Much respect to this man as a fundraiser. He convinced people to pay him to play Viking and go sailing as his job. Could be grants or private fundraising or both.
It illustrates how one monetizes a PhD in a subject overtly noncommercial like archaeology. Plenty of people have sailed in these waters, maybe even played at being Vikings. But with a doctorate in the field, one is able to make the case that doing so will be Real Science because you have developed expertise in that knowledge domain, and research skills to fit whatever you find into the broader scientific context.
I’m not being dismissive, by the way, it’s a fantastic idea to explore for new archaeological finds. And it is absolutely true that academics need to have as much hustle as entrepreneurs to find funding.
eesmith 4 hours ago [-]
I find your use of "play Viking" dismissive, despite your disclaimer.
The article mentions how some archeologists learn flintknapping, which helps them understand their finds better.
So no, he did not "monetize" his PhD as he didn't have one while doing this fieldwork, and he paid for part of it himself.
Also, my high school grades got me a college scholarship. I don't interpret that as me monetizing my high school degree, but then, I don't view everything through a hustle lens.
His has "a general interest in ancient seafaring and experimental archaeology" with a focus on "reconstructing the sailing routes used by sailors from the Viking Age in Western Scandinavia". He "spent 11 months learning about traditional sailing and boatbuilding techniques at Fosen Folkehøgskole", "conducted a series of sailing trials and trial voyages onboard traditional clinker-built, square-rigged boats", and "spent about 500 hours sailing or rowing, often for several days at a time, enduring every kind of weather imaginable, in an attempt to test the performance of these boats under the widest possible range of conditions."
How do you get from that hard work to "playing Viking", without being dismissive?
IAmBroom 3 hours ago [-]
Historical reenactor here.
"Playing" is only dismissive if you view the incredible, fast learning children achieve (compared to adults) as "mere child's play".
By "playing" at reenactment, we test out theories on how things worked, how people did things, and why they did them.
My favorite example is a Dutch hat. Every instance two friends found in artwork had a spoon slipped into two cuts in the raised brim. They thought that looked stupid, and made one without the spoon (they merely pinned the brim up). The hat wouldn't stay in place, so they decided it needed a weight to stabilize the raised side of the brim... like a spoon.
eesmith 3 hours ago [-]
Where do you see me dismissing play?
What does "play Viking" mean to you, in the context of what this researcher is doing?
Don't overlook that snowwrestler coupled playing Viking to monetizing one's PhD.
Do you do historical reenactment in order to monetize your play?
If I learn to operate a 1907 Avery steam tractor, would you say I am playing farmer?
2 hours ago [-]
bigyabai 2 hours ago [-]
Farming is a job, which people do to eat. I've known farmers, and yes, if you bought a tractor and drove it around SF I would accuse you of "playing farmer" as well.
You don't have to take it personally - roleplay can be an effective tool. If you're training to operate a tractor on a farm, then you are consciously "playing farmer" with the intent of driving positive results.
petsfed 1 hours ago [-]
Back when I was "playing" (in the dismissive sense) at being physicist and physics teacher, what I found was that the secret to actually understanding something was being free to fiddle with the parameters of the thing to try to dive a preferred outcome. That's more or less the mission statement of Bell Labs in its heyday.
I don't understand how you can exist in this space (that is, Hackernews and the larger startup culture) while being dismissive of folks out there exploring their particular parameter spaces, outside of practical constraints.
djtango 2 hours ago [-]
Well he is playing Viking. Sailing in that way was not only their living but it was also life or death for them.
They struck out into the ocean without a map of the world, let alone GPS and satellite phones. They didn't even have life jackets.
Without downplaying this researcher's earnest efforts, nothing we do today could come close to truly recreating what it was like back then for people to live and breathe the sea like your life depends on it and to reacquire whatever deep nuanced tacit wisdom they accumulated about how their ships handled in the waves.
Whenever I've watched interviews or studied people at the top of a craft, any craft, you'll be surprised at the amount of detail they are sensitive to. A recent thing that comes to mind is how much Chopin studied and analysed the anatomy of the hand to deepen his understanding of piano technique
gwervc 4 hours ago [-]
Researcher here: yes it's playing. And playing isn't a bad thing. If we hadn't fun, a lot of us would have quit already.
eesmith 4 hours ago [-]
Sure. In my 20s I remember telling my boss that I had so much fun programming that I would do it even if I wasn't paid. (That was probably a mistake, but at least it was a state job with salary guidelines.)
