Mercury Made Redundant

Although the subject matter of Detritus of Empire wanders far afield, the origins of this blog relate to archaeology.  Having been for a number of years now a volunteer excavator at the Vindolanda site on Hadrian's Wall I had tried various ways to keep the folks back home up to date on my adventures.  I started out quite modestly, just tapping out a group email each night.  I was writing from a 300 year old pub and using computers that seemed almost as ancient.

But of course technology has changed a great deal since then as has the ease with which information can be transmitted, well, anywhere.

If Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods, was still around he would by now have been laid off. Or as my British friends would have it: made redundant.

A generation ago archaeologists would do painstaking line drawings, take black and white photos that had to be sent to a lab to process, type up their reports by hand and bundle them off to a printing press.

Now in principle anybody with an average cell phone can in real time show an artifact being uncovered...and everyone on earth could watch it happen.  Distant alien civilizations too, one supposes, but they will have to wait a while for the signal to reach them.

This presents us with unprecedented opportunities.  And unexpected challenges.

For every person - paid or volunteer - who actually wields a trowel there must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of armchair enthusiasts.  In theory they can now follow a dig "virtually".  Age, health, geographic distance, job or family obligations....none of these are an impediment any longer.

I have tried when digging to transmit a bit of the flavor of this, as well as giving a few peeks into areas that do not usually get mentioned in popular archaeology.  What kind of fabric is used to cover the site at the end of the season?  What sort of stones are most prized by the guys doing wall consolidation? Can you really hear water running beneath the site after a heavy rain?  And is it from natural channels or from some Roman drainage ducts still functioning 18 centuries after their install?

It is the last sort of musing that can cause problems.

Those of us who blog about active digs are certainly not dummies.  We know not to crow about things like coin hoards that might attract middle of the night metal detector bandits.  We know that apparently significant findings such as new inscriptions are the proper business and privilege of the supervising archaeologists to report.  But on some level beyond that of common sense, the archaeology community seems uncomfortable with the newer, freer exchange of information.

Archaeology is the constant process of wondering what lies a few centimeters further down.  And I think the thing that gives our professional colleagues the most qualms is simply this:  premature speculation.

For good or ill, the internet is spontaneous. Rumors, celebrity gossip, political punditry, it goes on around the clock.

Archaeologists on the other hand work meticulously, one grain of sand at a time.  It may take them several seasons of work to decide whether a series of walls are from the 1st century or the 2nd...and they do not approve of brash whippersnappers who offer quick opinions.  (extra credit question:  do they disapprove more when said whippersnappers are wrong, or when they are right?).

So, blogging and archaeology.  The instantaneous meets the methodical.  Neither side is going to be in their comfort zone.  So which view will win out?  The one that looks to the future or the one that specializes in looking to the past?

An Eye that does not sleep

When the family of J.R.R. Tolkien sold the rights to The Lord of the Rings to the company that ended up making the (quite good really) movie trilogy there was a minor dust up.  Evidently down in the fine print of the contract was a provision that among the other merchandising rights signed away was permission to use the copyrighted material in advertising for gambling.  The deeply religious Professor Tolkien probably turned over in his grave a few times but the contract was signed and was in fact quite specific.

And they meant it too.

I am with the Professor on this one.  Vegas casinos are noisy places, inhabited not by cheerful hobbits but by dead eyed slaves (to their gambling addiction).  I realize that Frodo and company enjoyed a bit of pipe weed when they could get it, but I hardly think the foul stink of Marlboros would be at all the same to them.

No, casinos are no place for the Free Peoples of Middle Earth.  Orcs would manage there.  They would never have to see the sun. And they would constantly be under the watch of the Eye that Does Not Sleep....

"...a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favorite haunt.  They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill or a hand-loom..."

J.R.R. Tolkien "Concerning Hobbits"

Las Vegas - Out my window

Vegas is not exactly known for being a subtle, understated place.  They build things big and garish then knock them down to build something bigger and gaudier.

This is soon going to be the world's biggest Ferris Wheel.  It will make the London Eye look puny in comparion.  500 feet tall, when it opens sometime next year you will be able to take a slow 30 min turn on it, seeing glowing neon in all directions.

Here is the view from my hotel window.  For perspective I am on the 16th floor, and am not even near the halfway point of it.

Quite the view from my window.  And looking straight down I could see a couple of street people laying out on cardboard across the avenue from me. Most people pass them by without awareness.  I can't claim to be a "better" person than these marching fun-seekers....but when you are in town for a conference on ER medicine perhaps you can't help but see the side of society that others can look past.

