After much delay while modern elements of this project were engineered and installed, the 4 main structural posts have been installed onto their stainless steel base plates!
The need for modern foundation elements in this project has been discussed previously. As you will have seen from my other project blogs, I am familiar with the manual raising of earth-bound posts as the structural components of traditional buildings. Nevertheless, this stage of the project marks the beginning of the end of the modern aspects of this project and therefore a stepping stone to the more traditional elements of the build.
It is worth discussing the topic of compromises further. Any reconstruction project like this is beset by compromises from the outset. In the modern world, those compromises include the use of modern access solutions such as aluminium ladders and tower scaffolds, along with (in this specific case) the need for modern footings on the main structural posts that are capable of giving a known building longevity. However, the intrusion of the ‘modern’ reaches fundamentally into a project like this in the form of the volunteer teams who are physically building the structure. In terms of experimentation and data collection with polished stone tools, we are hampered by the simple fact that our volunteers are NOT Neolithic carpenters. They do not have the skills and knowledge of Neolithic carpenters based on their knowledge of the Neolithic world around them. They have not used these tools from birth, nor have they made their own tools to their own exacting requirements. As a result, these remarkable modern volunteers are having to make up for 5000 years of lost knowledge by immersing themselves in learning the tools and their capacity within their own knowledge and bias of a world with not just metals but also mechanisation! However well they adopt these lost methods and master their nuance, they will only have, at best, a few months experience rather than the lifetime of acquired skill their Neolithic ancestors would exhibit.
There is a certain irony in the fact that when this team of volunteers finish building this incredible Neolithic Hall, they will be ready to build their first Neolithic Hall! What a luxury it would be to take these volunteers immediately onto another traditional construction project. The collected data for efficiency would be dramatically closer to some sort of Neolithic ‘truth’!
Week 9 saw the installation of the 4 main Purlins onto the main uprights. This marks the last of the modern lifting in this project and creates a substantial square frame that will support the roof structure. The curving line of the wall posts have been marked with wooden pegs and now the strange ‘Square in Circle’ footprint is plain to see! Very soon, the ash wall posts will replace these simple wooden pegs and form the low wall of the building. In the meantime, pegs are being made that will hold the wall plate in position while the epic and seemingly unending task of hewing the 10 metre Scots Pine rafters continues.
The wall post tenons – measuring some 400mm long and 50mm thick are being cut using steel axes – but several key experiments are being run to also produce those same joints using stone tools. It is amazing to see the volunteer teams begin to really get to grips with the use of stone axes, adzes and chisels to shape the tenons to the required dimensions! After 8 weeks of hard, physical graft, the volunteers are now approaching this task with skill and stamina and are producing incredible tenons that exhibit very similar marks to those found on surviving Neolithic carpentry from Germany.