A reconstruction drawing of London Bridge in about 1590 by Stephen
Conlin, specially commissioned by Country Life Magazine. © Stephen
Conlin. All Rights Reserved. 
www.pictu.co.uk
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Showing posts with label 16th century. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 16th century. Show all posts
Monday, 14 October 2019
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
Wild Foods. Nettle Pudding.
My sincere thanks to Grizz for sharing this recipe with me.
https://antiquitynow.org/2015/01/07/bon-appetit-wednesday-ancient-nettle-pudding-britains-oldest-recipe/
http://neclhg.freeforums.net/thread/620/travels-john-heckewelder-frontier-america?page=1&scrollTo=1872
Ancient Nettle Pudding
Recipe courtesy of Ancient Craft and Celtnet Recipes
According to Celtnet Recipes, “when most food was boiled in a large
pot, adding dumplings or ‘puddings’ to stocks (was) a good way of putting
starch in the diet. These large dumplings are flavoured with wild herbs and
nettles.”[9]
Ingredients
1 bunch of sorrel
1 bunch of watercress
1 bunch of dandelion leaves
2 bunches of young nettle leaves
Some chives
1 cup of barley flour
1 teaspoon of salt
Instructions
Chop the herbs finely and mix in the barley flour and salt.
Add enough water to bind it together and place in the center of a
linen or muslin cloth.
Tie the cloth securely and add to a pot of simmering venison or wild
boar (a pork joint will do just as well). Make sure the string is long enough
to pull the pudding from the pot.
Cook the pudding until the meat is done (at least two hours).
Leave the pudding to cool slightly, remove the muslin, then cut the
pudding into thick slices with a knife.
Serve the pudding with chunks of barley bread.
*The pudding can be served along side the meat with which it was
cooked, or it can be served as its own stand-alone dish.
[1] Pappas, S. (2012, September 28). Ancient
Burial Shroud Made of Surprising Material, Scientists Find. Retrieved January
2, 2015.
[4] Nettles – discover its healing, medicinal
qualities. (n.d.). Retrieved January 2, 2015, from http://www.nettlesforhealth.com/#!nettle-uses/c18ah
[8] Macrae, F. (n.d.). Traditional English
cooking: Nettle pudding and other ancient recipes. Retrieved January 2, 2015.
[9] Boiled Nettle Pudding a classic reconstructed
Ancient Recipe. (n.d.). Retrieved January 7, 2015, from http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/ancient/fetch-recipe.php?rid=ancient-boiled-nettle-pudding
https://antiquitynow.org/2015/01/07/bon-appetit-wednesday-ancient-nettle-pudding-britains-oldest-recipe/
http://neclhg.freeforums.net/thread/620/travels-john-heckewelder-frontier-america?page=1&scrollTo=1872
Wednesday, 28 November 2018
More Information on the Penny Knife.
I should have picked up on this information a long time ago when Willy contacted me saying that the penny knife looked just like a Trattenbach
pocket knife. Somehow I missed Willy's post! Then recently I was contacted by Robert asking for more information on the Penny knife, I told Robert that I had no more information to give him. Then I get an email from Robert with this, to me anyway, astounding revelation that these penny knives were being made over 500 years ago in Austria, & they are still being made today! So my apologies to Willy for missing his post, & my thanks to Robert for the information he sent me that started a new line of research.
Here below then is what I have found so far:
Penny Knife Information.
Almost everyone knows the pocket faucet - a folding pocket knife with
a turned wooden handle that fits in any trouser pocket and is used in a variety
of ways, from jausen to mushroom picking. In 1422, the knife production in
Trattenbach was first mentioned in documents, since 1682 it is considered an
independent guild. One of the secrets to success was the hard,
high-quality sharp steel used for the blades. The knives were exported to
large parts of Europe and as far as Africa. Today two more factories
produce the Trattenbacher pocket felts by hand. The knowledge about the
history, production and use of the pocket fagot is still upheld today in
Trattenbach:
The Trattenbach pocket knife, a foldable knife that consists of a
blade and a lathed wooden handle, has been hand-produced in Trattenbach for
nearly 600 years.
Since 1682, Trattenbach’s cutlers have been recognized as an
independent guild.
The first written mention of knife-making there is from
1422.
Saturday, 27 October 2018
Intercontinental Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland and in the Colony of New Sweden
Blog author's copy of a brass trade kettle.
