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“They have other sorts of Cabins... that are covered overhead; the rest left open for the Air. These;;;serve for pleasant Banqueting- Houses in the hot Seaon of the Year.”
John lawson, 1701
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Quotes from an historic journal....
...stimulate an idea for a project.
Studies of prehistoric technologies, tool forms, and artifact types have resulted in part from a desire to go beyond ethnographic analogy and to supplement the often sketchy field notes and interpretations of ethnographers and historians. In most cases the ethnographer or historical observer did not have the opportunity to observe a particular task from its inception to its conclusion and of necessity reported on conditions observed at only one point in time. Thus, detailed observations of complex processes or manufacturing procedures that require a specific series of activities performed over a period of time are often lacking, and the complexities of performing various tasks within primitive technologies are often misrepresented in the ethnographic and historical records. Experimental archaeology, then is generally the only means of providing additional information about primitive technologies or potential solutions to questions to manufacture and use processes that have not been addressed adequately in the historical or ethnographic literature.
John L. Fagan
Experimental Archaeology and Public
Involvement: A Case Study
Living in the Past
In 1980 the BBC sponsored a one year project to see how modern people would adapt to iron age technology and living skills. The following is a brief excerpt from the project journal relating to living in the grass thatched common house (30' high and 50' across).
It is necessary to live an experience in order fully to comprehend it.
John Percival, Living in the Past, 1980.
The inside of the big round house was always filled with a thin haze of woodsmoke, which turned into a choking fog when the baking stove was fired in the early morning. Everybody was kippered by it. Skin, hair, clothes, everything, was deeply impregnated, so that they smelt, quite sweetly but distinctly of woodsmoke.....the round house was remarkably warm. In the daytime, even with both doors gaping to the cold air to let in what little light there was, the area round the fire was always warm. At night, with the doors closed it was almost to hot for comfort. After the evening meal people would spread their sheepskins on the uneven floor and gather close around the fire, chatting, spinning, one of the girls might be knitting and one of the men whittling a knife handle or making a thumb pot from clay prepared earlier in the day. The fire would be banked up brightly, not for warmth, but to provide extra light. So, as the evening lengthened, the circle widened as everyone withdrew from the heat, often to lie on the bare earth floor and gaze at the firelight flickering on the polished beams of the roof. Not that they were really polished, but the smoke had formed a shiny black carbon surface on the rafters and dyed the thatch a deep orange, the straw also seemingly varnished by the smoke until it shone. Thick black nets of cobweb, heavy with soot, spoiled the illusion of zealous cleanliness.
Archaeologists used once to believe that the fire hazard inside these round houses must have been a constant risk, and I had worried about myself. But the sparks which swarmed towards the roof seemed to die before they reached the black pocket of constant darkness, just beneath the roof cone itself.
On the nights that I stayed in the round house I would sometime spread my sleeping bag close to the fire as it slowly burned down. The villagers had a system for keeping it burning all night. The cooks for the following day - in practice it was always the man who was responsible for the fire - would cut and bring into the house a huge green log, an ‘all-nighter’. The fire would be raked and scattered and the big log placed on the embers. The log would then smolder gently all night long and the cook in charge would only have to spend ten or fifteen minutes in the morning with dry twigs and split kindling blowing and fanning until it flared bright and hot to cook the breakfast of boiled wheat and cereal coffee.
WHY BUILD
TRADITIONAL HOUSES TODAY ?
By John and Ela White, Ancient Lifeways Institute
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As a young boy I was fortunate to have relatives of my grandparents’ generation who still spoke the Cherokee language. Proud of their Cherokee and Shawnee ancestry and culture-bearers in the truest sense, they filled me with an awareness of my responsibility to keep our lineage traditions alive. They communicated the importance of traditional culture and that it was not to be tampered with or joked about. These attitudes, which I absorbed as a young boy, are still with me.
Along with a wide range of oral traditions (stories), I also learned traditional technologies from them—pottery, cordage, flint knapping, wood working and details of house construction. My uncle told me that before the hewn log cabins there were those constructed of “poles” and that before them the Cherokee lived in clay-plastered wattle and daub homes with thatched or bark-shingled roofs. Behind each “summer” house there was the aw-si or winter house, a small earth lodge. He demonstrated its construction by using miniature timbers whittled with appropriate crotches for rafters and forks from which to suspend household goods and hunting equipment. A foot or more in diameter, it was large enough to learn construction techniques and sequences.
While on the hunt or in times of war, oval lodges of the age-old woodland pattern were built, covered with bark and canvas or cattail mats. Smaller structures based on the same pattern were used for sweat lodges, birthing and menstrual lodges.
The Gatiyi or great communal town house, was vividly remembered long after the last of them had fallen in decay or been burned by the Americans. Holding up to 400 or 500 people, ideally raised on a substructure mound, the town house dominated a Cherokee settlement. Basically an earth lodge with a steeper and higher roof than those of the Pawnee or Mandan, all serious community activity took place either within its vastness or in the plaza or square in front.