But having fun and playing as part of work is doesn't mean I was "playing programmer." Even had I been an unpaid trust-fund baby.
What does "play Viking" mean to you, and how do we know that's what this researcher is doing?
Would you also say that he "plays sailor", given that he's an actual sailor?
Should we say the people building the 13th- century style castle at Guédelon are playing serfdom?
Those trying to rediscover ancient building techniques are playing Egyptians, Romans, Eastern Islanders, Incans, etc.?
Was Thor Heyerdahl was "playing a 'Tiki person'" in his famous raft voyage, when that culture doesn't exist, or was he trying to demonstrate that the raft hypothesis for human migration could not simply be rejected as impossible?
Henchman21 3 hours ago [-]
I think you’re the only person in this thread who took “play” as dismissive. This tells us a bit about you but not much else.
Chris2048 8 minutes ago [-]
> This tells us a bit about you
Unnecessary Personal attack
eesmith 48 minutes ago [-]
No, I didn't say "play" was dismissive.
I said that describing the researcher's work as "play Viking", done as a way to monetize one's PhD, is dismissive.
The more so as the researcher was partially self-funded, and didn't have a PhD.
I don't think it's right to characterize everyone doing experimental archeology about Norse practices as "playing Viking", nor to only pick out those studying shipping routes.
The same for other fields - I wouldn't say that people researching how the ancient Romans made concrete are "playing Romans".
Henchman21 16 minutes ago [-]
I’m not sure why you seem so fired up about this turn of phrase using the word “play”. But, in recognizing that you are, I’m simply going to let you do you and wish you well :)
spauldo 46 minutes ago [-]
"Play" has a specific meeting for reenactors. When I was in the SCA, I "played" an 11th century Welsh longbowman. It's certainly not a derogatory term when used in this context, and the amount of effort put into it isn't relevant. I just wore the clothes and learned to hit a target with the bow more than half the time, but I played alongside people who spent a lot of time and money learning the languages and skills of the roles they played.
andoando 32 minutes ago [-]
I think its just implying he had fun doing it. I mean I sincerely hope he did, would you really rather believe this was a super serious endeavor, no fun allowed research?
pimlottc 4 hours ago [-]
I read "playing viking" affectionately. How many people manage to turn a childhood dream into a sustainable career?
eesmith 4 hours ago [-]
The article doesn't mention when he started this goal. How do you know it was in childhood and not, for example, as an undergraduate student?
Is it a sustainable career? He only recently got his PhD.
As a kid I dreamed about being a programmer (among many other things), and I am one.
If I bought an old PDP 11/70 to get hands-on experience on using early Unix systems work, would that mean I'm playing a Bell Labs researcher?
IAmBroom 3 hours ago [-]
Give it a rest.
If that word bothers you, substitute "recreating" or "testing".
medstrom 11 hours ago [-]
> In terms of the results themselves, the boats are extremely seaworthy crafts. When you get in them for the first time, you don't think that, because they're very, very light. They feel very flimsy, and they're very low in the water compared to a modern sailing boat. So you feel really in touch with the wave, which is kind of scary. But because they're so flexible and because of the way they're rigged, they're actually really stable, even in big waves.
> "We kept going out thinking, 'Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,' and then it would be fine, and we'd be, 'Okay, let's go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'" Jarrett continued. "So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning."
Sounds like they had fun.
wincy 16 minutes ago [-]
When is the last time someone used a vessel like this to sail to Iceland? I’d pay for someone to do that. Amazing what our ancestors accomplished.
nsavage 10 hours ago [-]
I can't help but be remembered of the discovery of the HMS Terror, one of John Franklin's missing ships. It was announced that it was discovered conveniently located in what was already called Terror Bay, and that the ship's masts were even sticking out of the water. The local Inuit of course knew it was there.
> You are able to ask very different questions the minute you walk away from your desk and get on a boat
Indeed. Read this as I am heading out to sail my Skerry.
Liquix 13 hours ago [-]
a true scientist: He even fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon ... it did not work.
bored and shored? board boats of boards o'er fjords. might strike a chord, see a fnord, expand your gourd
j_bum 5 hours ago [-]
Eminem? Is that you?
divbzero 13 hours ago [-]
There’s an old NOVA episode “This Old Pyramid” that applied experimental archaeology to the Egyptian pyramids: exploring how the pyramids were built by actually building one.
