As a set of tools to help teach students how to survey like an Iron Age engineer, I put together a few measuring lines from hemp string. The top is a string the length of the radius of the circle we shall inscribe (labelled "diameter" before I thought better of what I cut). The second is a simple measuring string based on a meter, with knots marking a half meter, decimeters thereafter, and centimeters in the final decimeter; we’ll be working on a 1:30 scale, which means that 1 cm:1 Roman foot, so this is a tool to get students used to using a measure that isn’t a stick with notches. The last, since we’re going to be inscribing ellipses in order to draw the walls of long houses easily, is labelled "ellipse".
The wooden tags are labels of a sort found in Bergen excavations. Spelling is a little creative (tiamitR, mitiR, ilibs) due to the limitations of futhark, but I used 10th-11th century Norwegian runes (I keep mixing up my T [see notes], so it’s not purely circa. 1000 CE).
