Blogging Archaeology – where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go?

Posted on 23/03/2014 by Katy

The final month in Doug’s archaeology blogging carnival, the final question to answer. Doug asks,

“where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go? I leave it up to you to choose between reflecting on you and your blog personally or all of archaeology blogging/bloggers or both. Tells us your goals for blogging. Or if you have none why that is? Tell us the direction that you hope blogging takes in archaeology.”

So this is maybe the last off-topic post that I shall write on this blog. It’s been great fun to be involved and it’s helped me to find new bloggers to follow. At the moment the main audience for my blog is me myself as I work out what blogging is all about; but I am sure that Mike Pitts has it right when he blogged about the need for specialists in general and archaeologists in particular to use vehicles such as blogs to reach out to wider audiences. He writes,

“For the professional archaeologist, a blog or website can be approached in the same spirit as an academic publication – care taken with grammar, style, facts and illustrations will repay itself. The chief difference between a journal article and a blog need be no more than reach, between a readership of a hundred or so and millions.”

That’s where I would like not only mine but also other heritage-focused blogging to be going – to communicate with wide-ranging audiences. Not necessarily each blog, because some will remain specialist and targeted by necessity; but taken together, to be in touch with as many different people as possible.

This conviction led me to take a broad look at the blogs that I am currently following; 21 blogs appearing in my WordPress Reader, one I pick up through RSS and two via e-mail. Why do I follow them and what can I learn from them? Where are they going? Here are a few observations based on the 21 blogs in my Reader.

The blogs I follow – general classes of author type.

Seven of the blogs are written by researchers at various stages of an academic career – everything from doctoral researcher to professor. Of the three museums, two are regional and one international in scope (some of the other museums that interest me do not blog (yet), but I stay in touch via other social media). “Heritage body” = a team within a national charity, a government agency and a conference whilst “Historic Environment commentator” comprises independent individuals or organisations. “Materials/craft” speaks for itself. In general I follow these blogs to be informed; to be educated; to keep up to date and in touch. I like learning from posts that extended my limited knowledge in various areas of archaeology/history theory and practice that aren’t my specialism; getting news about research progress, exhibitions, field projects, upcoming activities and events; finding out about inter-disciplinary research and interesting collaborative projects; exploring mixed-media posts that illustrate craft and manufacturing skills.

Here’s what I don’t like – distracting moving images on the page, too many exclamation marks, delivery that is just too “matey”, not being able to access all my blogs in one place [maybe I can display them all in the WordPress Reader, but I just don’t know how – any advice?]. Most of all I dislike (a) inaccessibility (my county Historic Environment Record and Archive Centre has a blog on the council website, it has great content but no “follow” or RSS button so the only way to find out what’s new is to remember to visit the website or follow links from the monthly newsletter – hopeless); and (b) infrequency. Whilst I don’t want to use up all my time reading blog posts and not writing my own, it is frustrating to find an interesting blogger and then never hear from them. This chart shows how many posts each of my 21 bloggers has published in the current quarter (we’re not quite at the end of March, because I want to fit this into the blogging carnival, so the figures will have changed slightly by the end of this month):

The frequency of blog posts published by the blogs I follow, for January, February and 1-23 March 2014.

Having counted numbers of posts for this quarter and not a whole year, I can’t tell if my figures represent any seasonality in posting volume. Nevertheless, the two most prolific bloggers, numbers 20 and 19, are both from the “Historic Environment commentator” class. These two blogs’ remit is advocacy for the historic environment, and are run by independent groups who are concerned to raise awareness of threats to archaeology, both in the field and in museum collections around the world, and historic landscapes. No surprise that these are very active blogs.

In contrast, four of the bloggers I follow haven’t posted yet in 2014; yet they have good past content. Blog 8 is the conference; this convenes in early January each year, so naturally it’s not posted in February or March. What’s more surprising is that the museums, blogs 2, 5 and 3, are not more prolific. Number 3 is the British Museum – with so many departments and projects I would have thought blogging might have a higher profile for outreach and communication purposes? Likewise blogs 9 and 11; these belong to national organisations. Are they worried about information-overload for their followers; or do they experience other constraints in their use of social media?

