| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| jema |
If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?Whilst in Wales we went to the re-constructive site:Castell Henllys Now I will be the first to admit I am almost as ignorant as the average tourist, though not as ignorant as the guy who thought these people everyday life was a struggle to survive. But as I wandered round these massive tall structures that were "furnished" as to reflect how people apparently lived, I found three questions to ask the guide.. 1) Wouldn't they have had some sort of flaps for ventilation to clear the cooking smoke? The guy said he did want to try that. 2) Wouldn't they have made far more use of the vertical space? One platform in one Roundhouse hardly makes sense to me. I got a probably. 3) Last but not least, I looked at the uneven unpleasant mud floor and said, if these blasted houses last 20-30 years then surely they would have done something a bit more decent underfoot. Here I got that they used polished red clay, but our modern shoes would mess it up 
Here I really gave up on asking any more, as if the expedients of either sealing off a section, asking people to remove their shoes, or accepting a bit of wear and tear is too complicated, then how much credence can you give any of it? The visitor comes away thinking the people there lived a much tougher cruder life style than I would imagine they did 
Wouldn't it be so much more interesting to see just how decent these structures (which are impressive in their shells) could have been made to live in, as the people would have undoubtedly done. |
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| Chez |
Basically, if you ask any group of archaeologist to interpret any given data-set, they will each come up with at least three scenarios which contradict not only each other but themselves.
Harold Mytum, who was one of the excavation team at Castell Henllys when I was at York in the late 1980's, had an excellent story about horse testicles in a tree to illustrate this; which I will tell you in person when we next meet if you remember to ask me. It's the reason I gave up archaeology, really. The contradictions, not the testicles. |
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| jema |
My thought was that with this sort of reconstruction, loads of things are not likely to be in the evidence. e.g. you can figure out if people had glass as glass will be found, you cannot figure out if they had the basic wit to put a flap in a roof or line a floor as unless someone has recorded the fact the evidence will not survive.
So why not in this sort of reconstruction just give credit to basic human resourcefulness? |
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| Cathryn |
Those archaelogical programmes on telly annoy the hell out of because they seem to make big unaccredited or unacknowledged assumptions about the way people lived. | ||||||
| Chez |
If you find glass, you know they did use glass - but if you *don't* find any, you can't assume that they didn't. Floor linings tend to survive, because the structures collapse over them. I think that a lot of reconstructions aren't actually done by archaeologists, per se - more people interested in getting tourists in, and therefore more cavalier with their evidence and the scrupulousness of their reconstruction. English Heritage are a case in point - they (in the past at least) tend to twiddle to make things look like 'how they think they should'. I'd rather your chappie with an honest 'don't know', tbh. But I can see where you're coming from. |
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| JB |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
Two things spring to mind ... Traditional hebridean crofts didn't use ventilation. The smoke trapped inside helped to dry the roofs and crofts in general. When ventilation was added the building were never completely dry and were far unhealthier (unhealthier even than sitting in a closed box full of smoke from a peat fire) Watching 'Tribal wives' recently one of the programmes was in a masai community and their traditional hut also had no ventilation and a fire in the middle of the hut which burnt constantly. |
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| jema |
I agree you cannot strictly assume anything, but in this case I think you can be reasonably sure on the glass question as there is no shortage of contemporary finds and so it seems pretty unlikely that glass would not have been found, if not at that site but others.
The flooring they do have evidence of, but they choose not to reconstruct it for the lame reason I gave. I guessed wrongly according to you that such evidence might be more perishable. |
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| jema |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
fair enough, shame the guy didn't know that. |
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| Chez |
I *think* I'm right - I'm a bit rusty ... and of course it depends on whether the site was disturbed or not afterwards. And on the soil type, whether it's water logged or not, all that stuff. The thing I find frustrating is that all of those tiny little things get put in to the detailed dig report; but not necessarily extrapolated from for purposes of reconstruction. |
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| Chez |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
No excuse for poor research if it's your subject area, though. |
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| JB |
And sometimes a carefully constructed lie can be more useful than an accurate but potentially confusing truth. Presenting a mediaeval community as having no medicines and starving over the winter probably educates most people more than trying to explain that herbal remedies are medicines but not quite in the way we would understand and yes they could eat over winter but there are limits to the preservation of food by salting and smoking; the latter might be more accurate but that's no use if the punter is just confused at the end of it. The best of these that I have seen are those where, however accurate the reconstruction has been, the guide really knows their stuff and can either give you the 'history for beginners' view or the undergraduate introduction according to what you the punter would best appreciate. |
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| Behemoth |
Is there anything in there not being anyone with the necessary skills to provide an accurate reconstruction? | ||||||
| cab |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
And the thatch caught and filtered a lot of the tar from burning peat, thus when the thatch was later spread on the land when it was replaced it made for an excellent pest killer. If the building isn't air tight, you can achieve a certain amount of ventilation through design, and I should think that a roundhouse design would be ideal in some ways to capture and using smoke high up (thus preserving goods hung above and providing thatch treated as mentioned for use as fertiliser/mulch). If you get a chance, there are 'black houses' preserved/reconstructed from earlier in the 20th century, and also some iron age (if memory serves) reconstructions on Lewis. The similarities in construction and use are very interesting, and tie in well from talking with old timers on the Island.
