Felicita

Sunday 5 October:  Nine Ladies

The past few days have been packed, but pretty fun. I now have a bank account here and a debit card. This is significant because Britain almost exclusively uses a chip and pin system and have been phasing out the magnetic strip cards. So, while I can get money out of an ATM, I haven’t been able to use my US bank cards at many shops, or use any of the self check-out lines at the grocery store. The chip and pin cards do have the magnetic stripe, but it also has a chip similar to the ones on a SIM card.

Saturday was a day to relax and get caught up on writing projects. I walked down to the Castle Market (significantly I walked to the Castle Market. I didn’t just happen to come across it while I was wandering about). Along the way I passed an old churchyard with an apple tree full of small apples. I picked a couple and took them along. They tasted very good for what looked like wild fruit; there were some blackberries, too.

       Sunday was a full day. I was to have lunch with Rob and Judy, whom I met last March. They are friends of Gretchen’s (my boss from the Science Museum) and live on the edge of Sheffield. They’ve lived in Canada and the US and Rob is fascinated by American history. He’s a retired professor of psychology and now lectures as a hobby. Something that I don’t think is done in the US much. Judy made us a very nice lunch and suggested we go for a drive. She’d seen an article in the local paper about a ring of standing stones called the Nine Ladies and since she’d never seen them, she suggested we go for a drive. It’s just the beginning of autumn now and the leaves are beginning to turn. We drove past Chatsworth and then up into the hills.

As we passed various villages Judy would explain which Duke owned them. The place took a little bit of finding, but whenever we really needed directions there seemed to be someone around to ask. In the end it wasn’t hard to find the place, despite there being no signs. The reason that the circle was written up was because several groups were protesting the expansion of a quarry that would significantly alter the landscape and disturb archaeologically sensitive sites. We hiked through a small path through woods, little more than a deer path, with ferns growing as high as my chest. We wondered at times if we were following the proper path, but figured it best if we aimed for uphill. After my experience at Mam Tor, I figure these sorts of things are always going to be as high as possible. All through the hike, I kind of marvelled at the fact that after Sunday lunch I was going for a walk in the country to see a stone circle. Dressed in Sunday clothes no less.

Finally we seemed to reach a crest and saw the stones ahead at the top of the rise. It was a perfect bright afternoon, with the sun shining on the stones. They aren’t huge, but hauling them up there still would have been a chore. There were nine and one flat paving stone in a large circle. Forty feet off was the King Stone. I wished I’d brought a compass (I definitely need one) so I could see how things line up. I could have used my watch, since it would be nice to have something more precise. But it looked as if the King Stone might have lined up astronomically with the centre of the circle. Then again, there were too many trees around to see if it lined up with any features of the landscape. After wandering around and admiring them for a while, we headed back down the path we came. After a few minutes hike we were surprised to find ourselves at the ring again. The second try did the trick and we realized that we missed the style next to a gate. 

Back at the Braggs, we had tea with toast and cheese while Rob played boogie-woogie music for us. Judy gave me rosemary and basil plants, so I now have a little culinary garden going in the kitchen.

I got dropped off at the university student union where I met Colin and joined in with the role playing society. It was fun being in a game again, even if it was a one off. I joined a group playing Edgewalkers. A modern day urban fantasy game set in Sheffield. I did pretty well. I found out later that the first thing I did was exactly the opposite of what the GM planned. It all started off with a significant character being blown up and the only witness was badly injured in the explosion. People who game with me, know that I would never run away from an explosion. In fact I commandeered a car to get back to it. Then I proceeded to split up the party. We had fun and I didn’t damage the GM too badly…

I am seriously considering running a game myself…

8 October:   Vitreous Materials and Faience

The time is flying by. Tuesday we had our Glass and Vitreous Materials class (it almost sounds like something from Hogwarts). This week was Faience. The first part of the class was lecture and then we got our hands dirty (we are told not to wear nice clothes to class).

