Finnish Agricultural Museums & Early Medieval Irish Material Culture
I'm still in Finland after Cudgel War, and today we visited two agricultural museums. Well, one was a dedicated agricultural museum, and the other was a well-preserved farm complex from the mid-1800s. One of the things that's noticeable about food in Finland is that a lot of it is medieval-plausible, and it turns out that much of the stuff used on farms and in daily life up to what the Isles would call the Victorian Era is pretty similar. The Finns don't believe, as far as I can see, in changing something that works.
The effect of this, just after I've done a deep dive into Early Medieval Irish Material Culture (including the lack of cooking vessels) is that I found myself staring at a shelf of wooden items going "lathe-turned, check, carved, check, stave-built, check...". The stuff made from birch bark isn't known to me in Irish archaeology, but I haven't been looking for it yet either.
So the end effect is that nearly everything in these two pictures (both from Sarka) is plausible for Early Medieval Irish. In the first picture, almost everything is wooden. The second object from the left on the top shelf is described as "a ceramic pot covered in birch bark", which was used for souring milk in Karelia, and as I've found, ceramics weren't much used in the Irish early medieval. In the second picture, the grinding device on the top left of the shelves wouldn't be accurate, and the metal three-legged pot on the bottom right likewise. Everything else is, pretty much. And amusingly, that pot was the only cooking vessel in the whole museum.
I've taken lots more pictures, and I'm going to have to learn to do enough woodcarving to make carved vessels. It doesn't look too hard; I've done a few whittled handles for pans and knives before, which looks about the same level. The stave-built stuff may have to wait a bit; it feels like that's a more complex set of tasks.
It's honestly a little weird to be reading about a specific set of vessels in one era in one country on Thursday, and on Friday to see them on display for an entirely different time and place!