that there are hundreds of growth rings in the woody parts of the root system.

The "oil lamps" are paleo projects as experiments. Nobody objects to what I do in my house.
which is 2 x 1200 sqft and fully finished, even a walk-in cold room. The bear fat jar is in there, some place!

Likely run the lamps on the stove in the upstairs kitchen (I have 2 kitchens) with the range hood running for stink.
Besides the central heating furnace and duct system, I like to use a wood pellet stove for heat.
Expecting to burn 10,000 lbs or so again this winter.

Yes but you aren't in Arctic Canada are you?
It is more energy efficient and more green , so good for you. 2 kitchens with fans. Pellet stove. Mountain view. Yeah. That's nice. Ok. I take it all back.

Nope. Just hang out between 53N and 54N in central BC.
Two weak layers, one at 18cm and another at 48cm, really ripe for avalanche locally.

The paleo questions arose
1. travelling from one igloo to another what's for heat and light?
2. paleo cave drawings and paintings: there's no torch soot on the roof. How did they see for so long to paint/draw?

OK so what's not to like about a stone candle?
It appears that the critical component is the wick material.
Without wick, no amount of candle helps at all.

Here, well south of the tree line, I can understand that wood fires supplied heat and light.
Even bone burns and it was used in paleo times.

There were numerous plants the early natives used for cordage - probably one of these was also used as wicks in a stone candle.
Claude

NativeTech: Native American Cordage


<center>

<center>Inner Bark Fiber</center><center>Basswood Bark</center><center>Cedar Bark</center><center>Dogbane Stalks</center><center>Milkweed Stalks</center>

<center>Grass and Reed Fiber</center><center>Bulrush Reed</center><center>Cattail Leaves</center><center>Sedge Grass</center><center>Sweetflag Leaves</center>

</center>

There's nothing not to like about stone candles. In fact that whole culture has a certain appeal to it. I'm actually fascinated to learn how we all not only survived, but how we created and / or what we created the because it's always been an inherit part of us. To have the privilege of seeing original artwork done on cave walls and such is so inspiring. Imagining how how things were actually done has mystified most of us.
I wouldn't have wanted to live back then but I wouldn't hAve minded living a certury or so ago.
There are so many reasons why but that's really going off topic.
Candles made from bees wax are nice.

This Paleo oil lamp exercise is Inuit. Tundra. No trees at all. Local wick for local lamps from local material.
One plant in common is Cotton grass which I can harvest in August in local highway ditches (small patches of it.)
Taking only the fuzzy tips, I do not compromise the perennial plants whatsoever.
My only other choice are some of the fruticose lichens, the hairy looking ones. I can pull those out
of the spruce trees in my front yard.

Will be cool to saw off the soapstone slabs and carve the lamps.
I'll use the UBC/MOA online collection as my definitive guide for design.
Fat sources and wick materials for experiments.
As I said, I'll run one as the reference with good wick and beeswax.
I'm still a little puzzled as to how and where to hold up the wick to burn as best it can
without cremating itself.

The Churchill River, particularly the stretch which runs across Saskatchewan,
is dotted with stretches of ancient pictographs which could only be made from a boat.
Leaving Missinippe, going east/downstream, there's a bunch up Rattlesnake Creek.
The best and biggest is a limestone wall going into Frog Narrows.

Oh! So paleo isn't just a diet?

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

...
I'm still a little puzzled as to how and where to hold up the wick to burn as best it can
without cremating itself.
...

You could try twisting some of the cotton grass into "threads", then braiding the threads. Tie a half-knot in the braid near an end and that should cause the end to stick up.

The Inuit may have traded walrus/seal/whale bones and teeth to other tribes further South that had access to cedar trees. Perhaps a Northern version of Kokopeli...

Claude

Thanks Claude. Do believe that the cotton-grass gathering season is over. 0F/-20C and lots of snow in the ditches.
A Paleo Forum member did twist cotton grass into a wick as you describe. Then, they laid about 6" of it horizontally with a bunch
of twisted knobs sticking up, like individual wicks.
The light output, like 4+ candles, was great! Easily enough for cave painting.
Then to go home, you light your walking torch and push the lamp wick into the melted fat to snuff it out.

The other thing I'm learning is that smaller lamps were made of marine shells eg oyster and abalone.
I wonder just how many of those have been overlooked or misinterpreted in archaeological digs.

I think it's going to be useful to work with what I can find that might have been available, locally.
At the same time, try some cedar bark, lots on some WRC carving wood downstairs!

I do have a spool of really cheap cotton string = crude. I plan to mash that up for wick expt #1

While it's common to suppose the the natives of the PacNW jumped from the Neolithic into the Iron Age,
explorers report that most tools were iron-tipped when they arrived.
Two probable sources
1. Around the N Pac rim through Siberia and south.
2. The Japan Current crosses the Pacific and has been delivering asian trash to BC for millennia
including the recent tsunami which sent us a big motorcycle packed in styrofoam.
Fortunately, the radioactivity of the sea water has not risen very much and we have not found
any junk that glows in the dark from the Fukushima reactor.

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

Expect to have an agent buy 70lbs/30kg Brazilian soapstone for me.
Some paleo people are interested in Inuit style oil/fat lamps.
Have bear, lamb, bison & pork fats to try. Basically a flat candle.
Need to saw off some slabs and make a few. The lit wick part might be burning
3" long at a time = lots of light and heat for hot water, too. I predict pretty stinky, burning animals fats.

Somehow I missed this part. Are you being contracted to make so many? That's pretty cool actually

Hi
The soapstone lamps will sort of depend on the shapes of the chunks I get.
I plan to carve 3-4 lamps. From what I can see in the online collection at UBC/MOA,
the lamps all look like no bigger than hand-size with 1/4" walls and possibly 3/4" deep.

I'll think about carving whatever I might see in the rest of the stone.
There's no rush. Some wood sits for years before I see it.
The stone really is soft enough to cut with a handsaw and carve with a screwdriver.

That's quite an issue as there are no real shavings and chips. Small rock chunks and
tons of greasy (soapy?) feeling rock dust. I have a setup that keeps most of the mess under control.
The dust I can wipe up with handfuls of damp potting soil.