Posted on 04/11/2015 9:05:16 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Centre for Experimental Archaeology on Belfield campus is only one of its kind in the world.
Brendan O’Neill at work on his early medieval round house on the UCD campus.
How did our ancestors create the world they lived in? How did they survive without the modern accoutrements that make our lives easy?
The question is at the heart of archaeology and forms the basis of a unique project in a quiet corner of University College Dublin’s sprawling Belfield campus.
UCD is the only university in the world with a centre for experimental archaeology. It is not made of bricks and mortar, but of wattle and hazel sticks.
Experimental archaeology involves reconstructing buildings and artefacts from ancient culture, using only the tools and materials from that period.
Such a method gives students of archaeology a grasp of the past they would not get from studying books, according to Prof Aidan O’Sullivan, director of the Centre for Experimental Archaeology.
“It’s absolutely transforming. If you get a student who digs up clay and makes a pot, when they go to a museum they are looking at these artefacts differently,” he said.
PhD student Brendan O’Neill says recreating artefacts has increased his admiration for how our ancestors lived. Where we have scientific rigour, they had tradition, and trial and error.
All fired up They had an “incredibly sophisticated” understanding of fire, he says, and were able to recreate intense fires of up to 1,500 degrees, hot enough to smelt iron, in furnaces made just from clay and sand.
MA students on site have been using charcoal and a bellows made from leather and twine to smelt copper. “It gives us an understanding of the time and investment that was put into things, and their relative importance,” said Mr O’Neill. “I work in the early Christian period. They had iron and bronze. Iron was used for working the land, but they put just as much investment into bronze, which were things of adornment.”
The students have built a reproduction of one of Ireland’s oldest houses, from 7800 BC, using intertwined birch trees like a wicker basket to create a structure that looks like a giant chimney stack. A previous attempt blew down but this one is secured from the inside using sticks and rope.
Another PhD student, Bernard Gilhooly, has built stone axes and tried them out on meat and trees. The handle is made from the holly tree, the head from shale and the axe secured with pine roots
It does not look like it would cut through butter, but it is capable of cutting down a small birch tree in five minutes.
Mr Gilhooly said experimental archaeology is a way of getting reconnected with our ancestors. “We want to understand the people who created these. If we can bring that to the fore for the public to know and understand, that’s our job done.”
As a graduate of UCD who majored in Anthropology (Archaeology emphasis)(note that Archaeology isn’t a separate degree at UCD, so your degree says Anthropology), I find this fascinating. What is even more fascinating is how I actually made it through the program being a conservative and a Christian.
Whoops! This is Dublin! I assumed it was UC Davis. Now I look like a complete fool! :-) Still fascinating.
They had iron and bronze. Iron was used for working the land, but they put just as much investment into bronze, which were things of adornment.”
Actually their bronze technology was highly advanced
and was used to make many plows and tools.
They could treat bronze to make it hard and keep
a fair edge too.
I’m an iron man but there is stuff about bronze metal
working we know little about.
We’re always surprised to hear that ancient civilizations had an “incredibly sophisticated understanding” of anything. Yet if one has a biblical worldview it makes sense. Adam was perfect when he was created as his genes were not yet marred by sin. Subsequent generations would have had less time to be affected and also would have been smarter, stronger, faster, etc. than we are today.
But, the academic world consistently rejects the history presented in the bible and will always be annoyingly surprised at how advanced ancient civilizations were.
Modern Americans pride themselves on being smarter than anyone in history, but it is all just hubris. Metallurgy is one area that proves this pretty consistently. There are numerous ancient metal artifacts that we cannot reproduce despite all our modern technology. Who are the ignorant savages?
I’ve always been of the mindset that if time travel were possible, most of our ancestors would easily acclimate to modern society and become very successful, but most modern people would be dead in a month if they traveled back in time.
What’s crazy about the past is how incredibly small the world population was back then and it took forever to grow. Back in the time of Christ there were less people in the entire world than the total population of the USA right now. And it took almost 1800 years to reach a billion. Now we add a billion in seemingly the blink of an eye, every 10 years I think it is. 30 more years we will hit 10 billion.
Cant we just clone them like in sci-fi movies?
In AI they recreated an adult dead person, as an adult, no childhood.
That’s OK. This Cal Poly alum is not laughing at you
........much.
Or you could work in rural Africa or Asia and talk to the elders on how they lived in the good old days. Of course, nowadays they have cellphones so you could just text their grand kids and ask questions.
So is Obama, by setting us back a few centuries.
Great topic.
When these comparisons are made, we should start with the number of millennia it took to domesticate animals, grow crops, create tools, speech and writing communications.
I believe early discoveries of metal, clay and other materials were originally accidental, followed by a natural curiosity and ultimately became more sophisticated. It would have taken several thousand years. What is fascinating are the parallel developments throughout the world by tribes who had no knowledge of each other’s existence.
No fool like a degreed fool...
Pomona or SLO?
That should have had a
};^P>
The original. .....SLOtown.
Some Socal Poly grads bristle when that question is posed
because they don’t think Pomona is the real deal.
Being from NorCal I really don’t get the dispute.
*shrug* I Liked Pomona.
/bingo
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