Hey Blog! It’s another archaeological post. Yes, another. But this time, it’s not about digging, but about experimental archaeology!
Experimental archaeology is, by definition, experimenting to find out how archaeology was made – how something was done in the past. Say I find a mysterious lump of metal, clean it, examine it, and still can’t figure out how exactly it was made; I need to go to an experimental archaeologist for them to test different ways of making it to discover the method that produces the most similar result. I mean, I’d probably do that myself but you get the idea. Some experimental archaeology is done using both written and unearthed evidence, some uses the information from what we’ve dug up alone. It is especially useful if you want to understand how people lived, as if you realise they need to spend hours making one small decoration, you can deduce they have a lot of free time, and so the other necessities mush be able to be done faster.
The reason I can tell you more about this now is because the weekend before last, I was on an experimental archaeology camp. With the Scouts. Yes, this is another post about Derbyshire Scout Archaeology, and again, I attended as a Young Leader. One difference between this time and last is that we were all camping overnight! The plan was originally to stay in tents, in the field, but due to heavy rain risk (it did rain, but not heavily) the plan was changed last minute to sleep in the farmhouse, and run all the activities under a roof. This was perhaps helpful, as it would have been rather damp outside, and while flintknapping and string making can be done in the rain, it’s harder to do cooking or discuss authentic, 80 year old guns.
There were five activities for the Scouts to partake in: flintknapping, bushcraft, ancient cooking, Vikings, and WWII. It seems like the premise of the camp went along the lines of “make the tool, attach the tool, hunt, cook, bury your dead and then become advanced and blow people up”. For flintknapping, we had engaged the fantastic Dr. James Dilley, who I have mentioned previously (see Breaking Rocks – Precisely! from two or three years ago) and knows an enormous amount about the prehistoric. He is expert at most things through building a log boat, to making impressive, beautiful, fully functional hand axes, and attempting to pass on this knowledge to Scouts who had probably never even considered how flint tools were made; which is code for we were very lucky to get him to help.
Bushcraft was being run by a couple of members of the local Scout Bushcraft team, who had arranged to show some Scouts how to make cordage. By the second day, I had a piece in excess of 6 ft. long, and hadn’t even been working on it for most of the time. Ancient Cooking was Mum’s activity; I knew about it from what she’d been practicing at home: the Scouts were making flatbreads after grinding their own flour (actually, none of them ground enough to make anything out of it, but they had a practice with the quern) and then eating them to check if they had made them well.
Vikings was an activity run by some University students, who wanted to help and were very knowledgeable about Vikings, runes, and how people lived in that era. The WWII experience was an impressive collection of real equipment from the Second World War, containing everything from camouflage cloth to a bomb disposal kit, from unopened bandages to Bren guns. While we wouldn’t have been allowed to use it if it hadn’t been decommissioned, I’m not sure that some of it couldn’t be recommissioned, it was that authentic! All we lacked was a map table, and then the room would have looked like HQ – except for the half-dozen Scouts who certainly wouldn’t have been allowed in 80 years ago!
I had a good time Young Leadering, and I think the Scouts had a great time too. I got to spend an entire weekend hitting rocks with the experts and making a length of string, alongside guiding young people through experimental archaeology. And just by stepping in to help a few stuck Scouts, somehow managed to impress the Bushcraft team, so there may be more opportunities on my way in future. I don’t know yet. I have no doubt I’ll do some more archaeology in the future, so I will be keeping the flints in that box on the windowsill, and the trowel still in my drawer, waiting to get back to digging stuff up or testing new theories – whichever one comes next!