Page 51 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

On Knots and Swamps 39

the Maglemose period (C14 date about 8200 B.P.) Among the finds was
a bone point, barbed, still fastened to the remains of a wooden shaft
by a lashing of turned string, probably made of lime bast. The string
had been wound tightly and regularly around the shaft and point, but
unfortunately, precisely the ends where the knots must have been had
disappeared (Fig. 4).
Amose, middle Zealand. Ronne, 1989.
Four natural stones found in a bog, three of which still had rope around
them whereas the fourth had traces of rope. All four were lying on top
of what were possibly the remains of a net, which was too fragile to be
preserved. The rope was made of lime bast. No knots were preserved.
The site was the garbage dump of a late Ertebolle settlement on a low
island in the bog, but the large amount of pottery found makes the
author suspect that the site might have been an offering place as well.
These ten sites are to my knowledge the only ones so far where artefacts
have been found of which it can be assumed with reasonable certainty that
they originally contained knots. Even so, only three knots have actually been
preserved: a clove hitch, something resembling a granny, and a row of half
hitches.
As was to be expected, all ten sites are water-logged sites. Five of them
were coastal-or lake-settlements, and in all five the artefacts concerned were
directly connected with fishing: a fishhook, a leister, a harpoon, netsinkers, a
line float. The five other sites are all offerings in bogs, but here the contexts
in which the knots were originally used are more diverse: two nooses used to
hang or strangle people, two carrying slings for jars, one carrying bag (if that
interpretation is correct).
In nine of the ten cases the material used for the rope was of vegetable
origin. The one exception was the piece of fishline from Tybrind Vig, which
had been made of some animal product. Five of the remaining nine artefacts
had rope out of tree bast, and in four cases this could be more closely identified
as lime bast. In three cases no more could be said than that the material was
vegetable, but of one of these it could be established that it had not been tree
bast. Finally, in one case (Skjoldnaes) nettle-fibres had been used.
The rope could be produced by braiding (Bokilde), but spinning and/or
twining seems to have been more common (eight, perhaps nine cases).
It is clear that only the bog offerings offer a glimpse of the uses of knots
and knotting in activities other than those immediately connected with water.
It is therefore the more unfortunate that only one of those five sites has pro-
duced an actual knot (Sigersdal, Fig. 1), and a partly undone one at that. Of
course, a source of potential bias with offerings is that they have strong reli-
gious/magical overtones, and that perhaps certain types of knots were reserved
specifically for these contexts, and not used in others.