The most beautiful of worlds? (or, sarma police)

Because today was part of a long weekend in Naples—yesterday was the feast of San Gennaro, the city's patron, known among other things for the miracle (officially speaking, "just" a prodigy, per the Church) of the liquification of his reliquary blood, which I witnessed in the cathedral—the school building shut a bit earlier than usual. So, on my way home along Spaccanapoli, I stopped and got a gelato. Since the side gate to Santa Chiara, where I usually enjoy my gelato, was closed, I continued on to Piazza del Gesù, where a small crowd was gathered round for some minor television personality talking with passers-by on camera. I eavesdropped in hopes of overhearing who exactly it was while I ate my foresta and fiordilatte, without real success (overhearing, that is; eating was a great success). When that got old I turned and headed for the little bookshop in the corner of the piazza, Dante & Descartes, to browse the offerings and say hi to Giancarlo the libraio. I picked up Louise Glück's Averno and the first of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale—I read them all some time ago in English, but I've been meaning to read them in Italian, especially now that I've been living in Naples for a few years.

Giancarlo mentioned that shortly there'd be a book presentation, a sort of epistolary novel of dialogue between two women in Venice, so I decided to stick around. It was a fun discussion between the two interlocutors and the author, which convinced me to add another book to my stack (Bruceremo by Caterina Serra). The book's epigraph is attributed to Heraclitus:

Il più bello dei mondi non è che un mucchio di rifiuti gettati a caso ("The most beautiful of worlds is nothing but a randomly tossed heap of trash")

Not remembering this particular Heraclitean fragment, and curious about its potentially archaeological reception, I looked it up, Diels 124. Diels' Greek text reads σάρμα εἰκῆ κεχυμένον. Σάρμα is a very rare word, attested in the fragmentary comic poet Rhinthon and, possibly, in this fragment of Heraclitus; the noun derived from the verb σαίρω "to sweep, clean," hence σάρμα would be "sweepings": "sweepings piled up (κεχυμένον) at random (εἰκῆ)."

The textual tradition, however, is messier than this. Like the rest of the so-called Pre-Socratics, we don't have any complete surviving text of Heraclitus. This particular fragment is found in Theophrastus' \so-called Metaphysics, and the manuscript tradition transmits σὰρξ εἰκῇ κεχυμένων, which is seemingly grammatically problematic in a few ways and so has been subject to various emendations, among them Diels's σάρμα... κεχυμένον. Similar is the conjecture σάρον, another noun related to σαίρω meaning "sweepings, rubbish" but rather better attested than σάρμα. Another option is that of Most, followed by few, σωρῶν εἰκῇ κεχυμένων positing a form of σωρός "heap": "just like the most beautiful of the heaps piled at random [is] the world-order." 

But the manuscripts of Theophrastus transmit σὰρξ: flesh.

"Σὰρξ is universally attested: all the Greek manuscripts and the Arabic (Ψ) and Latin (Λ) translations have it, so that if it is indeed erroneous it would be one of the primitive errors of the Neoplatonic archetype manuscript. With few exceptions, all scholars have thought it untenable and emended it,  mostly with a word that means “a heap or a pile [of sweepings]... However, what is untenable is this emendation, because it presents the wrong comparison and ruins the point that Theophrastus is trying to make" (Gutas, p. 328).

"Flesh" though art, and unto "flesh" thou shalt return... 

Gutas's streamlined version of this passage of Theophrastus, taking into account the various traditions: "for example, Heraclitus should have realized the absurdity of his own statement when he said that the human body, made up of elements “poured out at random” (i.e., by random and indeterminate first principles), is nevertheless the most beautiful arrangement of such elements." (You will have to go read Gutas's extensive commentary for translating κόσμος as "arrangement" rather than "world" or "universe.")

Another perfectly good, evocative, slightly mysterious pre-Socratic aphorism ruined by philology...

(As usual, there's more that I intended to say here, but the night is getting away from me, and I already don't know where I got the energy to write this all in the first place. And the role that the pre-Socratics play for the non-specialist—and I mean the non-specialist in the pre-Socratics—as a sort of mystical mists of mystery will have to wait for a future post.)

