A Find

Today I found something very interesting. I found a bodkin arrowhead in very nice shape. Though I doubt they’re related, I found the arrowhead next to some bone fragments. Interesting indeed.

Tomorrow we have a little shorter of a day and we’re going to roam around the Old Town area which is generally occupied by Albanians. The main castle, which we went to on Tuesday is there and I want to see it again. There’s a bazaar and there’s supposed to be some awesome kebab vendors. Oh, and there’s an English Pub, which we have to check out just because.

Sunday, I get to spend my birthday touring Bittola and Heraclea. Heraclea, at least, is in Thrace, the homeland of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and his general Belisarius. I’m wondering if we’ll see anything related to them.

I am posting some pictures, by the way, of Skopje, the site, and my little plot of land. As I said, we’re some 1000 feet over Skopje, both in where the hotel and the dig are located.

King of the Mountain

Today I did it, I walked up and back without stopping, with a few minor quibbles. On the way back, I started from a different pit, but it’s about 10ft up and about 15ft away. I also stopped twice to get out of the way of a truck and once to pick up stuff to go up the mountain. I’m gonna call that good.

The castle, by the way, is called Markovi Kuli, which basically means Marco’s Castle. Marco was sort of a Macedonian Arthur, though I’m reminded more of Alexander Nevsky. I say Nevsky because Marco also helped fight to defend a homeland which was under the control of an outside ruler, Turks is the case of Marco, Mongols in the case of Nevsky. Anyway, as their last king, he’s an important figure in Macedonian history.

I’ve not been finding much of late, mostly because I’m not really at a level that will give much stuff. I did find a piece of medieval glass yesterday, and we’re convinced that a sizable piece of metal lies under one corner of my test pit. Today, I finished clearing off 15 centimeters of dirt in preparation for chasing that metal bit.

I took a day off from walking around yesterday, and the schedule got switched around a bit so we could go to bed early so I’m pretty refreshed right now. Tonight I’m guest lecturing on the differences between history/historiography and archaeology, which is mainly just viewpoint.

Now I’m headed off to buy some food for lunch tomorrow and maybe baklava, which is very tasty, inexpensive, and comes in many varieties here.

Two Days

Today was the fourth day of the dig. The walk is becoming easier. I have told the others that my goal is to walk from the hotel to site and then after working back again without stopping.

The walk out consists of a big hill from the hotel to the trailhead, then almost immediately another big hill, then generally sloping downward to the final really big mountaintop climb. It’s actually easier going out than coming back because the generally sloping downward part becomes over a mile of generally sloping upwards.

Right now I stop at least six times, three each way, though yesterday I made it up the big hill at the end without stopping and today I made it up the first hill and then to the place on the second hill I had stopped the first three days.

The real challenge to doing this will be, I suspect, coming from my test pit, which is wayyyy down the mountain from the peak. In fact, It’s about half again longer from the test pit to the top than the big climb to get to the top in the first place. I’m estimating it’s about 80 feet up from my test pit to the peak. We’ve got a GPS and I plan on figuring that out just to now.

My test pit is likely a catch basin for stuff from up the hill. I’m finding a lot of roof tile and some pottery, mostly Byzantine, as well as a lot of animal bones in my pit. They brought the metal detector around and found a nail from the time of Justinian and a bomb fragment from World War II. There’s still stuff to find, though all four of us digging in this area are getting worried about where we might hit bedrock.

Our schedule is basically this:
5:30 Get up
6:00 Breakfast
6:30 On the road
7:15 Begin the day
11:00 Sort of second breakfast/lunch
1:00 End of the dig portion
1:45 Lab where we begin by cleaning our artifacts
7:00 Dinner
8:00 Class
Then crash.

We get from about 3 or 4 to 7 to roam around Skopje. Skopje itself is an interesting town. Our Hotel (Hotel Vodno) is well up the hill about 4 miles from the center of the city. The cab rides on the twisting-turning road with crazy cab drivers are, umm, exciting.

Yesterday we went to the local Irish Pub. It did not have Guinness or Strongbow, though it said it did. It did have a large menu, but it was sort of a gamble whether they had any individual item. What we did not get was the Indonesian Chicken subtitled “Nazi Goring.” Hmmm, not sure that marketing scheme would go well in many places. Oh, and we were served by a Slave. Well, we think it’s pronounced Slaavaa, but that was how it was spelled.