I have chosen to follow these bloggers – and I want their content – so I have to assume that my followers also want my content. Lesson learned – keep posting!

I also looked at the each blog’s number of followers. The figures come from the summary that the WordPress Reader gives when you select one of your followed blogs. These numbers are often different when you look at the counters that bloggers have on their pages, so I guess WordPress is only counting WordPress followers and not all followers using all platforms?

The number of followers that WordPress indicates for the blogs that I follow.

First, we must bear in mind that I have taken no account of how long these blogs have existed. It is reasonable to assume that longer-lived blogs are more likely to have more followers, whilst new bloggers have yet to attract their audience. Secondly, my figures are based on the WordPress count only.

Nevertheless, the run-away winner is the British Museum with more than 6000 followers. The next nearest, yet not that near with under 2000, is a “Historic Environment commentator” – one whose face and name are familiar from the TV, who writes entertainingly about archaeology and other topics with equal fluency, and who is passionate about the subject. Blog 10 is written by an academic, high profile in their own circle, whose cross-disciplinary research must draw in readers from a range of subject areas. Everyone else comes in below 500 followers. Working backwards on the X axis from blog 7 to 17 we have: an academic; a heritage body; four historic environment commentators; three academics.

The point that I am trying to make here is that my blogs with the most followers (blog 3 followed by blog 14) have equally high-profile authors – one of the most famous museums in the world, and (arguably) one of the most famous living archaeologists, at least in Britain. Discounting the conference for the moment because it is a special case, the two other organisations in my “Heritage Body” category – both national, well-established and high profile – should I think expect to have much bigger followings. Their blog content is (mostly) good. Perhaps the online audience demographic differs from their huge offline audience? Or perhaps they suffer from their organisations having multiple blogs, disproportionally promoted? Where do they think they are going with blogging?

If I want to connect with a bigger audience – whether people who already go to pains to pursue their interests, or who are trying to find their way in – I need to think about how they will find me. Lesson learned – get internet-savvy and continue to make connections!

To round off, I want to return to something that Mike Pitts wrote in December 2013 (see the link above to his “Talking Archaeology” blogpost). Mike is an experienced archaeologist, journalist, and editor of popular archaeology magazine British Archaeology. He agrees that there are “undoubtedly important digital opportunities that archaeologists can take greater advantage of”. He comments on the flexibility that blogs offer, how they can be used in different ways for different ends (excavation diary, topic-focused commentary etc). But most of all he stresses that “what matters most is not the medium but the message. In an unpredictable and fast changing media world, one of the few true constants is the value of content.”

Mike’s blog is full of great content, his ongoing coverage of the Richard III story being a case in point. “Heritage bloggers” have great content, and we could and should be the best advocates for the historic environment, for research, for museums, for skills; for all the things that we love and are enthusiastic about.

Weird and Wonderful #2

Posted on 09/03/2014 by Katy

At last, some good weather! Finally, I have cut my willow. I wouldn’t normally have left it this late, but it’s been so difficult to get on the ground in this rain. Neither do I have the right space to store too much greenwood; so it’s really important that my raw materials are in tip-top condition to keep, if I’m not going to use them right away.

These considerations bring to mind two issues: good materials; and seasonality.

I grow different varieties of willow, each of which is a basketry type: Salix purpurea “Dicky Meadows”; Salix purpurea “Lancashire Dicks”; Salix triandra “French”; Salix daphnoides “Continental Purple” and Salix alba vitelina “Britzensis”. Here is the first wonderful thing about willow. Many varieties produce great rods for basketry – good for their long, slender, straight rods with strong skin, and with flat, close-growing buds.

In Britain there are eighteen native willow species and twenty-seven interspecific hybrids (Brendell 1985:2). The second wonderful thing about willow is that it is fabulously successful at reproducing. There is widespread hybridisation, it flowers and seeds, and it will “strike”; push a 9″ stick of willow into the ground in early Spring, and it will root and grow for you.