M.C. Beaudry and T.G. Parno (eds.), Archaeologies of Mobility and
Movement, 17 Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology 35, DOI
10.1007/978-1-4614-6211-8_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Colonialism establishes particular and sometimes surprising networks of desire
between territories, things, and people. Their basis is in materials, material
cultures, and their movements across regions and continents. One such a network
connected the native populations of Lapland in the northernmost region of
Europe and the Swedish colony in North America. The colony of New Sweden was
founded in 1638 in the Delaware Valley, which encompassed the area of northern
Delaware, southwestern New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania. Here I
analyze the establishment and effects of this network through the
seventeenth-century trade in brass kettles in the two distant areas. I will
begin by articulating the relationship between colonialism, desire, and
material culture. The archaeology of colonial identity can be defi ned,
following Lucas ( 2004 : 186), as the study of how subjectivities are
constituted in the context of colonialism in terms of everyday material
culture. Desire, in turn, glues together everyday life with macroscale politics
and global networks of exchange. The concept of desire therefore helps us to
understand how colonialism functions as a force that establishes new ways of
life and interaction. The differing conceptions of desire, however, provide for
this fi eld of research very dissimilar ways of tracing the emergence of
identities. After specifying these differences, I will present the distribution
and consumption of brass kettles in North America, North Scandinavia, and
Finland as a case study. Lastly, I will discuss how brass kettles constituted
an element in the colonial and intercontinental movements of desire. The
concepts of desire and colonialism surface, though obliquely, as the main theme
in two recent historical studies on the relations between the settlers and the
Native Americans in the Swedish colony. The fi rst is Gunlög Fur’s book
Colonialism in the Margins ( 2006 ). The earlier historical tradition argued
that the relations Chapter 2 Intercontinental Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in
Lapland and in the Colony of New Sweden Visa Immonen V. Immonen (*) Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies , University of Helsinki , P.O. Box 4 , FI-00014
University of Helsinki , Finland e-mail: visa.immonen@helsinki.fi 18 between
the Nordic colonizers and the native populations of the region, mainly the
Lenni Lenape, were unusually friendly and peaceful. This was a symptom of the
civilized attitudes of the Swedes. Fur argues, however, that peacefulness was
more a consequence of the settlers having no options. The survival of the
colony depended on the goodwill of the natives and their readiness to
participate in trade. In a similarly critical vein, Amy Schutt examines
interaction between the native populations of Delaware and European colonists
in her book Peoples of the River Valleys ( 2007 ). Schutt’s focus is on the
native side of the colonial encounter, but she also emphasizes the
Indian–Indian relations. These relations were heterogeneous and affected also
the native attitudes and policies towards the Europeans. These two studies try
to create accounts that operate outside of the paradigm of Western
universalizing history. They do this by approaching the colonized as an active
force, emphasizing, for example, the role of the Lenape in defi ning the
conditions in which the early trade with the Swedes was conducted and later in
adopting the strategy of building alliances with an array of peoples. This
enabled their survival as a people during the advancement of the European
settlers. Both works have been criticized, however. First, Fur is accused of
failing to concretize her claims by explicitly comparing American and Nordic
colonialisms (Smolenski, 2007 ). Schutt’s work, in turn, has been criticized as
implying that the natives were merely reacting to European prompts, not defi
ning various situations of encounter in their own terms (Snyder, 2007 ). These
minor criticisms directed at Fur and Schutt arise in reaction to a particular
conception of colonialism and desire present in both works. The authors appear
to approach colonialism as an ideological device, a particular way in which
colonial social practices produce various subjects and defi ne their relations.
In this way, the colonial system of power carves out the contours of colonizers
and the colonized and their experiences. Desire is understood through the
concept of acquisition: colonial desire seeks to acquire something that it
lacks. In the case of brass kettles, the natives craved European things,
reacting to their presence as material signifi ers of colonial power and
European values, and wanted to satisfy their desire by engaging in trade. In
this framework, the traded items as actual material objects are secondary to
the workings of colonial economies and power. Desire as an Active Force The
relation between colonialism, the emergence of colonial subjects, and the
profusion of European products introduced into the Native American cultures can
be seen in a different light. This perspective rests on another kind of
conception of desire that, rather than confi ning analysis to the rigidly predefi
ned dualism between the colonizer and the colonized, shifts the emphasis to the
materiality and performative force of the products. In this view, desire is not
a representation of colonial politics or ideologies, but a productive force
that allows the emergence of the colonial setting and the fl ows of people and
objects. Such an inquiry into material culture V. Immonen 19 requires the
analysis of artifacts in relation to fundamental networks of desire. The
exploration of relations between bodies and objects, their microscale movements
and transformations, is given priority. The goal is to reveal the complex
dependences between objects and humans, in which the former are not simply
vehicles for meanings given by the latter. Things and material processes should
not be considered in isolation from the performative emergence of both
subjectivity and colonialism. Gosden ( 2004 ) favors such an alternative view
on the relations between desire, material culture, and colonialism. He argues
that colonialism is a particular effect that material culture has on bodies and
minds, and concludes that “colonialism is a relationship of desire, which
creates a network of people and things, but the exact shape of desire and the
ensuing network will vary” (Gosden, 2004 : 153). Colonialism is thus
established as an elementary relationship to material culture. Gosden’s defi -
nition of colonialism is based on the conception of desire as a positive
production of reality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1985 ). Desire is a machine, and
the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Consequently all
social production is desiringproduction, not something that precedes desire.
This framework does not bring about the easy amalgamation of the colonizer and
the colonized into some uniform coherence. Instead, desire is established and
based on differences, differences between the two and within the two. Desire in
this sense is not a desire for an object, for a traded product as such, but it
is desire to be drawn into another world expressed by that object. At the same
time, as a difference, desire establishes moments in which the authoritarian
discourses lose their grip on meaning and become open to the trace of the
language of the other: objects can express various worlds and their values, and
as objects, brass kettles participate in these fl uctuations of meaning.
Kettles in the History of the Swedish Colony The fl ow of kettles from Europe
into colonial setting gave a rise to various formations of desire and
subsequent experiences that I set to trace. These new experiences were highly
differing, but at the same time, part of the same colonial process. First, the
outlines of this process and the role of copper kettles are sketched focusing
on the Swedish colony and its history. Although in terms of archaeology New
Sweden remains poorly studied (Fig. 2.1 ) (Immonen, 2011 ), written documents
related to it are known relatively well and published (Waldron, 1995 ).
