New atlatl darts

Sunday afternoon I went out for a spot of archery and atlatlery. I took 3 new darts, courtesy of Nottingham atlatl - 2 titans and a 'scorpion' - a short, very lightweight dart.

You can see the scorpion against the normal darts here:

It was a beautiful day to be out, and I learned some handy lessons:

• The scorpion is really light. This means that it travels far and fast, but technique is crucial - even more so than a conventional dart. If you give it too much welly it just goes off to one side. It looks like regular practice with this will really improve my technique.
• One of the titans is plastic wrapped like my other darts (Nottingham Atlatl offers some kind of waterproof shrink wrap on darts to protect and strengthen them), and the other isn't. The plastic wrapped darts are much stronger and hard wearing, but heavier, and don't fly so well. The dart without wrapping flexes much more in the air, and just feels nicer to throw. But
  it's more susceptible to damage.
• The tips of my old darts were a bit battered and gnarled. Before this week my target had been a bike tyre attached to two heavy duty metal poles tied together at the top, and the metal had battered the ends of the darts. On sunday I realised that pushing two garden canes into the ground 2 feet apart and placing the bike tyre on top so the poles rest inside the tyre works much better.

2 more lessons from the long run

I was talking to a GP friend who's taken up running lately, and described the agonising stomach cramps that brought my long 2 day run to a halt. Apparently that was probably dehydration. Never been that dehydrated before - that was quite unpleasant. One to watch out for I think.

The second lesson is one about shelter. For years when lightweight camping I've favoured just a bivi bag, which is perfectly adequate even in moderate rain, as long as you're warm enough. It's the evening that's a problem - midges are always around unless you're up high. A bivi and bug net combination would solve that problem, but there are other problems.

1. Many mosquito nets are not small enough mesh to keep midges out, and 
2. Almost all are designed to be draped over a bed or similar, so they have an open bottom. Since midges rise up out of the ground like tiny flying zombies, this probably won't keep them out.

http://www.brettschneider.co.uk/floor%20mosquito%20nets.html

The small wedge net would be nice, except that a) it doesn't give you much space to move around, and b) the mesh won't keep midges out. The pyramid net looks promising, but would need something to prop it up. The pyramid net weighs 700g though, so combined with a 400g or more bivi, it's more than a kilo with no poles. Might as well carry a tent. It would be a nice big bug free space though.

http://www.borahgear.com/bugbivy.html - this would need a more substantial bivi in heavier weather, but is very light indeed.

http://www.terra-nova.co.uk/tarps-bivis-bothies/all-tarps/bivi-tarp/ - a bit more expensive, but being terra nova it's very light. Plus it has a pole.

Current favourite is the Snugpak ionosphere. It's a one man tent, but a bit bigger than my Vango Ultralite 2 man tent. It weighs about the same, but it's 2 layer, and the inner can be carried on it's own. That makes a free standing bug net weighing around a kilo. In worse weather the flysheet can go in too. It's Snugpak, so probably bombproof, and I live near the factory, so returns are easy in case of problems, plus it's money into my local economy.

Also looking at the Terra Nova Zephyr. 100g lighter, and probably a little more spacious, but without the option of only taking the mesh.

http://www.terra-nova.co.uk/tents-and-spares/all-tents/zephyros-1-tent/

Flint projectile point

I was at a loose end for an hour on saturday. It was a nice sunny day, so I sat on an upturned plant pot in the garden and played with flint for a while. I'm not very good at this, I don't really practice enough, but it's always interesting to experiment.

Digging around in my flint pile, I found a lump of cortex covered flint that a friend brought back from the seaside. After a few handfuls of sharp gravel due to frost damage, a good thwack with a 1kg hammerstone took a nice 2.5cm Levallois flake off. It would probably have been usable as a projectile point without any further work, but that's not what I was looking for.

Ten minutes of percussion flaking with a small hammerstone shaped the point a bit more symmetrically, and took a few parallel flakes from the edge to the ridge, but didn't thin it out at all. Since I was aiming for Solutrean, that was a bit of a fail.

I figured out later whilst mentally running through the process what had gone wrong, and it was the usual - I hadn't worked out what I was trying to do. Flint knapping consists of 3 steps for every single strike:

1. Work out what you want to take off
2. Work out how to do it
3. Do it

I had missed out steps one and two. What I should have done was create a platform to allow a strike like this:

Then struck the platform to fracture roughly along the red line.

and continued to do that along the edge of the flake.

It's easy for modern humans to look at flint artefacts and think they look rough, and unsophisticated. Intentionally shaping flint is extremely difficult, especially with percussion only, and learning how takes reflection and understanding as well as physical skill. While I intellectually knew that human cognitive ability probably hasn't really changed in tens of thousands of years, nothing brings it home like trying to work flint.

Neolithic axe carvings

Most of the neolithic rock carvings in Brittany feature the axe head. This is a pretty obvious representation of the polished axe heads found throughout the region in huge numbers.

What's very interesting about these axes, is that many of them are unused, or made from materials that make them completely impractical to use. Often they come to light in large caches.

