Location and Composition
Argillite is similar to the substance known as catlinite which was used by the indigenous peoples of the American Plains to carve their ceremonial pipes. However, while catlinite is of a reddish brown color because of its high iron oxide content, argillite is a dark-grey to black color because of its higher carbon content.
Argillite used by the Haida is found at the Slatechuck argillite quarry on Slatechuck Mountain near Skidegate on the east flank of Graham Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands of the North Coast of British Columbia, now called Haida Gwaii. In the Skidegate dialect of the Haida language argillite is called kwawhlhal. The quarry is very difficult to get to and its exact location is a heavily guarded secret by those who are able to point it out on a map. Argillite is an important commodity for the Haida people and presently only the Haida have the right to use the variety found at Slatechuck Creek, which occurs nowhere else in the world. One of the first documented reports of the Slatechuck quarry occur in about 1820 when prospectors looking for coal or copper came across a large deposit of the black slate. According to Marius Barbeau, a Canadian ethnographer who studied argillite throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the native owner of the land the quarry was located on was George Gunya, one of the first known argillite carvers.
The argillite from the Slatechuck quarry does not contain quartz or feldspar, and the organic matrix from which it is constructed is highly complex, characteristics which make it different from other argillites. The Slatechuck argillite began to form about 70 million years ago when a nearby vent in the earth’s crust heated a shale layer formed of kaolin and carbonaceous matrices. To the naked eye, argillite looks similar to other forms of shale, however differs microscopically as there are high amounts of organic materials trapped throughout the matrix.
Read more about this topic: Haida Argillite Carvings
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither increases nor diminishes. But as it is certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea which we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)