Spending a few months living and working with a colleague (C) and her family in a small-town vacation home in the south of France has basically no downside. Well, okay, we are a bit isolated from the center of things, and it takes a few hours by train to get to anything resembling a big city. But we have quite a good supermarket and a semiweekly farmers' market with lots of local specialties, so we get by just fine. Especially considering that local specialties here in the Perigord-Noir region include pate de foie gras and truffles and cheeses and mushrooms and chestnuts and walnuts and grapes and figs and apples and tomatoes and pretty much any other kind of temperate-zone fruit or vegetable you can think of, many of which we can just pick up off the roadside trees and bushes when we go out for a hike. With picturesque medieval buildings and breathtaking views over the valley of the Dordogne and fresh French bakery breads and our own little fruit orchard, what's not to love?
Of course, some people might object to the bones, pelts and flints all over the house, but that's not a bug, it's a feature. The reason we're here in this gorgeous back-of-beyond village in the first place is that it's smack in the center of an unusual region characterized by karst topography resulting from the dissolution of layers of carbonate rock, which is geologist-speak for the fact that the whole area is as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese. The immense number of caves made the region a very desirable residence for various populations of early humans (in fact, looking at some of the natural caves and so-called "troglodytes" or caves enhanced with walls and stonework by human inhabitants in historical times, I wonder whether this area might have had a higher population density in the days of some of the cave-dwellers than it does now!).
Consequently, the place is a magnet for paleoanthropologists who study early humans and their activities, including my colleague's husband Y. Studying the activities of early humans naturally involves reconstructing the activities of early humans, which can be a bit far removed from the activities of contemporary humans, but often turns out to be surprisingly handy or just plain cool. There may not be much of a career future for professional flint knappers nowadays, but when you're out for a hike and happen to need a cutting edge for some purpose, it's remarkable how convenient it can be to have someone in the group who's able to spot a good piece of flint by the side of the trail and shear off a flake of it with a hammerstone (and those flint flakes are pretty darn sharp even before they're professionally knapped).
But today's culture of technical specialization means that even many skilled modern flint knappers don't know much about sewing, which is how I got recruited into the Neanderthal Craft Club. It turns out that raw deerskin is comparatively easy to sew (although it was a bit painful while I was doing my first project, a deerskin thimble, but now that I've got the thimble it's much better). For lack of the proper tools I've been sewing the skins with a steel crewel needle and waxed dental floss, but I've been promised my own stash of sinew and a bone needle with sharpening flint as soon as Y finds a good piece of sandstone to grind it. I've also been promised an authentically prehistorically-crafted fossilized mammoth bone crochet hook (size G), which I feel confident will automatically make me the coolest person at the January Meetings Knitting Circle even if somebody is successfully proving the Riemann hypothesis in the same room at the same time.
And in fact, I'm finding out that there are things modern needleworkers can learn from the Neanderthal Craft Club, besides how to make things out of untanned deerskin. For example, I was losing my temper yesterday evening over the absence of a fabric marking pen or tailor's chalk or any other substance that would let me make visible but removable and non-damaging marks on knit fabric to trace with chain stitch embroidery (T-shirt baby quilt project, pix may follow). Even if I knew where to get a marking pen or tailor's chalk in a French village, I wouldn't know the French word to ask for it. Tonight, though, it occurred to me that the red ochre (hydrated iron oxide pigment, found all over the place in the form of dirt) that the early humans used in lots of their paintings seems to show up pretty well on a lot of surfaces. And although Y tends to leave a trail of the stuff wherever he goes, it generally seems to wash off with little trouble. So I borrowed a chunk of ochre from Y's toolbox, mixed it with water to form a sludgy liquid the way I've seen Y do it, and applied it to the fabric with a pointed stick to trace my embroidery lines. What do you know: it works great.
(10 November: Corrected post title.)