Gutas, Dimitri, ed. 2010. Theophrastus On First Principles: (known as his Metaphysics) : Greek Text and Medieval Arabic Translation. Philosophia Antiqua. Leiden: Brill.

The Quantity of Antiquity

Prompted by a passage in Maurizio Bettini's 2023 Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture (my broader thoughts on which I reserve for another time and place), I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the amount of stuff that survives from the ancient world, at least in an impressionistic manner. Ideally I'd like to put together something more rigorous (that means something has numbers...), but perfect is the enemy of the done.

Bettini's work is measured and dialectic and ill reduces to quotation of an isolated passage; just a phrase, then, will have to do here, the more so since his larger point is of no concern here. He refers to la pesantezza, chiamiamola pure cosalità (p. 84; "the weightiness, we could even call it the thingness") of the accumulated mass of texts, structures, artifacts, and traces that remain from  the Greco-Roman past. (In all of this I have the impression of retracing things put better by others previously.)

How much of ancient Mediterranean antiquity "survives" until the present day? There are different classes of material, clearly. The literary texts that we know, overwhelmingly via a continuous manuscript tradition, are many, though relatively few compared with what we know once existed, thanks to citations of titles in surviving texts, for example. This number is unlikely to ever change by any significant number, even if the work being done on the eponymous materials from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum is very promising.

Material culture, that is artifacts, that is stuff--bones, stones, and, overwhelmingly, broken pieces of pottery, among others--is another story. Here again what "survives" is probably a very small percentage of what once existed. The metric that is always rattling around in my brain is the Panathenaic 1%, which was, as far as I know, first put together by Martin Bentz (but I would be happy to be corrected). In short, Panathenaic amphoras were produced for the victors of the Panathenaic games at Athens. Because we know the frequency of the games etc., we know in theory how many Panathenaic amphoras should have been produced in antiquity. If we compare this with the number of such amphoras known archaeologically, we get a figure of about 1%. Of course, this is a different kind of 1% than with literary texts. This number could change (and is changing) as a consequence of ongoing archaeological excavation. But it at least gives us an order of magnitude for the proportion of a particular class of ancient ceramics that are presently known and knowable to Science. 

(What about the other 99%? While it is often said that ceramics break but are otherwise almost indestructible, and there is some truth to this, this is not the whole story. While the Romans were great offenders, in that the socio-economics of empire led to the production of immense quantities of ceramics, these same dynamics also contributed to the spread (not the invention—that pre-dates the Roman use) of waterproof pavements made using ground-up potsherds—the usual name for such pavements is the Italian cocciopesto, which literally means "ground-up potsherds"—the production of which must have pulverized unquantifiable* tons of pottery, sparing future ceramicists from having to catalog them. Of course, a lot of this terracotta dust probably also came from bricks or rooftiles, whose destruction is less generally mourned [sorry, Phil].
* anything and everything is quantifiable if you're willing to fudge a bit. Actually, Vitruvius in Book 7 gives recipes for various kinds of pavements, one for instance calling for three parts of potsherd to one part lime. The problem would be to calculate how much ceramic material all the many such pavements consumed...)

So, only one percent! A discipline founded upon loss. At the same time, many archaeological storerooms have reached critical mass. The sheer number of artifacts deriving from excavations (or, to a much lesser degree, surface finds, whether stray or due to regular archaeological survey) is immense, and strains the resources of already underfunded museums and archaeological superintendencies. I don't think those outside of archaeology (nor many within it, especially those coming from, say, North American backgrounds) really appreciate just how much stuff there is. (This is where a bit of numbers, which is to say rigor, would be helpful.) More studies of materials from depositi would be ideal (of course, meanwhile, there's an "overproduction" of PhDs relative to the declining number of positions available in academia.)

(Some excavations have turned to a form of catch-and-release, where the materials are given a rapid study, and those from which little further information can be gleaned, due to their nature, state of preservation, or context of origin, are quietly and secretly disposed of, or simply used as backfill for excavation trenches.)

I have more to say but this turns out to already have gone on a bit long.

But why? And thieving some joy

I mean, obviously, the project is too big. It's incomplete, and incompletable. It's anachronistic, a one-man band in an era of collaborative symphonic orchestrations, big linked data.

