I did hut building yesterday and that
was really good.
We had a fire and we put tarp
over and filled in the gaps with willow.
Coming here, I really feel like I’m
getting a taste of what being an archaeologist is
all about, I mean
there's only so much that you can read in books and stuff, but actually being hands on,
I feel really good about it.
Experimental archaeology sort of works as an [...] in that you
try to recreate the conditions
of the past and see if it’s still
something we can do
and how our predecessors would have done
these activities, so things like; is it still possible for us
as modern humans to pull down a tree
with a hand axe? The answer is usually no.
I think it has been a very influential
thing for all of our students,
in as much as they
start their degree by learning
something about
past technologies, about technologies that they might know
about from books, but they’ve never
experienced for themselves.
So they have a chance to actually think through what are the materials,
how does the technology work...
So we’re just crushing up some iron or getting it ready
to [...] into the furnace to melt it.
Iron melting in this case is
like a solid-state process, which I didn’t know before.
And I just sort of keep the [...] going, and sort of keep a constant airflow, and hopefully
after much fun you get a finished result.
Our kind of point of the activities is them to see what is actually left over, because
as archaeologists is all that we can actually find – we don’t actually know
what they did but we can find out what they did through the remains that are left over on the site.
It’s already sort of let us know
how we’re supposed to think, about the questions we should ask,
what we can tell from things that we find, so it has been a good
preparatory course I think for the year.
The things you take from it are really...
like it's your first experiences at uni and it’s your first experiences together, and it
really helps to build
everything. So PrimTech is so essential for our archaeological degree.
We met these guys a couple
of days ago when we had our first
introductory lectures, but it feels like I’ve known these guys for years.
I was expecting to be tired all the time and wanting to sleep, but I’ve done two activities so far
and I can’t wait to do three more.
