There is no reason and the truth is plain to see

Driving down the highway, the pavement disappears beneath me and I have the extraordinary sense of going somewhere. The street lights sparkle against the night sky, I streak past the few other cars, always going just a little bit too fast. There is a moment of silence as the song switches on my playlist. The first chords of A Whiter Shade of Pale float through the air and I smile to myself.

My head is full of imaginary scenarios. Me rolling all my clothes into small bundles and boarding a plane. The first time I set foot in Newcastle, lost, confused and slightly stressed, but so full of the future. Buying sheets for my bed, decorating a small but cute one bedroom apartment. Stepping into my first class, nervous but excited, meeting all of the other MA students. Walking along the river, watching fall turn into my first English winter and actually missing the snow. I see a favourite pub, with dim lights and Newcastle Brown on tap. I imagine my favourite cafe, with brownies for bad days and lattés for early mornings.

I picture myself on my first excavation, sweaty with the dust sticking to me, but smiling. I imagine finding that one thing that catches my attention on a random day in class - my thesis in the making. I see the Colisseum, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the Acropolis.

I imagine what it will be like to be doing something I love everyday, for the first time in my life. What it will be like to be unemployed, to devote my time only to my studies.

And I smile.

The Philosophy of Restoration

A number of things today have me thinking about the restoration architecture and archaeology. In my Intro to Archaeology class we watched a movie about the restoration of the Parthenon. And I just went to a lecture at school by Mary Beard about the restoration of Pompeii.

My first introduction to the idea of restoration was at Pinhey’s last summer. The house at Pinhey’s was restored by the Canadian architect Julian Smith (who also restored the Vimy Memorial) in the 1990s. This is the part of the tour where I would discuss the philosophies of restoration. At Pinhey’s, a lot of the house was left as it was found. This way, you can see the deterioration over time. The deterioration is part of the story. It’s a story of a the gradual decline of the wealthiest family in March Township. Parts of the house needed to be restored in order to perserve the structural value and to allow it to be used as a regulation public place. But the philosophy of Julian Smith, as with most modern restoration architects, was to make it very obvious which parts were new material and which were original. You do this by not matching paints exactly or by not finishing the wood. So you get an idea of what it would have looked like, but you are changing the original material. This works very well at Pinhey’s, since the family didn’t do any major restorations while they were living there, due to their decline of wealth. At Billings it’s a different case. The family renovated and modernized the house themselves while living there, which drastically changed the original structure of the house. Because of this, the outside of the Billings Estate National Historic Site looks old, but the inside looks fairly new, with white washed walls and such. Personally, I prefer the authenticity of Pinhey’s, because when you walk in the front door you’re essentially seeing what they saw 150 years ago.

The movie we watched in class this morning was a documentary about the ongoing restoration of the Parthenon. It was very interesting. Essentially, in order to keep the Parthenon standing at all, it was in need of a major restoration. But they’ve had alot of problems with it. You see, the Athenians didn’t build the Parthenon to be straight. They built it to look straight. This means that all of the lines are slightly curved, creating the optical illusion of perfection, though it is actually imperfect. They didn’t care about how was but how it looked. Which says a lot about the Athenians. This, however, leads to another problem. Each column is made in several marble pieces. But they are all different, by fractions and millimeters. That means each “piece” of the Parthenon only fits in one spot. They have to be very precise when creating the supporting pieces in order to get it just right. They’ve been at it for 30 years. It took the Athenians 7 years (under Pericles, during the Athenian Empire) to make the Parthenon. And, aren’t we supposed to be more advanced than them? Apparently not. As the documentary says, not only did they have a complex system of measurement but they also had tools created in their mastery of mettalurgy that we can’t replicate today.

This afternoon, Mary Beard was telling us about the Allied bombing of Pompeii in 1943. It destroyed many parts of the ruins of Pompeii, and as a result a lot of Pompeii isn’t an original but a restoration. Beard said that as a society, we turn a blind eye to the restoration of major sites like Pompeii and Hadrian’s Wall. Because we want to. We want to believe that this is our “unmediated contact” with the Roman World. That we’re seeing what they saw. When really, a lot of the restorations, such as that of Pompeii and those done at Knossos by Arthur Evans, are more of a product of what we imagine the ancient world to be. It says as much about our society as it does about theirs, maybe more.

“As our vision of the ancient world changes, so does what we choose to find at Pompeii.” - Mary Beard.

The Emperor’s Body, Ancient Poop and More Reasons to Buy Shoes

I bought a couple of archaeology magazines about a week ago, and I’m going through them slowly, finding some interesting stuff.

Apparently, the statue of Emperor Hadrian that the British Museum has had since the 1860s is actually pieces of three or more statues plastered together. When the museum’s conservators took the layer of plaster off around Hadrian’s neck, they discovered that the head was too small for the body, the neck didn’t fit together. Also, apparently, the hands are from different statues too. This seems a good way to create the perfect man, I think. Simply plaster the best pieces together. According to the Bristish Museum website, it was the museum staff who put the different pieces together, on assumption that all the pieces were found near each other in Libya.

Also, they were able to prove that humans lived in North America over 12,000 years ago. How? Poop, of course. Archaeologists apparently found the a dried piece of shit from 14,300 years ago in a cave in Oregon. They’re actually able to isolate human DNA from this. As Kristen asked: How did they know it was poop? It looks like a rock to me…

I’ve bought three new pairs of shoes in the last month. I used to hate shoe shopping - apparently now I’m obsessed. But it’s okay, because it’s genetic. Turns out that humans have been wearing shoes for 40,000 years. An anthropologist analyzed the toe bones of a skeleton found in China and found that the shape of the foot indicated that this person wore shoes. Apparently, if you walk bare foot your whole life your middle toes curl under for traction. But not shoe wearers, they put all the pressure on the big toe and the rest of the toe bones are less developed. See, now I can tell myself that if I don’t buy shoes, my middle toes might curl under….

Science humour…

Today, I was reading about gay dolphins and gnome poop.

Ah, the world of blogging.