Following on from willow’s strong inclination to expand its tribe is its determination to keep on growing. Cut back some willow, and return next year to see how well it has come on! Be amazed at all the straight rods growing out of the treetop where a branch has fallen away in a storm! I imagine that it would take no more than a season to realise how easy, and how valuable, it is to manage willow to grow really useful products; from basketry rods to fence- and building-sized poles on pollarded trees.

Which brings me to seasonality. It’s time to cut the basketry rods once all the leaves have fallen off. This is usually from November. The rods are then a season old, good and straight with no branching, the buds are small and flat, the leaves have fallen naturally. You can continue to cut over the Winter, until the sap has started to rise again, when the buds on the rods will start to push on. As long as you can keep your harvested rods cool and dry (beware mould and frost), you don’t have to use them right away. They change from “greens” = unseasoned rods, to “browns” = seasoned rods. All it takes is the right amount of soaking and damping when you need them, and you can make baskets with your browns any time of the year.

So if you do want to store your rods, this has an impact on the building space that you need. The right space for storage, the right space for soaking and mellowing, the right space for working (although working space is the least demanding). Which is another way of saying that it was not necessary in the past for life to be entirely governed by the seasons, given planning and preparation.

Last year, however, the lack of frosts meant that my plants still had leaves well into December. Then it seemed that it would never stop raining. If I had cut my rods a few weeks ago, I would have risked loosing the lot to rot in storage. As it is, I was only just in time, as you’ll see from the photos (the buds, especially towards the tips, were starting to sprout). The photos also suggest another wonderful thing about willow, the beautiful range of bark colours.

What the pictures can’t convey, however, is the last wonderful characteristic of willow that I want to highlight. The fabulously spicy, salty, aromatic smell.

Willow harvest, March 2014

Brendell, T. (1985) Willows of the British Isles Princes Risborough: Shire Publications Ltd

This post is the second in an occasional series called “Weird and Wonderful”.

My brother was eaten by cannibals

Posted on 26/02/2014 by Katy

Object type: fork
Museum number: MAEB:1987.11.622
Description: four-pronged Cannibal Fork made of wood, 290mm x 53mm x 53mm
Findspot:
Materials: wood
Technique: carved
Acquisition Date: 1987
Notes: Donated by the Edgcumbe family (see correspondence file 1987-11-EDG), claimed to be a Fijian cannibal fork

Extract from the transcript of the diaries of Rev C. Edgcumbe.
EDG01/03/b

Transcript of a letter concerning the death of Lt F. Edgcumbe, written by Midshipman William Tovey to Rev C. Edgcumbe .
EDG01/01/326/b

General Register Office. Certified Copy of an Entry of Death (Death Index: District Stepney, vol. II, page 47)

“Riverside Murder” Times [London, England] 7 Jun. 1841: 6 The Times Digital Archive. Web. 26 Feb 2014

Cannibal Fork in birch (billet), February 2014

Cannibal fork in birch (centred billet), February 2014

Cannibal fork in birch (billet on the pole lathe), February 2014

Cannibal fork in birch (turned billet), February 2014)

Cannibal fork in birch (lathed billet), February 2014)

Cannibal fork in birch (cutting the prongs), February 2014

(Blogging Archaeology)

Blogging Archaeology – what is your best (or worst) post, and why?

Posted on 28/01/2014 by Katy

January’s “blogging carnival” contribution (#BlogArch 3) – plenty of people rallied to Doug’s December call for posts, I expect this month to be no different!

Doug wants to know:

What are your best (or if you want your worst) post(s) and why? Compare and contrast your different bests/worsts.

I leave it up to you to define what best is. We bloggers have all sorts of different stats available to us. You could look at-

Most viewed -single day?, week? month? year? all time- I leave it up to you

Most individual views

Most diverse audience

Facebook likes

Most viral (however you define viral)

Most Tweets

Went viral on reddit

Or you could go a bit more qualitative-

Best conversations

Led to a talk or a paper

Personal favorites (again however you determine that)

Most proud of

Best comment left by your audience e.g. this post changed my life,

These are just some ideas to get people started but please use what ever criteria you want.

