Where’s the trees? Gathering and using timber in Neolithic Orkney | Hacker News Reader

Where’s the trees? Gathering and using timber in Neolithic Orkney

nessofbrodgar.co.uk

39 pointsrntn6 comments

There's a woodland on Hoy, Orkney's wildest looking island, which is a great snapshot of what a real native Orkney woodland would look like. There are no deer on Orkney, so the woodland gives a great impression of the different layers of species that form when given a chance (the rest of Scotland has a herbivore problem).

Here's a great post on the woodland by a very knowledgeable person: https://alanwatsonfeatherstone.com/a-day-in-scotlands-most-n...

I live on the mainland across the Pentland Firth from Hoy, with our place looking across to the hilly island. We've planted 1,000 trees or so over the past couple of years. I'm growing a lot more from seed I collect locally from woodlands that weren't planted by someone (true local seed stock). There aren't so many native woodlands in this area and it's almost impossible to source trees grown from local seed. It's great to see proof that even on Orkney these sorts of woodlands want to thrive.

"We can perhaps see something similar in the historic period, when wood was brought in from Norway. “Flatpacked” timber structures"

So, they're basically they saying they had an IKEA equivalent in Norway about 500 years ago? Wow.

What I understand from other write-ups of Orkney, it was in many ways a centre of ritual, and was not perceived by the people who lived there as remote or peripheral.

If you re-center a map on Orkney, nowhere is really very far away once boats are given. No local timber? No problem. We need what you have, you can have timber from us.

(I loved visiting back in the 70s. the stones of stenness and maes howe were lovely, as was the italian PoW chapel out by Scapa Flow. I cycled around. Orkney was the last place in Scotland with glass bottles taking inside-screw stoppers: all the home-brew fanatics, the headmaster of the Stromness Academy included, hoarded them, to keep local beermaking alive and well)

Not perfect but an inverted map helped me think about this boat centric view of the world:

https://www.werkaandemuur.nl/nl/shopwerk/De-Omgekeerde-Werel...

If you imagine the sea as very mountainous land, where people live by the coast it kind of works except for the ability to travel directly "through" the mountains. Though I think for many places, skating along the coast is enough to see how people would have moved.

> It has been suggested that in the third millennium BC Orcadian society was caught up in the unsustainable, and ultimately self-destructive, pursuit of prestige, social status and influence [15]. This scramble for social standing was manifested, in a highly visual manner, through monument construction. This saw the creation of increasingly large and elaborate stone “tombs” as different groups sought to outdo each other.

> The result was a competitive and unstable society [16] in which rivalries were played out as people invested “time and labor [in bullshit].

Man, I think I've seen this before.

Lots of trees are destroyed in the neolithic. If we can farm less we can have the trees back in the northern hemisphere https://treesforlife.org.uk/into-the-forest/habitats-and-eco...

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