Consequently, the outline of the colony’s history is soundly established. After
that, I will continue to the microscale movements of kettles in the everyday
colonial life, giving new insight into the global mechanisms. An important
motivation for the Kingdom of Sweden to become engaged in the colonial venture
was its economy which in the seventeenth century was weak— in stark contrast to
the nation’s increased political importance in Europe (Johnson, 1911 ). At the
same time, with the rapid expansion of military industry 2 Intercontinental
Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland... 20 and the constant need for
muskets and cannons, the European copper markets were developing at a quick
pace. Accordingly, copper mining became one of the most important industries
for the kingdom and a major source of income for the government. The Great Copper
Mountain in Falun functioned as the nation’s treasury and funded the heavy war
efforts in Central Europe. Although copper was a relatively valuable metal in
Europe, it was not used for making social distinctions, but rather manufactured
into weapons and domestic objects and distributed to a wide and varied consumer
base (Turgeon, 1997 : 5). In their continuous search for new markets for these
products, Swedish statesmen merged their interests with the commercial aims of
Dutch merchants and set to establish an overseas colony (Johnson, 1911 : 87–92,
95, 102). The developing markets of America and Africa had a huge potential,
but despite the great fi nancial and political ambitions, after its founding in
1638, New Sweden had a short history. The Dutch seized the colony in 1655, and
fi nally, in 1664, it was taken over by the English (Dahlgren & Norman,
1988 : 9, 64–65). The colony’s autonomous position ended in 1682. Because of
the pathetic fate of the colony, the number of colonists who had come from Europe
to New Sweden by the mid-seventeenth century remained less than 700. They did
not, however, come to an uninhabited terrain, but a region settled mostly by
the Lenape, whose number in the region approached 5,000 (Becker, 1976 : 25).
The Lenape were not purely hunter-gatherers, but also engaged in smallscale
horticulture during the Late Woodland Period (cf . AD 1000–1600). A
slashand-burn technique was used to grow corn, beans, and a variety of squash
(Kraft, 1986 : 115–118), and in fact two-thirds or even more of their caloric
intake was obtained through corn cultivation (Fur, 2006 : 106). Fig. 2.1 Among
the few thoroughly excavated sites of New Sweden are the remains of the
governor’s residence or Printzhof at present Governor Printz Park in Essington,
Pennsylvania (Becker, 2011 ). The residence was built by the third colonial
governor Johan Björnsson Printz (1592–1663) in 1643 (Photo by Visa Immonen) V.
Immonen 21 New Sweden never became a major market for Swedish copper, but
artifacts made of the metal nevertheless appear among the imported products.
When the fi rst voyage to North America was planned, the products to be traded
with the aboriginals included “adzes, hatchets, kettles, duffels and other
merchandise” (Johnson, 1911 ; 97; cf. 112). Upon his arrival at Delaware Bay in
1638, the fi rst governor Peter Minuit (1580–1638) presented a sachem , or as
the colonizers conceived, chief of the Lenape, with a kettle and other trifl es
in exchange for land (Johnson, 1911 : 437; Weslager, 1972 : 125). After the fi
rst voyage, brass kettles appear frequently in cargo lists and documents
related to trade. The seventh expedition brought 302 kettles (Johnson, 1911 :
255–256). The preparations for the eighth voyage also mention kettles (Johnson,
1911 : 258–259), while the ninth expedition bought 224 brass kettles from
Holland to bring them to New Sweden (Johnson, 1911 : 268). When there was a
shortage of trade goods in 1643, Governor Printz had to buy cloth and other
merchandise from the English and the Dutch. John Willcox of Virginia sold him a
variety of products including three kettles (Johnson, 1911 : 310). In 1644, the
ship Fama arrived along with 250 kettles (Johnson, 1911 : 316–317), and in 1646
the Haj came also with kettles in its hold (Johnson, 1911 : 329). In 1647,
Printz discussed with the Minquas the sale of land for which he paid, among
other items, four kettles (Johnson, 1911 : 332). In 1654, the last Governor
Johan Risingh (1617–1672) gathered 12 sachems and gave each of them “one yard
of frieze, one kettle [?], one axe, one hoe, one knife, one pound of powder,
one stick of lead and six awl-points” (Johnson, 1911 : 563–565). Brass Kettles
in Native Lives The transportation of kettles from Sweden to New Sweden appears
as a macroscale manifestation of the colonial effort, but the much more subtle
movements of the objects in the colony are of equal importance. These smaller
fl ows and accumulations of kettles did not remain unnoticed by the
contemporary Swedes. In the midseventeenth century, military engineer Peter
Lindeström (1632–1691) ( 1923 : 173) observed how local Indian households were
full of brass and brass kettles small and large, which they had bought from the
colonists. Indeed, in addition to various tools and cloths, brass kettles were
among the things that the Indians asked for most often when trading with the
Swedes or other Europeans [Fur, 2006 : 164; Johnson, 1911 : 191; Schutt, 2007 :
2; Weslager, 1972 : 125–126, 148, 149, 162, 170, 185, 216, 346; see also Martin
( 1975 : 133)]. Eventually brass kettles and imported ceramics replaced local
pottery, and the Lenape pot-making skills declined. By the time of the Swedish
explorer and botanist Pehr Kalm’s (1716–1779) voyage in the mid-eighteenth
century, the Lenape skills of making ceramics had almost vanished (Fur, 2006 :
204– 205; Kalm, 1970 : 240; Nassaney, 2004 : 346). In spite of the references
to objects made from copper or brass being relatively frequent, as actual
objects they are quite rarely found in early colonial Lenape sites. 2 Intercontinental
Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland... 22 Besides various copper objects,
like bangles, bracelets, buckles, buttons, crosses, earrings, fi nger rings,
hawk’s bells, Jew’s harps, religious medals, spoons, thimbles, and tubular
beads (Veit & Bello, 2001 ), only a few brass kettles are known. They were
discovered at the Bell-Browning-Blair and Minisink burial sites in the Upper
Delaware River Valley (Heye & Pepper, 1915 ; Marchiando, 1972 : 143). The
adoption of kettles by the Lenape is usually explained in functional terms
(e.g., Fitzgerald, Turgeon, Whitehead, & Bradley, 1993 : 54; Kraft, 1986 :
207–208; Weslager, 1972 : 107). For populations living mainly on hunting,
gathering, and semi-agrarian activities, they had signifi cant advantages
compared with the local pottery. Kettles were more portable and more durable
than ceramics, they were easy to hang over a fi re by the handles, and a hole
in a kettle was relatively easy to mend. Moreover, kettles were also turned
into various other objects, such as ornaments and arrowheads (Mounier, 2003 :
121). All these features greatly enhanced aboriginal ways of living. Turgeon (
1997 : 2) criticizes technological determinism implicit in the comparisons
between native ceramics and imported kettles. Kettles materialized more than
merely utilitarian values. The use of kettles, he suggests, was an act of
appropriation and transformation of the meanings that adhered to the objects.