Now I’ve only been blogging since April 2013, and I’m not very prolific – easing myself into it, I tell myself, but really I’m still working out why I’m doing it and what I want to achieve. It will be really interesting to read the “January” carnival posts of bloggers who have been writing for ages – such as The Heritage Journal. I’ve only 19 posts to choose from, they have thousands…

At the moment my favourite post is my second (in practical terms, my first, because it’s the post I wrote after briefly laying out my introduction). My worst – well, various, because they are less satisfactory, more self-indulgent, or just not very good.

I like my post about the cannibal fork that I carved last year for the following, un-prioritised, reasons: it’s short, but tells a story; it’s about an object, with a half-decent photo; it’s also about a museum collection, with relevant links. However, I am influenced in this choice by the fact that my experience at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, which led to the woodwork and the post, has stayed with me. There’s more to be done on cannibal forks…

My “best” post is probably the one I wrote earlier this month about EAC14 – this year’s UK Experimental Archaeology Conference, in Oxford. Blogging about it was an opportunity for me to clarify in my own mind what I got out of the conference and to get some of that down on ‘paper’, as it were. It made me express succinctly the key things that I took from papers presented over the two days at Merton College and the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. So it’s my “best” post because it helped me to summarize the most important things that I learnt, and reinforce them in my own mind. Otherwise, the paperwork would have been filed and my attendance wouldn’t have been as fruitful.

Experimental Archaeology Conference UK 2014

Posted on 19/01/2014 by Katy

Over 10 and 11 January I and around 70 other participants enjoyed EAC14, the eighth UK Experimental Archaeology Conference, in wet and woolly Oxford.

Co-ordinated by Chelsea Budd and Christophe Snoeck, ably supported by a team of student volunteers and the EXARC team, the conference was really interesting and great fun. There was a generous mix of papers, workshops, museum visiting (we couldn’t miss some of Oxford’s amazing collections!) and down-time over lunch – and especially dinner, in the pub, catching up with friends and making new ones.

I found five of the fifteen papers especially interesting and useful. Martin Smith from the University of Bournemouth described his research to test the efficacy of polyurethane bone substitutes in ballistics experiments. I liked this because it’s so important to question the strengths and weaknesses of the analogies that we use in archaeology (Wylie 1985). This is true of ethnographic analogies that might be called upon to discuss past cultural or social behaviours (like comparing Madagascan standing stones erected for the ancestors, to Stonehenge, for example)(Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998); as well as the materials, tools and actions we use in archaeological experiments. So it was great to hear from a researcher who is investigating the quality of analogy.

Related to Martin’s paper was the presentation by Meaghan Dyer on her Master’s work with Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh. I met Meaghan briefly in December last year but hadn’t had the chance to find out more about her work as I shivered on the Marlborough Downs filming on a tv shoot. Meaghan has been using the self-same polyurethane bone substitutes to research aspects of inter-personal violence in the early Neolithic.

Not that I have anything against flint – it’s very useful – but I always enjoy hearing and talking about non-flint stone technology. Elise Morero presented her team’s research into Bronze Age stone vase manufacture in the Eastern Mediterranean. It struck me that the lapidary techniques involved have much in common with methods and tools used to work precious stones (as opposed to striking those stone types that will flake, like flint), having seen the hollow forms and rock crystal on display at the Museum of London’s Cheapside Hoard exhibition. Elise concentrated on the hollowing technology; I would love to have heard about the techniques for shaping the outside of the vases, which may have involved turning. I do like a good lathe!

Enora Gandon of the Institute of Archaeology Jerusalem gave us an excellent demonstration of one of the great strengths of experimental archaeology; that the results of projects using this methodology can play a role in the development of theoretical perspectives that are appropriate to the archaeological record (Bell 2009). Brendan O’Neill from University College Dublin gave us a master-class in project design – and another non-flint stone project, looking at felsite on Shetland. These two papers described projects that are great recommendations for the use of experiment in archaeology. And in relation to my interest in sarsen stone, I found Brendan’s paper very instructive and can’t wait to read the results.