Then we went to the castle is the center of the city. It’s a fascinating collection of a variety of periods of architecture from Byzantine to medieval. It’s a cool castle and from there we can see the hotel and bits and pieces of the trail we walk to get to the castle we’re excavating. It’s encouraging to see how far we’re walking each day.

Today I just came to the local shopping center that has WiFi access to catch up on email and make this post, but tomorrow we’re going to roam about the bigger mall including a Macedonian Antique Flea Market. That should be fun.

Bones

The walk today was of course worse than yesterday. My muscles were wayyy tired. I expect it to be worse tomorrow, but I’m hoping it will start improving on Tuesday but right now I’m sore.

Today I began actually digging my plot. It’s in the lower keep on the north side where we think the wall was. I’m just scratching the surface, literally, but I found quite a bit of pottery and roof tiles. I also found three bones, probably of an animal but possibly of a small child. Some of the pottery was interesting as well because it was decorated.

Tonight, Dr. Fuller has insisted we all must watch the World Cup Final, which of course I wanted to do. It will be interesting to see if Zidane and the French can actually score on Italy.

More tomorrow as I see if I can make it up the mountain.

Owwww

Well, the dig part of the dig is very interesting. Lots of stuff I’m learning about how to lay these things out. There’s also lots of neat scenery and then the hint of possibly finding buried treasure.

But the walk to and from is a killer. It makes me long for walking around Pennsic. The final walk is a climb up this steep hill to the main castle. It’s very challenging.

My thought that this might be good for me physically is an understatement. I am likely to be in the best shape of my life at Pennsic. Nevertheless, I’m dreading tomorrow and the next few days until I acclimate somewhat.

Not much else to report, just: owwwwww 🙂

Welcome to Macedonia

I can now say that I have been to Vienna, Austria. Well, for a few hours in the airport. The flights from Heathrow to Skopje were on Austrian Airlines, and well, I guess I shouldn’t complain about the service on American flights. It was especially bad given that the flight from Vienna to Skopje was absolutely packed. There might have been one seat free. Maybe. And apparently everyone brought lots and lots of luggage. Bleah.

But I made it here. In terms of the real reason I’m here, this is going to be great. I’m very excited about what I’ve seen in terms of the hotel, the dig site, and that sort of stuff. There are twelve of us in the group, including the Fullers, some people from the St. Louis area, three from Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and myself. It seems like a good group.

Today we went out to Stobi, a Roman city about an hour from Skopje. They believe they’ve excavated only about 15% of the city, but what they have done is quite fascinating. Lots of impressive examples of Roman architecture and building technology (especially the baths of course), and some beautiful tiled mosaic floors.

There’s also a small museum with some of the items they’ve recovered. The most interesting item was a knife blade that looked very much like a saex blade. When I get the chance I’ll post pictures and you’ll see what I mean.

The when will be questionable. Macedonia bills itself as the first wireless country. Um, well, I have yet to find wireless and the wireless we thought the hotel had was not in existence. I’m at the American Corner room and using their computer right now, but of course for some reason the mail server at Metapros must be down because I can’t open my mail right now. GRRRR.

Anyway, the upshot is I don’t know how consistent I’ll be able to post. My plan is to go ahead and type up the LiveJournal entries, and then put them up when I can. This may mean that there will be several posts at once. I’ll try and let you all know when I’m doing multiple posts so you know to check down to previous posts, but I might forget. You’re warned.

So, for now, talk to you all later, whenever that is.

Last Day in London

Well, yesterday was my last day in London. I met with Sisuile again and we went to the Tower of London.

First, I don’t care what you think, London Bridge is Falling Down is not good theme music for visitors to this spot. There were a lot of people there, and it seemed like I could hear someone singing that song at some point the whole time I was there.

Second, the Tower of London is BIG. Way bigger than I had pictured in my head. It’s a huge conglomeration of buildings that various kings have added on to.

Third, it’s a heck of a place. Like Leeds, there’s not much early period stuff, but since I didn’t really expect any, I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a bunch of later period plate armor, but I was more interested in the historical guns and artillery. Dad, you would love seeing this stuff.

The Jewel House is also stupendous. I’m not a big fan of diamonds usually, but the size, quantity, and workmanship of the jewels there was amazing.