Detritus of Las Vegas

Who knows maybe in some far distant future archaeologists - human or otherwise - will be trying to understand curious ruins from the early 21st century.  Written records will have long since vanished as all information after about 2020 will have been strictly digital and probably not sufficiently backed up. The enigmatic residue of documentation will be heavily skewed towards remarkable pictures of kittens, word fragments such as "LOL", and an encyclopedic body of data regarding the Kardashian family, evidently the ruling caste of this confusing era.

I suppose your average suburban neighborhood will be understandable, if only by repetition.  But what on earth will these hypothetical archaeologists make of Las Vegas?

Personally I think careers will be ruined and friendships severed over the controversy as to whether this in fact was actually the location of Paris.

I'd like to help out these scholars from the far future, so on a recent walk around Las Vegas I picked up various small bits of ephemera.  My only requirement was that the size and shape roughly conform to the famous Vindolanda Tablets that have opened such a personal window into antiquity.

I am pretty sure this does not advertise two for one drink specials

Ok, here we go, the cultural history of Las Vegas on small bits of cardboard:

Yes a product called Snus, that had a malodorous camel as its emblem.  It flat out told you that your teeth would probably fall out.  This could actually be sold.  But you had to knock the price down a bit and perhaps direct your marketing to folks who no longer had cause to worry about tooth loss...

This item will be a poser for them.  Were there actually non alcoholic beverages consumed in Las Paris?  But the dumps on the outskirts of town only contained millions of metric tons of Bud Lite bottles...

craft beer drinkers apparently being extinct by this point in history

Another extremely common artifact from the site are these colorful cards.  The exact commercial transaction being proposed here is not specified, nor is there any indication as to how a price of $47 was arrived at.  I am simply speculating here but one imagines that the slogan "What Happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" does not apply to micro organisms.  Individuals who want to go for some kind of stupidity trifecta, take note, you can charge whatever this is on any major credit card for your wife or boss to notice.

note wedding ring.  worn at all times

These cards are handed out by shifty looking individuals out on the brightly lit Strip.  There are about two teams per block, more on the weekends.  They are for some reason always a man and a woman.

Vegas does take pride in a sort of free wheeling, uninhibited air.  But underneath it all is simply much that is seedy.  Wander away from the neon for just a hundred yards or so and you find beggars, homeless people, and sterile parking lots beyond which lie the darker and far more modest quarters where the actual workers of Las Vegas live.  Many of them come here with high hopes, with dreams of finding glory and riches at the blackjack table or on the stage.  My final artifact probably was dropped by one such soul, someone whose name I will redact.

A plasma donor card from back home.  I hope they found fame and fortune under the bright
lights.  I hope they did not have to sell anything more precious than blood.

From the Mending Box

As mentioned the other day, I brought home some items from the family farm, now an abandoned ghost of a place.  One thing I carried back was a series of several small boxes that appeared to have my grandmother's collection of mending supplies.  Buttons, needles, and just odd stuff that found its way in there I guess.  Many of the buttons had swatches of cloth still stuck on them.  I guess when clothing wore out grandma would snip the buttons off in case some similar garment needed a new button.  I wonder how many "lives" these buttons had.  But that is certainly not the only thing I wonder about.

Overall buttons, probably 1930's vintage.  I wonder if they came from my dad's outfit or one of his brothers'.  Husky Lad seems to be out of business but Big Yank is still around!

Some of the smaller items were in this odd little jar circa 1960.  Who knew they made extra meat baby food.  The little tyke does look rather carnivorous.  Hmmm, I used to visit the farm sometimes.  This might be me.

Here are two views of what appears to be a serving spoon made out of, of all things, lead.  It is so soft it would bend if you scooped up a good sized meatball.

The initials are of no known family members

Here's another small enigma.

Invite infection?  Why indeed?  I suppose the intent was to make folks relax about tetanus.

The mending box had all manner of odds and ends in it.  Small items of small value.  But my frugal forebears could not stand the idea of parting with any of it.  Oh, there was also this......

I wonder how many hours they spent hunting for this?  It probably still has pinch marks on it.

A Hewing Bee. Also Ghost Cows.

You find all sorts of interesting things cleaning out a very old house.  Out at the family farmstead I encountered a copy of the June 16th, 1922 Norwood Times.  It was a commemorative edition, marking the 50th Anniversary of Norwood Minnesota.

It had a lot of recollections of pioneer times, presumably by greybeards who remembered things first hand.  I found the accounts of how log buildings were constructed to be fascinating....because I could walk out to the Civil War era barn and see exactly what was being described!