The workshops offered the opportunity to follow up with some of the presenters as well as learn more about other topics. Rachel Hopkins, who is a member of Wolfson College, wowed us with medieval shoe-making and I for one could have spent all of the workshop time learning from her. As it was, I came away knowing how to “thread” a boar’s bristle needle (which I used back at home to re-string my amber bead necklace:

Re-stringing my amber bead necklace using linen yarn and a boar’s bristle needle.

It wasn’t only me who had a great time in Oxford – EAC15 will be in Dublin, we’re all looking forward to it already…

Bell, M. (2009) “Experimental Archaeology: changing science agendas and perceptual perspectives.” In Allen, M., O’Connor, T. and Sharples, N. (eds) Land and People: papers in memory of John G. Evans Oxford: Oxbow pp31-45

Parker Pearson, M. and Ramisilonina (1998) “Stonehenge for the ancestors: the stones pass on the message” Antiquity 72(276):308-326

Wylie, A. (1985) “The Reaction Against Analogy” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:63-112

Weird and Wonderful #1

Posted on 15/01/2014 by Katy

Last week I attended EAC2014 – the eighth annual Experimental Archaeology Conference – held this year in Oxford. More on that later, I shall write a post about my experience of this interesting, informative and fun gathering shortly.

Visiting Oxford offers the opportunity to visit the fabulous Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Conference organisers had arranged sessions specially for participants to experience the incredible world of Henry Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers and all the collecting that’s gone on since that eminent Victorian gathered in the world’s things. The museum describes itself as “the University of Oxford’s collection of anthropology and world archaeology”; the understatement does it no justice. It’s a surprising, shocking, life-affirming treasure-trove of human ingenuity.

There is so much to take in. The objects are famously displayed in their Victorian fashion, with uninterpreted, crammed cases devoted to types of thing rather than place/country/period/culture. Fascinating and frustrating in equal parts, this antiquarianism is a very important part of the museum’s character and delight.

It also makes it easy to see things for the first time, no matter how many visits you’ve already made. This happened to me on Friday last week. Just beside the side-door through which we entered the museum, I spotted this (forgive the poor photo, I took it using my mobile, in the low lighting):

A porcupine fish skin helmet from Kiribati (Gilbert Islands).

It’s object number 1884.32.31, collected before 1878 having been purchased at auction. It traveled around various of the London museums when in 1884 it was donated, one of the Pitt-Rivers “founding collection” objects.

It’s a bizarre object, part of a set of body armour designed to protect the wearer from weapons edged with shark’s teeth. The helmet’s arresting appearance would have served to make the wearer look as threatening as possible. Who on earth ever thought of skinning a fish to make a helmet?! What processes were required to cure the skin and ensure that the head-sized shape was kept open until the skin stiffened? And how was all this done while the poison tips of the spines were still active?

I admit that my perception is probably strongly influenced by two key issues. First, British native fishes don’t naturally spring to mind as potential sources of defensive clothing. Secondly, there isn’t anything quite like this in the British archaeological or ethnographic records. It’s easy to be amazed and puzzled by the exotic. The key thing to remember is that, “Kiribati is comprised of low-lying coral atolls, and so very few raw materials are available. Consequently, this armour is made from woven coconut fibre and fish skin.” (Mills 2006-7).

The porcupine fish skin helmet may be weird and wonderful, but it serves to remind us of the importance to people’s lives of access to materials, ingenuity of thought and skill in making.

Mills, A. (2006-7) Notes, Pitt Rivers Museum Catalogue entry 1884.32.31 [online database] http://objects.prm.ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID126789.html [accessed 15-01-2014]

This post is the first in an occasional series called “Weird and Wonderful”.

Where does all the time go?

Posted on 31/12/2013 by Katy

This has felt like an especially busy Advent. I’m always short of time during December, but since I’ve had these few days over Christmas to look back, I have realised just how frenetic it’s been this time round.

There’s a just-started bowl in the clave in my workshop, untouched in at least a fortnight, and four badly-finished bobbins off the lathe. Not only are they badly finished; I couldn’t get them done in time for 14 December when we would have used them in a Young Archaeologists’ Club activity (fortunately there were a hundred and one other activities available for the YAC members to enjoy).

