Nine days into their quest to paddle the full length of the River Thames, Theresa Emmerich Kamper and Sarah Day watched as a slate grey stormfront swallowed the blue sky. The onrush of rain was moving so fast there was no time to paddle ashore and unload their gear. Their buckskin dresses weren’t waterproof. And if their reindeer fur bedding got soaked, it would never dry. So, they draped their leather tent over themselves and huddled inside their cowhide canoe as they were hammered with hail, singing silly songs and bailing water with a wooden cup.
A man moored nearby poked his head out of his houseboat. “If you’re gonna do it like the Flintstones,” he called out, “you’re gonna get wet!”
Over the howling wind, they shouted, “It’s for science!”
Facing the elements while surrounding themselves with leather is, in fact, an important part of Day and Emmerich Kamper’s work. As experimental archaeologists, they research and recreate ancient technologies to gain insight into how our ancestors lived. They teach ancestral skills, such making clothing, pouches, preserved meat and bone tools from animals. Emmerich Kamper, who earned a PhD in ancient hide-tanning techniques, famously put her expertise to the test on the wilderness survival show Alone.
Last year, the women were brainstorming ideas for fun adventures. Day was looking for a reason to build the kind of boat Europeans may have constructed tens of thousands of years ago. Emmerich Kamper crafted a speculatively Paleolithic-style skin canoe for the show Surviving the Stone Age, but she’d only used it on short jaunts. If they took animal skin boats on a multi-day journey, they reasoned, they could learn more about how Paleolithic peoples might have traded along rivers and even migrated to islands around Scotland and the Mediterranean.
Theresa Emmerich Kamper and Sarah Day handcrafted animal skin canoes for their Thames adventure (Credit: Keridwen Cornelius)
The idea was born: they would paddle 255km of the Thames with handcrafted canoes, equipment and food that mimicked – as closely as they could practically and legally manage it – those made by Stone Age peoples.
Lessons in ancestral skills
Though only seasoned ancient skills practitioners can recreate Emmerich Kamper and Day’s expedition, anyone can get a flavour of their adventure by paddling the Thames in modern boats and incorporating some of their skills.
Emmerich Kamper teaches workshops worldwide in hide tanning and using the whole animal to make food, tools and clothing. Day offers bespoke classes for adults and kids in fire making, spoon carving and wild cooking.
Every August, the Wilderness Gathering brings dozens of instructors to Wiltshire, England, for classes in survival skills, herbal medicine, crafting with leather and more. And across the UK, foraging workshops have become as abundant as nettles. Try Wild Food UK, Foraged by Fern and Galloway Wild Foods.
On a sunny day in June 2023, they prepared to launch from Cricklade, 20km from the puddle-sized source of the Thames. Their ultimate destination was Greenwich, a place “at the beginning and end of time” as the home of the Prime Meridian Line, Emmerich Kamper said.
They had built their boats from wickerwork frames of willow and hazel branches covered in rawhide cowskin smeared with coatings of tallow, beeswax and birch tar, and as they unloaded them from their van, the canoes unleashed a smell of raw meat and rendered fat.
Due to their busy teaching schedules, they hadn’t tested them out yet. When they put the boats in the river, they began to leak. Emmerich Kamper wasn’t surprised. She’d originally sewed her skins with pig intestine, which doesn’t endure as well as sinew, and she’d had to make hasty repairs. But both women remained unflappable; they’d just bail water until the skins were wet enough to restitch. It’s all part of experimental archaeology.
They loaded the canoes with willow-branch backrests, bags made of deer stomach and cow bladder, and buckets fashioned from bark sewn with tree roots. “Part of the reason we’re doing this is to play with equipment, to see what works well on a river and what’s just dead weight,” Emmerich Kamper explained.
For food, they packed dried berries, nuts and nut flours. Day made pemmican from powdered dried salmon blended with tallow “and some berries”, she said, “because otherwise it’s like eating lumpy, gritty candle wax”. They also planned to forage dandelions, thistle stems, hogweed shoots and other greens from the riverbanks.
The 11-day journey took them from Cricklade to Isleworth (Credit: Keridwen Cornelius)
As they set off, the narrow Thames presented an obstacle course. They had to limbo under low branches, bushwhack through rushes and dangling foliage, heave the boats over submerged trees and get wing-slapped by an angry swan. The following day, the river widened and a headwind picked up, wreaking havoc on Emmerich Kamper’s lightweight canoe. “Theresa’s boat would literally spin on a sixpence,” Day said. “It would make a great hunting boat, but into the wind, it blows around like a feather in a puddle.”
