The past is not as unfamiliar as is often presumed. Those who work on history-related subjects know this well. In the present day, however, this knowledge is often overshadowed by a pervasive sense of progressivism, by which I mean the idea that human history is constantly progressing, and often towards some specific goal. The most forceful form of progressivism nowadays is that which touts the blessings of artificial intelligence, colonising Mars, and other technological wonders that will change our relationship with earth, with knowledge, with ourselves, and so on ad nauseam.
For me, however, raised as a son of farmers in the Western Norwegian fjords, elements of the past often resembles things from my own background. These resemblances are not due to the fjords being particularly backwards - although I suspect a lot of urban Norwegians would protest that this is exactly what it means - but rather that certain technologies are perfected very early in their history, and a lot of such technologies pertain to farm life. As a consequence, the solutions offered by these early technologies are still in use.
I was reminded of this longue durée history of technology when I was visiting the Viking Museum in Aarhus this weekend. (Not to be confused with the famous Moesgaard Museum a bit south of the city.) The museum is small, but contains a lot of interesting archaeological finds from the centre of old Aros, the tenth- and eleventh-century city which was located in what is currently the centre of Denmark's second largest city. The items displayed in the museum are typical of such trading hubs as Aarhus was in that period - typical, but no less interesting for that - and include cooking pots of soapstone, nails from boats, weights from a loom, and whetstones. One of the items that caught my eye was a sinker, a rounded stone used to weigh down a fishing net so that one of its ends is dragged down into the water and prevents the net from just floating on the surface.
Fishing with nets remains the best method for catching large amounts of fish on a lower scale, and in my family we are always paying attention to when the ice will break on one of the lakes back home, so that we can begin the season. Moreover, when I am out walking with my parents and we are traversing rocky ground, my father will often keep an eye out for rocks that might be suitable as sinkers. They are not as rounded and polished as the one found in the archaeological layers in Aarhus, but in order to serve as sinkers a stone only needs to be heavy but not too much, a bit thin and elongated so that it is possible to tie a cord around it, and shaped in such a way that it is easy to carry.
The sinker is a technology that need not be improved upon, and I am not sure that it can be improved upon either, only altered in various ways that might give the illusion of improvement. There are several such technologies, and I think it is healthy to be reminded that due to their longevity, they connect us to the past in useful ways - useful because it is good to realise that some solutions have been perfected early, and also useful because modern people do sometimes need the reminder that a thousand years is not that long ago in certain respects.