Unlike functional explanations, interpretations of these meanings emphasize
more the temporal change and fl uctuations in the uses the kettles were put to.
Witthoft ( 1966 ) divides the Indian–European trade into phases, the fi rst of
which covers the era from the fi rst contact to the 1590s. During this early
period, brass kettles were already among the products exchanged, but they seem
to have been cut up into ornaments and knives rather than used as cooking
utensils. It was not until the second phase and increased European contacts in
the seventeenth century that brass kettles started to appear in graves as whole
objects (Kraft, 1986 : 206–209, 214; Witthoft, 1966 : 204–207). The change in
the use of kettles can be associated with the meaning of copper in the network
of native social relations. Prior to the European contact, rare native copper
objects are primarily known from burial contexts, and the earliest contact
period artifacts were primarily of copper, because Native Americans appreciated
the metal for its scarcity and religious signifi cance (Galke, 2004 ). Hence,
values of native objects were extended to the European imports, and Europeans
were assimilated to the local social networks through these objects—materiality
was the basis for certain forms of social behavior (Miller & Hamell, 1986 :
318). When the availability of copper products increased as a result of
intensifi ed European contacts, copper objects became “a kind of currency,
available to and used by the elite and common people alike” (Galke, 2004 :
94–95). European brass kettles, or their fragments, appeared throughout the
native sites of the northeast seaboard once the fur trade began in the last
quarter of the sixteenth century, and they had a more or less similar impact on
all native populations as well (Fitzgerald et al., 1993 : 44). When the objects
appear in written sources related to New Sweden, they are usually among the
payments or gifts given to the natives. In that way, kettles participated in
the ongoing gift-giving process and were a means of building and maintaining
social relations. They were used in a similar manner, when, for instance, land
V. Immonen 23 agreements were settled among the native residents themselves
(Schutt, 2007 : 34–36). As kettles gradually became part of the everyday gear
(Weslager, 1972 : 377, 483), they were incorporated into other social rituals
as well. According to Weslager ( 1972 : 490), a Lenape bride was given a kettle
for cooking in her wedding ceremonies, and after death, she could be buried
with such an implement (Nassaney, 2004 : 335, 343; Weslager, 1972 : 100, 133–134,
174, 488). The movement of kettles from use and exchange into the immobile
grave context might seem minor, but it in fact implies a fundamental change.
The network of desire set by colonialism had become part of the native way of
life and was integrated into the burial rites. Eventually kettles were adapted
to the prevailing ways of gendering material culture and social practices, but
at the same time, their fl ow from Europe transformed the objects and their
micro-movements. As such these Lenape practices and contexts of using brass
kettles do not seem to differ signifi cantly from what occurred in other
colonies in North America. Nevertheless, New Sweden is of particular interest,
because similar developments occurred in the material culture of the Sámi in
Fennoscandia. Brass Kettles and the Sámi As in North America, the Swedish
administration faced seminomadic indigenous populations, the Sámi, in the
northern parts of the kingdom. With the progressing centralization and
tightening of the state control from the seventeenth century onwards, the Sámi
people experienced increased pressures to integrate with the Swedish state. The
colonialist framework in which brass kettles were imported and consumed was
thus more or less similar on the two continents, but the timescale was very
different. The contact between the Sámi and the southern farmer communities had
a much longer history than the relationship between the colonizers and the
colonized in the New World. In Lapland, the cessation of the Sámi pottery tradition
is, as in New Sweden, associated with the adoption of brass kettles. The use of
ceramics among the native populations, however, seems to have ended already by
around AD 400 (Bergman, 2007 ). Not surprisingly, the subsequent archaeological
material refl ects the popularity of kettles among the Sámi. In Finland, the
majority of medieval and early modern kettles, numbering several dozens, are
stray fi nds from the wilderness areas of central, east, and north Finland
(Fig. 2.2 ) (Anttila, 2002 : 25). On the basis of their distribution,
Taavitsainen ( 1986 : 38–39) suggests that the stray fi nds should be
associated with the utilization of the inland wilderness, and moreover, instead
of seeing them as hoards deposited by western and southern farmer–merchants,
they might just as well have been deposited by the “the Lapp” population, or
nomadic hunter-gatherers, who later became the ethnic group of “the Sámi” (cf.