Quite so; the idea that a fire must always necessitate ventilation above is I think a mistake. That isn't to say that sometimes archaeological reconstructions don't take some liberties, I've seen some dubious ones and some that seemed very good (and having a better half who studied archaeology to masters level, I get a pretty well informed opinion to go with my own practical interpretations). |
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| vegplot |
Very few people realise that churches until Cromwellian and latterly Victorian times were highly decorated and white washed.
One thing which taught me the value of ignore a lot of reconstruction was the large number of abandoned stone building in this part of the world. You see some with just bare stone walls and you naturally assume that's how it was when they were lived in. Then you come across another, of similar age, in not such a bad state of decay and you see detailed architraving, paneling, high quality plaster work and every you'd associate with a modern house. |
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| vegplot |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
A good example of this was at St. Fagans where they have a roundhouse and a fire burning in the middle. The smoke was dense but only above the level of the doors where it filtered through the thatch. From the outside the thatch looked like it was smouldering all over. The air below the smoke level was completely clear. The two doors ways, I'm sure, we're placed in the way they were for this very reason. Very clever and simple design which is often misunderstood or ignored. Our ancestors were not ignorant people. |
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| JB |
Skills shortage 'threatens' heritage sites |
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| Rob R |
Re: If archaeological reconstructions are miseading?
Using a modern mind to interpret old ideas is always difficult because we have so much knowledge that we don't conciously use to explain things but subconciously we are making huge assumptions about what they would know/think. To me point one & point two cancel eachother out, as you are assuming that they weren't using that space because there is no evidence to suggest they had a modern day lay out such as a second platform (ie no associated post holes). A lack of something doesn't really suggest a lack of use & it might be even more misleading for us to make that suggestion than it is to leave it out. I rather think the upwards space would be full in the winter, when Tesco's was shut. Equally there are enough completely stupid things that our modern minds, despite us knowing far more about what is good & bad for us, decide are good things to do because our values & priorities are so different. And reading this last paragraph I realised that Downsizer itself exists because of this. |
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| jema |
Except they said they did have evidence of better flooring they just chose not to portray that, and they did show a platform implying there would have been "floors" to some degree. | ||||||
| Rob R |
Archaeology is a bit like any modern science- it's only as accurate as the evidence available at the time & the way that evidence is used. I don't know much about the floor surface of iron age houses but I imagine it would take the daily reliving within the social structure of the time to really make it approach accuracy & quite difficult to recontruct & maintain, even on a small sectioned off area, in such a short space of time. Construct & renew is such a modern concept that we have become so used to that it's very difficult to imagine the continual maintenance that I would imagine you encountered all those years ago. I think their world would be far more dynamic than we can even contemplate & trying to pin that down to a single moment in time & preserve that as well as accomodating the modern needs can't be at all easy- especially in a discipline based so much on theory & with so little agreement amongst peers.
To address the original question, I think it is inevitable that any reconstruction will be misleading, not just to the 2000+ years past but also to the 10 into the future. Archaeology seems to be as much a journey into the mind as the past, and in that respect it seems to have worked. 
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| sally_in_wales |
Any experimental reconstruction will always be a work in progress. Sometimes, what it best shows is that the thinking of the archaeologists at the time a structure was reconstructed is quite simply not workable. A good reconstructed site should raise far more questions than it can ever answer, if its doing its job properly people should then go away saying 'that bit clearly doesnt work/give what we find in the excavations/keep you dry/etc etc' and then try to work out a reasonable hypothesis as to how the evidence should be interpreted next time round.
