Last week as part of the Bank Holiday weekend open day at
the MAA [1]
in Cambridge, I spent a couple of extremely interesting, although unfortunately
brief, hours doing some Experimental Archaeology.
Experimental Archaeology is where archaeologists get to have
all the fun (I say this about everything, I realise, but I do just really love
archaeology). It’s where archaeologists recreate items, methods, and techniques
used in the past in order to understand them more. This shouldn’t be confused
with historical re-enactment, or reconstruction.
Experimental Archaeology can range through any number of
activities. You can re-create an adze based on archaeological examples, and use
it to destroy your enemies chop down trees. The pattern of wear this
creates on the blade, and the stress lines through the timber can then be
compared to archaeological examples, to see if they match – if they do it’s a
fairly safe assumption that the technology that’s been recreated is extremely
similar to the ones used in the past.
This type of archaeology is most useful for prehistory when
we don’t have written records detailing how people lived. Sometimes the only
way to access that distant past is to try to recreate it, and see if the
results are the same, or if our theories are even possible! It’s all well and
good theorising about possible techniques, but completely useless to try them
out and find that they are completely unviable or impractical.
At the museum last week they were attempting to understand
how Ice Age people would have used animals to create clothing. This involved
killing and skinning a muntjac deer, before removing the fat from the skin with
flint, treating it with egg yolk (or the animal’s own brains!), and finally
smoking the skin with oak, which contains aldehydes that seal the skin to
prevent moisture from damaging and rotting it. And there you have it – a warm
and cosy Ice Age cloak. Easy.
Two (fairly) recent projects are close to my own heart (and
interests!):
1) Bronze Age Boat made in Falmouth
Using only tools and materials that would
have been available in the Bronze Age, a team of archaeologists, boat-builders,
and interested volunteers, have built a sea-worthy boat, which was launched
earlier this year.
This was a hugely ambitious project, and it
was so nice to see the launch head off without sinking! For more information,
see their Facebook page.
2) Earthwork in Wiltshire
Someone built a hillfort!! This
is a project at Overton Down in Wiltshire [2],
first created in 1960 when an earthwork was constructed in order to understand
site formation (both in the original instance, and how similar ancient sites
degraded into the remains we have left today). The project is designed to last
128 years in total.
From the above image you can see
that the structure of the earthwork decayed very quickly at first, rapidly
reaching a state similar to many ancient earthworks in our landscape today –
suggesting that such prehistoric sites reached their current conditions fairly
soon after abandonment, and have existed in stasis ever since.
From these few quick examples it’s clear that the
possibilities of Experimental Archaeology are endless and exciting, and I look
forward to seeing what else archaeologists come up with (and the rest of the
Overton Down project, if I live that long!).
[1] Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – great museum,
definitely worth a visit.
[2] Jewell, P. A. (ed.) 1963, The
Experimental Earthwork on Overton Down, Wiltshire, 1960 (British
Association for the Advancement of Science).
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