It’s not simply that there is too much to do, what with seasonal rehearsals and performances, shopping, card-writing, activities to run and work to polish off before everyone goes on holiday. There just isn’t enough daylight.

During Advent we got closer and closer to the Winter solstice (21 December this year). Currently on Greenwich Mean Time, clocks in Britain won’t go forward an hour for summertime Daylight Saving until 30 March 2014. And even though we’ve now passed the shortest day, the cloud-filled skies that we’ve been enjoying conspire to draw the nights in just as quickly.

What with sunrise around 8am and sunset around 4pm, it’s been impossible to do any handiwork before or after work at the office. With no artificial light, I haven’t been able to do anything much – either coarse or fine work. Even bringing wood in from the woodshed for the stove is a darn nuisance in the dark. If I lived in a roundhouse I’d make sure I kept at least one night’s fuel inside to avoid blundering around in the damp, muddy wetness (which would also provide some warm fuel ready to burn better than putting cold logs onto the hearth).

Ruth Goodman has made this observation a few times during episodes of “Tudor Monastery Farm” which has been showing on BBC tv. In their cod-sixteenth century world, they get up with the dawn and finish work with the sunset; apart from making some rush lights and enjoying the hearth fire, there’s no way to create a truly working light (tallow and expensive wax candles and glass balls filled with water aside; and how many of them do you need to carve, or sew, or weave?). How did the shepherds caring for the monastery’s huge flocks cope with lambing in the darkness? Or any of the other nightly emergencies on the farm?

Even more amazing – how did the goldsmiths find enough light to complete the fabulously intricate work exemplified in the Cheapside Hoard, currently on display at the Museum of London in a marvellous special exhibition. The exhibition interpretation includes some information about the buildings of Goldsmiths’ Row on Cheapside, the likely layout of shopping and use of cocklofts in the four-story buildings for gilding rooms, taking advantage of south-facing windows for maximum natural light. Magnification must have been used for elements of the delicate soldiering, laying down enamel powders and other fine work (one of the figures in an engraving of a jeweller’s workshop, 1576, seems to be wearing spectacles – for short sight or magnification?). But lenses, whether ground glass or water bowls, aren’t enough on their own. You need excellent light, too.

The dark is good for some jobs. Neil Burridge suggests that casting in the Bronze Age would have been carried out in the dark or semi-darkness, making it easier to use furnace and metal colours to judge the required temperatures. It’s amazing watching him work, sitting in a roundhouse at Trewortha with a sheet across the doorway to keep the real sun out whilst he pours liquid sun into a mould.

And here I am, benefitting from electricity that (in the house, at least), extends my “working” hours as long as I want. It’s probably not good for us to be up at all hours. So I’ll call it a night.

Forsyth, H. (2013) The Cheapside Hoard; London’s Lost Jewels. London: Museum of London

Blogging Archaeology – the good, the bad, and the ugly

Posted on 03/12/2013 by Katy

Well, the good mostly; because I haven’t been doing this long enough to have experienced the whole range of ups and downs.

This post has less to do with my stated aims in writing a blog, and everything to do with the invitation given by Doug to join in a blogging carnival. This month, Doug is asking about archaeological bloggers’ experiences of blogging – the ups and downs. This made me reflect on my start in April this year, how I feel about my attempts at blogging, and what I’ve learnt so far.

I’ve discovered that writing, albeit in a small way, about materials, objects, making things and artefacts is helping me to think about what I’m doing. Not only what I’m doing in the present, but what I might go on to do in the future. I didn’t anticipate this outcome when I first signed up on WordPress. At that time, I expected to write something like a cross between a diary and essays on the archaeological record and archaeological theory. Far more formal, and I’m so pleased it’s not like that.

In fact, it helps me to write down a little about what I’m doing in learning about materials, replicating artefacts, experiencing materiality for myself. Discovering unexpected things about the natural resources that it’s otherwise so easy to take for granted (our museum stores are bursting at the seams with all that stuff, and that’s without all of the objects that once formed essential parts of people’s lives, made in biodegradable material, which we will so very rarely recover).

