30/11/2021
I thought I would give you a bit of an insight into some of the TV work I have done over the last 20 years. My Sky box finally packed up and I had a few programmes I was in saved on the hard-drive and thought I would do some screenshots (not the best quality) and tell you a bit about that particular programme.
I did this program for BBC Coast and filmed it in Denmark. It was about a log boat from Tybrind Vig from the Mesolithic period approximately 10,000 years ago. The log boat when excavated was found to have a fire hearth in the back of it and that always fascinated me as I was sure it would not be there just to keep the log boat paddlers warm at night.
I finally got a chance to do some research into why the fire was there. I did the research at Biskupin Archaeological Festival in Poland in 2007. I was reading a paper at the European Association of Archaeologist conference in Malta in 2008 on Mesolithic /Neolithic transition and I was to research the use of log boats in Poland. The basis of my research for the paper was, what would a Mesolithic community do if two new products were traded they had never seen before.
One was linen yarn and the other grain. The yarn I though could be made into fishing nets and used in log boats. I wanted to see if the hooped netted fishing traps that were usually set in rivers could be adapted to be a trawl net behind a boat on open water.
So as I had a log boat to use and ten days with my team I thought I would try out the fire in the boat. I also had an idea how to make torch flares last longer when night fishing to attract fish to the boat as night fishing was the only reason I could think of why the hearth was in the boat.
Copying the archaeology we filled the end of the boat with damp sand and then made a hearth of igneous stones which was pretty simple. For years before this I had been wondering if birch bark was used for torches in prehistory and this night fishing boat trip gave me the opportunity to try this out too. Birch bark was a very important resource in prehistory because fire pits were made to cook the bark to extract the layer of natural tar that was inside the bark. This birch bark tar was used as a glue for may things in the mesolithic but primarily to bind flint arrowheads to their shafts. If you were going out for a nights fishing with your torches there would need to be hours of torch light used and not much space in the boat to have lots of torches taking up space. So I cut the bark from the tree and made small bundles of it and cut a slit in the top of a willow pole. That way you could have a basket of bundles of bark and when the fire went out you could just slip a new bundle in the slit at the end of the pole and keep going all night.
I had not tried this until the first night fishing attempt with my team in Poland. The fire was lit and my team including my son Dominic lit the fire and paddled out into the lake as it was getting dark with a basket of bark, two poles and a bone harpoon.
An extraordinary thing happened as you can see in the picture the flares worked perfectly being very bright and easy to keep burning. What I did not expect was the bark curled up in its bundles and once lit and held over the water the end strips of the bark dropped off and fell into the water creating what looked like lots of little floating tea lights all around the boat! The tar in the bark made them waterproof and the tar just kept burning creating a light as bright as daylight to lure confused fish up to the surface. Unfortunately my teams harpooning skills were not to the standard of the mesolithic fishermen, but it convinced me that the fire in the boat with the addition of the bark flares made night fishing a very real possibility.
So I read my paper at the Conference in Malta which went down very well. Years later I was telling a Producer of a Time Team special on a Stone Age Tsunami programme I was working on, all about the little lights around the boat as we were using a log boat for that programme too.
Later the producer left Time Team and went to work for BBC Coast and asked me to replicate my Polish research off the north Sea Coast in Denmark near the Tybrind Vig museum.
So in 2008 I went to Denmark with Kif my brother-in-law who made the bone harpoons we were to use and was very skilled on the water and Mark Horton from Coast to film the log boat night fishing.
I am not that keen on small boats, but the film crew assured me that we would be filming in shallow water. So we got the fire in the boat loaned from the museum and waited for it to get dark.
I set up a camp to do some cooking to end the programme with and we eventually set off in the boat into the North Sea. The film crew had a nice big boat that they filmed us from. If you know anything about filming it can take many takes of a scene before you get the right one and before the moon rose it was pitch black on the water.
Then an off shore breeze started up!
We would do some filming with the lovely bark lights and by the time we were finished with each shot we found that the crew boat and our boat had been blown almost a mile off the coast! So for the next shot we were towed nearer to the shore with the crew boat and started again and so on for hours.
It was really quite disturbing at times when we finished filming only to turn around and see our beach campfire a tiny speck on the horizon.
Then Mark who wanted to sit next the fire at the back of the boat, put a bundle of birch bark on the fire instead of a log and the boat caught on fire! That would not have been too bad on a normal log, but this museum boat had a false back on it glued together with tar, which if it had caught fire it would drop out and we would have just sunk like a stone into the sea.
But that didn't happen and we put the fire out.
Then when we were ready to paddle back to shore (I say we it was Mark and Kif doing the paddling) The moon rose and I was suddenly transported back in time to Tybrind Vig that I have written about in my Stone age Novels!
It was truly magical all thoughts of how far off shore we were or how deep the water was under us went out of my mind as I entered the novels I have been writing about for so long.
We paddled along a river of moonlight right back to shore in time to cook fish to finish the filming.
If you want to read the paper I read at the Malta Conference you can find it at
academia.edu under Jacqui Wood
Paper title 'Daily practice of Prehistoric Europe during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition'
In the paper there are pictures of the bark bundles
