Word: commune
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...after Easter at a commune near Orléans, France. Inside a warehouse, an altar has been set up on a kitchen table. Surrounding it are a coat rack jammed with secondhand clothing, rows of used appliances and abandoned furniture, and assorted bric-a-brac. All in all, an appropriate setting for the annual get-together of the "Emmaus movement," which has shown thousands of people in 23 countries around the world how to rebuild their self-esteem by recycling the junk of the consumer society...
These young Britons are not members of a hippie commune, but volunteers for an experiment in Iron Age living, sponsored and filmed by the BBC and now on English television as a twelve-part series. Isolated deep in the Wiltshire woods, they have spent nearly a year trying to re-create the lives of their Celtic ancestors of 2,200 years...
...Producer John Percival, an archaeology buff, conceived the project after a visit to a re constructed Iron Age settlement in Lejre, Denmark. From 1,000 volunteers, Percival selected six couples and trained them in Celtic crafts and culture. One couple, with the commune's only children, three boys, braved it for much of the year but quit the experiment several months ago. The others have stayed on, raising crops and livestock, making pottery, cooking Iron Age food and spinning and weaving wool sheared from their own sheep...
Doing things "proper Iron Age" became the commune's buzz words. A sieve made out of animal hair was allowed-the Celts might have devised it. But when John Rossetti made a chair, Percival destroyed it. Says he: "It was too early to have thought up such a thing." Martin Elphick, a doctor from Kent, pursued primitive medicine, treating flu with violet and willow bark, headaches with valerian root, and asthma with deadly nightshade. The Iron Agers developed their own dyes, appletree bark for yellow, the yew tree for orange, lichens for brown and green...
Last summer the Ainsworths' five-year-old son developed a persistent rectal disorder. The commune wanted to vote on whether the family should stay or go, but the Ainsworths balked at the notion of group control and left. Was that a proper Iron Age decision? Says Lindsay: "An Iron Age mother would have attended to her child, especially if it was a boy." A specialist later reported that the primitive diet had produced the ailment, which contemporary meals promptly cleared...