I can't compete with Arachne, for instance (or the whole ensemble of iDAI)--how could I? I can't compete with the Beazley Archive for pottery. I can't compete with Digital LIMC for illustrating Classical mythology. I can't compete with the Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali (see, in particular, the currently 376172 results in Beni archeologici!) for the sites and artifacts of Italy. I'm sure I'm forgetting other projects of this ilk; it's late. (Edited to add: Wikimedia Commons! I can only bow in awe... and meanwhile mutter that there aren't enough cross-cutting boxes)

Why continue? Well, it's my own form of madness. I hear from many of you that you find it helpful, and I'm very glad for that. It does encourage me to keep going! But at root I would probably be doing it anyhow, to scratch my own peculiar itches, which have a lot to do with adding context to absolutely everything--sorting everything into little (and not-so-little) boxes. The great thing is that they can each go into multiple boxes! I can cross disciplinary, chronological, and geographical boundaries when and where I feel like it.

What's more, for certain classes of material, I can compete with Arachne; for example, they only have nine photos of Genucilia plates; where I've got, as of this writing, 76 such photos (and there are more on the way, Leah and Laura!). Now, the Catalogo Generale returns 108 results for Genucilia. Maddeningly, however, the majority of these include only photos of the profile of the plates (not even profile drawings, except in rare cases). My brother in Bacchus, no one is looking for side-views of Genucilia plates, at least not to the exclusion of the tondo decoration.

Further, hoo boy, the Catalogo Generale has a clunky interface. And if I want to see other artifacts with the same provenance as a given Genucilia plate, I'm going to potentially get everything from the Neolithic to the 1950s. That could be cool for some people, but it's not what I'm looking for. I can also see other artifacts from the same chronological range (here we're limited to half-century spans, which is probably realistic for a big archaeological database). You can compare "349 a.C - 300 a.C" on the CatGen with "2nd half 4th c. BCE" on my Flickr. If you want to get a sense of Late Classical-very Early Hellenistic material culture, you might want to have a look at both! Of course, my results are going to skew slightly more monumental and flashy (though I do try to get some cookpots in where possible), because I'm limited to what makes its way into museum cases, whereas the CatGen in theory has access to all the archaeological storerooms of Italy, even if this dream is far from being realized as yet). But I can show you things from outside the national boundaries of Italy, even if they were originally found there. And ideally it should be easy to see monuments, sculpture, potsherds, and miniature terracottas cheek-by-jowl for a given time and place. Another benefit, from my point of view: conceptual categories such as "Ancient dance" or  "Funerary lions of antiquity"; (we can also have a little fun sometimes, as a treat).

Not to be forgotten: being able to license all the photos as Creative Commons! This is becoming more common with the big databases, but it's not universal.

There is also the possibility of being able to put together collections of photos for teaching purposes (albeit imaginary classes that it seems increasingly unlikely I will ever be able to teach). 

Other considerations: I'm not dependent on external funding (well, I am, to the extent that I still need to eat, access the internet, buy more backup storage, and keep the Flickr subscription renewing ad infinitum). I am, however, dependent on Flickr continuing to exist. There have been times in the past two decades when it hasn't looked good, but by golly they've scraped by and carried on. If something were to happen, I'm confident someone would build a place to go. In a sense, Flickr is just a frame to hang all the metadata on. (But I very much hope it sticks around as long as conceivably possible! Which of course leads me to another limitation--I have to stick around as long as conceivably possible. Now, if the human world is still chugging along for the foreseeable, I absolutely need to get this m(a/e)ss of photos and metadata into some kind of an institutional framework sooner or later. But that's not for this post.)

Autoarchaeology, or, retrointrospection

 Since I've been blogging again, I took some time to read back through my previous posts. I started this darn thing nearly 20 years ago, somehow... Anyway, I rediscovered a bit of my own past, namely the fact that my Flickr antiquity project actually predates my being on Flickr (I can't tell or remember if it predates Flickr itself, but it could).

