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The sun beat fiercely down on my head. I passed beneath a high arch decorated with intricate carving. The worn stones beneath my feet radiated heat. The road was 2000 years old. On my right hand rose the columns of a temple, on my left a hill, its steep slope terraced with more tall buildings.  Ahead lay the open space of the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome. I had been waiting for this experience for approximately half a century.

The Roman Forum lies between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. It dates back to the 8th century BCE, when the first religious and civic buildings of the future centre of empire were constructed, and was the focus of civic life in Rome. As Rome declined, so did the Forum. Many of the buildings were preserved because they had been taken over as Christian churches, but after c.800 CE the Forum was used as a stone quarry for medieval and Renaissance builders, and many buildings have vanished or lie in ruins. Picturesque blocks of fallen masonry and broken columns are grouped around the tourist walkways, with small trees and acanthus growing among them, begging for a watercolour sketch. But you can still walk along the main road and even the ruins are several stories high.

I couldn’t get over the massive size of these buildings, and the height to which some of them had survived. I am used to Roman buildings which survive as low flint footings for wattle and daub walls.  Looking up at them, I remembered painfully translating Juvenal’s satire on the dangers of Rome at night, where he mentions tiles falling off the roofs of tall buildings and cracked pots being thrown out of the windows (Satire III, 268-314).  I passed the temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife Faustina (as imperials both were of course deified after their deaths). It was during his reign that the Antonine Wall was built in Scotland, although he never visited himself.  According to his statues and the opinions of various Roman historians, he wore a beard and was quite a good guy. In fact, if the description given by his adopted son and successor Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 1.16 and 6.30) is at all accurate, many a modern politician could benefit by following his example. The temple was adapted to serve as a Christian church in 1602, and a rather odd-looking extra bit added above the row of columns where the roof used to be.

A little further on, at the foot of the Palatine Hill were the ruins of the temple of Vesta. For many centuries virgin priestesses had the duty of guarding a sacred fire in the temple, which symbolised the hearth of the city and could never be allowed to go out. Another of the texts I had had to read was some lines from Ovid’s poem about the foundation of Rome (Fasti II, 381-422). According to legend, Romulus and Remus’ mother had been forced to become a Vestal Virgin to prevent her from marrying and producing an alternative king to her usurping uncle. The god Mars got around that one… Next to the circular temple with its three surviving columns was the house where the Vestals lived, and its courtyard garden or atrium, originally enclosed by the buildings of the massive complex. A Vestal was chosen as a child and served for thirty years. Today broken statues of long-dead Vestals line the paths and show the dress and hairstyles and even the names of the women who, long ago, spent their lives here. Reading their names and seeing what they would have looked like somehow made the experience more personal.

As I walked around the various temples in the Forum, I thought of the poet Horace, wandering idly around the Forum 2000-odd years ago, asking the price of cabbages and corn and listening to the fortune-tellers. (Satire 1.6, 111-131). Now I was wandering idly in the same place, surrounded by increasing hordes of tourists with their forests of selfie-sticks. Strangely enough, those hordes of tourists didn’t actually detract from the experience. I sat in a shady spot on a fallen block, sipping at my water bottle, and somehow the Romans I knew only from their poems and letters were as real to me as the coach party posing beside the columns of the temple.

When Horace had finished his stroll in the Forum, he went home to a bowl of leeks, chickpeas and however you want to translate the word “laganum” (pasta, pancake, etc.?). I repaired to a nearby café for cold lemon tea and a magnificent ice cream – pistachio plus coffee plus chocolate. There are some pleasures the ancient Romans hadn’t discovered!

I love smoked eel. My kind sister-in-law stuffs me with smoked eel from Germany every Christmas, to the point where I actually can’t eat any more. Well, it is rather rich and oily. I like it even better than kippers, although I love them too. I am fond of smoked salmon, and I won’t say no to a bit of smoked mackerel, or pickled and salted herring. Perhaps I should have been a Viking?

