On the idea of Newstave

The premise of the blog

Hopefully some of you still are interested in reading after enduring my first post, I’m getting to the good stuff I promise, but first one more bit of groundwork-laying. 

In the last post, I hope I established a couple things- that Culture is the set of tools that we choose to use to do things, and tools we use to do things are technologies, so culture is a form of technology. This carries the implication that culture is a living, changing thing not a static state- in other words, it’s a word for something we employ, not something we belong to.  

That brings us again to the idea for this blog, a blog about culture, technology, and design. That's a subheading that lots of online magazines carry, but they tend to focus on products you can buy or things others have made. This blog is for those that want to be culturally generative themselves- and who think critically about what we do and why. 

The kind of people reading this are united by mutual interest in things like old technologies, historic building methods, using hand tools, but what is it about these things? Why when you go to a historical carpentry meetup are there so many people interested in traditional dishes or working with horses? What principle unites these things? What underlies what people think they like in a thatched cottage, a stone bridge, timber frame building, an old ax or a wooden oxcart? 

why do these two bridges feel so different? They both function well but they mean something different about the culture that made them. Which world would you rather live in? Which bridge would be easier for you to make? Which materials would you rather drink bits of in your water? Which would be more destructive if it washed away? And which would you be allowed to build?

We are all a part of the movement of people drawn to things like this but we often have a difficulty articulating why we are drawn to these kinds of things or what unites them. Those that can articulate might say it has to do with ecology, for others self expression, or a sense of being involved in their world, for others they fear something important in the way we think of ourselves as humans is being lost.

I agree with all of the above and for me a part of the reason is that the pre-industrial tools of the past lend themselves to being culturally diverse and generative. If anyone can make and modify their own wheelbarrow out of wood it makes sense that we will see a diversity of designs of wheelbarrows. Granted it’s usually one maker in a village or so but as is often the case the small community is the unit of culture, and every person in the village understands the wheelbarrow and can say that they want it a little more this or that way, and they observe that of their neighbor until a highly ideal and refined product is arrived at-that may still be different from the wheelbarrows in a similar environment elsewhere. Things made in this way can be iterated on very quickly and with little additional cost.

There is a world of us out there now working along these lines and doing amazing things with these technologies. People are rediscovering construction methods, and the principles that underlie homesteads, barns and the hidden wisdom in the form of construction. People are rediscovering agricultural techniques- understanding the reason behind the form of the tools of husbandry and others are reconstructing them. People are building wooden mills and ships, cutting new millstones, propagating ancient strains of wheat and the knowledge for their hand harvest, others are propagating the knowledge of oven making and the culture of using bread. All of this not out of a reverence for the past but out of a joy in the richness of the present and hope for the future. 

We are united by shared interests, but sadly not by geography. Our emerging cultural complex is a system of widely dispersed nodes, which makes some of the elements of our work difficult. 

The technologies we employ thrive on physical community, and they absolutely require group labor at times. Thus, the learning of them is best done in person. Psychologically we want to be able to have an intellectual community with others who share our common sensibilities, so as not to feel that the world is somehow constantly passively set against how we are trying to live. For young people where are they to first learn these skills, and where can they meet others with the same interests? In the workshops and farms where they are needed of course.  We can create a network of places that need and welcome these journeymen and women. 

That’s the reason for this website, to create a platform for social encouragement and discussion of practical education, and to coordinate real world gatherings for fellowship and learning.

Together here we can share research in old methods, and hopefully one day undertake new research projects. We can share tools and techniques, we can meet in person to share our enthusiasm and support one another.

My articles will be about my small areas of focus. I’ll write about frameworks for thinking, and about woodworking, which is my trade. Woodworking is an important building blog of these forms of technology. Wood is what eventually grows in most areas if left undisturbed, and as such is our most primary agricultural product and object of husbandry. We can make almost all subsequent tools and structures from it, as well as use the byproducts from those activities for ready solar fuel. It is inseparable from the idea of the design of cultural reproduction in the north, and many of the human scale tools and methods from history that we will discuss and rediscover here are made from it. The primitive farmer who was living in deep relationships in his biological and cultural environment of the past was a woodworker, not by trade but by definition. 

My hope is that others will write articles about other areas once the community grows. 

If this does gain some momentum we could make a powerful difference in the depth of our knowledge. 

Some dream goals for the future would be to establish research and praxis working groups for the various aspects of cultural technology, though they are all intimately connected. Some first ideas of these could be:

Material technics working group, for carpentry, masonry, thatching, the making of tools and artifacts

Food systems working group, where do recipes and dietary systems arise in different historical cultures, how and what did people eat, how do they preserve food, and how can we adapt these technologies today for our own culture of food.

Animal husbandry working group, focused on draft animals and livestock, how we worked with our animals in the past and what of that can be useful today.

Landscape technics working group, focused on arable land, forest management, hedges and fence rows, ditches and watercourses, pasture, how did we shape our landscape in the past?

Calendar custom working group, what did people do in the different seasons, what signs for different actions did they see in the behavior of plants and animals? How did they understand the right time to do different tasks? 

Where could we get new information? 

In every rural town in every country there is a largely ignored population who know more than us about all we are looking to learn, the elderly, the last of the generation who grew up working with draft animals and manual ways of doing things, if not directly, then through their parents.

In remote places there are last vestiges of the old organic community practicing ancient skills, this is another place important to send folks to learn how things are and were done. We could reach out to both these communities to collect information.

Much of the good knowledge we have now came from the efforts of nineteenth century ethnologists, often motivated by a romantic nationalism, who sought to record aspects of vanishing culture. They did valuable work but I think went about it for the wrong reasons. We can access the extensive archives of these researchers that are stored in journals and academic institutions and dig up information useful today. 

I also propose that we take up a similar task but to view it through a more judicious lens. We should frame our research around the technologies people employed rather than trying to read into or comment on the nature of people and cultures of the past. 

we could create our own informal institution of research, not academic, but practical, and send out our own documentarians- not ethnographers, but technographers.

We can also increase our understanding by conducting our own experiments and research and reporting to each other on our results. How many hours does it really take to cut your firewood by hand? How much cheaper is a sawn house frame really to a hewn one? Does maple coppice make good spar gads and liggers for thatching? Did they not make new england timber frames from ash because it was not good or because there was little growing at the time? Does clay lime straw infill hold up in a wet northern climate? Can homemade reed batt panels be a practical insulation? There’s only one way to find out! 

With these tools we can harmlessly build a new material culture and a thriving world of organic artifact- even in the midst of the industrial landscape of today. We can establish our own networks and create an example of what human impact can look like at its noblest and most graceful, and we can do it with joy, reverence, energy and enthusiasm. Maybe others will take notice. 

Lastly, people always ask about the reason for names. The name Newstave comes from a few double meanings:

A stave is the stave of a barrel, and we hope to cut a new stave to make sound the leaking container that holds the collective knowledge of our pre-industrial past. 

A stave is a piece of a song or poem, and we intend to hum a different tune to that that has been too often heard the last few centuries. We want to regain our creative voice and lift it to our own new and living poesy and song, to write a new stave.

A stave is a piece of wood like for an old stave calendar or primstave and we intend to reconnect our reckoning of time and the seasons with the behaviors of an agriculture in harmony with our local landscape. We want to inscribe a new stave to order our lives around the rhythm of nature.

young cooper repairing a old barrel. Image from Le Cercle des Cartophiles du Loiret