You might be interested in Guédelon Castle - a project to build a 13th century castle in France using our best guess at the resources and knowledge available at the time.
atombender 21 minutes ago [-]
There is an excellent documentary series about it, Secrets of the Castle [1], with historian Ruth Goodman and archeologist Peter Ginn taking part in the building and upkeep. Very old-fashioned but highly rewarding stuff, as are all their series, such as Victorian Farm.
Going even further back in time, Kon-Tiki back in 1947 demonstrated it was indeed possible to travel on a balsa wood raft to get from South America to Polynesia, settling that part of the debate.
Of course, Heyerdahl's diffusion model was completely wrong, but that's a different topic.
MarkusQ 2 hours ago [-]
Incomplete, perhaps, and vastly oversimplified, but not "completely wrong"; the more genetic evidence we get, the more it appears that ancient people moved around much more than we used to think.
My proudest moment (perhaps) was changing a tire without a jack a hundred miles from anywhere. I couldn’t raise the car, but I could lower the ground!
vintermann 7 hours ago [-]
So not really like Vikings, but like Jekt traders. It looks like there is little written about the Jekt trade in English.
vidarh 7 hours ago [-]
Yes and no, as the article says:
> "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."
His guess - whether right or not - is that this ship-structure is similar enough that it serves as a possible way to identify possible Viking era landing places.
deltarholamda 4 hours ago [-]
Boat designs change very slowly, so I would bet on his guess. Most changes would be in improvements in smaller technologies, e.g. improved nails, than in major hull shape changes. As I understand it, Vikings did use barge-like boats, but they mostly used the longboat form, and the major change to long boats is to make them longer to carry more, which doesn't change the draft that much.
To my mind, the greater change would have been to sea levels from the 11th century to now, which would alter landing spots more than the boat design.
zxexz 11 hours ago [-]
> Others have tried to cook like the Neanderthals, concluding that flint flakes were surprisingly effective for butchering birds, and that roasting the birds damages the bones to such an extent that it's unlikely they would be preserved in the archaeological record.
I found this statement a bit alarming, as flint flakes being quite effective in butchering is quite well known — anyone who has practiced or studied “primitive living” ( that term doesn’t feel right…) would know.
However, that was not an explicit conclusion in the referenced paper, just by arstechnica. Not even a gripe, though, very interesting article!
ethan_smith 10 hours ago [-]
Flint fractures conchoidally to produce edges as sharp as 30 angstroms - sharper than modern surgical steel which typically reaches only about 300-600 angstroms.
potato3732842 8 hours ago [-]
They're probably looking for something more specific than "can make something that works well enough for youtube", like seeing if an exact copy of flint found in a site yields the same leftover marks as found on other bones in the site, or something.
cratermoon 4 hours ago [-]
Also, it's one thing to say that with modern techniques and design that flint flakes work for the purpose intended,
it's quite another to say flint flakes as they would have been made in the neolithic can be used in specific ways not necessarily by design,
and then collect and write up all the findings in an academically rigorous way.
There's plenty of research on things that "everyone knows" which turn out to be not true,
so validating these ideas is still worthwhile science.
It illustrates how one monetizes a PhD in a subject overtly noncommercial like archaeology. Plenty of people have sailed in these waters, maybe even played at being Vikings. But with a doctorate in the field, one is able to make the case that doing so will be Real Science because you have developed expertise in that knowledge domain, and research skills to fit whatever you find into the broader scientific context.
I’m not being dismissive, by the way, it’s a fantastic idea to explore for new archaeological finds. And it is absolutely true that academics need to have as much hustle as entrepreneurs to find funding.
The article mentions how some archeologists learn flintknapping, which helps them understand their finds better.
Do you think they are playing Stone Age people?
For what it's worth, https://www.ht.lu.se/en/the-faculties/staff-training/interna... says funding came from Erasmus+ traineeship, several other grants, "and my own earnings", and he started while a grad student. (That page is from 2023.)
So no, he did not "monetize" his PhD as he didn't have one while doing this fieldwork, and he paid for part of it himself.
Also, my high school grades got me a college scholarship. I don't interpret that as me monetizing my high school degree, but then, I don't view everything through a hustle lens.
His has "a general interest in ancient seafaring and experimental archaeology" with a focus on "reconstructing the sailing routes used by sailors from the Viking Age in Western Scandinavia". He "spent 11 months learning about traditional sailing and boatbuilding techniques at Fosen Folkehøgskole", "conducted a series of sailing trials and trial voyages onboard traditional clinker-built, square-rigged boats", and "spent about 500 hours sailing or rowing, often for several days at a time, enduring every kind of weather imaginable, in an attempt to test the performance of these boats under the widest possible range of conditions."
