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So it wasn't mentioned, but part of the technology of memory is rhythm and rhyme.  There is a reason why millions of people can sing the same exact song.  If you told a story to a million people, you would get a lot of divergence.  The rhythm limits the substitute words that can sneak in.  And the rhyme further limits the number of potential substitutions.  Then of course, when everyone sings the song together, people correct their errors.  So it is basically the origin of checksums and parity bits.

That is why songs for entertainment are relatively new, they used to be how we stored all of our lore.  Smiths, farmers, just about everyone had their own songs they used to store knowledge.

In Ireland we have a legend about a witch called an cailleach, she is said to have carried rocks in her an apron of white, which she spread across the land in the winter, when winter turned to spring she fled north taking her apron with her and as she did she scattered the rocks across the land, these rocks are still visible in the landscape all across Ireland, these rocks are now know to be glacial erratics, I believe this legend to be a memory of the melting of the European ice cap at the end of the last ice age.

I used to remember dozens of phone numbers.

This is very interesting. One “story” we’re told is that James Cook found a number of islands in the Pacific. What we’re not told, and something I found out recently, was that there was Polynesian navigator on the crew who could locate upwards of 190 islands in the Pacific Ocean using his knowledge and a “star map” made of twigs and string. Cook didn’t “find” anything, ancient knowledge from a local guided him.

Im from village in Slovakia. On one of the hills in our valley are remains of fort. According archeologic research, it was built sometimes between 4000 to 3000 years BC (5000 to 6000 years back) and abandoned during great Lužicka culture depression around 1200-1100 years BC (3200-3100 years back). In my village and other village from valley next to us, there is a fairytale about people who cursed that fort, because they were ordered to carry rocks on top of that hill (top of the hill where fort was built is 910 meters above sea level) for construction of its walls and also water because there is no other water source than rain water up there. Till today you can go up there right to what remained from that water tank and walls. Its crazy when you think about it. Some fairytale survived 5-6k years since times of construction of that place and you can still touch real things from that fairytale.

The aboriginal song lines are literally a matter of life and death. Water can be extremely hard to find in the outback and the song lines were a map of the water sources passed down through the generations. There was a very strong incentive to keep them accurate and resist drifting. It's an ingenious solution to a serious problem.

"it's harder to erase a song than to erase a city."  The Silurian Hypothesis.  Interesting stuff.

One my favourite stories (because it's so startlingly old) is that of the Pleiades: The seven sisters who were attacked, and fled to heaven. These days most people can only distinguish 6, or at least 8, because the stars have moved but if you track them backwards there was a time 50-80kya when you would have seen seven.
Versions of the story exist from native Americans to Australians, and include some detail about one sister who then hid or returned to earth to explain why one is now "missing".

This is the same with the story of The Seven Sisters.  Multiple cultures have stories about the seventh sister going missing, and it turns out there did used to be a seventh Pliedes star, and we remember when it vanished.  When you navigate as much by the night sky as the land, losing a star is a big, big deal.

My grandmother could recite long poems even in her 80’s.  She told me that when she was young no one had radios or phonographs in her neighbourhood so when friends got together everyone was expected to take turns entertaining, either by singing, playing an instrument or reciting a poem.  Having a great memory was normal then

I have often wondered if the reason Northern Europe (especially England) seem to have a religion based on "pleasing the water" is because of the loss of Doggerland.  It was gradually being lost by the raising oceans, but then over 8,000 years ago a large tsunami happened destroying what remained of Doggerland in a day.  It destroyed a lot of eastern British Isle, especially Scotland.  After that, we see these cultures giving gifts to bodies of water, almost like: 'here's a gift, please don't hurt us, again.'

Sit down with a Maasai cattle herder and ask him about his cows, and he will recite lineage of every single one of his hundred cows back a dozen generations. Ask him about his lineage and he'll do the same thing back several centuries.

This isn't unusual, its just an trained and practiced skill amoung preliterate cultures. Accurately memorizing and recalling mythes, legends, geneologies, etc... is daily fact of life.

The amusing thing is, if you read early writing's by the Greeks there was a huge debate about writing, and Socrates himself didn't like writing things down because he believed it distorted communication and lead to an atrophy in memory. Today we only know this because Aristotle wrote it down.

