many items were found with Lucy the Iceman's 5,000 year old frozen body one of those items was a dagger this video will show you how to make an Lucy the IceMen style of dagger the first thing we're going to need to make our dagger is a wooden handle the handle on it sees dagger was made out of a sh wood here I'm cutting a piece of ash wood with the copper axe while it is still green and then shaping it using Flint tools I will then let it dry in season the ash wood dagger handle was just under 9 centimeters long and had a groove carved on the tip of it to receive the stone blade the back of the handle also had a notch carved around it which helps secure a piece of grass cordage next we're going to make our stone dagger blade out of a piece of Flint begin by striking the Flint core with a hammer stone to drive off large flakes these flakes are incredibly sharp and can be made into different primitive tools including scrapers and arrowheads as we continue to reduce the rock we are left with many large flakes including this by face which is a perfect size to make a dagger blade the next step is to grind down any sharp edges with an abrasive rock and then strike the edge of the piece with an antler to drive off flakes as you continue to remove flakes the blade will become more thin in uniform and begin to develop a centre line all the way around the edge you can then switch to a smaller antler for the finished percussion work once we have our piece of Flint work down to a rough buy face like this one we're ready to do the final shaping now buuut sees knife blade was not very big if it wasn't already attached to a handle archaeologists might have classified it as an arrowhead but because it was frozen for all those years and still attached to the handle they knew it was a small knife blade people often ask where I give my information on how to make these iseman reproduction gear and my favorite resource is a book titled the man in the ice here on page 113 as a color photo of the dagger with its scabbard this book is great because it gives a lot of dimensions one of the dimensions it gives is that currently in modern time the knife blade is 6.4 centimeters long so I just draw the shape and measure out 6.4 centimeters and then I have something to go off of originally they estimate this knife blade to be seven point three centimeters long so I'm going to make it with the complete tip they don't know if the tip was broken off five thousand years ago and just something that would - is still using or if it broke off in between or during recovery now this black part down here is the tang which represents the part of the knife that was in the handle so we need to make this flint blade in this shape and then we'll insert it into the handle we know exactly how the IceMen shaped the Flint because he had this tool on him this was laying in a similar area to where they found the dagger it had a groove as well on the back of it which may have had grass cordage tied around it and tied to his waist as part of his tools and when they first found this they didn't know what it was because they haven't found anything like this I'm from the same era to compare it to but after doing more research they found out that it's a piece of lime wood a branch and it was hollowed out and had a piece of deer or stag antler shoved into it the tip of the antler was blackened from being hardened and it was wore down a lot more than what I have here was sticking out less and what they determined is that it's a flint knapping tool they call a retoucher or pressure flaker I've been using this tool for flint knapping and actually works really good you can put your thumb right there wrap your pinky around there and then you can just use it to apply pressure and drive off the flakes so I'll show you that process now using a 5,000 year old style of pressure flaker to make and bhutesu the IceMen style dagger blade before you start pressure flaking you really want to grind the edges of your knife down to develop platforms to push flakes off of then use the pressure flaking tool to press in and down to release the flake continue this process of grinding down the edges and pushing off flakes until the blade becomes more uniform and closer to the desired shape now that the blades pretty close to where we want it we're going to start shaping down the tang and putting in the notches for the lashing within a few minutes we have the back of the blade looking like how we want it and the overall blades starting to look pretty good is not flake for flake exact replica but it's close to the size and shape of what you to use more than five-thousand years ago the next step is a carve a notch in the tip of our ash handle that will fit tightly with the lower half of our stone blade using stone tools definitely takes a lot longer but it gives you a good sense for how things were done more than 5,000 years ago now that the stone dagger blade fits well into our wooden handle we're ready to secure it annuities other artifacts such as his arrows and copper axe you use a natural glue called birch tar but in this case he did not use any glue instead he use the long strong fibers of animal tendon this is called sinew here I'm going to use seeing you from the back of an elk to start we need to get the sinew fibers wet and pliable traditionally this was done by chewing it in your mouth after all several minutes of mixing with your saliva the scene you become soft and ready to wrap around your stone blade the sinew fibers will shrink as they dry make an incredibly strong hafting that will hold your stone blade in place once the stone dagger point is secure the final step is to wrap the back of the ash wood handle with a piece of cordage to do this first take some natural plant fibers and twist them using the two-ply twist method the original length of the cordage is not known as it was broken off sometime in the past 5,000 years it was probably long enough to be able to be tied off on something such as his backpack or his belt to help prevent the dagger from being lost now we have a small dagger that's made out of the same material and is the same size as the one who'd see the IceMen used more than 5000 years ago there's a few more things I wanted to talk about with boots ease dagger hopefully to help reduce the number of negative comments I get on this video people are very opinionated about glue to the Iseman and his gear and have different beliefs about how he lived in the what he did one of those lines of thought is that some people don't think that this is a dagger at all because I had a broken tip and it was found near his fire kit of using flint and iron pyrite and some tinder fungus that some people believe this is actually a striker for making fire and it could be I just feel like going all the work of making the cutting edge it's likely a dagger for just a more of a pocket knife type and striking it against the pyrite would really wear down the blade that's another thing is why is it so small this was probably a cutting tool that was much bigger and because he had his pressure flaker with him as it dulled and chipped he would just work it down so it was probably a lot longer and then worked down to this size also another comment might be why'd you call it a knife and some places in a dagger and others technically it's a dagger because it has two cutting edges a knife is classified as having one cutting edge and a dagger as two so I think of it more as a pocket knife cutting grass or cutting up some meat but because it has two cutting edges it's called a dagger to a picture of the original dagger and this picture is actually to scale it's the same size you notice a few different is the sinews not last as far down and there's some dings in here what that is is when they found the body and tried to get it out of the ice they use ice picks and they were just hacking away at it they tore apart boot C's hip and they actually struck the artifacts too so an ice pack actually hit the handle and put gouges in it and this damage here occurred when they gouged the scabbard with ice picks - so these things took abuse that tip may have been broken off from the people recovering it and getting it out of the ice and that's what it looks like now with x-rays but this may not be the original shape this Tang may have came out a lot more because those ice picks struck directly at the handle area and may have had part of the blade extend out there and be chipped off by the people recovering it that weren't very careful with the artifacts so this original blade may not be the shape it may actually extend out here and have more of the Tang exposed on the handle and it's too bad that the artifacts took some abuse but I think this is closer to what it looked like when it was in use and then after time and a rough recovery it looks like this even more impressive than this dagger blade which is pretty simple to make for primitive technology I have way more fun making the scabbard this thing is made out of tree bark with grass twisted it's a weaving technique called double plating and I'll show you that in the next video how they were able to weave some grass and bark into this intricate scabbard to hold the dagger and he used leather a lot for making a belt and different things but they did not use leather to make the scabbard to hold his dagger they used this twisted plant fiber so very interesting it's amazing that it survived 5000 years and we'll show you how to make that in our next video