It started with a website on  FreeWebTown.com, which no longer exists, neither the host nor my site, though it stuck around long enough to get scooped up by the Wayback Machine here. I called it "Emporical Images of the Ancient World," and it's really the same idea in nuce as my Flickr account, just that my interests have become slightly less parochial. As for the name, "I want it to be an emporion for the empirical study of Antiquity, hence the name."

As I wrote, no later than the summer of 2005,

The scope of this site is generally Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East in the pre-modern period. The focus is generally miltary equipment and representations, but is really limited only by my own whims, resources and abilities. The basis is my own collection of digital photographs, but this has been supplemented where necessary and/or desirable. *NOTE:* This site will never be "complete" or "finished." I envision it as a perpetual work-in-progress: it will change as I go new places, take new pictures, add new information and revise old information"

More on Flickr: tags and timelines

The Etruscan ritual calendar called the Tabula Capuana; see more here.

In addition to the collections approach detailed in yesterday's post, Flickr also allows up to 75 tags per photo. I try to use these in two ways. There a bunch of general tags to start out with, to help steer in people from search engines. Then there are more specific ones meant to be useful from within the site. Among these, along with things like material ("marble," "bronze," "ceramic") and culture (a concept to be problematized, for sure, but handy in a pinch; e.g. "Egyptian," "Greek," "Etruscan") are, in particular, the chronology tags.

For instance, a photo could have the following tags:

        "5th c. BCE" "early 5th c. BCE" "1st half 5th c. BCE" "1st quarter 5th c. BCE" "490s BCE" "480s BCE" "470s BCE"

Decades are generally the smallest temporal denomination possible (unless there's a coin or an inscription that allows precision to the year, but those are rarely going to be useful when searching for other things). Of course, different categories of material can be dated with different degrees of precision. There are some prehistoric artifacts that just get, say, a "3rd millennium BCE" tag. I don't bother when it's 1st millennium BCE or CE, but just go directly to centuries. Plenty of things only datable to the century.

I generally only add decade tags when the thing in question can be dated to within a quarter-century. 

For the time being, there's no good front-end to just browse by chrono-tags. You can click on them from existing photos, or plug them in using the following URL, substituting 470sBCE for the relevant unit (e.g., 5thcBCE, early5thcBCE, 1stHalf5thcBCE, 1stQuarter5thcBCE... not case-sensitive):

        https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=7945858%40N08&tags=470sBCE

If you want to combine the chrono-tags with other tags, just add them after a comma, like so:

        https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=7945858%40N08&tags=470sBCE,bronze

In addition to the material and culture tags above, I'll add the shape (hydria, column krater) for ceramics, figures depicted (Theseus or Artemis - this can get tricky for gods, since you're likely to end up with photos of their temples or sanctuaries; if you just want photos of representations of the deity, you may be better off using the Gods, heroes, and mythical creatures collection), or just what the thing is (grater, figurine). As the scope of the project has increasingly come to focus on Italy, I've tried to add most tags in both English and Italian (beyond any other locally-relevant languages). The chrono-tags are only in English, though; the 75-tag limit doesn't make it feasible otherwise.

Not immediately relevant to searching directly via Flickr, but I also want to mention here Pleiades machine-tags. These are a way of integrating photos in Flickr (not just mine!) with the ancient-world linked-data gazetteer that is Pleiades (you all already know about Pleiades, I hope). There are a couple of write-ups from back when these were first implemented, here and here, but in short: I can add a machine tag to a photo, let's say.: pleiades:findspot=432754 That code links to the site of Capua on Pleiades. There, on the right-hand sidebar, you'll see "132 other related photos" (more in the near future, probably!). Clicking on that will get you all of the photos on Flickr which have been tagged as either depicting Capua or as of artifacts with a findspot of Capua. If you're uploading photos of ancient stuff to Flickr, I recommend adding Pleiades machine tags! If not, if you leave your tags open, I might add them myself... 

(Ancientists reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on chronological definitions: I've got a pretty good idea of when the concept of the "early 5th c. BCE" begins, but when, in your mind, does it end? When does it become "mid 5th c. BCE"?  Also, I'd be interested to hear of other ways of dividing centuries. I once saw them divided by thirds in a museum in Germany. Absolute mad lads.)