However, a major spanner in the works for the vast majority of reconstructed sites that can be visited by tourists is that whilst the original design may have been drawn up by archaeologists working from the site reports, the site itself is almost always run by the tourism bit of the local council or equivalent, with a completely different agenda and different resources and limitations. The wear and tear pattern of day visitors is also very different to the wear and tear patterns of a small group of people in residence, we had this problem at the medieval village Gareth works at, the evidence is of beaten earth floors that had settled into distinct wear areas, the reality is that hundreds of visitors traipsing through on a set route wears deep tracks in the floor that fill up with mud the second it rains, causing knock on damage to the floor. Re the roundhouse roofs and floors, what most reconstructions have shown is thet the whole cone will fill up with smoke to the level of the doors and will slowly and steadily filter out through the thatch. Inside, you sit below this smoke 'roof', and having no holes in the thatch means that the fire burns consistently no matter what the wind is doing outside and no rain gets in. The percolating smoke increases the life of the thatch, keeps you bug free, and plausibly works well as a storage area for smoked and wrapped meats. Putting an extra floor into this area isnt good as the solid smoke layer makes it impractical for anything much. You do end up with a smoke free living area below though that is really snug on a cold night. Most reconstructions err very hard on the side of caution re thinking 'they must have thought of this'. We're certain people were imaginative, inventive and adaptable, but a reconstructed site is meant to show mostly things that we are fairly certain we have evidence for, being experimentally put into use to see what happens. There is always a big problem area in that we just arent people from then, and we will never have all the pieces of the jigsaw. As long as the sites are honest enough to keep saying 'this is a current best guess and we know there will be things wrong' and people are still going away saying 'I want to find out more about how x or y worked at that date', they are doing their job just fine pending a multi million pound research and reconstruction maintenance project, which would be lovely, but I've never yet been to a reconstructed site that has adequate funding to resolve the problems that arise from the second after the buildings go into use. |
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| 12Bore |
Sorry, I just came across this thread.....horse testicles?.......tree?
C'mon, you can't possibly leave it like that!! 
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| vegplot |
Reconstructions are also often just a snap shot of an often narrow period in history which can't possibly emulate the dynamics of everyday life, not unless you actually set up a community to try and relive times past. I can't see that working particularly well unless the separation remove all modern knowledge and only assimilates knowledge of the time you are trying to recreate, of which we are often ignorant. | ||||||
| dpack |
there is a range from as good as known evidence can produce to capn bob's pirate village
the sophisication of bronze age housing is seen at scara brae where the locals had no trees so used stone without assuming too much the high space would be where i keep things dry .no hole works with thatch ,in tents etc with a non permiable roof a hole at the top and an offset fire is ok if the door flap is arranged with wind in mind , hot stone heating from an external fire is better (if you dont have a stove and chimney ) |
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| GENT |
Phew, thankyou sally! i was waiting for your you! I feel that i have been waiting for a thread just for us! 
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| Rob R |
It would be an interesting project to reconstruct such a home and keep it authentically, quite impossible, most likely, in modern times but interesting none the less. I wasn't volunteering, by the way | ||||||
| milkmaid |
there is ventilation in the iron age house it's a small hole in the roof covered over with a small piece of thatch ,it wasn't as smoky as some of the houses that i have visited
one of our favorite places to take freinds when they come they are always impressed with the fact you walk into a black hole opening in the side of a buried round house and as your eyes get used to it you can read in there ,not many vistors ,a lady spends most of here summers there ,she says it's her second home there are some aguements about, that there is a back room north facing and archaeologists say that it is a work room it's much more likely to be a store room there is a cold shelf as well  and it's very dark much to dark to work in ,they do say it's to big for a food store but remembering how much food and herbs medical and eatting it would take to get a family though the winter ,it would have to be fairly big
the roof is high ,and there is a shelf high up in the roof ,they think younger people or food again was stored there with the smoke rising again to perserve the food slept up there with older people sleeping by the fire ,smoked muttom over the fire ,later on there wasn't any at all ,hebrides furniture is very low as the smoke rises a bit and you sat under it ,that's what we were told somewhere else
beach is great to ,we've been about 10 times so far and never tire of it ,haven't been this year as not many vistors and it's quite a way from us ,the constuction is really clever as well 
you've also got to remember my nieghbour still remembers smoking mutton and sea food over the fire at home ,and her mother walking to the stream setting a fire by the stream and drying sheets spread cross across the heather on the moor,she hated butter making and it was wrapped in dock leaves ,although the knowledge is starting to be lost ,her husband also says that you always know when there were visitors as you would hear the clicking of knitting needles from outside as no time was wasted,they also bled cows to make black pudding instead of killing them , |
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| dpack |
umm proper
im not sure 67 would cooperate for pud |