Live and learn (Montréal version)
Thursday, 13 October 2011
I’ve never excavated foundation walls in this density before, and I’ve certainly never seen them color coded as to age.
Musings
Look up (again)
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
I’m definitely not up on the architectural detail in Catholic houses of worship so I don’t know the “proper” name of this feature, but I did enjoy this bird on the ceiling of the rooflet over the altar in this cathedral. Out front is a statue of the original patron, and the pigeon atop his head loved his perch (coo-coo) and did not take flight for the whole five minutes we spent in front of the façade.
Ah, wandering along links in WikiPee, I discovered that the rooflet is a baldachin, Italian baldacchino. There’s one in St. Peter’s (Rome), and this building was meant to imitate that one, hence this copied detail mimicking the Bernini original there. Enough; I will probably forget this in a few days….
Please lift teepee…
Friday, 30 September 2011
I just love dioramas. And I really love dioramas made by one person in their own vision.
Kudos, G!
I remember being spellbound as a kid each time I was taken to the museum at MSU as I examined the detail in their dioramas. I particularly remember one of the square in the Aztec version of downtown Mexico City (that is, Tenochtitlán) and of a small family of deer in a tropical forest somewhere that had leaf-cutter ants traipsing along the spine of a tree’s buttress-root. In fact, when I encountered leaf-cutter ants in the wild, maybe for the first time—and it was many years later—I watched and watched.
A diorama had come to life!
Distempered glass
Friday, 23 September 2011
Archaeologists can spend a lot of time with fragments. How they have fractured tells you something about the material they’re composed of and how they broke.
These are Corelle, pieces of the rim of a 2-quart serving bowl in Winter Frost White (the web maintains), although they look a bit blue here.
Corelle is a tempered glass, and I’ve never before seen glass break into elongated shark’s teeth.
Wide ranging Tuesday
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Spent at least half the day and most of my daily allotment of alert brain cells on the 2011 articles in Cliodynamics, the journal discussing the intersection between mathematical analysis and history (mostly).
Then I took more of those sun-dried tomatoes I mentioned yesterday and made some sloppy joes, of course not like your mom made, if she was a Midwestern cook from my childhood. And it wasn’t just the sun-dried tomatoes.
Repurposed buildings
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Right in the middle of the former Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, the developers dropped in an outdoor natatorium—an amenity for residents of the factory-turned-housing complex of today. The weather has turned cool enough that at dusk on this Saturday night not a soul was swimming or socializing poolside.
Cool guy, Buck the Baker
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Google is amazing. Or, really, what’s out there on the web is amazing.
Recently, a friend suggested taking a look at Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides. So, I requested same of the county library. The wheels of transference brought it to my branch, and wah-lah, I paged through it a bit this morning.
A weird fact jumped out at me: James Earl Ray worked in the bakery in prison, in the Missouri State Pen.
Way back in the mists of time, I worked in Burwell NE, in the very interesting Sandhills (called the “the largest and most intricate wetland ecosystem in the United States” in WikiPee), and one of our local friends was Buck the Baker. You see, one of the stories Buck told, and I never had a reason to doubt the truth of his stories…he said he baked for Uncle Sam during WWII, and one of the guys who worked under him was…James Earl Ray.
What, I wondered, happened to Buck the Baker? He had heart problems when we knew him, and he was well into his sixties, so I figured I knew what I’d discover, but the bigger mystery that had to be solved first was: what was Buck’s “real” name? Several years ago when JCB and I were out wandering, we went through Burwell, and I think I identified the storefront that had been his bakery. It is neither a bakery or restaurant now, as it was then.
My very first search attempt turned up this Virtual Nebraska page authored by Emma Bristol (thanks Ms. Bristol!), which reveals that Buck’s name was Orval D. Newbury. And there’s a picture!
How heartwarming to find a picture of Buck at Fort Hartsuff, where he loved to bake and participate in reenactments! (That’s him on the left. Here’s a snow-falling-on-cedars moment when we stopped by there.) Buck once served our whole crew “elk* stew”—he said it in quotation marks and wouldn’t answer questions about it) at a special evening event hosted by the manager (I can’t remember his name), his wife (they also had an octagon house down in Ord—I think this one), and their lovely children. How special!
The fall we were there Buck made me the largest b-day cake I’ve ever had, a giant sheet cake. We even sent pieces home with passersby!