A guide to using my Flickr resources using collections

It has often occurred to me over the past several years that the structure of my Flickr account (dedicated mostly to archaeological sites and artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean in its broadest sense) is probably somewhat opaque to most users. I imagine that, typically, if you've encountered it previously, it was a search result for some ancient type of thing or site you were googling. And that's great! That's part of the reason I try to get 100% of your daily tags and metadata into each photo (the Flickr 75-tag limit per photo is kind of a bummer, though). 

There are other ways, though. For some reason, Flickr makes it very hard to even learn of the existence of Collections, which are albums full of albums. A tiny bit of structured data for you! Anyway, they're available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/collections

The first collection is "Topography," within which you will find sub-collections by country. The most thorough by far are Greece and Italy. (n.b. there are also several countries that I haven't visited, but which have produced artifacts that I've photographed elsewhere, so they have a collection, but are usually very skimpy in terms of uploaded photos.) Within each country are further nested sub-collections by region or state, and within each region are the albums. The principal types of topographic albums are Sites (usually titled with the ancient name(s), sometimes with a nod to the modern name) and Museums (these also include photos of a museum's permanent collection that I've photographed on display on loan somewhere else). Occasionally some non-ancient album has snuck in.

The next collection is "Subject/Object Types." This is a big one, and there are no sub-collections. For now, it's kind of a grab-bag of albums that haven't gotten structured elsewhere. These are albums based on type of thing or concept. A few examples (out of the current 194 albums within) include "Ancient architectural models," "Ancient molds," "Ancient slavery," "ELC votives," "Greek athletics," "Museum galleries," "Small bronzes." Ideally I have attempted to organize the contents of each album chronologically, oldest to most recent, but in practice this is rare.

Next collection: "Gods, heroes, and mythical creatures." As it says on the tin. If you don't see an album here of the figure you're looking for, it doesn't mean there isn't a relevant photo; I just might not have created a special folder yet.

Collection: "Ancient persons." A grab-bag of emperors and other personalities who had their picture taken more than once in antiquity. For now pretty sparsely populated--just give me another 50 years or so... 

Collection: "Animals." Within you will find albums collecting photos of different animals (as represented in ancient visual media, for the most part).

Collection: "Ceramics by type." A relatively recent creation. Different wares, classes, techniques. No structure as yet other than alphabetization. 

Collection: "Named vase-painters, groups, etc." Also recent. Also, a lot of the albums within will have photos of only a single pot attributed to the titular painter. Someday, maybe, they will get friends.

Collection: "Materials." Go here if you're looking for photos of something made out of a particular material (for example, bronze, or a particular kind of marble [though, again, marble sub-categories remain mostly aspirational]).

Collection: "Particular objects and contexts." The albums within are typically tomb-groups where I've photographed the contents individually, or particular artifacts/artworks that warrant multiple photos. There's no strict criterion, and I could probably create more of these albums.

Collection: "Exhibits." These are albums of galleries and artifacts displayed in special exhibits. Frustratingly, Flickr doesn't show you very much of the title of each from this page. 

Collection: "Historic collections." These are albums collecting artifacts that once formed part of a particular or well-known private collection, which are now either split among multiple museums or simply make up a relevant part of a single museum.

Collection: "Inscriptions." Epigrafiends go here: sub-collections of inscriptions divided by language.

Collection: "Sculptors and their traditions." Totally aspirational, mostly a holding tank for future albums. 

Collection: "Masonry styles." Another almost empty, aspirational collection.

There's no grand plan, there's only good intentions and fickle attentions... There are a few classes of material that I try to make a point of always uploading once I've photographed them, however; if you're dying of boredom, you could try to figure out what they are. And if structure isn't your thing, you can as always just dive into the photostream from the most recent uploads here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/

As always, if there's something you're looking for and don't see it on my Flickr account, feel free to drop me a line and ask. I have literally tens of thousands of photos taken but not "yet" uploaded. In particular, if there's an album with only a single photo in it, it's very likely that I have others of that category not yet edited.

