Rain of Maggots

Yes. You read that right.

Today in my trench two cicadas crawled out of some holes, still in their skin. Throughout the day the noise got louder and louder. We joked that by excavating our pit we'd released a plague.

It was funny until a storm rolled in, and it started raining maggots.

As in, the larvae of flies. Turns out they like to hang out in the forest, munching on leaves, and when an occasional thunderstorm comes along, they get washed out of the trees onto the heads and shoulders of unsuspecting students.

I'm sure you can imagine the results. Absolute shrieking, running about, flapping of hands, total hysteria and tears.

Want proof? Have a look at our ride home afterwards:

 

Baracca tales

Several years back, the excavation of Poggio Colla invested in an aluminum shed in order to protect its field tools from the elements. As an object made of metal sheets, it proved a major trial to carry the bits to the top of the hill where the tools are actually used. Since then, the shed has survived in varying states of preservation from year to year.

Until last year, of course, when we arrived to find the baracca ('hut') totally upended. It took us a week to make it past the horror and rebuild the abused structure. Much sweat and love went into the making of it and it became what I believe is the strongest version yet to grace the hill top. It even has a earthen embankment to keep it sturdy.

This year I was sure that the baracca would be in perfect condition, but alas for human intervention. Someone decided to use part of the roof to build what we think is a deer blind.

But the real problem is that we aren't even excavating on the hill this season, instead we're much further down the slope. So far down the slope that its way too far to carry tools back and forth every day. And thus we need a new baracca.

 

Gretchen and Phil tie up some supporting posts for the roof.

 

So we stole back the deer blind piece, the door, and one or two extra sheets that we had chucked in the woods. Add a few logs from the old sieve tripods, knot some ropes, and voila, a pseudo-baracca that will have to do for now.

Let's hope there aren't any thunderstorms in the near future, as the new shed seems a bit open. In fact, it's been noted that it looks more like a tiki bar and could use a few strategically placed coconuts and liquor bottles. So far it's working, though, so wish us luck!

Heirloom Archaeology: The Yard Edition Pt. 2, St. Francis

When I grew up, I assumed everyone had a St. Francis in their yard. We had one. Others in my family had one. When I asked who he was and why he was there, I was told that he protected and encouraged happy wildlife, that he would bring bounty to our little garden. He brought good luck to the yard and the squirrels and the morning doves.

Garden statues of holy figures are a tradition especially loved by Catholics. The concept and general idea behind them will be familiar to those studying ancient shrines for nymphs and other locally sacred beings.

In our family, St. Francis is the dominant garden statue and his presence can be traced to one particular image. It's the most 'sacred' in the family because its the oldest and it reaches back to the elder generation's childhood. It's been through hurricanes and moves, has been broken and reassembled, but somehow its still standing. It's the talismanic Athena Polias of the clan.

The statue of St. Francis has lived in the garden of the ancestral home's courtyard. The courtyard itself has gone through numerous changes over the years. Back in the day ('50s) there was even a palm tree in the middle.

This is where the grown ups sipped their cocktails: Myrtle Rask (my grandmother) and Anna Mae Sirl (great-grandmother).

But St. Francis was there, his toes in a bird bath, surveying his domain. He spent the years encouraging all the tropical plants to go wild, watching over the tiny lizards zipping across the patio, and providing a perch for song birds come to raid the bird feeder.

Analysis of the photographic evidence shows that nowadays St. Francis is in almost the exact same location, with some of the exact same plants still thriving under his protection.

St. Francis in 1958.

Best of all, he's still protecting the little animals :)

Heirloom Archaeology: The Yard Edition

In keeping with my continuing study of my aunt and uncle's Florida house, I've decided to start documenting some of the artifacts residing here. Indeed, here at the ancestral homestead one is surrounded by artifacts and heirlooms of a wide variety. Almost 60 years of habitation by the same family have resulted in an interesting conglomeration of objects. For (me) an archaeologist and lover of stories, it’s an ideal and happy situation, especially since its my family. Many of these artifacts would not be considered ‘heirlooms’ in the usual sense of the word. The term more often refers to  proudly displayed items that are ‘worth’ something, if not because of cost, than because of an aura endowed by story or legend. But I'll be calling my little project heirloom archaeology regardless.