Just to close the circle, Google also reveals that Buck went to the great teepee in the sky in the early 1980’s (records I found differ), not long after our fieldwork ended. And, in concert with his interest in history, Buck also left an interview with the Veterans History Project.
* I’m pretty sure the “elk” went moo.
What reality is the one you seek?
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
The original—well, the original tiles reconstructed in the museum. With positively lousy lighting.
Today was Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli day. We dodged persistent raindrops getting there from a nearby train station, and discovered the museum was more of a ramble through the art objects from several Naples-area archaeological sites—especially Pompeii and Herculaneum—than a comprehensive survey.
In particular, the museum highlighted that while we have visited those sites and seen roads, sidewalks, walls, and floors, many of the decorations we’ve seen have been copies, while the originals were removed to this institution for safe-keeping—beginning in the 1700s. Well, plus some of the architecture has been reconstructed (rather than merely stablized), too.
The colorful copy we saw at Herculaneum. In somewhat better light.
Both of us were very glad that we saw P and H, the sites, first, and then the out-of-context artwork plopped together sometimes in a mix-and-match fashion that we found extremely disconcerting. One room, for example, had this mosaic from Herculaneum paired with tile-inlaid columns from Pompeii. Many of the displays, however, were from single rooms/residential complexes, but usually were not displayed in the order they were originally. Like I said, mix and match.
Live and learn: Herculaneum
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Herculaneum was a Roman city of perhaps 4K, maybe 5K, people when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Residents had mostly fled the community by the time deadly hot gasses killed over 300 remaining, many on the beach. (More may still be entombed in the volcanic deposits that remain unexcavated.)
The beach area is now covered in green vegetation along the right side of the picture. The grey wall bordering it and in the background are the volcanic…stuff (technical term) that buried the city, and remain along the margins of the excavated area and beneath the modern city. The volcano’s output pushed the shoreline back, and it is now over 1500 ft to the SE. The old beach, now exposed, is essentially a moat and would flood if pumps were not removing water at a huge rate. Anyway, the mini-forum where you see teensy people in the middle is the second story above the arched rooms that shippers would have used. The large arched rooms in the foreground are perhaps a third story (all high stories) above the ancient waterline. Residences sit even higher, and would have enjoyed fine ocean breezes. The upright evergreens along the far horizon line the main entry route (from the left), with views between oleanders into the ancient city.
Perhaps the coolest thing about Herculaneum is that the volcano’s effects were different than at Pompeii, such that wood (and other organic materials) was carbonized in place and preserved. The balcony is from the first century AD, as is the screen below it. The red on the wall of the second floor is likewise ancient.
We underestimated how interesting we’d find Herculaneum.
Our sybaritic day
Sunday, 29 May 2011
“There’s an archaeological site,” Someone Else said, “let’s stop.!”
And thus we had a wonderful guided tour of Sybaris—to the Greeks, or Copia—to the Romans. We saw the ruins of Copia, except for a stretch of the Greek’s road. (Read the Greek community’s history here.
You’re looking SSE toward the Roman center-of-town, which had a large circular city fountain, the theater, and at least one temple.
Apparently the coast side of Copia had a harbor and city gate, but the sea is now several hundred meters away. I guess sediment from the mountains washed down over the ruins protecting wall bases and floors, as well as the roads.
I’m not sure of the hydrology, but we saw and heard two busy pumps, keeping the water at bay. One place we could see the current water level, nearly 2m below the road—so the pumps must run continuously to keep the site from flooding—at least during rainy periods—and we experienced that recently. The yellow pipe is part of the water-removal system.
Thus, we have left Sicily, and are doing a quick perusal of the Ionian coast (Jonian is the spelling here). The B&B we stayed at hooked us up with a local Calabrian restaurant, and we dined with two French couples staying at the same B&B—a linguistic olympics for all of us, as we switched among French, English, and Italian, especially to discuss the foods we were eating. John used Google translate several times; for example, you gotta really know a language to know “white mulberry*” (Morus alba) in it—they were raw, fresh, sweet, and part of the fruit course along with dark, sweet cherries. Yum.
The white mulberries are probably a legacy of the silk industry. A town up the way, Catanzaro, was known historically for its velvet, silk and other textiles; I’m guessing that’s the link to the Morus alba trees….
* mûre