Museum capsule reviews, part 2

 Frosinone: Museo Archeologico Comunale

I first tried to go in 2017, to see some architectural terracottas relevant to my dissertation, but the hours were wrong. Hadn't managed to get there again. It was open this time, but the terracottas were in another castle. Unbeknownst to me, the Roman section of the museum (Republican and Imperial both) has been moved to a second location, which is only open on special occasions (needless to say I wasn't there on one of those). The material remaining in the original site (two and a half galleries) includes pre- and protohistory as well as Volscian tomb-groups and a single but important Archaic female head antefix indicating the presence of sacred architecture of some standing in the 6th c. BCE. Upstairs is a Volscian tomb discovered near a roundabout north of Frosinone (there was no label information, but that was what the museum staff told me). So anyway the Frosinone museum holds the lead in the series against me, 2-1.

Castro dei Volsci: Museo Civico Archeologico and Roman villa

Four small galleries, of which three are dedicated to the Roman villa at Casale di Madonna del Piano, across the street from the museum and visitable for a small additional fee. Roman villas aren't really my thing (though of course anything ancient is my thing), but this one is interesting in having a use-life spanning something like the 1st c. BCE to the 8th or 9th c. CE (though at some point the pars urbana goes out of use, and it becomes purely rustic, until someone builds a church into some of the rooms, and then the Longobards show up and start burying their dead). In the first, non-villa room are a handful of Mid-Republican Etrusco-Latial-Campanian votive terracottas and miniature pots from a pair of probably open-air sanctuaries on the slopes of Monte Nero in Castro dei Volsci, which the museum panels identify as likely being Satricum Volscorum (distinct from Satricum southeast of Rome with its temple of Mater Matuta, which however also has a Volscian phase). If you're there, you might as well also see the villa, which has some mosaic floors and a seemingly wildly-overbuilt steel shelter, but honestly I wouldn't go out of my way to see it (apologies to the pro loco of Castro dei Volsci...).

Pastena: Museo della Civiltà Contadina

I don't generally love guided tours, but they make more sense in the many museums of "peasant culture" scattered around Italy, which often lack the labels and didactic apparatus of your typical archaeological museum. I was mostly happy to see a pair of local amphorae, called cannate, which have a sort of stirrup-jar like form with upswung handles and a spout. They have red and black tempera decoration, and were made in the nearby town of Pontecorvo in the 19th and 20th century (and possibly earlier, though I don't know enough), dying out in the 1970s. There's a single potter in Pontecorvo working today, who has partially revived the tradition, processing all of his own clay, with a kiln in the back of his workshop, but his pots lack the gracility of the classic cannate (I still bought a pair of them, because I think he's doing something important, even if it seems likely that the tradition will die, again, with him).

Ausonia: Museo della Pietra

I happened to be able to be there for the museum's reopening after a reinstallation (missed the ceremonies and the preceding explicatory talks, though, so I'm lacking that context). It's installed in a tiny castle at the top of the town (next to a church that has a couple of spolia altars with Latin dedications to Hercules). The museum only has a handful of artifacts (four additional Latin inscriptions; two stone lions, originally from Roman tomb monuments, which were reused in the Middle Ages to mark the town's northern boundary with Cassino, and smashed up at a certain point by the townsfolk when they wanted to surreptitiously extend their claims; and a collection of stonecutters' tools donated by local stonecutters); where it really shines is in the didactic panels, which present information on the geology and geography of the area, its dry-stone masonry traditions, and cultural practices having to do with stone. The museum also launched an ethnographic campaign to interview said stonecutters. These are visible in a video terminal, but each one lasts over an hour. They seemed to be hosted on youtube, so I was hoping to find them there, but thus far no luck.

Museum capsule reviews, part 1

I've been meaning for some time to put down slightly more formed thoughts about museums I've visited. I should have started doing it twenty years ago, but better late than never. Assessments are from my own, highly partial, particular (and peculiar) point of view.

Thoughts on the recently visited:

Artena: Museo Civico Archeologico "Roger Lambrechts"

A small but well done museum, with a recent-ish (2009) installation. All of the material comes from the ancient site up the hill at Civita di Artena and its territory. (The name of the modern town has been applied, probably wrongly, on the basis of an ancient Volscian town attested by Livy.) The museum has two rooms, one with Archaic and Republican materials, the other mostly Imperial. I appreciated putting all the (numerous!) Genucilia plates on display, allowing an appreciation of variation within the series. And the rest of the Mid-Republican material is great to see (arulae! architectural terracottas! all the common and cookware you could want!). And decently lit. 

