Time Travel I

I spent most of yesterday at at event day at the Ice Age Museum Monrepos.

I guess most time I spent watching Dr. Johann Tinnes, who was demonstrating flintknapping, and explaining bows and harpoon tips and |atlatls and whatnot. Events like that are so much more interesting in my opinion than a normal museum because the replicas the artisans brought along you could actually take in your hand.

To the right, from the top:

• handles of atlatls
• a little “tin” for needles, made from a piece of hollow bone with a wooden stopper at each end
• an ivory flute (holes on the other side)
• several harpoon tips, mostly carved from bone, one with a bone core and added flint blades
• unfinished harpoon tips to show the work progression.

I took some more photos of tools made by Markus Plesker:

[caption id="attachment_27" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="knives, arrowheads, sickles, an axe and a hatchet"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_28" align="aligncenter" width="262" caption="Arrows and atlatls (those do not belong together, the arrows are for bows)"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_29" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Closeup of an attached arrowhead."][/caption]

There also was a range where you could try out bows and atlatl. I didn’t do so well on the archery, but with the other I made the spear stick in the target (albeit a bit off the marked field) on my third try, which was a lot better than the people who took turns while I was waiting. The targets were images of animals, and two plush birdies. XD

For a break, I listened to a presentation about a dig in Schleswig-Holstein. It dealed a lot with geology (how informative or confusing the layers of ground were, then the characteristics of the found flint tools, and odd depressions whose walls were littered with flint and bone stuff, but the ground not, which is unique and mysterious, and they have no idea what’s up with that.

I chickened out on taking a photo of the roe deer carcass that was butchered as demonstration (not connected with the archery…) - I’m still too damn shy. There is something about watching some little kids scraping rests of flesh off a hide, while another “borrows” the forelegs to put life-size footprint-stamps on their clay project. Those are some children who’ll grow up knowing that meat equals dead animals, which is a good thing.

The last part of the event was an archery tournament between a bunch of reenactors of different periods. the tournament itself took less time than them explaining their bows, but there you go. In contrast to the boy next to me who honestly said “This is bloody boring because they talk so much”, I found it at least somewhat interesting.

Here they are all posing for the audience, to the very left the resident shaman: