Fields Recordings From The Sea

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fitzcoraldo F
fitzcoraldo Apr 20, 2004 11:20:45
Replying to FourWinds

A stone blade can be created in a matter in minutes and these folk knew where to find the good stone. A skin house such the Mount Sandal houses would take no time at all to erect. A weeks worth of roots, berries and firewood can be gathered in an hour or two if you know where to look and as for hunting, the hunters follow the herds, sites such as Starr Carr show that the hunters didn't go out willy-nilly chasing-down animals, they camped beside the watering sites and allowed the animals to come to them. One decent kill could feed a family for a couple of weeks plus provide skins and bone tools.
Domestic dogs and a decent thicket of gorse would have provided protection from the beasties.

Our nomadic ancestors were in-tune with the landscape and would have had the business of living finely tuned, this way of life had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We cannot directly transpose the lives of modern hunter gatherers onto those of our ancestors but we can make a decent guess using both anthropolgical and archaeological evidence.

I liked the description of smoking hydrax droppings in a pipe - good shit man ! (-:

T TomBo
TomBo Apr 20, 2004 15:16:56
Replying to fitzcoraldo

"A weeks worth of roots, berries and firewood can be gathered in an hour or two if you know where to look."

I gotta disagree on this one. Speaking as someone who does gather firewood from the local woods, I can assure you that no matter how thick on the ground the wood is, there's no way you could gather a week's worth in an hour or two, never mind with roots and berries into the bargain. It takes a lot of wood to keep a fire burning even for one night - wood burns much quicker than coal, at any rate

I know they didn't have coal :) - or did they?

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/21664

I've never foraged for food, but I know someone who's done quite a bit of it. There <i>is</i> plentiful food to be had in some areas, but again, you couldn't possibly gather a week's worth in an hour or two. It comes in such small quantities that I think it more likely that there was a fairly constant search for food going on, in much the same way as birds or rabbits are constantly on the look out for something to eat. Of course, there was much more forest back then, and this would have made finding food easier.