A Georgia Girl in Germany

After trekking through the Affenberg Monkey Farm as part of MacKenzie's Brownie field trip, we made our way to Pfahlbauten to visit an open-air museum. The most interesting thing about this museum is that most of it is housed in replicas of early architectural buildings on Lake Constance. By early architecture, think 3,500 years B.C.!!

The group of huts below is actually believed to be the most accurately built at Pfahlbauten. Many of the remnants of these reed-roofed huts have been found in what is now the center of Lake Constance, which led archaeologists to initially believe that the stone age houses were built upon stilts in the water. However, they later realized that the huts were instead built upon the shoreline...which is now in the middle of the lake since the size and shape of Lake Constance has changed over the centuries.


All the huts and everything inside them are authentic replicas. I don’t think the girls quite realized what a treasure they were viewing, but they sure enjoyed our tour through several of the huts and being able to peek inside the rest. The huts below are the not-as-authentic ones that were built over the water instead of on the shore. We were able to walk through these huts and even saw demonstrations of stone age tools and bronze age advancements. The girls liked feeling the difference coarseness and texture among the bear, boar and deer skins in one of the huts.

Last year a group of 13 individuals (7 adults and 6 children) lived in a section of Pfahlbauten for eight weeks. Their experience was filmed and will air on German television later this month. For more on their experience (completely in German), see http://www.swr.de/steinzeit/html/DAS_EXPERIMENT.html.


After our tour, the girls relished in being able to peer through windows, run around the buildings and climb into boats. Below, they all took a few minutes to pose with their tour guide, who was very patient with them, answering their many questions and explaining how people lived several millenniums ago.


Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Girl Scout outing without group sing-alongs. This activity is typically done around a campfire in the evening, but they were trying to pass the time while waiting for two dozen girls and their chaperones to emerge from the restrooms. I was surprised that MacKenzie was actually in front, helping lead the group in song!


To see more of the Pfahlbauten Museum, go to http://www.pfahlbauten.de. Again, it’s all in German, but the photos are still pretty interesting.

Labels: Germany, Girl Scouts, MacKenzie, Travel, Zachary