The stories I heard were in a kitchen by the wood cook stove or up in the hills of the Sequatchie Valley near Chattanooga. My father and his mother's people were born there only a short distance from the Chickamauga towns where our ancestors had lived and died to hold back the frontier for just a little while.
Several years later I talked at length with a Nanticoke woman in Pennsylvania who had been born in a thatched birthing lodge. Her family was one of the last to speak the Nanticoke language. As my mother's mother had a farm in the traditional Nanticoke territory, I took the opportunity to build a small thatched cdge as it had been described to me. I spent some weeks in 1951 or 52 living in it. Both the thatch and I were saturated with the delicious wood smoke. The old Nanticoke woman had talked in length of their great dugout canoes and of her people's extensive lore of the moon, tides and the ways of water creatures and migratory birds.
My memory of those kindly old people is that they would gladly share their treasure of traditional knowledge with anyone who was respectful and interested. At the slightest sign of inappropriate behavior or attitude, however, they closed up like a clam. They wanted their knowledge preserved but it was more important that it be respected. When the last of my older relatives died, it was like a door had been closed forever. Then one day I found where the old BAE reports were hiding in the library....
In graduate school at the University of Chicago and Stanford I was concerned with the anthropological study of the cultural transmission process itself. What could be learned from the experiences of others that would benefit those concerned with the survival of traditional culture in contemporary Native American Communities?
Storytelling in the longhouse.
The approach of George and Louise Spindler, depicting the interrelationship of the many complex aspects of the cultural transmission process, did much to expand my horizon beyond the idea of some wise old person teaching tribal wisdom. I began to see more clearly how objects and the technologies requ
ired to make them formed linkages between a lifeway and its environment. An object, a “thing,” carried with it many associated pieces of cultural data, like a bunch of grapes. My older relatives had seen this in a concrete form—that there were tiny threads that stretched through time connecting the here and now with whomever made the object in the past. It didn't have to be a family heirloom; it could be an arrowhead or potsherd in a farmer's field or an object in a museum.
But it was the accidental discovery of a small volume in the Stanford Bookstore that was to pull together these many threads. Understanding Fire and Clay by Arne Bjorn was a work concerned with the rediscovery of ancient Danish pottery firing techniques. But in the background of so many illustrations there were fantastic houses, many of them. A letter to Arne Bjorn led to a gracious invitation to visit the Historisk/Archaeologisk Forsogscentret at Lejre, Denmark. In 1972 the White family spent the summer at Lejre and several other programs that utilized reconstructed cultural environments.
At the Iron Age Research Center Ela, my wife and colleague, studied hanging warp loom weaving techniques with Ninna Rathje, whose replications of the Bog Peoples’ woven clothing we saw in the National Museum in Copenhagen. I primarily worked with Arne Bjorn, who had developed the ceramic research program. These Danes were very interested in Cherokee pottery technology that I had been taught by my great aunt Sally Hicks. I had also learned how to chip arrowheads, scrapers and gunflints from my great uncle Charlie Copeland and demonstrated this. (In my family flint knapping, pottery and many stories never died out.) It was Arne Bjorn who impressed on me how lucky I was to carry this knowledge as a living tradition.
It was the houses, however, that had drawn us to Lejre and Ela and I were overwhelmed by their impact as a cultural environment. We lived, cooked and slept in one, together with our four children. We both knew immediately that this was how to teach a culture, that this was where everything seemed to fall into place. Artifacts and traditional technology belong here. There is a natural flow in traditional technologies that rarely synchronizes with a modern classroom. Ever since Lejre we have felt that by far the most effective and appropriate educational environment in which to study ancient lifeways are reconstructed living environments.
As director of the project to build the Pawnee Earthlodge at the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), I intended to show how successful a replicated cultural environment can be within an existing museum facility. Working closely with tribal elders, existing ethnographic collections and the late Dr. Gene Weltfish, the Earthlodge project was a bridge between the Pawnee, an academic institution and the general population. It was intended to build trust as well as to communicate what the Pawnee wanted us to understand about their culture.
In 1976 I began to construct traditional woodland structures at the Center for American Archaeology in Kampsville, IL. Ela taught non-loom weaving technology while I taught ceramics. This led to the establishment of the ethnographic component to Northwestern University's Archaeology Field School that I directed until 1985.
1978 saw the construction of a village of five structures representing the houses of various archaeological cultures of the Lower Illinois River Valley. As originally conceived, the village would function as a research and teaching facility as well as being available to the general tourist. Technologies appropriate to the culture were a part of the living environment of each house.
