Lycksele

The very oldest Lycksele
On January 19, 1606, an employee of the Royal offices, Daniel Hjort, had arrived in Västerbotten and at Granö, where a Sami meeting was to be held. This  village – an outpost in the Parish of Umeå and an old court venue and trading place – was at the beginning of the 17th century a joint centre for the Ume and Ångermanland Sami. Daniel Hjort had now been given a delicate task. Now it was a matter of making essential decisions on the future of the Ume and Pite Sami Countries. Among other things a suitable church site was to be chosen within the area. The placing of an ecclesiastical centre in these Sami countries was a decision that had already been made, and also that the Sami country trade would be located to this inland site.

Rock paintings

Rock paintings in Lycksele
In 1976 archaeologists discovered a rock painting at Korpberget (Raven Hill). The rock-face was then covered with grey paint that had been used by municipal staff to cover some graffiti. The paint was washed off in 1995. Then a small reddish brown elk figure appeared which was painted with red ochre, a clay which is rich in ferric oxide.

Read more ...

Excavation

Excavation at Gammplatsen (the Old Site)
Here there was a church site in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the Sami and tradesmen from the coast met to do business during the church and market holidays. Today there are traces from the tradesmen’s and later the settlers’ dwellings in the form of some 150 house foundations and other remains. These have on separate occasions been investigated by archaeologists, who have made a number of various findings, among others clay-pipes, pottery and various utility goods of metal.

Read more ...

Sawing technologies

Planks, boards and beams were first produced by cleaving timber logs with axes and wedges and then carving them smooth with broad axes. From floor planks in houses, built far into the 19th century, can be observed that this very old technique has been in use for a long time after more mechanized methods had been introduced. The oldest iron saws can be seen among the Mästermyr findings from the Isle of Gotland, dated back to the 10th century. These include two types of handsaws.

Read more ...

Mechanization

The beginning of the forestry mechanization

The tractors came to the forests
The cutters with their tools and the drivers with their horses were the most important components within forestry in the 1940s, even if there were lots of signs of new technology on its way in. Examples are: the power saw for felling and machines for barking by the roads. There were tractors of a simple kind, farming tractors with or without halftrack and the Oliver Cletrac track-driven tractor, also called the OC-Three. There were also onsets of a purpose-built forestry tractor, "the Steel Horse, which was of north- Swedish breed from Jämtland. Apart from these there were surplus machines from the Second World War with the amphibious tractor - or "Snow Weasel" - which is probably the most typical one. The truck had been introduced to become a serious competitor to log floating, and soil scarifiers had taken over part of the arduous mattocking. This was, however, a good start. Everyone agreed that the great, overriding problem in order to get further was to develop machines which could also make their way through tough and steep terrain. It was in the north that the big resources had to be put in — because of bog land, marshes and, in the winter, deep snow, which were hard to force one's way through — and the companies did so by establishing forestry technology R&D departments. A joint effort was the SDA test station in Lycksele, which had relatively advanced machinery for work steel as well as wood work. The cooperation among farmers, producers and institutions or researchers, which had been so successful in the development work, was flourishing. From the outside it had been observed as The Swedish Triangle of Development, and this concept was spread to others.

Read more ...