How do you get from that hard work to "playing Viking", without being dismissive?
"Playing" is only dismissive if you view the incredible, fast learning children achieve (compared to adults) as "mere child's play".
By "playing" at reenactment, we test out theories on how things worked, how people did things, and why they did them.
My favorite example is a Dutch hat. Every instance two friends found in artwork had a spoon slipped into two cuts in the raised brim. They thought that looked stupid, and made one without the spoon (they merely pinned the brim up). The hat wouldn't stay in place, so they decided it needed a weight to stabilize the raised side of the brim... like a spoon.
What does "play Viking" mean to you, in the context of what this researcher is doing?
Don't overlook that snowwrestler coupled playing Viking to monetizing one's PhD.
Do you do historical reenactment in order to monetize your play?
If I learn to operate a 1907 Avery steam tractor, would you say I am playing farmer?
You don't have to take it personally - roleplay can be an effective tool. If you're training to operate a tractor on a farm, then you are consciously "playing farmer" with the intent of driving positive results.
I don't understand how you can exist in this space (that is, Hackernews and the larger startup culture) while being dismissive of folks out there exploring their particular parameter spaces, outside of practical constraints.
They struck out into the ocean without a map of the world, let alone GPS and satellite phones. They didn't even have life jackets.
Without downplaying this researcher's earnest efforts, nothing we do today could come close to truly recreating what it was like back then for people to live and breathe the sea like your life depends on it and to reacquire whatever deep nuanced tacit wisdom they accumulated about how their ships handled in the waves.
Whenever I've watched interviews or studied people at the top of a craft, any craft, you'll be surprised at the amount of detail they are sensitive to. A recent thing that comes to mind is how much Chopin studied and analysed the anatomy of the hand to deepen his understanding of piano technique
But having fun and playing as part of work is doesn't mean I was "playing programmer." Even had I been an unpaid trust-fund baby.
What does "play Viking" mean to you, and how do we know that's what this researcher is doing?
Would you also say that he "plays sailor", given that he's an actual sailor?
Should we say the people building the 13th- century style castle at Guédelon are playing serfdom?
Those trying to rediscover ancient building techniques are playing Egyptians, Romans, Eastern Islanders, Incans, etc.?
Was Thor Heyerdahl was "playing a 'Tiki person'" in his famous raft voyage, when that culture doesn't exist, or was he trying to demonstrate that the raft hypothesis for human migration could not simply be rejected as impossible?
Unnecessary Personal attack
I said that describing the researcher's work as "play Viking", done as a way to monetize one's PhD, is dismissive.
The more so as the researcher was partially self-funded, and didn't have a PhD.
I don't think it's right to characterize everyone doing experimental archeology about Norse practices as "playing Viking", nor to only pick out those studying shipping routes.
The same for other fields - I wouldn't say that people researching how the ancient Romans made concrete are "playing Romans".
Is it a sustainable career? He only recently got his PhD.
As a kid I dreamed about being a programmer (among many other things), and I am one.
If I bought an old PDP 11/70 to get hands-on experience on using early Unix systems work, would that mean I'm playing a Bell Labs researcher?
If that word bothers you, substitute "recreating" or "testing".
> "We kept going out thinking, 'Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,' and then it would be fine, and we'd be, 'Okay, let's go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'" Jarrett continued. "So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning."
Sounds like they had fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_Bay
Indeed. Read this as I am heading out to sail my Skerry.
bored and shored? board boats of boards o'er fjords. might strike a chord, see a fnord, expand your gourd
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1460448/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Castle
Of course, Heyerdahl's diffusion model was completely wrong, but that's a different topic.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)...
https://youtu.be/jD-EMOhbJ9U
My proudest moment (perhaps) was changing a tire without a jack a hundred miles from anywhere. I couldn’t raise the car, but I could lower the ground!
> "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."
His guess - whether right or not - is that this ship-structure is similar enough that it serves as a possible way to identify possible Viking era landing places.
To my mind, the greater change would have been to sea levels from the 11th century to now, which would alter landing spots more than the boat design.
I found this statement a bit alarming, as flint flakes being quite effective in butchering is quite well known — anyone who has practiced or studied “primitive living” ( that term doesn’t feel right…) would know.
However, that was not an explicit conclusion in the referenced paper, just by arstechnica. Not even a gripe, though, very interesting article!
There's plenty of research on things that "everyone knows" which turn out to be not true, so validating these ideas is still worthwhile science.