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Portuguese infantry in the Napoleonic Wars did not carry a ‘national flag’. They carried a King’s Color and a Regimental Color. The King’s Color was the multi-colored design shown on the left in this picture. It was the same for all regiments. The Regimental Color had a solid colored field, and is shown on the right in this picture. The field of the Regimental Color was the same as that regiment’s facing color. (Hmm, actually not in this picture. That’s not what I expected to see.) These flags are shown in more detail on the Warflags site that I linked earlier.
You'll shoot your eye out, kid!
I’m glad you’re enjoying the pix. I worried that I’d hijacked your thread. Since you encourage me, I’ll carry on. I’m no expert of course, but I’ll share what I have.
There’s no signage at Kispoko, so sometimes we have to guess. I don’t think this is a beehive – honey bees aren’t native to North America, they were brought over from Europe. My best guess is that this is a smoker. Someone built a small fire in the bottom of the structure, and the top part looks smokey on the inside. Maybe it was an experiment, the top part couldn’t hold more than a few pounds of meat.
Justin Houston told me that the thatch-roofed building with vertical log walls is Cherokee traditional architecture. It looks different than the buildings I saw at Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee North Carolina. I’ll take Justin’s word, I’m not familiar.
Here’s an open-front booth that seems too open to live in. I expect it’s to sit in and do craft work in good weather. That’s what people were doing in structures like this at Oconaluftee. I think open-sided arbors, roofed with leafy branches for shade were also common village structures, probably every household had one or two:
I know that the Creek Indians farther south built above-ground granaries, but I don’t know about any north of the Ohio River or in the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence region. I’ve read that people in the Ohio country often stored corn in underground pits. People in the Ohio country usually left their villages after the fall harvest, to go on the winter hunt in family groups, so it was wise to secure the corn in a pit under a big rock.
In Osage Indian Customs and Myths, Louis F. Burns wrote something I’ve long suspected: that Indians usually gathered deadfall for firewood, and rarely cut or chopped wood. Burns wrote specifically about the Osage, but I have noted many accounts of Indian women and children gathering wood, and none of wood-cutting, so I think the practice was general. In this well-known Karl Bodmer painting Sioux Camp, there’s a low pile of brushwood in front of the rightmost tipi, and I think that’s the woodpile:
I made a couple of Indian woodpiles, out of scraps of grape stem. You could use any twigs you have handy. Grape stem is lovely, organic, woody, fractal-looking stuff. It’s not very robust, but if some pieces break off, no problem, I eat another bag of grapes and glue on some more stem. Behind the woodpiles is a section of abatis that I’ve built from grape stem.
Here’s some other bric-a-brac I use to decorate Indian camps and villages. The stretched hides and cooking gear are all from the 1/72 Imex Eastern Friendly Indian, Lewis and Clark and Pioneer sets. They’re theoretically a bit small for 28mm models, but really, they look fine. Besides the camp items, I pillage the Imex sets for figures I can use in my 28mm collection as teenagers and children. Also, a couple of the sets have plastic tipis and wigwams that are too small for their nominal 1/72 scale, but great for 15mm:
Here are a few more pix from Kispoko. It’s an experimental archaeology project, and probably not all the experiments succeed. Here’s a stretch of wicker fence that someone experimented with. It doesn’t seem to fence anything in particular. I don’t know why anything in an Indian village would be fenced:
This structure with wicker walls and bark roof looks like a pen for animals, maybe a chicken coop. Pre-contact Indians kept no domestic animals besides dogs, but some native people learned to keep livestock:
Someone carved this turtle into a tree at Kispoko. Woodwork sculpture is a deep tradition in the woodlands. Might be hard to represent in 28mm, though:
That’s all I have for now. Best regards.
You'll shoot your eye out, kid!