Anttila, 2002 : 16–36; Siiropää & Luoto, 1999 ). In addition to surviving
intact kettles, however, sheets from brass kettles, some with rivets or holes
for rivets, have been found in various sacrifi cial and settlement 2
Intercontinental Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland... 24 sites
throughout Lapland in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Their dating covers a period
from the eleventh to the seventeenth century (Carpelan, 1987 , 1991 , 1992 ,
2003 ; Hedman, 2003 : 186; Odner, 1992 : 131; Okkonen, 2007 : 35–37; Serning,
1956 : 91–93; Zachrisson, 1976 : 47–50, 62). For instance, in Finnish Lapland,
the excavations of the Juikenttä settlement site in Sodankylä, dated from the
twelfth to the seventeenth century, revealed fragments of several brass kettles
(Carpelan, 1966 : 68–69, 74). Further pieces of kettles were discovered at the
Nukkumajoki 2 site in Inari, which was settled from the fi fteenth to the late
seventeenth century (Carpelan, 1992 : 41–42, 2003 : 73). References to kettles
in connection with the Sámi are equally common in written sources. The oldest
one is a document of the Piteå court dated to as early as 1424. The text states
that any coastal farmer who had the right to trade with the Sámi and who
provided items that the Sámi required for their survival, among others a kettle
or a pot, was given the right to trade with and claim taxes from that
particular Sámi for three years without interference ( Handlingar rörande
Skandinaviens historia , 1848 : 27; Voionmaa, 1912 : 61). In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when southern burghers arrived at the Sámi markets of
Normark in Norway, they brought brass kettles along as sales items (Fur, 1992 :
45; Itkonen, 1948b : 206). In eighteenthcentury Finland, the burghers of the
town of Tornio transported kettles to Lapland in order to sell them to the Sámi
(Itkonen, 1948b : 198). Moreover, the brass kettles are common items in the
probate inventories of Sámi families in the nineteenth century with the
wealthiest ones owning as many as six or seven (Itkonen, 1948b : 307–308). In
many cases, fragments of brass kettles appear to have been purposefully
severed. For this reason, Christian Carpelan ( 1992 : 41–42, 2003: 73)
associates the fi nds with Sámi sacrifi ces. When copper fragments are known
from farm settlements not inhabited by the Sámi, they are, in contrast,
interpreted as residue from mending. For instance, fragments of brass sheets
were found in the fourteenth- century site of Kello Fig. 2.2 Two brass kettles
from a hoard of four kettles found in a peatland meadow at Käärmelahti,
Maaninka, Northern Savonia. The kettles were made in the fi fteenth to
seventeenth centuries. They have been interpreted as a hoard for depositing
capital, or a sacrifi cial deposition (Kivikoski, 1934 ; Taavitsainen, 1986 ).
The diameter of the fi rst one is 39 cm and the second 28 cm (National Museum
of Finland, inv. no. 9769:1, 4) (Photo by Visa Immonen) V. Immonen 25 in
Haukipudas, North Ostrobothnia, Finland. The settlement belonged to Finnish
farmers, and accordingly the fi nds are seen as leftovers from repairs
(Koivunen & Sarkkinen, 1994 : 18–19, 21). The Kello site is not an
exception. Although larger objects of copper alloys are absent in the
archaeological assemblages of northern towns, pieces of scrap metal are
relatively common (Nurmi, 2011 : 64, 145). The explanation for this situation
appears simple: brass kettles were valuable items also for European colonizers,
and they were not lightheartedly discarded (Soop, 1963 ). Following this
reasoning, however, Zachrisson ( 1976 : 47) poses the question of whether the
fragments found in indigenous sites are raw material just like the scatter from
non-Sámi settlements. At least some of the sheets have clearly been cut into
pendants and ornaments. Kettles in Colonial Networks of Desire Similarities in
the adoption of brass kettles and the ways in which they changed the local
material cultures in North America and Lapland are notable and denote the
global mechanisms of European colonialism. On a macroscale, the copper created
a geographical and cultural tie between the two continents and between the
worlds of the colonist and the native. Various networks of desire partly
clashed, but partly they also amplifi ed and transformed each other. As in
North America, the decline of the local pottery tradition in Lapland is
associated with the substantive adoption of imported ceramics and brass
kettles. Another striking commonality is the cutting of kettles into smaller
pieces and making them into other artifacts found in both indigenous sites and
sites belonging to the Swedish colonizers. Having said that, however, in fl ows
of desire, there are no hierarchies between macro and micro, or global and
local. Desire is independent of the mobility of people and things, but
constantly establishing their transformations and relations. Hence, it is also
important to trace small shifts and consider their impact on larger trends.
With undeniable force, colonialism drew two worlds and continents together,
concretized by brass kettles, but this apparent uniformity was full of
differences: differences between the administrative strata and the other
settlers, between European and native customs, and between a range of native
populations with their respective histories and ways of life. The social and
economic trajectories of the Lenape and the Sámi groups were quite distinct.
During the seventeenth century, both the Sámi and the Lenape were able to some
extent control the European colonizing power and the fl ows of trade goods
(Fig. 2.3 ). The Sámi communities experienced increasing pressures from the
Swedish state that constantly enhanced its control over its subjects and
regions, and as a consequence, their subsistence strategies took drastically
new shapes. Many communities experienced a transition from hunter-gatherer
subsistence to reindeer pastoralism (Bergman, 2007 ; Itkonen, 1948a : 302).
