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archaeology
Cunicoli di Claudio and the Vanishing Lake
From Saga to Science: American Vikings
Recent news of Norse remains in North America has rekindled my interest in what was once the main theme of this blog, the connections between literature, myth, and archaeology. Much of Viking archaeology has been spurred by scholarship of medieval literature; some of the most notable archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries have been those guided by details from the classical and medieval epics. The impulse to look for archaeological roots to literary sources like the Icelandic Sagas, with their accounts of Viking adventures spanning Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and America, illustrates the power that stories have over even the most academic of imaginations, causing researchers to embark on long quests for sites like the lost Viking Vinland.
The Icelandic Sagas are prose histories written in the 13th and 14th centuries describing events that took place in the 10th and 11th. While most of the sagas focus on folk stories or family histories, some depict the Viking expansion westward: the settlement of Iceland, Greenland and the western land known as “Vinland.” Stripped of their supernatural trimmings of ghosts and seers, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eirik the Red tell similar stories of the arrival of Icelanders on the northeast coast of America, at first the accidental result of the harsh storms of the northern Atlantic, but later a deliberate attempt at colonization, four centuries prior to Columbus.
At the Edge of the Black Lagoon
Earlier this summer, I visited the trails at Sapsucker Woods, a place of ponds filled with lilies and singing bull frogs, and boardwalks over fern-filled swamps where the mirror-smooth water resulted in a vision of a sepia-toned underworld just beneath your feet. The watery landscape was entrancing in a way that is very different from walking the hills or the lakeshore, and I found myself thinking about the singular ways that wetlands resonate in human consciousness. There is a special in-between quality to wetlands, a porous boundary with no clear shore that lingers in the imagination. Marshes and swamps and fens, like mountainsides and moors, are wildernesses that belong to monsters and outcasts, or to the dead. In Beowulf, Grendel and his mother haunt the “awful fenpaths, where the upland torrents plunge downward under the dark crags, the flood underground.” From Old English to a modern day example, there’s Tolkien, an eternal Beowulf fanboy, and his Dead Marshes with their drowned warriors.
Often these depictions are meant as a warning – to fear the creature in the black lagoon. Avoid the Great Grimpen Mire, and don’t follow the will-o’-the’whisp, the light that pixies and púcas use to lead travelers off the path to drown. Just from Saturday morning cartoons alone, we probably all thought quicksand was going to be a bigger deal in life than it ended up being. No matter what the setting, human beings tend to create stories about their physical landscapes. The special place of dread and possibility that wetlands hold in the imagination, though, doesn’t disappear with scrutiny. The archaeological stories held within wetlands are as intriguing as any myth. Maybe more so, because they are often sparse on all but the most gruesome of details.
Drawing Bones and Mapping Worlds
Title aside, this post has nothing to do with the summers I spent designing tombstones; instead, it’s about how 2 of my favorite things come together: drawing and science. I don’t think it surprises anyone to say that art and science can go hand in hand; scientific illustration and imagery is often the easiest way for the public to engage with new research – think how exciting new images from Hubble are, or pictures from the latest deep sea dive of new species that look like they came from the Black Lagoon. The field of scientific illustration allows access to concepts otherwise unobservable, from microscopic to macroscopic. Physical and natural sciences like botany, biology, etc all rely on a long tradition of illustrators providing precise diagrams and figures, which communicate in a more universal language than any text. In the case of geology and archaeology, something that has always delighted me is how vital bringing together artistic skills with field research could be, from sketching artifacts and mapping outcrops, even to planning geophysical surveys.
Field Notes: Adventures in the Temple of the Moon
In the middle of a sand-filled plaza surrounded by decaying walls, a coarse jumble of black boulders spills out of the ground like it was just disgorged by the volcanic peak above. A crowd gathers at the edges, peering at the strangely garbed figures processing with agonizing slowness across the sacrificial platform. An ominous sound fills the air.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Other than sweat and possibly tears or blood, there are no sacrifices today, just scientists in robotic get ups working to figure out what lies beneath the surface at Huaca de la Luna, the Temple of the Moon. You’ll have to forgive the title that sounds like a lost Tintin book; this is where I spent two weeks of my summer this year, listening to the near constant “beep” of ground penetrating radar pulses, hauling equipment, and in between, exploring one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the Americas.
Rules for Fieldwork, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Benefits of Mud Baths.
Everybody’s got to have to have rules to live by, right? Here are a few things that seem to have recurring usefulness for this sort of thing.
1. Never pass up the opportunity to eat, sleep, or use a toilet.
2. Batteries: fear them, and their potential ability to blow you and/or your car up should you forget to tape the terminals.
3. Just because it’s not your mess doesn’t mean you don’t have to clean it up.
4. Never take anti-malaria meds on an empty stomach, particularly before 6 hour car rides. And if you do, hope there are barf bags available.
5. Why pack multiple pairs of pants that will just get dirty when you can wear the same pair for 2 weeks straight?
6. If you don’t wear a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen of the appropriate SPF, Indiana Jones appears and beats you with his whip.
7. Field notebooks – it’s only science if you write it down! No joke here, the slow march of dirt and destruction across formerly pristine notebooks is one of my favorite things.
8. No matter what you read in outdated textbooks, don’t actually lick or eat your field samples.
9. Never go anywhere without your knife.
9a. Or duct tape.
9b. Or your own personal roll of toilet paper.
10. In case of dinosaur attack, remember to remain motionless at all costs.
11. And in case the Ark of the Covenant actually does turn out to be in Ethiopia, unleash on the nearest neoNazis or bigots of your choice!
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