nigelswift
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Re: spare time
Apr 20, 2004, 10:14
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Because wood rots, and stone doesn't, isn't there a danger that speculation is based on apparent evidence that's misleading?
I mean, yes stone began to be used at some point in different places but if it was a follow-on from timber it could signal merely the spread of a new technical idea, a new and better way of doing things rather than a change to pastoralism or changes in mindsets. Better ways of doing things can be embraced by all cultures once the idea takes hold without it necessarily being evidence that the culture has changed.
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fitzcoraldo
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Re: Sudden thought.
Apr 20, 2004, 10:28
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Hi Tom
The coastline has altered radically in the last 10000yrs.
Around 9000BC you could walk from the north east of England to Denmark.
If you draw a line from the Tees to the north of Denmark and from the Isle of Wight to Calais you'll have a very rough guide to the points where the British coastline was joined to mainland Europe. Also with sea levels being lower than they are today, much of the coastline was a lot further out than today. By around 7000BC the land bridge had deteriorated into marsh and the channel had been breached but it would still be possible to cross to Europe in a small boat, with a couple of dry- land stops on the way. By around 5000BC the coastline pretty much resembled what it is today apart from a few esturies still being marshlands.
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FourWinds
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Re: Fields Recordings From The Sea
Apr 20, 2004, 10:31
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But the lifestyle of the modern Bushman is rather different these days:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0102/feature6/
using bitumen from car tyres? At one time the gum for a glue needed to be collected/extracted. Now Bushmen (proper name 'San' ? or is that a different group?) have metal knives that don't wear out. Before they would have had to find good stone and make blades. They keep herds these days, probably have in a Lapp-style way that I mentioned earlier. But today they have barbed wire to keep them under control while stationery - no more building fences when they stop.
So much more is available now that figures of any modern society can not possibly reflect a 'similar' society of 5000 years ago.
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fitzcoraldo
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time, tide & the domestic idyll
Apr 20, 2004, 11:20
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A stone blade can be created in a matter in minutes and these folk knew where to find the good stone. A skin house such the Mount Sandal houses would take no time at all to erect. A weeks worth of roots, berries and firewood can be gathered in an hour or two if you know where to look and as for hunting, the hunters follow the herds, sites such as Starr Carr show that the hunters didn't go out willy-nilly chasing-down animals, they camped beside the watering sites and allowed the animals to come to them. One decent kill could feed a family for a couple of weeks plus provide skins and bone tools.
Domestic dogs and a decent thicket of gorse would have provided protection from the beasties.
Our nomadic ancestors were in-tune with the landscape and would have had the business of living finely tuned, this way of life had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We cannot directly transpose the lives of modern hunter gatherers onto those of our ancestors but we can make a decent guess using both anthropolgical and archaeological evidence.
I liked the description of smoking hydrax droppings in a pipe - good shit man ! (-:
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TomBo
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Re: Sudden thought.
Apr 20, 2004, 15:10
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now then gadgie
thanks for that, very informative. fuck but things have changed - I love the idea of walking from here to Denmark!
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TomBo
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Re: time, tide & the domestic idyll
Apr 20, 2004, 15:16
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"A weeks worth of roots, berries and firewood can be gathered in an hour or two if you know where to look."
I gotta disagree on this one. Speaking as someone who does gather firewood from the local woods, I can assure you that no matter how thick on the ground the wood is, there's no way you could gather a week's worth in an hour or two, never mind with roots and berries into the bargain. It takes a lot of wood to keep a fire burning even for one night - wood burns much quicker than coal, at any rate
I know they didn't have coal :) - or did they?
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/21664
I've never foraged for food, but I know someone who's done quite a bit of it. There <i>is</i> plentiful food to be had in some areas, but again, you couldn't possibly gather a week's worth in an hour or two. It comes in such small quantities that I think it more likely that there was a fairly constant search for food going on, in much the same way as birds or rabbits are constantly on the look out for something to eat. Of course, there was much more forest back then, and this would have made finding food easier.
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TomBo
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Re: Fields Recordings From The Sea
Apr 20, 2004, 15:22
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With the greatest of respect...
The setting up of your barbecue on your neighbour's lawn proves nothing about how hunter-gatherers would behave. Our instincts have been conditioned by so many years of agriculture that it's simply impossible to reason backwards like that.
And anyway, my neighbour regularly sets up his barbecue on my lawn (to say nothing of employing builders to trample it into oblivion) and I don't behave at all violently towards him. Although I suppose I do sometimes use music as a weapon on them when I need privacy. Beside the point, though!
You'll have to come up with better proof than this if you hope to make a more convincing argument than the one that's based on the scientific observation of chimps that FW mentions! ;)
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FourWinds
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Re: time, tide & the domestic idyll
Apr 20, 2004, 15:56
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"Of course, there was much more forest back then, and this would have made finding food easier."
And more dangerous! A proportion of the hunting group would have had to be on the lookout for big cats, bears and wolves fans.
How long does it take you to pick a couple of tubs of blackberries? A couple of hours? That's great if you can preserve them, but you can't gather a week's worth of berries and keep them fresh.
Wood collecting is very time consuming. You need big logs to keep a fire burning for a long time. Dead wood will burn too fast so you have to fell trees, chop them up and drag them back to camp. As Tombo says a big camp fire will burn a lot of wood in one evening. I think the figures are more likely to be 12 hours per day ...
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fitzcoraldo
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Re: time, tide & the domestic idyll
Apr 20, 2004, 16:23
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One solution to finding wood is a rolling program of ringbarking trees to enable a steady source of wood throughout the year. There would also have been opportunities to obtain storm-wood from the local rivers and even from beaver dams.
From the archaeology we can see that nuts were popular but a lot of the diet would presumably have been meat.
If time is spent between the summer camp and the winter camp then folk would have know the location of the best food larders. The folk at Star Carr also took fish and wildfowl. So I still don't think that they would have spent hours foraging for fruit & veg especially when meat was so plentiful & relatively easy to obtain.
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fitzcoraldo
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Forget Atkins
Apr 20, 2004, 16:41
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Go Palaeolithic
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020325/020325-2.html
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