Bede's World

Well, let me start off by saying that I would bet our posts may become slightly less interesting and exciting over time for two reasons. One, we did a lot of really fascinating orientation-type events right smack in the beginning, before school work and such. Two, we are cramming week one's worth of postings into week two because we didn't get internet set up here until this past Sunday. Thus, all of the exciting stuff from week one and two have basically become one week...and an action-packed one at that (AND we didn't even include the parts about finding a sports bar that shows American football and short-circuiting our apartment).

So with that little disclaimer out of the way, I'll write a bit about our trip to the "living history-type" village of Bede's World (Bede was Christian missionary and monk living in England during the 7th-8th century Saxon period)...

The Archaeology staff decided to take all first-year undergraduate and graduate students to an "ancient skills" day at a Saxon recreation village located at "Bede's World" museum. It was a recreated farm, complete with versions of early livestock and other farm animals, houses made in the Saxon style, etc. Our group was given an exclusive day-long adventure at the farm, complete with lessons in wattle-and-daubing, flint-knapping, bread-making, pottery, kiln-making, and smelting. For those who are less versed in ancient and early Medieval technology and life, I'll give a brief overview of some of these techniques. Wattle-and-daubing was used to construct houses, sheds, etc, and consists of horizontally weaving willow branches through thicker, vertical willow branches (the wattle) and then covering the surface with a mud-straw substance (the daub). The final product would be smeared with a lime finish to give the structure a nice weatherproof cover. Flint-knapping is a very ancient technology and the means by which very early peoples made weapons, tools, and other objects. Pieces of flint were broken off from large flint nodules and then essentially smashed and ground into shape (forming arrowheads, knives, etc). Bread-making, pottery, and smelting are fairly self explanatory and timeless, so I won't go into much detail there. Finally, to make a Saxon kiln, one digs a long hole in the ground which is wider on both ends and thin in the middle, and tends to be a bit hard to explain without a visual aide so I'll leave it at that.

It was quite fun to learn all of those ancient techniques, especially since we were given the opportunity to try many of them ourselves (not smelting unfortunately, for legal reasons). We spent an hour at each skills station with lunch half-way through the day.

Our day concluded with first-hand lessons in archery and axe-throwing, given by some chaps clothed in early Medieval dress (who later doubled as the Medieval music-makers). Following the archery time, we were told we were going to be given a marvelous feast...unfortunately it wasn't Saxon food and it wasn't quite a feast, as well as being served in the cafe, not the farm due to E-coli concerns. But we followed dinner with a walk out to the "farmhouse" led by the Medieval musicians, playing a bagpipe-type thing, a drum, and a string instrument of some ancient variety (sorry for the hardly historical and expansive definitions). There we were given samples of mead and an Old English poetry recitation (clips from Beowulf and Caedmon's Hymn). All in all a satisfying ending to an exciting and slightly tiring day. The pictures (which keep moving to the beginning of each blog no matter where we try and put them) are of us practicing ancient skills and of some of the things we made.