I had arranged for a clay-like soil to be brought to the site by truck and wheelbarrow, and the Japanese devised a wooden pounding tool with which to compact the material.
Meet the mortar and pestle (the bowl is the mortar, and the pestle is the club-like pounding tool).
I was sweating from the exertion of rigging up a 500-pound tool string with my crew and the nervousness of being responsible of running a $2 million exploration job in an offshore oil platform in Africa.
There are many other special tools, including stone gouges, drills, toothed hammers (known as bushhammers or bouchardes), and, often used today, power-driven pneumatic tools, for pounding away the surface of the stone.
Are you trying to keep ten pounds of tools in a nine pound bag?
On board had been 650 pounds of tools and spare parts, about 300 pounds of clothing and 1,600 pounds of food, most of it freeze-dried.
A hammer, for example, is a great tool for pounding nails, but not so good for cutting wood or screwing in screws.
Indeed, at Bouri, Ethiopia, mammalian bones that were cut and pounded by stone tools occur in 2.5-million-year-old sediments contemporaneous with those yielding A. garhi.
When the Atlantis, commanded by Scott D. Altman, shipped off from Cape Canaveral, in addition to seven astronauts and thousands of pounds of tools and replacement instruments, it carried a special 575-pound Imax camera that recorded the action, including Dr. Massimino's cosmic yank, in 3-D.
These Olmec monuments were generally carved in the round with great technical prowess, even though the only methods available were pounding and pecking with stone tools.