The oldest structure replicated was based on a post mold pattern from an Early Archaic horizon (ca 6500 BCE) at the Koster Site. Groupings of four post molds in a rectangular formation had been interpreted as a scattering of small rectangular buildings, barely large enough for a nuclear family. As some of these posts were up to 2’ in diameter, it was obvious that they were not corner posts but the center posts of substantial structures. Features, including small hearths, occurred in an oval roughly 24’x 26’ around the center posts. As there was no sign of an external wall, as present in later earthlodges, we reconstructed it with rafters reaching the ground. The Archaic house was thatched and we intended to cover it with sod the following year. A major flood in the spring of 1979 damaged the house severely, although it was repaired. The walls of a nearby Mississippian wattle and daub structure formed its own substructure mound.
Another major flood in 1980 proved the folly of further construction in Kampsville and we began to build houses on our own land in Michael, five miles south, located in a side valley adjacent to a spring-fed creek with lots of natural resources. The location proved ideal. The first house constructed was based on the double-walled structure from the Zimmerman site, a proto-historic to historic Kaskaskia village on the Illinois River.
When the Center for American Archaeology closed their year-round educational program in 1985, Ancient Lifeways Institute began to accept students in Michael. Whereas in Kampsville students lived in dorms, we were now free to utilize our structures as living environments and students could live in the “village.”
Maketa Mahwa, Black Wolf Village in the local Tamaroa language, provides an appropriate context where cultural activities take place. Consisting of two llliniwek longhouses, the Kaskaskia house, a large domed winter lodge, a small derelict thatched structure and surrounded by a palisade, there are enough structures to "feel" like a village. Attempting to capture the flow of traditional activities, Ancient Lifeways Institute's programs involve finding natural resources and then processing and manufacturing items in the village. Evenings are filled with social activities such as traditional songs, dances and perhaps a gambling game. Each evening ends with a traditional story-telling in the artifact- rich Kaskaskia house.
We use structures as environments within which cultural activities take place. They provide a context that gives meaning to the various aspects of an ancient lifeway through enhancing empathy as well as communicating the interweaving of various technologies. Ancient Lifeways Institute's approach to cultural ecology is to use traditional structures as the logical intersection of human activities. Our modern homes and schools insulate us from so many thing—heat and cold, the phases of the moon, the length of the sun's cycle, the direction of the wind. An evening that ends around the flickering flames of a central hearth allows us to reflect on the ways of our ancestors and to truly enter that world.
The Law of Fire
from, I Built a Stone Age House, by Hans-Ole Hansen, 1962 English edition.
Do you know the law of fire?
You will learn it now. From the day the first man fetched fire from a burning tree or from the flame-pewing mouth of the great volcano, he and his descenants for thousands of generations have been subject to the law of fire.
My companions and I had to learn the laws of fire too. We did not tend our fire as we should, we were irreverent and did not see that there was always someone in attendance. So, one day the fire rose, stretched up, and reached for the roof. Straw and rush heads began to glow and curl up in the ties. Then it got hold of the roof. Suddenly we saw its face appear over the ridge of the roof, and our hearts went into our mouths in horror.
We did what we could to master the fire, labored by the sweat of our brows. We fought for the house that we had toiled so hard to build and in which we had spent so many happy hours. But the fire grew and grew, became a giant. Hissing, it spread along the underside of the roof, then rose up like an ogre and took the roof up with it into the air....the heat became so intense that we had to withdraw quite a distance to watch our handiwork being destroyed and collapsing rafter by rafter.
At last the Fire God himself fell silent and sank down behind the now blackened daub walls. Then there was silence everywhere, except for the loud, clear song of the grasshoppers in the bushes. We felt as if the fire had embraced the whole world, although it was only a thing of our own that had burned. Carefully and respectfully we stepped into the fire ravaged floor, still hot and now open to the sky, to see if anything had survived.
The memory of that day is firmly imprinted on our minds, and our advice to you
is: profit by our bitter experience and remember to respect the law of fire
NORTH AMERICAN HOUSE
RECONSTRUCTION PROJECTS
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A photo coliection of some of the projects undertaken by Errett Callahan. These project models are submitted as models for readers to review. The effort, skill, and dedication needed to complete a project like those presented in this issue is a common thread among those who undertake such projects. As we have stated earlier, there is much more to learn through the process than simply reconstruction techniques and design. One must also remember that everything above the ground is and “educated speculation” of what a house might have been like. Some evidence supports decisions, but a good deal of insight and “feel” direct alot of what gets done. The structure we build are resurrected from the remains of the old ones. It is in their tracks we must walk to do the job right.
THE CAHOKIA PIT HOUSE PROJECT - Sponsor: Cahokia Mounds Society, Collinsville, IL, 1983
A reconstruction of a 1000 AD Emergent Mississippian pit house, based upon an exact duplication of the excavated floor plan. Construction took place between Oct. 1982 and Feb. 1983 and required 1300+ hours of work. Built predominately with stone tools, local natural materials, and technologies of the period.
View from the southwest.
The Floor Plan from John Kelly, Formative Developments at Cahokia. 1982.
Primitive Technology Page 4