BREAK: Liza, Werner and Lucia (left to right) wear stone-age costumes while shopping in a supermarket in Albersdorf, Germany. Liza and Lucia are Dutchwomen, while Werner is German. They were taking part in an annual experimental archaeology camp with 26 participants.
By Wolfgang Runge
They call it a Stone Age camp and they try as authentically as possible to imitate the tough living conditions of that age. But now and then, still dressed in their leather loin cloths and leather skirts, they’ll head to a supermarket for some modern-age food shopping.
This summer makes the tenth time that archaeologists of Hamburg University and their students are taking a voyage back in time – to the Stone Age - in the town of Albersdorf in Schleswig-Holstein.
“Many of us have been coming here for years,” says Tosca Friedrich.
This year, there are 26 who want to find out how humans possibly existed 10,000 years ago. The air is filled with the smell of burned wood, the pungent smoke burning peoples’ eyes. A healthy workplace this does not appear to be.
But for Jannie-Marie, from Denmark, the Stone Age site is a dream come true. The 27-year-old archaeologist is busy measuring the carbon monoxide levels that our ancient ancestors were subject to. Using the latest technology, she can get a sketchy picture of how people of the late Stone Age period lived. Back then, open fires burned in their abodes, for heat and light and for cooking food.
Jannie-Marie has hung high-tech measuring equipment the size of a carrot around the necks of the other participants to monitor and document as precisely as possible the carbon monoxide of the air
being inhaled. Her experiment could help to fine-tune the construction design plans of the rooftops of houses in open-air museums.
At the same time, the archaeologist hopes to find out how Stone Age humans built their roofs without chimneys. If our ancestors became ill, she argues, then they were certainly intelligent enough to change how they built their roofs.
They were at least clever enough to build boats, as evidenced by pictures dating to the late Stone Age period that were sketched in the cliffs along the Norwegian coast. About 6,000 years ago the artists scratched into the rock a kind of how-to for building a boat made of wood and fur. It looks like a basket with a person sitting inside it with a rope in his hand.
“It is only a matter of speculation as to whether this was a fishing line,” another archaeologist, Stefan, says. “From this sketch we can surmise how boats may have been built back then,” the 46-year-old adds. “There’s a lot that can be imagined, but we’ll never know for sure.”
Building a hide-covered boat goes a lot faster and simpler than carving out a tree trunk to make a floating vessel. And, such boats can theoretically be built to much larger scale, as illustrated by the boats of the Inuit people in the Arctic region. These boats are up to 8 metres long and have room for up to 20 people. Also, they can be turned upside down to create a makeshift tent.
“You don’t have to be too daring to imagine this,” Stefan says.
The hide-covered boat that he built in Albersdorf was not so large. Together with archaeologist Nele, 35, he stuck twelve hazelnut rods in the ground and wove in between them eight large willow branches.
With leather strips and bast-fibre ropes he tied the ends together.
“It looked like a large basket standing upside down on the ground,” she recalls.
Across this shell of hazelnut and willow, they stretched the raw hide of cattle “with the furry part on the inside.” Three to four days of drying out followed, tightening and hardening the hide - and then the boat was ready to be launched.
The sustenance necessary for this they got from the beer they brewed and from pots of stew they cooked. “From the finds, we know which plants the humans had at their disposal and we can see what they might have made from them,” summer camp organiser Tosca Friedrich says.
The summer camp in Albersdorf not only serves the experiments of experienced archaeologists, but also the training of the next generation.
“The young students must first acquaint themselves with the materials and just watch how things work,” Friedrich says. “You can’t forget that we are from Hamburg University - we’re city people.”
The students first have to master certain skills of our ancestors. “If as an archaeologist you look at a find and have never before worked with the materials, how can you then interpret it?”
As an example she mentions pottery-making. The first time around in the kiln, the pots and plates burst, leaving only shards behind. She learned from her mistakes. “Making artefacts in particular is a matter of experience,” Friedrich observes. -DPA