By the time night fell, they were exhausted. They’d run out of potable water and they couldn’t find a campsite where they wouldn’t be trampled by cows. Finally, they spotted a pocket-sized clearing. But to get there, they had to wade through stinging nettles in bare feet and buckskin skirts. They made a fire, boiled Thames water and filtered it through a T-shirt. Day seared a pork joint on a slab of basalt, then simmered it with acorn flour and foraged mushrooms in a clay pot with a lettuce leaf lid. As they ate, the heat from the fire inflamed their nettle-stung legs. “It was like being zapped with an electric cattle prod,” Day said.
The next day, the headwind continued to buffet them, so they towed Emmerich Kamper’s boat. They enjoyed chatting and singing in the same boat so much, they kept it up the rest of the 11-day journey. On the single day a tailwind blew, they fashioned a sail from a stick and a leather tarp. Emmerich Kamper held the sail high, looking like a human mast in her buckskin bikini top and full back tattoo.
Each night, they propped up the canoes with sticks to serve as windbreaks and to help dry out the skins. Underneath, they rolled out bedding made of roe deer and reindeer furs, which kept them toasty but moulted flurries of white hair. “I woke up this morning, and I looked like a Yeti,” Day joked.
At night, they propped their canoes up with sticks to serve as windbreaks (Credit: Keridwen Cornelius)
As the days progressed, the women’s respect for these ancient canoes grew. The vessels required minimal maintenance. They were light and nimble but could carry immense loads. Emmerich Kamper and Day could picture Stone Age people hunting seals in these sturdy skiffs, or seasonally shipping baskets of acorns along the Thames. Aesthetically, the canoes were enchanting. The skins flowed with the rippling water and glowed amber in the sunrise. They wafted woody and animal aromas.
Everywhere the women paddled, adults and kids stared at them with wonder and peppered them with questions. These interactions became their favourite part of the adventure. Fascination with ancestral and wilderness skills is increasing, thanks to media interest and TV shows, plus people’s growing desire to connect with nature, to live more simply and meaningfully. “People thirst for something they can’t really name,” Day said. “But they know it when they see those boats.”
The canoes ferry the imagination to a distant time. The Stone Age, which stretched from roughly three million to 6,000 years ago, encompasses more than 99% of humans’ technological history. This period shaped who we are today, so in a sense, it’s still inside us. “When you do a journey like this,” Day said, “you can feel an almost tangible link with someone who was living a very different life a very long time ago.”
Yet, the Thames is quite different from what it was in the Stone Age – and it slowed the women down. Thousands of years ago, people would have camped freely and lit fires every night to dry out their canoes, helping them skim through the water faster. Emmerich Kamper and Day weren’t allowed to light fires in most places. They struggled to find spots to camp or even break for dried berries on a sandbar. They waited for up to an hour to get through each lock. “It’s funny because all the real issues we’ve run into have nothing to do with the fact that the Stone Age was hard,” Emmerich Kamper said. “It’s that we’re on a modern river.”
Interacting with people along the route was their favourite part of the adventure (Credit: Keridwen Cornelius)
A near-constant headwind and two epic thunderstorms also put the women behind schedule. On the 11th day, they paddled 32km, racing to beat the tide rushing in from the Thames estuary. Their legs and backs ached so much they could barely stand. To distract themselves, they sang old English folk songs. They navigated through the dark by the light of headlamps. It was after 22:00 when they docked in Isleworth in south-west London, 219km from their starting point. But Emmerich Kamper had to fly to Denmark to speak at a bushcraft symposium so they couldn’t reach Greenwich, 36km away.
In a sense, though, they reached something more distant. “One of our motivations was understanding past people’s personal experience with using this technology,” Emmerich Kamper said. “Knowing what it feels like to sit under a leather tent in a rawhide boat in the middle of a thunderstorm. It makes past peoples real.”
The journey gave them a boatload of ideas for fine-tuning their canoes and experimentally testing coatings and the physics of drag through water. They celebrated the end of their voyage by planning another Stone Age expedition as they ate takeaway by the river, somewhere between the beginning and end of time.
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