Childhood summers

I apologize once again the long silence in my blog. I have been away from Internet for a large part of the summer. It was great having summer holidays for the first time since 2001. Besides the previously mentioned trip to Ireland, we spent a lot of time in our summer cottage. Time somehow seems to extend there. It reminds me of childhood summers, and the way they felt endless.

They don't make summers like that anymore. The passage of time seems to accelerate when you grow up. Weeks are flitting by almost too fast to notice. Month, which was an eternity when I was a child, is hardly no time at all. Even years feel shorter (I recently had my birthday, again! I definitely don't feel that old.). I am often aghast at how many years have passed from something that for me seems to have happened quite recently.

We split time down into regular, measurable units; days and hours, minutes, seconds even, but our personal, experienced time does not always move at the same speed. A week abroad feels like a longer time. Then when you return home and everyday life takes over, it quickly fades into something that happened long ago. If, however, you keep returning to the same place, like archaeologists doing fieldwork, you may get a funny feeling that hardly any time has passed since your last visit, although it may in reality be a year or two.

I think it is the way our brain works that makes the difference in the way how our personal time behaves. The human brain is an amazing thing. Even when we are just idly walking along a street, the brain keeps taking everything in, filing and classifying, making connections. For most of the time, we are not even aware of this happening. The brain filters much of the incoming perceptions as background noise that our conscious minds need not be informed about. When we go to unfamiliar circumstances, the brain keeps making remarks to our consciousness more often. This has no doubt been a survival trait for our ancestors.

For a small child every day is still full of new experiences. For most of us adults our daily lives run pretty much the same script over and over again - get up in the morning, go to work, try to get things done, pick the child from daycare, go home, cook dinner, go to sleep. We do this negotiating through our everyday lives in a sort of autopilot. When we travel and go sightseeing we are pre-disposed to pay attention to our surroundings. However, in our normal lives we have little use for the knowledge gathered abroad, so it gets filed away. If we, however, return to the same place later on, the brain picks up from where we left the last time, bringing forth the memories surprisingly fresh.

Experiencing the National Museum (Dublin)

While in Ireland, we also went to see the archaeological exhibition in the National Museum in Dublin. It is a very different experience to go through a museum with a three-year old. I had dreaded it beforehand, imagining a mad rush through the halls, but it turned out to be fun. It was like seeing the same old flint pieces and brooches from a new perspective - even literally. Something I had never realized before, the cases are too high for a small child to properly see inside. No wonder kids tend to get bored. So I carried Son piggyback around the exhibition and he showed a surprisingly long attention span when I explained him what the items were and what they were used for.

The first thing Son wanted to see in the museum were the mummies in the small Egyptian exhibition. When he saw the first one I could feel him trembling, whether with fright or excitement I could not tell. The other very interesting exhibits were the model of a passage grave - although to his disappointment there was no entry to this one - the replica of a Viking boat, and a real Viking Age skeleton. We also saw the bog bodies, which I found rather gruesome, but Son just looked at them in silent contemplation. Leaving out the gory details of human sacrifice I explained to him that these people were buried in bogs. Our son considered asked me several times why, and when no acceptable explanation was forthcoming, he answered himself: "Maybe they did not have sand."

Afterwards we have had many a hard discussion about what happens after people die. Son has expressed his wish to become a skeleton and requested that after death he will be mummified. He was very offended when I tried to explain that we don't practise mummification and insisted on it. He also made a little sarcophagus out of modelling clay spread on top of a small bottle. I had to make him a skeleton, and he very carefully pressed the eye sockets and mouth to the skull.


It is nice to have a shared interest, but I hope he will grow out of it and make a career in plumbing or something sensible like that.

Visiting Newgrange

This story actually began many years ago when Mares and I fatefully met in Leicester where both of us had enlisted to do MA in Landscape Studies. I still regard her friendship the most important outcome of that year. However, for various reasons I had never before visited her in her native Ireland. So her wedding provided me with the perfect excuse to travel to Ireland for the first time, and my family gladly tagged along. We had a superb trip. The Irish are extremely hospitable and generous people and we just loved every moment of it.