Preserved fish is really the reason why I visited Lübeck, Queen of the Hanseatic League, in 2018. I got involved with a local project which included trade with the Baltic. During medieval and early modern times, Orkney and Shetland traded stockfish and other salted and dried fish such as ling and tusk with towns in the Baltic area, including Bergen and Lübeck, and during the course of researching my contribution I got really interested in the Hanseatic League. Why on earth did nobody teach me about the Hanseatic League before? I can’t remember any mention of it in our school history lessons although for hundreds of years the Hanse was a major force in North West European trade. Beginning in the 12^th century and lasting for about 600 years, a confederation of merchants from areas speaking Low German built an extensive trade network which crossed political borders. They dominated the Baltic markets and their trading range extended as far as Southern Europe. The League had enormous power. They received protection and “privileges” from local rulers, and enforced their wishes and their monopolies by means of trade embargoes.  “Privileges” were deeds granted by a ruler allowing the Hanse a trading post, lower customs duties, free import/export of goods, freedom to trade with all locals & foreigners.  Their principal kontors or trading enclaves were at Bergen, Bruges, London and Novgorod, although there were many smaller ones.

From the mid-14C, representatives of the Hanseatic towns and cities held assemblies called “Hansetage” to take joint political & economic decisions. The first Hansetag was in 1356 and the last in 1669, the official beginning and end of the league. By the 17^th century the Hanse was winding down, eclipsed by the rise of new territorial states whose rulers wanted their law followed without special economic or political status for merchant towns.  The Thirty Years War (1618 – 48) and the rise of trade with the New World also contributed to the end of the League.

But getting back to fish, since there weren’t any freezers in medieval Europe, drying, salting and pickling were the only ways to preserve fish. Salt herring and stockfish were very important for the many fast days demanded by the church, at one point Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and all of Lent and Advent, and for long sea voyages. Stockfish is cod, which is not very oily and can therefore be salted and air-dried until it is as hard as a board and keeps for years. It is possible that being forced to eat salt cod for such a large percentage of the year might become a little tedious, especially as to reconstitute it, you have to soak it for hours and beat it with a mallet.  I think I might lose my Viking foodie tastes if I really had to eat it so much of the time.

Lübeck was founded in 1143 CE, and from 1230 to 1535 was one of the leading cities of the Hanse. The city was a major port in the lucrative salt trade dominated by the Hanse. All that salted fish meant that salt itself was a vital commodity, and it came mostly from the inland town of Lüneburg where it was mined from a geological formation known as a salt dome, and sent to Lübeck to be shipped on to Scandinavia for salting herrings. One of the sights of Lübeck is the “Salzspeicher”, a group of six salt warehouses built between 1579 and 1745, used for storing the all-important salt.   

So I decided to visit Lübeck, and its wonderful Europaische Hansemuseum (European Hanseatic Museum).  Today the old quarter is still a very pretty town, built on an island in the river Trave near its outlet into the Baltic Sea. I went there in spring when the trees were green with young leaves, and flowering cherries overhung the main bridge.

Lübeck is famous for its Brick Gothic architecture, characteristic of the area around the Baltic Sea, which has little suitable stone for building, and in spite of extensive damage during World War II is a Unesco World Heritage Site.  The 13^th – 14^th century Marienkirche is a striking example of the Brick Gothic style. It has the highest brick vault in the world, twin spires and pointed arches over huge windows. The style was derived from France and the Marienkirche was the prototype for around seventy brick Gothic churches in the Baltic area.

The streets of Lübeck are lined with tall gabled brick houses up to seven stories high. The gabled houses which survive today are mostly 15^th and 16^th century and would have belonged to the elite but they were building brick homes as far back as the 13^th century here. Around 1200 CE Lübeck was mainly wooden houses, but by about 1300 CE, seven hundred to thirteen hundred houses had been built of brick, with gable ends facing the street & lots of storage space. Those merchants were mega-rich to afford all those bricks!

The island city was surrounded not only by the river but by a town wall with four massive gates, two of which survive, the15th century Holstentor, and Burgtor, also built of brick.  The Hansemuseum is located in part of a large Dominican monastery, founded in the 13^th century on the site of the original castle. I particularly liked the town hall (Rathaus) which started life as a brick Gothic building but with Renaissance additions. The round shields visible from the side of the Market Square designate the city’s status as a Free Imperial City. In the 13^th century the Holy Roman Emperor gave it the status of an imperial free city, which added to its importance.