Unlike the Lenape, however, the Sámi were more aware of their possibilities as
part of the kingdom and were able to employ their position as royal subjects
and appeal directly to the sovereign (Fur, 1992 ). 2 Intercontinental Flows of
Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland... 26 Under colonial pressure, Lenape social
organization also readjusted from subsistence economy to hunting for skins, as
furs were the currency of European trade. In contrast to the Sámi, the Lenape
initially had an upper hand in terms of subsistence and could set the
availability of the European goods as the condition for the colonizers’
survival (see Fig. 2.3 ). Lenape participation in European trade, however,
never reached the extent of neighboring groups like the Susquehannock (Custer,
1996 : 314). The situation changed fatally around 1675, when the European taste
for furs plummeted and the fur trade stagnated. The basis of the native wealth
and indigenous means for control crumpled (Fur, 1992 ; Newcomb, 1956 : 83). In
the trade networks established by colonialism, brass kettles were commodities
in the fullest meaning of the term. Partly alienated from their prior context
of the colonizer, but still having their benefi cial material qualities, they
became part of the desiring machine of the indigenous life, extending its
possibilities. The meaning of brass kettles shifted and their movements
differed from those in the homeland, and this affected even the lives of the
colonizer. In Lindeström’s description of the Fig. 2.3 The frontispiece of
Thomas Campanius Holm’s book Description of the Province of New Sweden ( 1702 )
depicts a friendly encounter between the local Indians and Swedish traders in
New Sweden. Holm never visited the colony and based the image on stories told
by his grandfather, who lived in New Sweden in the 1640s V. Immonen 27
accumulation of kettles in native houses, one can sense a surprise or
amusement. In Europe, a kettle of brass was an everyday object of no particular
interest beyond its material and utilitarian value, but in the New World, it
became more articulately a trace of homeland, of the familiar domestic sphere
and comfort. Lindeström saw how these ordinary objects, kettles, appeared in
excessive numbers, creating a disturbing colonial experience in which a familiar
object strangely metamorphosed. In Lindeström’s observation, potential feeling
of nostalgic everydayness has been severed, and this surprise continues in the
contemporary scholarly need to provide explanations for the strange movements
of kettles in native lives. Why was a European object not used in the same way
by the Lenape as it was by colonists? What was the function of kettle fragments
in indigenous sites? In North America, the fragments of brass have mainly been
conceived as a sign of the high social esteem given to copper instead of
utilitarian concerns. The appreciation of copper as raw material declined,
however, as objects made of the metal became common through intensifying
European contact. In Lapland, the phenomenon of brass sheets is often
interpreted as cultic behavior, although also more functional views, related to
using brass as raw material, have been presented. The two interpretative
traditions seem to imply that discovering kettle fragments excludes the
possibility that they had other uses prior to breaking them, or simultaneously,
when used in sacrifi cial or cultic contexts. Objects and their fragments are
mobile, taking new shapes and meanings, and taking into account these miniscule
histories is crucial when the range of possible interpretations is considered.
Therefore, if brass objects were so popular and scrap metal could be used to
mend broken kettles, one might ask, why should brass fragments be considered as
signs of exotic and cultic behavior? Might it have been also an effi cient way
of utilizing materials? Brass kettles, their use, and raw material were already
familiar to the indigenous groups. As Marshall Sahlins ( 1993 : 17) concludes:
“The fi rst commercial impulse of the people is not to become just like us but
more like themselves.” Brass kettles were adapted to the native material
culture and attached to different environments, practices, and values through
the process of commodifi cation (Galke, 2004 : 94; cf. Herva & Ylimaunu,
2006 ). Their colonial and European macro-movements were met with confl icting
micro-movements in the native lives. Kettles were invested with distinct social
values and employed as currency, but they were also used in cooking and buried
with certain members of the Lenape community. These various ways in which
kettles circulated among the native groups show how the colonial desire
instituted shifting formations of value. In effect, brass kettles gave form to
the desires of hunter-gathering cultures, made their subsistence strategies
more effi - cient, and contributed to their social change (Fitzgerald et al.,
1993 : 54), and thus, as artifacts, they bore transformative possibilities not
actualized in European contexts (Rubertone, 2000 : 431–432). The expanding
colonial desire produced new differences and created novel affective
attachments and investments involving time and labor. Acknowledgments I would
like to thank the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (TUCEMEMS)
for a travel grant which partly enabled me to write the present chapter. 2
Intercontinental Flows of Desire: Brass Kettles in Lapland... 28 References
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http://www.springer.com/978-1-4614-6210-1
file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/9781461462101-c1.pdf
Written By Visa Immonen.
Written By Visa Immonen.
Thursday, 11 October 2018
Call To Arms! All Muzzle-Loader Users PLEASE Sign This Petition!
The law against using these primitive tools off the range has no
legitimate reason for existing, it was shear ignorance on the part of the law
makers that placed muzzle-loading pistols on a RESTRICTED license!
If we don't fight for our rights to legitimately use these primitive
guns, then no one else will, because the majority of the Australian public are
also probably totally ignorant in regards as to what these pistols actually
are. Restricting these pistols has no basis in public safety, criminals do not
use these guns & have not done so for at least the past 300 years!
So please, if you are a black powder enthusiast, a living historian
or a historical re-enactor, sign this petition.
Tuesday, 24 July 2018
What the 16th-century shipwreck found on the Kent coast can tell us about trade in Tudor England
Tudor warship, part of a manuscript presented to Henry VIII in 1546
by Anthony Anthony. British Library.
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/whitstable/news/video-experts-uncover-rare-shipwreck-186389/
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/whitstable/news/video-experts-uncover-rare-shipwreck-186389/
Friday, 6 April 2018
Forum Notifications?