In archaeological terms, 'heirloom' can be used to imply simply those objects “maintaining and reifying ties with the past” (D. H. Thomas 1976, 128). Commonly, archaeologists discuss heirlooms in terms of ancient chieftons and prestige. For example, in 1999 Lillios posited that “in chiefdoms, heirlooms serve to objectify memories and histories, acting as mnemonics to remind the living of their link to a distant, ancestral past. And because not all the living have equal access to that ancestral past, as heirlooms are typically valued objects that are not available or equally accessible to all members of a community, the possession, display, and transmission of heirlooms also differentiate the living and help to reify inherited social differences” (Lillios 1999, 236). That is, heirlooms are interesting because of their significance in society. In their Archaeologies of Memory, Alcock and Van Dyke likewise stress social memory.

These aren’t the heirlooms I’m interested in. Rather, I’m interested in 'memorable' objects  in a familial and domestic setting that are significant to the immediate inhabitants due to their life history and their link to the past, only. Not because of the social significance that they acquire outside of the domestic sphere. For the purposes of this blog, heirloom archaeology is a mash-up of familial archaeology and domestic archaeology on the micro scale.

 

Let’s start with this strange object that serves as part of the garden sculpture here. To me, it’s a mystery. Mechanical people might recognize it, however, as an engine head. Not just any engine head, but the engine head of the 1973 Volkswagon Bus that carried the Kelly family (my aunt, uncle, and 3 cousins) all over the country on camping trips, from Florida to Yellowstone. At some point, the engine broke, was fixed, broke again, and limped its way through the 70s and into the 80s. That is, it carried the family until 1981, when it finally gave up the ghost. That’s when it got turned into a piece of garden sculpture, rewarded for its loyalty in a spot of honor by the porch (instead of being thrown out like the engine from the 1965 Pontiac).

 

 

Another example is this object holding up the boat. Tools tend to be objects passed down from parents to children, with the result that many people have old-timey gear sitting around their garage or house, looking vintage and hip but usually serving no other purpose. This piece, however, is actually still at work. We can trace it to the Depression and  the 1930s, when Charlie Lloyd Kelly lived in Center, Mississippi with his Irish family (early settlers of Miss., arriving in the 1830s). C.J. used this mechanical jack until he died and it was passed down to his son, my Uncle Jim (Kelly). Today you can observe the depression-era jack still in use, slightly jerry-rigged, here in southern Florida.

These are a special kind of heirloom, then. Of little monetary value, these two artifacts make up the domestic material culture of the household. Ask the family about them, and you'll start a flood of talking, story-telling, reminiscing, and oral history. They're ugly and unremarkable and don't draw the eye. Yet, they're certainly significant links to the past that are part of the present life of the family home.
 

Plants as historical artifacts

When I was at the American school a few years back, Harriet Blitzer gave us a fascinating talk about olive trees and how their shape and growth patterns reveal some fascinating data about their life history and the historical circumstances of the trees' immediate surroundings. Much as the matrix of an ancient person's bones tell us whether they struggled as a laborer or suffered with diseases, the shape of the branches, the thickness of the growth, and the form of the trunk explain the presence or absence of human activity, erosion, natural competition, and so on. Plants serve as historical records, evidence of events and site formation.

This bush is likewise a historical artifact, although in its case it is an heirloom of sorts. It's a cherry hedge and sits outside my window at my aunt and uncle's house. But what you might not recognize at first glance is the fact that this little bush is actually 50 years old. According to the oral history shared by Joanne Kelly (née Rask), this bush was planted by her mother, Myrtle Rask (née Sirl), my grandmother. When the family moved to the house in the 1950s, she established a garden at its south edge. A long cherry hedge, situated in a L-shape, served as a fence for Myrtle's garden.

