Archaeology

“…it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man…”  wrote Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in his essay Essay  “Of Gardens” (1597).  I agree with him.  When I visit a town for the first time, the first place I go to is the museum. The second place is the town’s botanical garden or public garden.

But you do not have to visit gardens in the real world to enjoy their peace and beauty. Human beings seem to have planted gardens for pleasure as well as food, as far back as written records go, and probably earlier, and archaeological excavations now pay attention to evidence for gardens as well as buildings. There are many “gardens” recorded in history as wall paintings or written descriptions, which you can enjoy as a virtual experience. These were not real gardens but gardens illustrating an ideal. Plants which flowered or fruited at different seasons could be shown together and there is a lot of symbolism involved in the plants chosen, which I am not qualified to go into. But they are as beautiful as any real garden. My personal favourites are the garden painted on the wall of the tomb of Nebamun, a middle–ranking official who lived in Thebes in Egypt (around 1350 BCE); the garden of King Alcinous, described in the Odyssey (probably composed 8^th century BCE but thought to have been set in the Late Bronze Age around the 12^th to 11^th centuries BCE); and the garden painted on the walls of the empress Livia’s (58BCE – 29CE) dining room at her villa at Prima Porta north of Rome.

The estates of wealthy Egyptians always had a walled garden where the owners could enjoy peace and quiet and cool shade. The painting of the garden of Nebamun shows a pond full of fish,  water birds, papyrus and lotus flowers, which is surrounded by trees and plants: dom palms, date palms, acacias, sycamores and mandrake plants. You can visit this garden online on the British Museum website, or in the Egyptian galleries at the museum itself. I love it because of the beautiful colours, and I am very fond of pools with water lilies. It is easy to imagine yourself sitting by the pond, shaded from the hot sun by the palm trees, trailing a hand in the cool water and smelling the scent of the lotus.

The garden of Alcinous, king of the Phaiacians on the island of Scheria was described by Homer in book VII of the Odyssey. It was four acres in extent, watered by two springs and warmed by a constant west wind. Much of it was an orchard, which, magically, produced fruit all year round, pomegranates, figs, grapes, olives, apples and pears, without ever suffering from blight or frost. Beyond the orchard there were flower gardens. Even in translation (alas, I have no Greek) the words of the description paint a beautiful picture of an ideal garden, warm, peaceful and perpetually fruitful. You can almost feel the warm wind, taste the wine from the grapes. The Project Gutenberg website has a selection of translations by different people.

Livia was the wife of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. The dining room of her villa at Prima Porta was decorated with beautiful wall paintings of a garden surrounded by a low wall, with a wide variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, with birds perching in them, and garden furniture, drawn in exquisite detail – quinces, pomegranites, myrtles, oleanders, roses, daisies and many more. I have seen the frescos in a museum in Rome and they are beyond stunning. Google images will get you there – there are hundreds of them.

Take Bacon’s advice. If you are staying in, for whatever reason, refresh your spirits with a virtual visit to the gardens of our ancestors.

In my professional capacity I have cleaned many a floor. No, I don’t mean vacuuming the carpet. I mean excavating the floor of a prehistoric family home. One in particular stands out. The year I graduated from university, I went to work in France on an archaeological site in the Dordogne region. This area is famous for its prehistoric painted caves, but there are also many sites in the region where people lived as well. The site I was working on dated from the end of the last Ice Age, when humans, and they were modern humans like us by this time, were still hunter-gatherers. They lived, not in the deep caves where the paintings were made, but in rock shelters and overhangs. They often made them cosier by building fireplaces, and walls across the entrances, and paving the floors. The local limestone splits into handy pieces, and the shelter I worked in at the end of the summer had a floor tiled with limestone pieces carefully chosen and fitted together. It was covered with the rubbish the original occupants had left behind.

I spent about three weeks drawing and excavating that blasted floor. The words “sur le dallage”, “dans le dallage” and “sous le dallage” are still burnt into my brain like a French language exercise. First I had to draw the surface of the floor and everything that had been left lying on it – bones, flint flakes etc (sur le dallage). Then I had to take three dimensional measurements of all of these objects, and excavate each one and place it with a label in a little plastic bag. We didn’t have GPS in those days, so we used tape measures and a curious little string triangle constructed on the edge of the trench. You measured the depth of the object by sighting across to the triangle using a wooden measuring stick. Then I had to excavate the floor and take up all the limestone fragments, again carefully measuring in and labelling everything that I found in the cracks among those paving stones (dans le dallage). And finally I had to do it again when all the stones had been lifted and I got to the area underneath (sous le dallage).

This is the nitty-gritty of archaeology, which programmes like Time Team can’t really convey. It takes WEEKS to excavate a thing like that properly and a lot of it is boring, repetitive work, which nonetheless has to be done with absolute accuracy.  But the thrill is that you are uncovering the lives of humans thousands of years in the past, people who felt the cold of winter and wanted a fire and a windbreak, people whose feet got wet and wanted a floor that wasn’t a sea of mud, people who sat round the fire and gnawed on a marrow bone, and carved decorations on their possessions, whether for magic or just for pleasure. People very like us.