Valmontone: Palazzo Doria Pamphilj

At the moment, aside from a handful of inscriptions immured in the entryway, there are only two objects on display, both sarcophagi. (I was hoping to see the section advertised on the website, with artifacts discovered during the construction of the high speed rail line through the area, but the place seems to be undergoing renovation.)

Of particular interest to me was the earlier one, a massive monolithic tuff sarcophagus found at Valmontone in 2011, of broad Mid-Republican (4th-3rd c. BCE) date. A growing number of these have come to light in the areas around the Colli Albani, and they're really deserving of a more thorough study. Of more interest to most people would probably be the later, marble strigilated sarcophagus, mid-3rd c. CE with lions devouring ibexes. The lid, with a representation of roof tiles and antefixes, is interesting. You'll want to go while there is daylight, because the lighting leaves something to be desired.

Anagni: Museo della Cattedrale

Go to see the richly frescoed medieval crypt of Saint Magnus! But there is also some archaeology to be seen. Of note, a Roman ceramic pig rattle with blue glass-paste inserts, of a type that has been hypothesized to be souvenirs from the Temple of Hercules at Tivoli. Plenty of epigraphy (including a big Severan inscription recording the paving of the road from Villa Magna to Anagni, reused as paving in the cathedral). A small collection of ELC votive terracottas. A strange sort of Republican(?) pyxis. A curious red figure krater with a horseman and a kitharode. Daylight helps. Some classic Late Republican triglyph and metope frieze spolia in the front of the cathedral.

A highlight is the inscribed stone thesauros from some ancient sanctuary in the area. A stroke of museological genius has this installed such that it reprises its original function, and you can make your own offering to the museum:

Anagni: Museo Archeologico Ernico

Despite opening with some fanfare in May 2023, it is currently closed with a rusty padlock. Chissà... 

More to follow, hopefully in a more or less timely fashion. (And photos, eventually, hopefully.) Also, I think I need to update the layout of the blog to make it more legible on smartphones?

Early thoughts on Peter Riley’s Excavations (2004)

 

The first hundred poems in Peter Riley's Excavations are meditations on prehistoric burials described by J.R. Mortimer in Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds in East Yorkshire (1905); text in italics is mostly verbatim citation of Mortimer’s reports.

It’s impossible to read without wanting to contort one’s body into the positions of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age deceased described within—preferably with a compass in hand, pointing one’s head north-northeast and facing south-southeast, toward imagined origins. Conceivable too the desire to dislocate one’s jaw to gorge on repasts prepared for eternity:

39.                                                                                                          40

Speech cancelled into music the lower jaw removed and placed, intact, on the chest, teeth down. A small pottery vessel was inserted in its place, touching the palate; its contents included the bones of a small animal. And Lockd me up with a golden Key Head to South facing upwards, legs flexed and turned to West young and slender left hand thrust into groin, right arm across chest two yellow quartz pebbles rounded with use just beyond the fingers of the right hand, beside the left ear | sun pitch, clay star, black blade fracture – speechless with horror. Bite my heart, three-personed sky, and I’ll earn a living, out in the streets and bars of earth. And spend into the whole astrology, at speech’s vigilant reprieve.

Of course the dead, famously, do not bury themselves, nor indeed do their interrers typically write about the process—“Distance joins us by the third person” (n. 6).

Each piece tends toward the opaque on its own; much like prehistoric tumuli themselves, and archaeological phenomena in general, it is in the aggregate that the mass of poems really begin to speak, with their repeated chalk pavements, their curated dismemberment, flint-blade prosthetics and lost eyes. Riley curates the bones of the past, defleshed and capaci—both capacious and capable of—creative reappropriation, laid out with grave goods (“food, rubbish, the usual suspects,” n. 11) in tableaux morts.

So far the first hundred, previously published as Distant Points in 1995, are better than the new set, which follow William Greenwell’s 1877 British Barrows.