It's pretty obvious they're meant as currency, or at least a show of status. From an anthropological point of view, that makes a lot of sense: for almost all of human history, the axe (not the knife, sorry bushcrafters!) has been the universal tool. We have been reliant on wood for our survival, and a small axe is able to do everything we need to do to make other tools, weapons, and prepare our food. If we look at Oetzi's gear, the most valuable item in his gear was his axe.

So one axe represents survival. What happens if you lose your axe? You are then dependent upon the assistance of others. An axe represents independence. A *spare* axe represents wealth - even if you lose an axe, you're still capable of caring for yourself. So a man with 3 axes, or even more, is wealthy indeed.....

links:

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=6924

http://www.megalithic-visions.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Symbols.AxeCarving

Ile de Gavrinis

During a recent trip to Morbihan, my partner and I took a guided tour of the neolithic cairn on the Ile de Gavrinis. The cairn is the key site in the complex of megalith sites dotting the whole Morbihan area. Photography inside the cairn is forbidden, so I can only offer pictures taken outside (plenty of pictures on the net of the carvings inside though).

What interests me particularly about this site is the fact that it is roughly coeval with the cup and ring markings scattered throughout Europe, and concentrated so spectacularly on Rombald's Moor. The carvings in the Morbihan area look so very much more sophisticated, but perhaps they are just much better preserved. After 5000 years of weathering, the outside carvings are dim at best.


I've long thought that the cup and ring markings could form some kind of map or 'land registry', with cups denoting homesteads and rings denoting boundaries, or perhaps importance. The straight lines that we find on some of the better preserved cup and ring stones (like the Badger Stone for example) could represent geographic features to orient the map. These carvings from Locmariquer show similarities to cup and ring markings, and also have perhaps the look of a map:

Much of the carving in the Gavrini site looks abstract*. The swirling patterns covering most of the slabs look like they're just there for decoration, although one set of patterning looks like it could be a torso, and there is another (this photo shows a reproduction) that is possibly a bow with siyahs and a recurved tip:

Certainly there are microlith finds from the area that would seem to suggest bows were being used in the area at the time.

There are also innumerable axe symbols on the Gavrini carvings:

The axe symbols are very frequent in the Morbihan carvings. Which makes it odd that we don't see them alongside cup and ring markings around Rombalds moor.

It's interesting also that some of the carvings in Morbihan are very clearly representational - such as the axes, and this 'axe plough' from the roof of the Merchants Table in Locmariaquer.

Yet there appears to be no representational carving at all in the Rombald's Moor carvings. Perhaps all the carvings are representational, and we just don't know what of.....



*Although I don't think I believe this one myself, here's an interesting passing thought. Right through the Iron age in northern europe, field enclosures are mostly round - square enclosures seem to be a Roman innovation. Recent work in permaculture has found that maximising boundary lines increases crop yields - the highest yields come from the edges where the plants get maximum sunlight & water. Maybe the swirling lines at Gavrini are meant to represent plough furrows?

Creswell Crags

Last saturday we took a trip down to Creswell Crags, just south of Worksop. Creswell Crags is the northernmost known paleolithic settlement site in the UK. Since the ice would have started just north from there, it's about as far north as people were living in the upper paleolithic.

Human settlement at Creswell is dated to around 20-30,000, which makes the site roughly contemporary with Chauvet. The site is a beautiful limestone gorge, with a stream running through it which was landscaped in the 19th Century into a very attractive pond. Cave sites along the northern side of the gorge are in full sunlight for much of the day, and must have been a very attractive prospect for paleolithic troglodytes. 

The site has been the source of a large range of interesting finds, including Solutrean points, linking the site to other sites in the Solutrean culture in central & southern France.

In 2003, the discovery was made of figurative cave art inscribed on the wall of a cave on the south side of the gorge. We went on the guided tour of Church Hole, and as you'd expect after 25,000 years, the engravings are difficult to make out. They are visibly there though. Until 2003 it was believed that there was no cave art from the paleolithic in the UK. Church Hole changed all that.

One particular piece was the large horse head on a single panel. It's clearly been coloured at some point in the dim and distant past, which helps to make it visible. Horses of course are a regular theme of Magdalenian art, which fits into the known timescale. 

The tours were excellent, the guides knew their stuff and set the scene well. The collection of finds on display isn't vast - Creswell only recently got a visitors centre and a lot of finds ended up in the permanent collections of the British Museum and Manchester Museum. The ochre horse head engraved on bone is a spectacular piece - that dates to about 13000 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creswell_Crags#mediaviewer/File:Ochre_Horse.jpg

The location itself is fantastic and worth a visit in its own right, but for anyone interested in paleolithic Europe it's a must.

Bit warm out

Today was planned to be another ultra running day. I'd worked out a route starting from Settle and heading home via Malham & Wharfedale.

Happily, Yorkshire is in the grip of a bit of a heatwave at the moment. Not much by some standards, but it's 25 degrees out there. A bit too warm for a 65km run.

So I'll stick to 25km this afternoon, and leave the 65 until maybe october.