After that, I hurried home to make sure I was ready to go. Eddie, Mia, Ian, and a few others are headed to the Isle of Man today, so they came over last night. I got virtually no sleep, but I have now seen Shaun of the Dead. That’s a pretty funny movie, and an SCA event waiting to happen.

Eddie brought me over to Heathrow at 3:30, it’s now 5:30, and I’m blogging from the airport. I’m very excited about the dig (especially since my textbook showed up on Tuesday and I don’t have to stress about that), but I’m not ready to leave England. There’s too much left to see.

British Museum (Take Two)

I met Sisuile at the British Museum and we had a blast. This time I looked at other stuff besides the Sutton Hoo and early medieval period stuff.

Obviously, there’s a ton of interesting stuff from a bunch of cultures. We spent 3 hours looking around and I know for a fact we missed much of the museum.

Nevertheless, I have now seen the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles (which are no longer the Elgin Marbles, by the way), and a host of other beautiful items. I have lots more pictures and sooner or later, I’ll get them uploaded.

After the museum, we had dinner and watched the Italy-Germany World Cup match. That was one of the dullest games I’ve seen, even though Italy won without going to penalty kicks. The England-Portugal game, despite a total lack of scoring was wayyyy more exciting, not simply because of the atmosphere I watched it in, but because both teams were seriously trying to score.

Anyway, next will be the Tower of London.

Winchester

I can’t begin to appropriately describe Winchester. It is perhaps the most beautiful city I have ever been in, at least the downtown part.

The first place I went was the remains of the Norman Castle. Not much still exists, a few passageways, the remains of a tower, and then the Great Hall which has been kept up. The Great Hall is incredibly beautiful, with stained glass heraldic devices of all of the kings of England (including attributed ones to those who did not technically heraldic arms such as Cnut and Alfred), and many of the leading noblemen and bishops in English history.

The hall itself is glorious, with its buttresses and incredible stonework. On one end there’s a family tree of English royalty starting at the end of the 13th century. On the other end is the great Round Table listing Arthur’s knights and where they sat. It’s amazing, no doubt about it, but….

It is overshadowed by Winchester Cathedral. I’ve been fortunate to have seen some beautiful architecture and embellishments, such as St. Basil’s in Moscow, but I’ve never seen anything like this. The architecture is stupendous in a way I cannot describe.

The cathedral is also a historian’s wet dream. Hundreds of people are buried there, including Jane Austen. You walk over these intricately carved stones with people’s names and occasionally something about them. This isn’t particularly uncommon, but adds to the historicalness (if that’s a word) of the place. St. Swithun is buried there, somewhere. Many great noblemen and bishops of England are also buried there.

On a shelf there are six funerary boxes. This include the remains of such names as King Edmund, King Ecgfrid, King Cnut and Queen Emma, and others. Now the boxes say who’s in them, but nobody’s really sure at this point who really resides in these. During the Civil War, Cromwell’s troops apparently brought these boxes down and poked around in them. All that they know is that there are definitely bones in all of them, but who knows if they were mixed and matched.

Nevertheless it is awe-inspiring to see the caskets that such names, names I’ve studied, once resided in.

But there’s more. The Winchester City Museum has a lovely collection of Anglo-Saxon artifacts. Oh, yeah, there’s this big Victorian era statue of Alfred, and then there’s the river. It’s a beautiful river running right next to the remnants of the medieval and Roman walls.

Whatever you do, plan on going to Winchester when you come to England. You won’t be disappointed.

Now I’m back at Eddie and Mia’s and I’ll go into London to meet Sisuile at the BM and for one last English soiree before jetting off to Macedonia on Wednesday.

Serendipity

I did not enjoy grade school much, but I have some fond memories of 6th grade. My teacher was Mr. Bigelow, and he played a lot of chess with me during lunches and after school.

I also remember the English book pretty well. The book was entitled Serendipity. It took me a while to wrap my tongue around how to pronounce it, but once I figured both how to say it and what it meant I really liked the word.

The word is very applicable to my weekend. I would like to apologize for being so far away from the internet this weekend. The B&B I had hoped to stay did not have rooms after all, despite advertising that they had real-time online room availability. This will be, by the way, a very long post, to make up for several days of notes and thoughts.

Nevertheless, Serendipity kicked in. I found some listings for other stuff and ended up at the Keppel Head Hotel which is in the Hard in Portsmouth.

