# Ancient Web: Storm's Stone Age Skills Became a Memorial Workshop Stone Age Skills preserves the writing and practical experiments of wilderness educator Storm, who died in 2008, through a site maintained and reorganized by Walter Muma. 2026-10-14 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Storm's Stone Age Skills Became a Memorial Workshop](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). Stone Age Skills is a personal workshop that became a memorial. Its author Storm died in February 2008, but the writing about fire, stone, mushrooms, and plants did not have to disappear with him. [Visit Stone Age Skills](https://stoneageskills.com/index.html). The homepage identifies Storm's life dates as 1969–2008 and says Walter Muma of Wildwood Survival kept the website online after his death. In October 2011 Muma reorganized it so that more of Storm's previously unpublished work could appear. The opening message describes sharing lessons with some fourteen thousand people over years of teaching; that is the author's own account, not an independently audited attendance figure. The [articles directory](https://stoneageskills.com/articles/index.html) moves from hand-drill and bow-drill firemaking to fungi, shell containers, stone blades, yucca cordage, horsetail flutes, and slings. One essay concerns making a drill tip from quartz crystal; another documents what did not work when trying to burn a hollow wooden vessel. ## The mistakes are part of the collection Storm was not only recreating old tools from diagrams. His [quartz-tipped drill experiment](https://stoneageskills.com/articles/quartztippedhanddrill.html) begins with crystals collected from a California pegmatite outcrop and explains why he wanted to make holes in bone needles and shell ornaments without modern micro-drills. He names the materials and shows the sequence of testing, even where he lacked experience. His extensive hand-drill fire research, including hundreds of wood combinations, has its own finished Ancient Web article. The broader site offers a different subject: the complete teaching identity surrounding those particular experiments. The [resume retained by Muma](https://stoneageskills.com/articles/resume.html) is especially valuable. It mentions outdoor-science education, forestry work, fisheries observation, field experiments, and publication in venues such as *The Bulletin of Primitive Technology* and *Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming*. The archive also preserves Storm's recommendations to other makers and specialist forums. Some techniques described here involve fire, cutting tools, and identifying wild organisms; preservation of an article does not certify every procedure as safe to reproduce. The point is to retain the work and its maker's voice. That distinction turns this site into something more than a survival-skills directory. It is an example of one webmaster keeping another person's workshop open after the teacher can no longer answer the mail. [Explore Storm's collected articles](https://stoneageskills.com/articles/index.html) and [the preserved biography](https://stoneageskills.com/articles/resume.html). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#memorial](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/memorial/), [#outdoors](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/outdoors/), [#primitiveskills](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/primitiveskills/), [#personalarchives](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/personalarchives/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-storms-stone-age-skills-became-a-memorial-workshop/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-14T15:13:21+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:04:39.654071+00:00 Description: A memorial website retains its author's hand-made tools, outdoor experiments, wild food essays, and first-person naturalist voice.