Life in the Stone Age and Bothering Hedges with Sally Pointer

For transcriptions and more detailed shownotes, please go to: https://swordschool.com/podcast/life-in-the-stone-age-and-bothering-hedges-with-sally-pointer/

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Sally Pointer is a freelance heritage educator, archaeologist and presenter of traditional skills and historic crafts. She is also an author and an Experimental Archaeology MSC student at Exeter University.

Sally lives near Hereford, which is in the west of England on the Welsh border. It’s a rural area and perfect for her hobby of “hedge bothering” – a mix of foraging, looking at all the species that are in the hedge, what the birds are up to, and also checking for any pixies or interesting bits of wood.

We talk about her time spent in the Middle East as a child, where she and her family could go off into the desert and find stone age campsites and dinosaur bones, just sitting there. This sparked a love of experimental archaeology: finding out how people actually spent their time, what they made and how they lived.

We discuss the misconceptions about “cavemen” and how actually they weren’t at all stupid. They made Bunsen burners, they dug mines, they wore makeup, and they wanted the same things out of life that we do now.

Sally has written a book about the history of makeup and tells us about a slightly alarming experiment she performed on herself, which explains why on earth people were so keen to wear toxic white lead makeup, despite its dangers.

There is lots more in our conversation, including the stupidest thing a member of the public has ever said to us at an event, how to gain an extra two hours in the day, and whether Sally could survive in the wild.

To find out more about what Sally does, and see her YouTube videos covering things like the acorn pasta and nettle material mentioned in the episode, see: https://www.sallypointer.com/