There’s a goodly amount of history in that last statement, actually. As I was walking around the naval exhibits (more on this later), I found out that the first admiral to fly his flag on the Victory was an Augustus Keppel, and the hotel, founded in 1779, was named after him.

The Hard? That’s the region in Portsmouth right next to the naval base. It referred to first stretch of hard land a sailor would walk on after being at sea. In Portsmouth’s heyday, there were over 100 pubs in essentially a 3 block area. The Landlord of one of the few remaining pubs, the Ship Anson, had a map of the hard in the late 1700s showing essentially every building as a pub.

Serendipity is staying in the same hotel that undoubtedly some Royal Navy officers stayed at before going out to fight the French Navy and drinking at a pub that served their sailors.

As I said, the Hotel was right next to the historic dockyard area which was the naval base. I looked through the Royal Navy museum which has quite a bit of fascinating stuff, but of course I went there for one reason. I went to see the HMS Victory.

The Victory is amazing, daunting, impressive, beautiful, and powerful. I have lots of pictures which eventually I’ll post (speaking of which I’m trying to catch up on some Yorkshire pictures right now).

Unlike Jorvik, the Victory has virtually no Disney, relying on the ship, the equipment, the weaponry, and the history to impress the visitor. It succeeds. It’s also very cramped. I hit my head several times, no worry of course since it’s my head. The deck beams are about 5ft to 5ft, 6in.

I think I’ll let the pictures speak for more of the Victory, but I will say it’s well worth the visit. It is very eerie to stand over the plaque showing where Nelson was shot.

After seeing the museums and the Victory, I took the Harbor Cruise. This was extremely cool. I had noticed a Russian ship, which I later found out was the Admiral Levchenko, moored very close to the Victory, as well as a French ship, the De Grasse moored behind it. They weren’t easy to get pictures of though, but once I was on the Cruise, we went right by them and I got a number of good shots of them. We also went by several RN ships, two destroyers and a frigate, plus several mothballed ships, including an Invincible-class carrior, the Indomitable I believe. I was ecstatic.

The Cruise stopped at a couple of places, so instead of returning to the Hard, I got off at Gunwharf Quay and walked over to Old Portsmouth. This was quite a long walk around the various ship berths but you simply follow the chain. There’s a series of stones with the image of chainlinks in them that lead around to the various historic places near the port.

Anyway, I walked around to the seawall and the circular tower guarding the harbor entrance. I have pictures of this tower from the Cruise and then pictures of the harbor from the tower. The entrance to the harbor is extremely small, only about 500 feet and I was told that the USS Harry Truman, a Nimitz-class carrier was too big to actually enter the harbor and had to actually moor in the Channel when it came over to participate in the yearly naval review.

I also went and had a pint at the Spice Island Inn, which is the last place that Nelson is known to have drunk at before getting on the Victory and heading down to Trafalgar.

I did all of this yesterday, it was a blast. I then went to the Ship Anson and hung out and watched the English do Karaoke. Talk about weird, a old English lady karaokeing a gangsta rap song. I also got to talk to some of the sailors off the De Grasse.

Oh, and before I completely forget. I got Fathmbjorn a parting gift, one that expresses much of both English and Scottish heritage. I’ll post pictures, once I have given it to him.

As I said, this was all Sunday. Saturday involved a lot of me walking around to find a place to stay, a quest which was impacted by needing to do it fairly quickly. England and Portugal played their World Cup game that afternoon, and I wanted to watch it.

And watch it I did at the Ship Anson. I ended up sitting at a table with a guy named Rob (we’re everywhere) and we watched England and Portugal squander chances left and right. I had felt that England was toast if it got to penalty kicks, and I ended up proven right. It was, however, sort of difficult for England to not get to PKs, as Wayne Rooney was sent off for bumping his Manchester United teammate Christiano Ronaldo leaving the English to play 10 to the Portuguese 11 men. England actually played significantly better, I thought, after that, and had some chances, but keeping Portugal off of the board was challenging.

The crowd at the pub was electric. It was amazing to be a part of that.

I hung out a bit longer and watched a bit of the France-Brazil game. The French sailors were loud and raucous. I decided to make it a bit of an early night, and strolled on home, to prepare for a Sunday of walking around.

Now I’m in Winchester, and I’ll leave that for another post. I will say, however, Winchester holds the most amazing building I’ve seen yet, and with that little teaser I’ll end this Tolstoyian post.