Just in case you have not been receiving any notifications from our group forum, there are a stack of new posts in a variety of topics.
This forum is not the same as the old one, & some of you may have failed to click on the subscribe to topic! Anyway, like I said, there is a heap of new threads & information there if you are interested.
Keith.
Monday, 2 April 2018
Slide Carrs & Drag Carts.
From some accounts the slide carr or drag cart was one of the earliest known forms of transport. These were certainly in use in Europe, Ireland, Scotland & Wales from roughly the 16th century to the early 20th century. These carts or carrs could be drawn by horse, dog or by people.
I have reached that stage where I am not as sure on my feet anymore, & carrying a pack of any weight just adds to my difficulty if I should trip! So I decided to make myself a drag cart. My Mother was Welsh, so it seems only fitting that I should make a woodland version of the Welsh drag cart.
Drags &
Slide Cars
The slide car was a wooden framework that was dragged at an angle
with one end on the ground and was pulled by a horse between the shafts: it was
normally used for transporting hay.
Jenkins, J Geraint, Agricultural Transport in Wales, (1962), pp.
13-19
1732, Ireland
and comparison with Wales
There are no Carts or Waggons here [in Ireland], they have Carrs,
which are a kind of Sledges, set on two solid wooden Wheels straked with Iron,
& drawn by a single horse; they carry great Burthens, some 600
Weight. They differ from the Welsh Carriages only in This, as They have no
Wheels. These carriages are undoubtedly the Best for preserving the Road.
Loveday, John,
(1711-1789), Diary of a tour in 1732 through parts of England, Wales, Ireland
and Scotland, made by John Loveday of Caversham … Printed from a manuscript in
the possession of his great-grandson J. E. T. Loveday, with an introduction and
an itinerary, (Edinburgh: 1890), 31st May,1732
1768
Glamorganshire
Most of their draughts are performed by one horse in such a sledge as
this [drawing of a drag cart lettered a to d] aa the shafts like those of a
waggon or cart which slide on the ground on the ends bb. C is a semicircular
hoop from shaft to shaft, to keep in the sacks or bundles of hay or wood etc.,
which is laid on the cross bars dd. The machine is light and much preferable to
carrying the weight on the back.
Young, Arthur,
(F.R.S., Secretary to the Board of Agriculture), A Six Weeks Tour through the
Southern Counties of England and Wales, 1stedition, London, 1768, pp. 110-111
1767 between
Edwinsford and Hay
[They use a] car which I believe is the oldest and simplest
construction of a carriage, that is in use anywhere. It is composed of two
shafts, in length, about 11 feet, upon which are nailed 5 or 6 cross bars, in
length 3½, which serve to support the weight which is to be carried, which is
hindered from slipping off behind, either by three half hoops interlaced and
fastened into holes in the last bar, or by two prongs of wood fastening in the
shafts, with cross pieces between them ; the ends of the shafts are sloped off
; and trailing upon the ground serve instead of wheels : the harness consists
of a saddle, with a niche across the middle, into which a wythe twisted and
fastened into the fore part of the shafts, hitches : the horse has also a
collar of straw, and another of wood over it, into which are fastened two rings
of iron, long enough to receive the end of the shaft , which being put through
the ring, is hindered from returning by a small peg of wood, which fastens into
a hole made for that purpose. [Drawing (loose) and two little sketches of the
car included in the text.]
Banks, Joseph,
Journal of a Tour in Wales, 1767-1768. “The copy of a Journal of an Excursion
to Wales, &c., by S.S. Banks began August 13th, 1767, ended January 29th,
1768”, NLW MS 147C (transcribed by his sister S. S. Banks from the original now
in the University Library, Cambridge MS Add 6294 (2), p. 51
1775 near
Newport, Monmouthshire
Hitherto there is very little appearance of either different manners
or language. Very few of the people speaking Welsh. We saw a few slide carrs
such as are used in Ireland but these are not uncommon in Gloucestershire.
Grose, Francis,
[Journey to South Wales, 1775], British Library, Add. MS. 17398, f. 67
It is enclosed
on the land side by a steep and high mountain, to be ascended only by narrow
paths traversing its sides, by which the inhabitants convey their fuel of turf
on slide cars composed of two poles, fastened by rungs in the hinder
part, of which is placed a wicker creel, about a yard square; having no wheels,
it does not press on the ponies which draw it downwards, and it is so light as
to be easily drawn up when empty.
The type of traffic on the turnpike roads was also a major factor in
their condition. In 1729, at the beginning of the turnpike era, the vehicles
which were normally used for the transport of goods could be categorised into
three types, the slide cart, the truckle cart and the wheel car. The Irish
slide cart was a wheel-less vehicle, it had two long straight posts which were
drawn or dragged by the drawing horse. At the bottom of each post, the wearing
end, was a replaceable shoe. Containers were attached to the posts into which
the load which was to be transported was placed. These vehicles were most
suitable for use on the land or in mountainous areas as the posts caused a lot
of damage to the road surfaces.
The modern Irish name for this wheelless cart is the same
as the old Gaelic name, Carr Sliunain. Dr. Sullivan J states
that there is no reason to suppose that the Irish Carr is a
loan-word from the Latin Carrus, the stem Car being prob-
ably common to the Latin, the Germanic, and the Celtic
languages.
the Kintail Highlanders, if they used wheeled carts
to do the work they require of their wheelless carts. Indeed,
they could not so use them, except by putting the drag on hard
and fast — being first at the trouble of getting wheels, and then at
the trouble of preventing them from turning."
