many items were found with u The Iceman's 5,000-year-old frozen body one of those items was a dagger in this video we'll show you how to make an utu the Iceman style dagger the first thing we're going to need to make our dagger is a wooden handle the handle on UT's dagger was made out of Ashwood here I'm cutting a piece of Ashwood with the copper axe while it is still green and then shaping it using Flint tools I will then let it dry and season the Ashwood dagger handle was just under 9 cm long and had a groove carved in 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 Hammerstone to drive off large flakes these flakes are incredibly sharp and can be made into different primitive tools including scraper ERS and Arro heads as we continue to reduce the rock we are left with many large flakes including this biface 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 can continue to remove flakes the blade will become more thin and uniform and begin to develop a center 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 flant worked down to a rough by face like this one we're ready to do the final shaping now UT's knife blade was not very big if it wasn't n already attached to a handle archaeologists might have classified it as an arroe head 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 get my information on how to make these Iceman reproduction gear and my favorite resource is a book titled the man in the ice here on page 113 it has a colored photo of the dagger with its Scabbard um this book is great cuz it gives a lot of Dimensions one of the dimensions gives is that currently um in modern time the knife blade is 6.4 cm long so I just draw the shape and measure out 6.4 cm and then I have something to go off of originally they estimate this knife blade to be 7.3 cm long so I'm going to make it with the complete tip they don't know if the tip was broken off 5,000 years ago and just something that oie was 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 uh Flint blade in this shape and then we'll insert it into the handle we know exactly how the Iceman shaped the Flint because he had this tool on him this was laying in a similar area to where they found the 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 cuz they haven't found anything like this um from the same era to compare it to but after doing more research they found out that it's a piece of limewood 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 it was sticking out less and um what they detered mined is that it's a flint napping tool they call a retoucher or a pressure flaker I've been using this tool for Flint napping and actually works really good you can put your thumb right there wrap your pinky around there and then you can just um 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 pressure flaker to make an UT the Iceman 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 [Applause] shape now that the Blade's pretty close to where we want it we're going to start shaping down the tang and putting in The Notches for the [Applause] lashing within a few minutes we have the back of the blade looking like how we want it and the overall blade starting to look pretty good it's not flake for flake exact replica but it's close to the size and shape of what utzi used more than 5,000 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 [Applause] 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 anu's other artifacts such as his arrows and copper ax he used a natural glue called burgar but in this case he did not use any glue instead he used a long strong fibers of animal tendon this is called senu here I'm going to use senu from the back of elk to start we need to get the senu fibers wet and pliable traditionally this was done by chewing it in your mouth after several minutes of mixing with your saliva the senu becomes soft and ready to wrap around your stone Blade the senu fibers will shrink as they dry making incredibly strong halting 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 Ashwood handle with a piece of cordage to do this first take some natural plant fibers and twist them using the two-p 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 vent the dagger from being lost now we have a small dagger that's made out of the same material and is the same size is the one utzi the Iceman used more than 5,000 years ago there's a few more things I wanted to talk about with UT's dagger hopefully to help reduce the number of negative comments I get on this video um people are very opinionated about U the Iceman and his gear and um have different beliefs about how he lived and uh what he did one of those lines of thought is that some people don't think that this is a dagger at all because it had a broken tip and it was found near his fire kit um of using flint and iron pyite and some uh Tinder fungus that some people believe this is actually a striker for making fire and um it could be I just feel like going all the work of making The Cutting Edge it's like a dagger for a just a more of a pocket knife type and um striking it against the pyite 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 doled and chipped he would just work it down so it was probably a lot longer and then worked down to this size also another um comment might be why' you call it a knife and some places and a dagger and others technically it's a dagger because it has two cutting edges a knife uh 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 um because it has two cutting edges it's called a dagger next to the picture of the original dagger and this picture is actually to scale it's the same size and you notice a few differences um the senu is not lashed 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 UT's hip and they actually struck the artifacts too so an ice pick actually hit the handle and put gouges in it and this damage here occurred when they gouged um the Scabbard with the ice pix to so these things took abuse um 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 um the people recovering it that weren't very careful with the artifacts so this original blade may not be this shape it may actually extend out here and have more of the Tang Exposed on the handle and it's too bad that um the artifacts took some abuse but I think this is closer to what it looked like when it was in use um 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 had way more fun making the scabard this thing is um 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 um some grass and bark into this intricate um scabber 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 5,000 years and we'll show you how to make that in our next video