Just as it’s easy to browse posts in the blogs that I follow, it’s easy to browse my own posts. Flicking through my posts is a convenient way to review progress, to remind myself what’s left undone, or where I might want to go next. I don’t have to have everything swimming round in my head, or photos inaccessibly buried in an external hard-drive.

And it’s proving useful to be able to go back and have a look at what I’ve written. This is a learning process. At work, the audience for my written work is resolutely specialist, academic, technical, corporate. I can find a different voice in my blog. Part of the learning is learning about myself; being more realistic about my expectations of myself in blogging.

Maybe my blog will become something more for me. I can imagine writing more extensive, referenced work; using my blog as an outlet for aspects of my research; and perhaps I will be able to develop an audience interested to follow artefactual. For now, I’m happy with how things are, and pleasantly surprised at how it’s turning out.

The end of a cherry tree

Posted on 26/11/2013 by Katy

A friend has recently given me some lengths of cherry wood. The tree has been cut down to open up an area of her garden, and a second will also be subject to the tree-surgeon’s chainsaw. I’m fascinated by the changes that the wood is undergoing when cut. The logs have been “bleeding” while sitting against my workshop wall, exuding a jelly-like sap from the cambium. The sapwood cuts white and then oxidises to a livid orange colour.

I’ve posted some photos of a bowl that I’ve carved in the cherry, on my Gallery page. You can glimpse the oxidised interior, which I’ve yet to finish. As I took the photos shortly after finishing the exterior, the sapwood on the outside is still quite pale. It’s really interesting to think about these simple, but striking, transformations in raw materials. Although there are some dramatic transformations evidenced in the archaeological record – from hide to leather, from ore to metal, from clay to pottery – some changes are just as striking and mysterious even though they are simple. I wonder what people in the past thought about the colours, textures, and smells of wood?

Sarsen #4

Posted on 10/11/2013 by Katy

I have finished the two facsimile sarsen hammerstones that I was making for the Stonehenge Visitor Centre Education Team.

Small quartzite sarsen hammerstone, 2013

The smaller hammerstone (Facsimile 1) is an effective pecking stone. A “dimple” in the cortex of the quartzite nodule became part of the stone’s grip; by accident, not design. The larger hammerstone (Facsimile 2) is considerably heavier and has to be held with two hands. It is good for attritional work, removing grains from the surface of a saccaroid sarsen stone. The last thing I did with it before packing it up was to cut a channel along the surface of the stone that I was shaping.

Large quartzite sarsen hammerstone, 2013

I made these two objects with a mix of “modern” and “prehistoric” techniques: that is, I quickly removed material from each original nodule using some of my iron mason’s tools before finishing them by using them as hammers on saccaroid sarsen. This means that I can’t use data from them in my research to understand how the prehistoric tools got the way we find them. But it is interesting to do the numbers.

As expected, both nodules lost weight as I worked on them. This seems a silly thing to point out. It is important, however, for a number of reasons; not least because archaeologists and curators have tended to describe and present the excavated artefacts as though they all represent the same finished state. Tools change during their life, however, and this change can tell us things about how they were made and used. The small nodule weighed 536g – the hammerstone weighs 444g. The large nodule weighed 2149g – the hammerstone it became weighs 1818g.

It is very difficult to describe the shape of these irregular objects in a meaningful way – a way that can be replicated. When I analysed the Stonehenge hammerstone assemblage (a forthcoming publication), I used a technique developed and used in geology. It makes it possible to document and follow the changing shape of the nodules as they become hammerstones.

The small nodule’s shape was “oblate spheroid”. By the time I had finished, the hammerstone shape still fell into this class, but now at the less elongated and ‘fatter’ end of the scale. This reflects how material was knocked off the circumference of the small nodule, making the tool more rounded than the nodule.

The large nodule’s shape was “sub-equant spheroid”. On completion, the hammerstone shape still fell into the same range of this class. This is a reflection of the blocky shape of the un-worked nodule which I chose specially for this quality; and the way that I concentrated on using one end of the nodule for hammering.

Had I continued using the hammerstones, their weights shapes would have changed. As it is, they are now with the Education Team and will take their place with the rest of the objects in the new handling collection.

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