Just read about a site where a bunch of copper objects were just "lost" after the archaeological excavation. Oops.
Current time travel apparatus location: Public library in Bangalore, India
I keep running across government-owned archaeological sites in South Asia that have had to get barbed-wire fencing or similar to discourage people from building or farming on them! I wonder if this happens much in non-poor countries. I also cringe to wonder how much history has been lost because of this.
Current time travel apparatus location: The Round Library, Bangalore, India
I get frustrated at how long certain sites take -- not at all frustrated if they're full of fascinating information, but if at the end of it all I find it's basically "The people at this site had dishes. The End." But the process will speed up eventually because though I start researching a site when it comes up chronologically in my old notes, I at that point do the research for its whole history, at least up to when I plan to stop my book (700 CE).
Current time travel apparatus location: Vancouver, Canada
I didn't get a certain site written up that I pretty much finished this morning, because as so often happens part of its dating was tied in with the style seen on a nearby site, whose date I didn't yet have so I turned to it. And that site is huge, so I'm still researching it. It's fascinating, with lots of photos of houses available in my library. (My presentation is pretty much chronological so I prefer to look at the archaeological sites in rough chronological order as well.)
I'm stopping work for today; it's 5:15. Will check out an interesting blog from Singapore, then cook some easy curry to serve with already-made Indian flat bread I got. This week I hope to get a lot done on my book stuff so got a lot of easy Indian food to make; unsurprisingly, that's what is available here...
Current time travel apparatus location: The Round Library, Bangalore, India
[We need a writer] who would give gaiety to his dry details of archaeological fact, blending with them so much humour, and so many bright truths of unfamiliar social history, that, when treating of old cabinets and tables and of other household relics of a past civilisation, he would make real to us some forgotten episodes of home life in remote periods. And we should feel in all he said that a noteworthy style of old domestic furniture should not be studied merely as a curio, nor simply as an expression of genuine art. Taken up by the imagination, it should be thought of in connection with the social needs and customs
that prevailed among the people who made it their own style....Fine examples of old furniture...cannot be valued too much as objects of patient and humble study. To find out the plastic secrets of their fortunate shapes will ever be a liberal education.
House and garden might come together into
pleasant companionship without being modelled on the plan of an Italian villa. The convenience of a common-room, the general
meeting and living-room of the house, might be contrived without
its aping a mediaeval hall. A stately staircase might be set up and be no copy of one in a Queen Anne house or a Genoese palace. Each bedroom might have its separate bathroom, and the contrivance of them not be tortured to the shape of Gothic turrets. So too the ease and comfort of roomy fireplaces and wood- lined rooms might be achieved without the guilt of plagiarising from a Jacobean farm.
THE god of Commerce...has been mis-worshipped.... To Victorian art he appeared an oracle which for ever gave out that the sale-worth is the real worth, and production at a marketable price always the test of quality. This has seemed such clear common sense that our houses have been built for the most part with nothing in view but their saleable quality. In this
way the fashions of what everybody has, but nobody can be accused of wanting, have driven out of the market, as being too expensive, the individual dwelling-house, built to the taste of the inhabitant. It was only in the old house that individuality found root in a congenial home where it could grow at its ease ; in the new house of the nineteenth century we have had to live all alike, our personalities numbered but not defined, as in hotel apartments. In the twentieth century it is to be hoped that the exercise of a little common sense will lead to houses being built for the taste and individuality of their occupiers, even though the initial cost should be greater. For the principles of commerce have surely been misunderstood when only the average in art can survive, and taste can no longer get what it
most looks for.
MOREOVER, see how the utility of workmanship has suffered by this custom of rating its value by the price paid for it. Competition, having crushed the special excellence, has turned its weapon on its own
productions, and established everywhere the cheap substitute in place of the genuine article. We have to take not what does not onlysuit us, but what is not the real thing at all -- fatty compounds for butter, glucose for sugar, chemicals for beer: and just as certainly the sham house for the real building, its style a counterfeit, its construction a saleable make-believe, its carved wood a pressing from machinery, its panelling linoleum, its plaster some pulp or other, its
metal work a composition, its painted glass only paper -- everything charmingly commercial and charmingly cheap. We have lots of beer ; we have lots of ornament in our houses ; arsenic in the one, and sheer humbug in the other. Let the twentieth century contrive at least to get its goods wholesome, and its ornaments hand-made.