Ever since I visited Lejre in Denmark as a child, I’ve been fascinated by experimental archeology sites and the possibility they offer to relive the distant past.
In Lejre, I would be assigned dress, tools and a house from respectively the Stone Age, Iron age, the Viking age, or the 1800. I’d prefer the Stone or Iron Age.
I’m currently planning to try and participate a couple days, maybe a week, in Lejre. I’ve sent in an application and I hope they accept it. Maybe I can think up some botanical experiments, see what seeds could be a vialble part of the Iron Age families diet or something. They prefer it if whole families sign up, but my husband’s wool allergy makes that impossible. Living for a week in a smokey barn on dirty straw with livestock below, while being dressed in coarse homespun wool would probably kill him.
One thing is certain: when I come back from holiday, I will be thrilled by the luxuries civilisation has to offer.
I really hope this happens this year. Has any other Doper done such a thing? How was it?
I was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism for several years. The degree to which some people work to actually recreate certain aspects of the Middle Ages is impressive, especially in manufacturing arms and armor.
I was a historic site guide for the Minnesota Historical Society for several years as well. We did early 19th century living history at old Fort Snelling. Research into the period never stopped, and a great deal of knowledge was needed to reproduce the military and domestic life of the period accurately.
snicker
Back when I raised sheep, I did a ‘sheep to shawl’ project that included digging and preparing clay from our clay bank, chopping down a tree [before it fell on the house] and firing some pottery, shearing the sheep, taking some saved fat [from the tail if you must know] and ashes from the grill we cooked Opal [the lamb] on to make soap, scouring the wool, carding, spinning with a drop spindle [carven twig and a fired clay drop weight we also made while doing the pottery] and weaving it on a drop weighted loom we made from wood harvested from our woods.
I also have experience dying with plant matter harvested [onion skins mordanted with vinegar and salt with a piece of iron scrounged from a friends forge makes a nice mustardy yellow], I can use a lucet loom, mrAru is actually at this moment doing some bone carving for a replacement set of toggles for a coat he made.
Yups, some of us SCAdians could be dropped back into the dark ages and get along more or less just fine [language barrier for most of us, though I do know at least 3 who speak Icelandic]
Not personally, but my old boss and some of her cohort shortly before I joined her field crew.
Her research specialty is proto-Pawnee sites on the Republican river. Long debated among archaeologists who study Amerindian sites is whether the ubiquitous rodent bones are inclusions from rodent activity, or indicative of rodents being a part of the diet.
So they gutted some mice and rats, roasted them over a campfire, and ate them whole. Then every participant collected her/his excreta, sifted the bones out, and subjected them to microscopic analysis. The point, if not obvious, was to discover what effects travel through a human digestive tract left on the bones, and to contrast that data with bones from rodents who died and decomposed without human intervention.
I believe they concluded that most of the rodent bones did indeed result from humans eating rodents.
Believe me (a former archy), archys are weird people. Mad dogs and Englishmen would tell them to get the fuck out of the sun, the stupid gits.
Sure, I’ve done living history . . . but not for a week at a time! I used to dress up in 1890’s farm clothes and help to interpret a historic farm that showed what life used to be like in my home area before suburbanization.
But my shift only lasted four hours. That was the right amount of living history for me!
Not me, but my sister. She interned at Kampsville, IL’s dig site teaching kids archaeology and also teaching some ancient skills as well: flint-knapping, burning/carving out canoes, growing maize, weaving, pottery, etc.
She always joked that if future archaeologists ever dug at that site, they’d be confused at the sudden decline in technology and wonder what had happened to the population to make them that way.
They prefer it if whole families sign up, but my husband’s wool allergy makes that impossible. Living for a week in a smokey barn on dirty straw with livestock below, while being dressed in coarse homespun wool would probably kill him.