By Brenna Wiegand
When it’s too cold to go out and hunt artifacts, Kit Kaser stays in and makes his own. He says it’s the next-best thing.
A boyhood desire to imitate arrowheads gave rise to Kaser’s lifelong passion to perpetuate the skills of indigenous people; in his case, through flint knapping. Today, the ancient art of making and using stone tools is found only among a few small bands of people. Kaser doesn’t like that.
“It all started because my aunt and uncle had a homestead cabin out in Eastern Oregon,” he said. “When I was about 6, I started going there every year. My mom showed me arrowheads she found in that area in 1921. I would go and spend two weeks in the sagebrush with my uncle. I’d find a few arrowheads here and there, and I got to thinking, ‘Hmm… I wonder how these were made.’”
Since then, he is outside every chance he has, traipsing from the Abiqua Basin to the old mining town of Granite.
He didn’t know any flint knappers and found little to read about the craft, so Kaser had to learn by trial and error.
“I tried using a steel hammer on obsidian – that’s the first no-no,” he said. “When steel hits obsidian, it sends a really high frequency shock wave through it and it’s like somebody ran a needle across a vinyl record or a piece of chalk on a chalkboard. It makes a real screech.”
He linked up Echoes in Time and the Society of Primitive Technology – whose mission is to research, practice and teach indigenous life skills. He realized how many people were on board, including an increasing number of archeologists.
“They are taking up the art of stone tool-making to help them in their study of ancient man,” Kaser said.
About 17 years ago, Kaser found a mentor in Goode Jones of Salem, who helped found Echoes in Time. To him, using primitive skills was the norm. “Goode is Cherokee, Osage, Scandinavian and some group up the coast called Fish Biters,” Kaser said. “His family made their own stone tools, arrows, bows, did their own hunting and everything.”
The group would travel to the High Desert, mining for obsidian on Glass Butte, where indigenous people also gathered.
“We’d go out two miles and spend a week or so camped out in the sagebrush and the snow and whatever else Mother Nature threw at us,” Kaser said. “We’d go out to the Butte and sit around and make some stuff and chat with different people, but spots like that are getting scarce.” Kaser’s trusty 1991 Geo has nearly 315,000 miles to its credit – and he has had Lyme’s Disease twice.
Kaser and his fellow “knappies” work mostly with obsidian because of its availability and relative softness.
“We like to use other stones such as jasper, but because of their hardness they have to be heat-treated first, and that’s a lot of work,” he said. Plus, it doesn’t always work.
Kaser only sells the stone tools he makes.
“An artifact is something to treasure and study myself – and to see if I can replicate,” he said. “Hopefully it’s not going to become a lost art like so many others in the last 100 years.”