Faïence is finely ground sand that is fired with things like bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), calcium carbonate and sodium carbonate (washing soda) and small amounts of copper oxide. After it’s fired faience looks like clay with a turquoise glaze, but it is actually an early form of glass. The earliest pieces were quartz pebbles that were carved and then glazed with the copper oxide. Later on people figured out how to grind up quartz (and sand), wet it with a little water, add the copper oxide and mould it into shapes. I made a few beads and pendants, but the stuff is very hard to work freehand. In ancient Egypt they usually pressed them into molds. After air drying it goes into a furnace (although it is a modern one, we won’t be doing it in a homemade brick furnace), and a chemical reaction occurs during firing. The carbonates and silica combine to make something very like glass and the excess carbonates migrate to the surface, still fused with the silica provided by the sand. But because we added copper oxide, it will all be a turquoise blue. I am doing two of the three types of Faience: efflorescence (where the glaze is part of the body) and application (where I paint the glaze on). There's a third type that's still done in Iran called the Qom technique or cementation, where artifact is made and buried in a bowlful of the dry glaze powder. The whole bowl is fired and then when it's cooled the excess glaze is chipped off.

9 October: Carl Wark

          















       Earlier this week the call went out to all archaeology grad students that the needed volunteers to clean the cremated bones excavated from the Aubrey holes at Stonehenge. Sheffield I one of the school’s that’s been participating in the project. I was first in line this morning (closely followed by Colin) and got trained in for washing. It’s not much different than what I’ve done before, but still, these are human remains from Stonehenge, rather than clinker from Minneapolis. I will start work on Friday morning.

            I was supposed to meet Judy again this morning. If the weather was bad, we’d go to the Millenium gallery, but if it was good, we’d head out to Carl Wark, another Iron Age hillfort. It was a beautiful day, so we hopped in the car and headed for the Peak’s District.

            Carl Wark is a famous hillfort (and reasonably accessible b public transit). We accidentally drove to another hillfort that was on the next hill over. It’s amazing to think that people hauled these boulders up the hill, but the view is amazing. On the other side we could see Carl Wark and so we scrambled down the hillside and hiked over to the other hillfort. It’s not a long walk, and there are others in the neighbourhood. In fact it seemed as if every hill around here had its own hill fort. The heather is just past blooming now and the leaves are turning. The weather was fantastic and we enjoyed looking at the scenery. There are no groomed trail or safety railing here; just cliffs and rocks and the occasional sheep. A couple groups of rock climbers were there along with other hikers.

            My metallurgy class was at two, so we stopped back at Rob and Judy’s house for a quick lunch. Rob gave me a couple of his short stories to read and then I got a ride back to the archaeology department.

Amazing. At 10 am I can be handling artefacts from Stonehenge, By 11 I am climbing around hillforts and I am back in class by 2. OK, I admit I was a little sleepy at class, but I held my own on understanding the chemical reactions caused by roasting and smelting sulphide ores. Carbonate ores, too!

            After class we all assembled at the Red Deer. We had a few beers and enjoyed talking archaeology. Roger joined us and I quickly got wrapped up in talking to him about possible projects. There is so much going on. I could take off for Greece or central Italy. Roger is also doing work in Siberia, which oddly enough dovetails with some of the stuff I was doing this summer.

            The other news is that the night before I finished the rough draft of my article on the Copper Complex of the Northern Midwest. I sent off copies for people to look at and comment on before I submit it to a journal. So, I had a few reasons to celebrate.

10 October

            The next morning I headed off to the department with a brief stop at the library to scan my ballot application. Minnesota makes it pretty easy to do an absentee ballot. I download the form, fill it in using Adobe Acrobat, print it out, sign it, scan it and submit it via email. My ballot will arrive as an email that I can print out and mail in or send it back as an email. I have enough time that I’ll opt for the former.

Colin and I were going to work together, but he fell ill with the crud that’s going around. So, after locating the missing 1 mm sieve, I got out a little ziplock bag of dirt, bones and rock and then emptied it into the sieve and gently ran water over it. I carefully picked out the bits of bones, rocks and shells and let the muddy part go into the sink. Then all of it goes onto paper towels that are on a tray with a wire mesh bottom. It's delicate work, we can't use brushes and so just run clean water over the fragments of bone while rubbing them gently with our fingers. The bits are small having been cremated by fire, but many are identifiable and we hope to ascertain a minimum number of individuals from them. It's a little overwhelming when I consider that I am washing part of a skull of someone who was buried thousands of years ago, and was important enough to their community to have been buried at Stonehenge.

We also have the bones from the infant burials exhumed from Stonehenge. They are in amazingly good shape considering their age and that infant bones normally decompose quickly. We have two years to study everything and then it all gets re-buried.

            I spend my days being blown away that I am here and doing this work. There are times when none of this seems real.

By the way, the sun sets around 6:30 now and it's dark by 7 pm.