On the day after the wedding we visited Newgrange with the happy newlyweds. Newgrange, as you may or may not know, is a Neolithic passage grave mound near the Boyne valley, Co. Meath. Besides burial, the site is also associated with calendaric functions, specifically the observation of winter solstice. It is also a part of a wider ritual landscape, which includes the areas of Knowth and Dowth. Together, all these monuments are called Brú na Bóinne in Irish, and they have been designated a UNESCO world heritage site.

The entrance to Newgrange is through the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre. As it usually happens, we had to spend some time in the visitor centre waiting for our tour to commence, so we went through the small museum which illustrated Neolithic life in the Boyne valley. Son was especially fascinated by the human skeleton (a model) reclining in one of the showcases. We had to go back to look at it several times and he kept asking me hard questions like "why do we have skeletons?", "why do people die?" and "how did they get the skeleton out?". He would have also really wanted to play inside the replica of a hut.

To get you into the proper mood for a pilgrimage to Newgrange, there is a viewing platform in the visitor centre from where you can see the enormous Neolithic passage tomb outlined against the sky - weather conditions permitting. After the torrential downpour Mares and her GC got for their wedding day, the weather had turned beautiful and the view was grand. Standing there Mares and I reminisced how our landscape archaeology fieldtrips were always plagued with bad weather. Most of the time we could not see the landscape because the rain reduced visibility to a few dozen metres.

From the visitor centre there is a short walk to the shuttle bus station across the river Boyne. The bus ride took us along winding roads through Irish countryside. Once we got a glimpse of Newgrange in all its splendour - again in the proper pilgrimage fashion, as I remarked Mares - before turning a hedgerow and not seeing the site until we arrived to the foot of the hill where the tomb is situated.

I have been to some famous sites such as Stonehenge and been rather disappointed, but I have to say I liked Newgrange. Since it is one of Irelands most visited (unless it is the most visited?) archaeological sites, the stream of tourists and sightseers has to be somehow regulated, and the system with the buses and all seems to work well. Only one group of people is taken up to the site at a time, and there the group is further subdivided into two, so that half of the group get to go inside the passage tomb while the rest have a chance to walk around the site. So there are not masses of people around the site, which means you can actually see something, even if you are not very tall.

The restoration done in Newgrange with the glimmering white quartz wall has been much debated, as it has been called into question whether that stones ever were on the wall of the tomb like they are now. I am not much in favour of heavy restoration of sites, not only because they tend to imprint one interpretation over others but also because they, for me, somehow seem to take away the dimension of time, but let that be enough of the subject for now.

Luckily, inside the tomb there has not been much need for restoration work. The narrow passage between the cold stones and the high chamber in the end are almost as they would have been in the Neolithic. It is awe-inspiring to look at the stone roofing and think that the structure has withstood time more than 5000 years.

Son, who had been giddy with excitement going into the tomb, peered into each of the three side chambers and was disappointed not to find any skeletons. He found a small brass stud from someones jeans on the floor though, and kept it as his treasure.

By the way, I filled in an application for the 2009 Winter Solstice Lottery draw, so I would appreciate if you kept your fingers crossed for me.

What I did in May

Good news have been cropping up lately:
- my article will be published, after all (my first ever publication in an international refereed journal)
- my paper was accepted for next year's ICAANE in London
- I got a four-month grant for writing my dissertation which means it might eventually be completed

The course in archaeological survey is almost over, the students just need to hand in the final assignments on post-fieldwork. As always, the course was an educational experience for myself in how not to do things. The course could have been better; I suppose it could have been worse. I have learned my lessons and will no doubt do different mistakes next year.

It was also an interesting glimpse into the undergraduate psyche and the pressures today's students are under. Back in the good old days when I was a student you had a certain number of months we were entitled to study grants, and how you used that time was your own business. If you used up the money before graduating, well, that was just too bad. Since then the Study Grants Board has become interested in the progress of your studies. You have to prove that you have been studying diligently, and the only way of proving that is, of course, getting enough credits. The close supervision of credits earned seems to have created a situation where the credits themselves are the end, and not the means to an end. The students do not study to learn anything, they study to get the credits.