The same argument can be applied to Ireland. In a very
hilly country half the time one is going up-hill and the
other half down-hill; when going up-hill there is no load,
and consequently the slide-car, being so very light, is prac-
tically of no weight for a horse. Coming down-hill with a
load a rigid vehicle has to be employed in any case, and so
the slide-car is equally efficient, the chief drawback being
that it can carry so little, but this is not of much account in
small holdings. The slide-car has, further, the great recom-
mendation of being made easily and cheaply without requir-
ing the services of a skilled carpenter or wheelwright. It is
also as easily, repaired, and all the materials are ready to
hand.
It is also interesting to note that these very primitive
carts can be constructed entirely of wood and thongs, or
ropes, and there is no necessity for any metal to be em-
ployed.
THE STUDY OF MAN
The slide car was a wooden framework that was dragged at an angle
with one end on the ground and was pulled by a horse between the shafts. It was
used for transporting hay.
Jenkins, J Geraint, (1962), Agricultural Transport in Wales, 13-19
A G Prys-Jones, The Story of Carmarthenshire, Volume 2, From the C16
to 1832 (Llandybie, 1972), illustration 17
Thomas Martyn 'machines without wheels, and drawn by one horse'.
Martyn, T., A Tour of South Wales, [1801], NLW MS 1340C, p. 67
A meadow ... produced a little crop of grass that the inhabitants
were busied getting in. This labour was performed by men, women and children,
all actively employed; some of whom carried it home on their shoulders, others
in hand barrows whilst a third party filled and drove the sleds made use of in
Wales, which drag upon the ground without wheels, and are drawn by a little
pony.
Warner, Second Walk, p. 171
SCOTLAND
In those roadless days certain primitive vehicles also had been
developed, how far back one cannot tell. Sledges were made of two sapling
trunks. The thinner ends were fastened to the horse on each side like shafts,
while the thicker ends dragged along the ground and slats or boards were
fastened between them upon which the load rested. They were so suitable for use
on steep slopes that in Kintail and the Gairloch districts they had only just
gone out of use about thirty years ago (late 1800s) when I was enquiring about
them. In earlier times they were also made with a sort of frame for carrying
peats, but as roads penetrated the country these sledges went out of use. When
Hugh Miller took the newly made road to the west to work in Gairloch in 1823 he
noticed two abandoned Highland carts lying beside it. In Theatrum Scotiae by
John Slezer (1694) there are illustrations of sled-carts (Arbroath) and there
is also an illustration of a sled in Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland
as related by Edmund Burt.
Grant, I.F., Highland Folk Ways, (1961)
The range, evolution, and historical sequence of farm transport on the
Island from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is discussed in this
paper, in the context of the development of the road system and capacity of
horse power. Human power resources included the use of the creel; thereafter
the sledge and various forms of early cart, specifically the slide carr and the
Irish carr, Island variations on the Celtic diaspora of such vehicles. The
influence of the spread of the ‘Scotch cart’ is considered, and the evolution
of the hay bogey and especially the ‘stiff cart’, a distinct type of cart (or
at least a distinct nomenclature) associated with the Isle of Man.
At the time of this survey: 1971-1981, it was still possible to see
in everyday use in Tuscany a most remarkable variety of archaic forms of rural
transport, especially in districts where peasants have been tenacious enough to
resist emigration. These vehicles range from the simplest plough-carrying
slide-car
I have often counted seven or eight slide-cars and carts in a single
farmyard; a situation certainly uncommon anywhere else in Europe today.
The above-said section of the Apennines, from Colle di Cadibona to
Montefeltro, constitutes the land of the Italian slide-car.
Where opinions may vary, there seems to be general agreement on some
aspects of the problem: all researchers seem to agree that 'A' framed
slide-cars, or 'travois' types of vehicles, must have played an important role
in the evolution and development of carts and waggons in ancient Eurasia
(Piggott, 1968).
In the Italian dictionary the slide-car is generally called with the
Tuscan word TREGGIA
In almost all Indo-European languages, however, we find the same
roots: Tuscan =TREGGIA or TRAINO; French = TRAINEAU; Portuguese = TRENO;
Spanish = TRINEO; English = DRAY or DRAG; Norse = TREKKE; Danish =TRAEKKE;
Dutch = DREGGEN; but in German SCHLITTEN.
Slide-cars are
made of two beams, which can only be pulled at a tilt by animals or persons
from one end. When the two poles are joined together at one end to
form a “A” shape, and attached to the yoke two animals are used. The other type
has instead parallel beams kept apart by means crossbars and drag along the
ground at one end, pulled either by an animal
or person from the other end. The first 6 I refer to as the “A” framed
slide-car, second I refer to as the “H” framed slide-car.
Whereas slide-cars are easily maneuvered in hill country, the sledge
with its rigid structure is a ponderous vehicle with a very large turning-circle,
and is better suitable on plains or open areas (Piggott, 1968).
When one horse, or only one cow, is harnessed on account of the
narrowness of some mountain tracks, the sledge becomes a slide-car. This
version of the vehicle is almost identical to the slide-cars of Wales and
Ireland (Thompson, 1958 – Jenkins, 1962). (Picture 44) This particular
slide-car, unique in Italy, is made of two poles kept parallel by means of
crossbars and, it has a built-up structure, which carries the load. Furthermore,
the two poles are specially chosen from naturally or artificially bent trees
which are adapted in such a way as to making the platform as little tilted as
possible, as one would best appreciate by looking at the drawing.
Rural transport
in Tuscany and the Northern Apennines A contribution to the ethnography of
vehicles.
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