 The back of the house in the 1950s. Note the hedge on the left side, cordoning off an area for the garden.

Now the garden is long gone, but a little bit of the hedge still remains.

At OSU, there is a historic plane tree near my old building with a sign proudly proclaiming that it stood, a young teenage plane tree, when the US Constitution was being signed. Our bush was proudly standing when my dad joined the Boy Scouts and when he went on to Vietnam, when my cousins took apart and rebuilt their first engine, when my aunt finally retired from teaching. Who needs a constitution tree, right?

May 1961: (Uncle) Tim Rask works in the garden, surrounded by the cherry hedge.

 

Back

 

Lake Worth, Kelly-Rask Homestead, est. 1952

Back in Lake Worth for some much needed down time before the excavation season begins. Back online with this blog, which has been closed for about the last year and a half, thanks to dissertations and classes.

It's nice to be back :)

Even More Graves of Archaeologists

Way back in the day when I was a more dedicated blogger, I did some posts about the graves of archaeologists (here and here and here [not an archaeologist, but whatever]). I always meant to follow up with some additional posts but, as happens, I never got around to it. I still think it's an interesting project, though, so I thought it would be worth returning to.

Here we go:

John Pendlebury's story has reached truly historic and heroic proportions. He was a British archaeologist associated with the British School next door to the American School. He worked at two of the most famous Mediterranean excavations EVAH, Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and Knossos on Crete. During WWII, he stayed on Crete as a British spy and in so doing won the hearts of Crete's entire population. The story goes that nobody on Crete knew who the hell Sir Arthur Evans was, but they all knew Pendlebury. He was wounded and captured during the German assault on Crete. The Germans stood him up against a cottage wall and shot him through the head. He's buried at the Commonwealth cemetery at Souda Bay.

Like Pendlebury, George Mylonas had his own war story. A soldier during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), he was captured as a POW. His Smyrna-based family lost virtually everything in the war, but he went on to become a prominent archaeologist in Greece. He was a student of David Robinson at Olynthus and in the late '20s he even served as the Bursar of the American School in Athens. He's most famous for directing the excavations at Mycenae - he's the guy who led the excavation of Grave Circle B. He's buried down the hill from Mycenae in the same little cemetery as Humpfrey Payne. Like the Blegen's grave in the First Cemetery in Athens, Mylonas' sarcophagus is decked out in a way that links him to the ancient peoples he studied - the spiral-y things running along the bottom are a decorative motif visible in Mycenean art. (I'd like to thank Vassiliki Pliatsika for providing me with the pictures of Mylonas' grave. Thanks!)

And just as a quick note, there are many more graves of archaeologists and classicists in the First Cemetery that need to be documented. For example, if you feel like stopping by, visit these people (courtesy of Dan Leon):

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones (1904-1970) - Author of "The Later Roman Empire, 284-602" and apparently popular with all the Late Antiquity peeps, even if he wasn't big on archaeology. He had a heart-attack on a boat on his way to deliver a series of lectures in Thessaloniki.

Adolf Furtwaengler [whom I've already noted - but it doesn't hurt to give him further props] (1853-1907) - Wrote a dissertation on vase painting, was instrumental in the development of the 'comparative method,' participated in the excavations at Olympia, and co-authored the first corpus of pottery finds ever (Mykenische Thongefaesse, from Aegina).  He helped to come up with the idea of using pottery and stratigraphy to create a chronology.  He wrote a bunch of stuff on vase painting and sculpture, ran a few museums and digs, published a monograph on Aegina, but contracted dysentery there and died.

Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991) - Possibly the Gregory Vlastos who published widely on pre-Socratic, Socratic, and Platonic philosophy and is credited by some with bringing about a renewed interest in Plato in the philosophical community.