[RUSTYME]

Have been reading two books lately , ' surviving the iron age ' (2001 by Peter Firstbrook) and ,'living in the past' (1980 by John Percival) .
The later was telling the story of a group of people who built and lived , for a whole year , in a reconstruction of an iron age village .
I watched the tv series of this ( living in the past , the iron age ) back in 1979 , and found it very interesting .
Reading the book now is just as interesting . It is a book about the year spent in the village , not a history book .
The other book is about a group of people ( some being the children of the people who did the ' living in the past ' year ) , who live for 7 1/2 weeks in an iron age village ( castell henllys ) .
Both books have their own appeal if you like history .

[MikeM]

I remember the follow up series they made to Living in the Past, where they spoke to the people now (don't recall the original series being so young and all) so will keep an eye out for the book. Mrs M was asking me what I wanted for my bathday, that could be a contender.

[Fleecewife]

At the time of Living in the Past, I felt that the 'villagers' spent so long trying to work out how to live as a community that they concentrated less than they could have on working out how such societies operated in the past.   It seemed to degenerate into something of a soap at times.

My favourite bit was a little light bulb moment    reached by the archaeologists - they had apparently long wondered what the strange indentations around the doors of excavated round houses were (probably gave them 'ritual significance'  )  but after the year, they found the same hollows in the same place, which had been made by dust bathing hens 

[RUSTYME]

In answer to the first part of your post fw , a section from the book ' living in the past' ;
" What we set out to do - and this has been much misunderstood - was to see if a group of quite ordinary young people , most of them born and brought up in towns , could learn to live successfully within the limits of an iron age technology . It was clearly impossible to recapture the beliefs and superstitions , the skills and experience , the basic social attitudes of prehistoric people and this was never our intention . But what we could do was to recreate the living conditions , the houses , the clothes , the food and the hard slogging labour which iron age people must have endured , and see if it was possible for modern people to adapt to those conditions . "
 
  The scrape holes were what stuck in my memory too , lol .
 

[RUSTYME]

The reason i enjoyed the 'living in the past' series in 1979 , was that in 1977 i had built a small stone hut in a clearing in the woods , grown my own veg , kept a goat , caught rabbits and pigeon and fish , made my own cloth and string and cured and tanned hides and lived there for 6 months + . I only had very basic tools , hammer , saw , knife etc , much the same as the iron age project , but i did it on my own ! , and i did it first , lol .