It's Back To The Future: Primitive Technology Explored

HAMPTON, Ore. - There's this to be said for road-killed jackrabbit: You can't taste the tire marks.

And, with a stuffing of wild morel mushrooms and nettles, it's not bad at all.

But there was more, much more, on the menu of the seventh annual Glass Buttes Knap-In, which was held recently to give nearly 200 participants a chance to continue their exploration of primitive technology.

In the afternoons, the circle around the fire pit could have been some band of desert hunter-gatherers, working away in the days before Columbus, doing the things they must do to survive.

The background noise was constant: the clink-clink-clink of fracturing obsidian, the low murmur of voices teaching, asking, evaluating, and the occasional punctuation of an exuberant whoop from the spear-throwing course.

Around the circle, arrowheads and knife blades emerged from the black stone. Baskets so tightly woven that they could hold water took shape. The fine points of sinew-backed bows, antler stone-chipping tools, brain-tanned hides, stone beadwork and survival cooking were debated.

Over the past 15 years there's been a surge of interest in the skills of American Indians and of all of humanity's Stone Age ancestors. From Georgia to Oregon, a growing number of outdoor seminars and informal gatherings focus on the mysteries of primitive technology, or aboriginal skills.

Glass Buttes decidedly runs to informality. It is a place where academia meets avocation, where the participants range from anthropology professors to back-to-the-earth hippies to Indians themselves.

"It's a gathering of anybody who has an interest in simple living," said Brian James, a founder of the Glass Buttes conclave. "They come with different priorities. Sometimes they're craftspeople who are interested in the skills. Sometimes they're people who want to live closer to nature."

James pursues anthropology and Native American studies at Evergreen State College. In 1986, he brought a friend to Glass Buttes and rendezvoused with Jim Riggs for a week of knapping - that's stone toolmaking.

Riggs, an anthropology graduate of Oregon State University, lives in northeastern Oregon. A pioneer of the primitive technology movement, he's crafted a living from writing, teaching and demonstrating old skills. He was the technical consultant for novelist Jean Auel when she wrote "Clan of the Cave Bear," and he filled the same role for the movie spun from the book.

Over the past seven years, Riggs and James have watched their little gathering grow. Riggs is its prime mover, but hardly a promoter. He sets the date each year and puts out a mimeographed notice to a very small mailing list.

In recent years, he's had to take care of other details. He passes the hat to cover the cost of rental toilets that he has trucked into the desert to protect the sagebrush environment around Glass Buttes, which is 75 miles east of Bend. But the knap-in still operates without fees, structure or timetable.

"What I want to do is sit around and do some knapping with friends," Riggs said. "For the people who come and want to learn, there's plenty of opportunity. But they have to ask. They have to be a little assertive."

For thousands of years, Glass Buttes was a popular Indian site for the quarrying and working of obsidian, the black, glasslike stone thrust to the Earth's surface by volcanic action. The high-grade obsidian from Glass Buttes moved along Indian trade routes and has turned up in archaeological digs far from the Oregon desert.

Its popularity still holds. The license plates around this year's tent and tepee encampment represented Western states from New Mexico to Montana. And every participant had a different story.

Like John and Gin DeCamp. He is a Tektronics engineer in Portland. She is the company's manager of computer-aided circuit board design. Every year they retreat from their high-tech world to a low-tech one, where they pitch a tepee and settle in for a week of collecting the nicks and cuts that mark every stone knapper's fingers.

"This is something that's far more real than the world we work in," Gin said. "There are people here who know things that are different - things that are worth knowing."

The ones who know those things best, the ones whose advice was sought most often at Glass Buttes, told similar stories. They're non-Indians who have studied anthropology formally or informally. Somewhere along the line all of them have tapped into Native American knowledge, often with Indians as their teachers.

Some have encountered Indian resentment of their interest. But they've also been invited into tribal circles as teachers and preservers of nearly forgotten skills, an Indian outlook reflected over the past week by Paiute women who came from Burns to spend a day with the Glass Buttes group.

"This is not about stealing a culture," said Scott Vandenbergh, of Oroville, Calif. "This is everybody's heritage. All of us, at some point in our history, have ancestors who worked with stone. This is what we're learning."

The branch of primitive technology buffs who are most interested in simple living skills often work with the hides and flesh of small animals, just as early hunter-gatherers did. They regularly collect skins from road kills. And if the kill is fresh, the meat may find its way into to stew pot or onto the barbecue spit.

The explosion of interest in old skills led a year ago to the creation of a national Society for Primitive Technology - Riggs is a board member - as a common ground for both academic researchers and serious amateurs. Over the past decade, that dialogue has been accelerating.