CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
It is well known that one cannot travel five hundred miles and one cannot travel five hundred more, not without first opening a car door.
And a car made of bronze would be absurd.
http://humanities.ku.dk/news/2015/the_bronze_age_egtved_girl_was_not_danish/
Ooh I've seen her and some of her oak coffin burial contemporaries in the museum in Copenhagen. They're extraordinary.
Aye and who can believe the long tales being told on Beeb4 last night about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens walking out of Africa into Europe? Walking? Ridiculous. Surely they just hopped on a cheap flight?
Is there any evidence of how bronze and iron age people navigated overland?
The first practically useful maps of Scotland date from the mid-eighteenth century and yet the drove trade dates from the middle ages so the knowledge of how to cross rugged terrain clearly existed in transmissible form somewhere.
I've seen native American maps where rivers are straight like lines on the London underground map.
Is there any evidence of how bronze and iron age people navigated overland?
Maybe not evidence as such, but Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines describes how aboriginal Australians effectively held 'maps' in their memories preserved through the medium of song - and surmises that these 'songlines' may have had a global reach in prehistoric times.
I saw the Tollund Man (and learnt about garrotting) when I was quite small when we went to Denmark. In a different museum a couple of years later I learnt about a variety of torture instruments.
I was very lucky to grow up in a house with PV Glob's The Bog People in the book case. Also nightmare medical textbooks mind.
I was obsessed with The Bog People as a wee lass. Set me on a course etc.
Have consulted archaeology hive mind re: good books about prehistoric navigation. Will report back.
Not wayfinding on the land, but I'm told The Barefoot Navigator by Jack Lagan is good.
"The first part of this absorbing book recounts a colourful history of seafarers and their navigation techniques. How did the Polynesians manage to populate an area of ocean larger than North America simply by analysing clouds,currents and wind direction? How did the Vikings routinely travel on the notorious stretches of water between Iceland, Greenland and Scandinavia?"
This reminded me of these amazing things: Greenland Inuit people used to make tactile, carved maps of the coastline and islands they navigated - you "looked" at them by touch. Ammassalik maps.
I always remember this map from Ian Armit, 1996 (first seen as a student):
An island centred geography - by flipping the map, we can see more easily how in a world without roads the seaways are the key to connectivity. In continental Europe navigable rivers (a wider category in smaller boats!) and large lakes would have been similarly important.
I too grew up in a house with a copy of PV Glob, and also such bedtime reading as Gray's Anatomy and Pirates of the Cell. I am however neither an archaeologist nor a surgeon.
@unhurt
Fantastic, thanks. Will read. As regards inland waterways ... Osgood MacKenzie recounts the journey with a coffin from Gairloch to Inverness prior to the Telford road that involved a footpath whose course was broken by Loch Maree, which they sailed up.
Prior to the completion of Wade's Great Glen road he kept a galley on Loch Ness.
@Arellcat
Interesting. The book was popular but what are the chances of this forum having three regular posters who have Glob as a seminal influence? Or rather what does it tell us about CCE that this is the case?
Spend your childhood looking at oddly distorted black-stained faces with squashed noses, grow up interested in bicycles??
I am a tentative fourth Glob disciple, I too vividly remember the book from my school days (I have an O level in archeology), although we didn't have a copy in the house.
The thing that really hit me in the Glob book was the serene look on the face of Tollund Man despite his having been slowly hung and thrown in a bog. The Mona Lisa can frankly stand down and I'm a da Vinci fan.
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