These traditions aren't even that old. I remember reading several books on mediæval memory practices in Europe, where she describes the techniques monks would use to commit plainchant to memory. They would sing the plainchants for an entire year, several masses a day, all different and from memory. It's the equivalent of committing every individual instrumental part of all of Beethoven's symphonies to memory, and these monks did it without explicit music notation.
The techniques she describes are like what you talk about here: they constructed large houses in their minds, filled with rooms, each room full of specific objects, each connected to specific musical material. Then, they navigated the houses as they sang, retracing the steps to recall the music (or the text; these techniques worked for literature as well).
It's remarkable how capable the human brain is of adapting those skills.

If you REALLY want to know how fragile digital data is, consider the story of the original Viking Mission to Mars data tapes.  A researcher wanted to review the original data.  He was given the data on 9 track tape.  However, 9 track tape drives had not been manufactured for about 20 years, so it meant finding a working tape drive to read the data.  Then came the issue of the schema of the data.  The program that the data was written in was very hard to find.  This was only after 40 years.  There is a whole industry that takes film of all varieties and VHS tapes and moves them to DVD.  DVD is almost an obsolete technology.  To which media to you move the DVD data to?  It is a major issue of long term data archival.

This reminds me of the Mount Pinatubo here in the Philippines. If I remember correctly, prior to the disastrous 1991 eruption, not many people knew that it was a volcano that can erupt as there were few recorded historical eruptions.

On the other hand, I believe the Aeta, an indigenous group living around the area, had knowledge on the nature of the mountain. A paper I read recounts that the Aeta myths recount a quarrel between a deity and a giant sea turtle, in which the sea turtle bores into the earth creating the volcano.

Think about the Illiad, didn't people use to think the city of Troy was a myth?

Since sand is silicon dioxide, our records and knowledge is literally written in sand.

An example of oral storage is the first nation people’s myth of the formation of the Great Lakes in a series of sudden floods.  Geologists laughed at this until they realized that that is exactly how it happened when a series of ice dams gave way near the end of the younger dryas.

Songs and chants are a great way to memorize something.  In example think about the ABC song.  26 letters that don’t mean anything to the 4 year old at the time, yet they remember them all with a few days of repeating the song.

Another method is the memory cathedral.  You build a castle in your head.  You associate what you need to remember with a physical object, and then mentally place that object on a table in a room in your imaginary castle.  Every day when you wake up and before you go to bed you walk through your castle and look at all the objects.  

Think about your home.  You know where all the objects in it are (or if you are a slob like me, where they should be).  You are simply creating a second, much more elaborate imagery home in your head.  When you need to recall that memory, you simply run through your imaginary home to the object you associated with that memory.  It takes practice, but it worked well enough to get me a 4.0 gpa in high school and college.

Another example of the power of memory over generations are the navigators of the south Pacific.  They memorized directions for sailing from island to island.  Young boys were chosen for their mental abilities, and then spent their entire childhood stay up at night memorizing all of the stars and their positions in the sky throughout the year.  In the book “We the Navigators” there is an account of a navigator navigating a long voyage that had not been performed by anyone for generations.  Yet he had in his memory the information to complete that voyage.  When the Spanish first sailed through that part of the world they interviewed a navigator.  The navigator was asked to name as many islands as he knew, with compass headings and distance to each.  The navigator named so many islands that the Spanish concluded he must be lying.  But this interview was written down and later found in Spanish archives.  Modern analysis shows the navigator was telling the truth.

My Memaw taught me plant names & their use in a sing song manner. Like there was a rhyme for every medicinal plant the woman had. And she had tons of different plants on hand. People were always sending or bringing her what most folks would call just weeds. Her house was marked by the hobos so they brought a lot of stuff from the other side of the Missa'hippy River. Memaw would feed the hobos & get their clothing cleaned or mended. She always had lots of old shoes & boots for them too.  She could sew up a wound as good as any plastic surgeon. When they left her house she sent food to last a few days. She would even delouse them. She told me the best medicine she practiced was to listen. When Memaw passed the hobos brought so many wild flowers that we didnt have room for them all at the funeral home. But yeah, she taught me all about plants with oral history passed down from her mothers who know how many generations. Her side of the family is from a really small tribe over on the Georga/Alabama state line. A cook on the Trail of Tears married one of my ancestors & they settled around the Arkansas/Louisiana state line. They drifted down around Baton Rouge La & settled there till they headed back to the original spot they came from over in Georgia. So yeah, oral history is a super real thing & I know that first hand. I even know a couple of songs about dangerous parts of the woods from back during the Civil War