"The barn was also built of logs, ten to fourteen high, either shingle or straw roof, with no windows for light, the cracks between the logs were plastered with mortar that I am unable to describe with polite words."

There you have it.  Only six tiers of logs visible in this view, they extend up a bit into the next story of the "modern" barn.

Just in case you wanted a closer view of that mortar that can't be described with polite words.  The long structure attached to the wall is a feeding trough for calves.  It is hand made and who knows how old.

In another slightly newer part of the barn, maybe late 1860s, you can see traces of exactly how the thing was built.  Here is an account from the Norwood Times called Building the Old Log House

"Later on when the country became more settled and anyone wanted to build a house, or barn, he would engage his neighbors and have a hewing bee.  A group of men would go into the woods and select and cut down trees and saw off the desired lengths.  The next group would follow and cut off large chips on two sides.  The hewers came next with their broad axes and made a straight mark with a chalk line, the whole length of the log and then hew it smooth on two sides until it was about six to eight inches in diameter.  Rafters were also hewn."

You can still see the lateral "chip marks" placed regularly before the guys with the broad axes, or perhaps in this instance saws, came along to flatten off the sides.  Note also the wooden peg holding this onto the slotted cross beam.  Were iron spikes in short supply or were they just building according to German traditions they brought with them from the old country?

Even the newer parts of the barn carry memories.  I recall this ladder up into the hay loft as being the entry point to a magical place where you could build forts, chase the barn cats.  Probably lose a shoe once in a while.  It is no longer a safe place to explore.

Barns have a nostalgic appeal in their own way.  Houses remember those who lived and died in them. Barns remember a daily cycle of hard work.  Times change for people.  But the needs of cows remain more or less the same.  Here after twenty years of abandonment we find a little patch of hay waiting to be tossed....and the pitchfork with which to do it.

Ghostly cows wait patiently for farmers long, long gone.

Farewell to the Family Farm

"Our" farm.  The term is apt.  My family arrived there in 1857.  Nobody had worked the land prior to that.  They bought it from a man who got it as a grant after service in the War with Mexico.  He never went near the place.  And before that....Lakota following the bison.  And as they found out to their eternal grief, the native sense of ownership differed a great deal from that of the encroaching white man.

It was an active farm until about 15 years ago.  A couple of aged bachelor farmers hung on until the last one died at age 90, still telling wild tales he heard from his grandmother who had been a young bride on the homestead during the Civil War.

It was an old fashioned German farm.  Crops, dairy cattle, pigs, chickens, a little of everything.  The soil was fertile and the family frugal, so they prospered over the years.

They never had to modernize too much, and were in fact a bit suspicious of change.  So the old stood alongside the, well alongside the slightly less old.

When the place finally became vacant the buildings just seemed to give up hope.  Ghosts held sway. Roughly a dozen people were born in the old farmhouse.  Roughly the same number died there.  A young son trampled by runaway horses in 1885.  All but one of my grandfather's siblings taken by diphtheria in the 1890s.

My father, now 91 and in a nursing home, is the last person living who was there when the place was fully alive.  He was offered a chance to go visit it recently.  He said he was just too tired.

A nice young couple have purchased the home acreage (the cropland was sold off a while ago).  They will of necessity raze some of the old buildings, but they will also bring the place back to life.  They have a new baby.  They are planning a couple more.  The man intends to brew beer in the old milk house.

They are even talking about raising a few bison, bringing history around full circle.

Some images from a farewell trip.

The house is circa 1875.  Parts of the barn are circa 1860, with newer sections just piled up on top.

One item I was tasked with retrieving was an antique bed and headboard.  When we dismantled the bed frame we found the bold claim VERMIN PROOF marked on it.  My wife will be pleased.

My kids are old enough not to fall for it, but I wonder how many youngsters today would look at this turn of the (last) century school writing slate and think:  "Hmmm...pretty early model iPad there."

Also up in the attic, an "Indianapolis Kraut Cutter".  This is only one part.  The whole thing stands about four feet tall and looks like it would make short work indeed of a head of cabbage.

As I said, ghosts hold sway here, but friendly ghosts.  I found a huge stash of my grandmothers's mending things.  Hundreds and hundreds of buttons.  She died forty years ago and I am sure my fingers were the first ones since then to touch the collection of buttons from coats, overalls, long underwear.  She saved every one of them and no doubt spent many a winter evening fixing and mending so as to get just a little more wear out of things.  No need to buy new...

I do not think the garden was kept up after her death.  But outside the house I found her watering can. It looks as if it was set down yesterday.