The same system that works on the level of an individual student, works also between the Minitry of Education and the universities. The Ministry, which hands out the money for the universities, requires universities to produce a certain number of degrees yearly to get the funds to run their teaching and research. Of course the requirements rise every year without similar input into resources. The universities are effectively treated as if they were factories producing rubber boots for the left foot only. Every year the factories are required to produce more boots out of the same amount of rubber. And they say hey, you can do that if you cut the amount of raw material per boot. The boots won't last any wear, but who cares, as long as the statistics look nice - the end product is useless without the right foot boot anyway.

Women travellers in the Near East

In an earlier post about temptations I promised to comment on the books I ordered after I have read them. I haven't even started on Flinders Petrie's letters and diaries yet, but Women Travellers in the Near East, edited by Sarah Searight, is a slim volume, which I managed to read on a train to Joensuu and back.

The book is a collection of short articles on several, mainly 19th century British and American women, who travelled in the Near East - or in the Balkans in one case - for various reasons, although the last article concerned archaeologists' wives in the 20th century. The articles concentrate on less-well-known female travellers, most of whom had no "academic interest" in the area where they were traveling. People better acquintanced with British history might find some of these women familiar, but I had never heard of any of them. In that respect it was slightly annoying for me that the articles act as short introductions rather than as actual descriptions of the travels of these ladies. The emphasis of the whole volume is, in fact, not on the travels, but on elucidating how the women described the countries and people they saw on their travels, and how their notions relate to orientalism*.

For anyone interested in the actual travel descriptions, the bibliographies of the articles include the original publications of the travel diaries or letters of these women travellers, as well as references to the other books written about them. So, Women Travellers works very well as a bibliography for further reading or academic work.

*as defined by E. Said in Orientalism (1978)

Family matters

I was offered a chance to go to the Danish dig in Jarash again this year. After some consideration I regretfully declined the offer. The foremost reasons were financial, but there were also family matters to be considered. I was away from home a lot last summer, and I had sort of promised my son already that this summer would be different. I could not break that promise.

Last summer while in Jarash I was reading the biography of Gertrude Bell. She was a well-off and educated British lady who traveled widely in the Near East, especially Levant, in the late 19th and early 20th century. She documented archaeological sites - she also visited Petra - and did services to the British Army during the First World War. In her time, when most women devoted their lives to raising a family, she was most exceptional - and I dare say she would still be. Her life is fascinating. What began to annoy me when reading the biography, however, was the way how the biographer, Georgina Howell, seemed to think that all of Gertrude's achievements were just compensation for the lack of husband and children. That, in fact, the true vocation of every woman ever born is to raise a family, and Gertrude threw herself into her work just to sublimate that need. It made my hackles rise. Surely Bell could have married if she really was desperate to have children - I understand she did not lack charm or suitors. What if she chose otherwise - in those days combining family and her way of life would have been outright impossible.

Trying to have it all is still not without its complications, at least for a woman. The idea of the mother as the primary caretaker sticks fast. When I do go abroad I often face questions about who will look after my son. I remind those who ask that the child has a father, too, and one who is perfectly capable of taking care of him, and try not to feel too bad about people who sagely say that a child should not be separated from his mother for more days than he has years of age. But sometimes I can't help wondering whether I am doing my son some irreparable wrong.

Home sweet home

So the seminar is over, and normal life has quickly reasserted itself as the only reality. I brought home with me a lot of thoughts about time and travel and maybe I'll write something about those one of these days.

I finally got to visit the Acropolis, which was something of a disappointment. Currently it is really just a big construction site. And although I understand and agree that you can't let millions of tourists to mess with the ancient monuments if you want to preserve them, being forced to look at them from a safe distance leaves me cold. It reminded me of my experience of Stonehenge. After trekking across the fields along the Avenue, it came as something of an anticlimax to circle the henge with dozens of tourists. These places leave me depressed rather than impressed.


If you think places like Acropolis or Stonehenge as landscapes, they are landscapes in the most sterile meaning of the word - something to be gazed at from outside. Maybe it has to do with the materiality of experience. You need to physically engage with the monuments to experience them - to walk among the columns, to see and feel the worn stone, to use yourself as the scale to begin to appreciate their immense size and the achievement it was to raise them. I am beginning to wonder if all this restoration and protection - an attempt to somehow keep the sites frozen in time - is really worthwhile. Maybe we should just let them decay and wander about the ruins.