October 27, 2017
In preparation for Halloween, the GBL staff decided to conduct a little experiment: could we carve a pumpkin using traditional stone tools?
The Tools
Obviously we couldn’t use artifacts from our collection; that’s where the Education Collection comes in. These are objects that either have poor documentation (sometimes called ‘orphan’ collections) or serve no real use, or which we ourselves made.
We used three specific tools. Here they are with their ‘modern’ counterparts; that is, ones you can buy from a store in the pre-made pumpkin carving kits:
versus
And gloves:
The Process*
*Please don’t try this at home!
First, cut the top off.
This took us about 15 minutes and a good deal of elbow grease on the part of our Librarian, Kelsey Grimm.
Second, move on to scraping out the insides.
Collections Assistant Alex Elliott took on this project, and was done in just about ten minutes.
Third, draw on a face.
Fourth, cut out the design. For this we used a sharper, longer flake, which was able to cut all the way through the walls of the pumpkin.
Fifth and finally is the most crucial step: name your pumpkin.
For obvious reasons, we named ours Glenn.
The Results
We ran into a little trouble getting a grip on the blades to use them, especially as they got progressively more slippery with the addition of the pumpkin guts. But overall the experiment was a success!