Creating photographic panoramas

A Staff Exchange to Sweden from May 20^th to 26^th 2002

I chose Sweden for my first staff exchange primarily to learn about the outreach work of the Bjare project. However, I soon came to realise that this is a very beautiful and fascinating landscape not least because of the amazing number of Bronze Age mounds and rock carvings. This is of course a very different landscape to the upland moor of north-east Lancashire but I was intrigued by the land reorganisation of the shifts, which has some similarity with the enclosure of common land in England in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. For example, the shifts left behind regular stone walled enclosures, which are typical of English Parliamentary Enclosure.

On my first afternoon Jenny had a meeting with a journalist from the local area who was interested in promoting the Bjare Peninsula as an interesting place to come and visit both ecologically and archaeologically. Also involved in the meeting was Annila Sterner of the ECP project and Hans Lundstrom, a local farmer who was chairman of a nature protection society in Bjare. We met the journalist (who provided coffee and sticky pastries - a subtle hint to any journalists who might be reading this) in the centre of the Bjare, which can only be accessed via very rough trackways. This was an inland area that had long since been left to grass over and had in many ways assumed the role of the outlands that were now largely used for growing potatoes.

On my second day we went to Jenny's office in Malmo where she showed me how to use a computer package that creates photographic panoramas. This was very useful indeed and has saved me many hours that would have otherwise been spent teaching myself. In the afternoon I spoke with Calle about his work as a cultural geographer. It was interesting to see the sources that are available to him and the information that he is able to extract from them about the Skone landscape.

On Wednesday Gunilla and Marianne were involved in a water festival for school children in north Bjare, not far from Bastad, and Jenny and I were invited to attend. The festival had a number of stations that discussed all aspects of water from plant growth and the creatures that live within it to ship wrecks. The Bronze Age station that Gunilla and Marianne ran, looked at the ritual aspect of water and the importance of appeasing the gods. Offerings to the gods were made by the children from wood and fern leaves, and strings of shells.

After the water festival we met up with Lennart who had agreed to show Jenny, Annila and myself the survey area of the Halland project. We had managed to choose a wonderful sunny day, which was perfect for our exploration of cultivation terraces, sunken roads and clearance cairns. We also saw a unique feature that was very difficult to explain….but enough about that until our trip to Halland in the autumn.

A highlight of the trip and an experience that I shall treasure for the rest of my days was the night we spent in the Bronze Age house. The reconstruction was incredible and it was all the more impressive the longer we were there, experiencing how such houses might have been used by people in the past. The house had been built with great attention to detail and this really showed- it made sense and it functioned well as a house, for example, the drafts allowed by the double ceiling actually drew away the smoke from the main room very successfully and the insertion of windows into the walls allowed shafts of daylight to flood into the darkened dwelling. Of course what first amazed me was the sheer size of the house. It was far larger than I had imagined and even from the outside I couldn't have anticipated the scale of the structure.

The next morning we awoke and as I swept the floor (with the wrong implement - as Gunilla later pointed out I should have used the birds wing and not the rake…well you live and learn), Jenny made a fire from the still smouldering ashes of the previous nights fire. We then changed into our Bronze Age garments, which were soon to prove very warm on such a hot day. The costume I wore was a replica of clothing found in a well preserved burial in Denmark, beautifully made from finely spun wool. We then spent the morning helping with a class of school children who busied themselves flint knapping, making shell rattles to ward of evil spirits and in preparation for lunch they chopped vegetables for a soup and ground flour for bread, which was then cooked in the hearth of the Bronze Age house.

To conclude, my trip to Sweden was fantastic and I have to say a big thank you to Jenny who looked after me all week, and to everyone else that I met who were so generous with their time - Anilla, Calle, Gunilla, Lennart, and Marianne.

I could write a lot more about my trip, we certainly packed a lot into a small amount of time and there are many things that I haven't mentioned - the snake and the volcano or the trip to the dentist and the circus.

Jo Clark

Impressions