Having enjoyed the standing buildings and indulged in an orgy of medieval brick and German stoneware jugs inside the museum, I turned my attention to food. The culinary delight for which Lübeck is most famous today is marzipan. It even has a marzipan museum. You can buy excellent marzipan in practically any form, including some rather nice marzipan coffee. But the food I enjoyed most was a fischbrot (fish roll) filled with salt herring which I ate sitting in an open-air café beside the river, washed down by a large glass of German beer. Lovely!

No, I don’t mean insect killer or Rentokil fluid put there by the curators. Though of course those may be there too. Woodworm in the Lord Mayor’s Chair, moths in the 18^th century sampler, beetles crunching that trendy piece of artwork made entirely from dried peas and lentils glued to a piece of cardboard, all need to be seen to. No, I mean poisonous, or otherwise hazardous, museum objects.

One day a member of the public brought in two World War II gas masks to a museum down south. Two staff members, who had not met these before, were about to try them on, when somebody (me actually) noticed and stopped them just in time. World War II gas masks usually contain asbestos, which is now recognised as a dangerous carcinogen. They either have to be sent away for decontamination by experts before you use them in your wartime handling sessions for schools, or they have to be sealed in airtight plastic with big red hazard warnings all over them and kept in the store.

But that is only the start. Do you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? This is thought to be a reference to the mercury poisoning suffered by makers of men’s hats in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when mercurous nitrate was used in the process of making felt for hats. If your collection has any Victorian top hats in it, you need to be careful handling them.

I once worked in a museum that had a fine collection of old stuffed birds. Museum curators have been known to become ill from handling such specimens, as arsenic was once widely used in taxidermy.  Surgical gloves on, please.

And of course the collection may contain old watches with radium dials, or even geological samples which are mildly radioactive. Even the store itself may have radon leaking out of the walls at levels which are hazardous to humans. This I have also met.

There are more things to beware of in a museum store than falling off a stepladder because you have forgotten your ladder training, or hurting your back lifting boxes because you skipped your manual handling course. Still, look on the bright side. If you have a few boxes of Victorian matches, they may spontaneously combust and burn the whole store down, thus solving all the problems!

Health and safety at work is an emotive topic. As I filled out a risk assessment form for that most dangerous of museum activities, colouring-in for toddlers, I could understand why some people feel that Things Have Gone Too Far. Shortly afterwards we were doing an education session on the revolt by the Bryant and May’s match  girls, who, if you remember, were all dying in Victorian times of phosphorus poisoning contracted at work. I am personally happy to waste five minutes filling in a ridiculous form if that is the price of a society that values workers’ safety.

There is nothing like working on an archaeological site for making you appreciate the value of health and safety legislation. Having slashed my hands many times making replicas of flint knives, I have never felt any temptation to wear shorts or sandals on a site where the soil is full of flint. And I have personally fallen into a trench when someone left a slippery piece of plastic on the edge of it. I was lucky it was only three feet deep. One director I worked for in Greece suffered a fracture when a stone that had been carelessly left on the side of a deep trench fell onto her shoulder during a minor earth tremor. It could have been her head. Another colleague was buried up to his waist in sand during a trench collapse. He told me that you do not have to be completely buried to suffocate. If the earth is above the level of your diaphragm, you can breathe out but it becomes impossible to breathe in.

Earth-moving is a potentially hazardous exercise for anyone. I particularly remember one site I worked on in the early 1980s. We were working around a firm of developers, who had dug out a deep hole in the hillside to put in an underground car park. There was a large chunk of concrete the size of a wardrobe in the bottom of the hole and they needed to get it out. They slung a chain around the middle and attached the other end to the bucket of a JCB, and start to pull it up the steep side of the hole. It hadn’t got very far when the digger with its driver started to tilt and slide towards the edge.

After some frantic shouting, they stopped to think, with the slab of concrete hanging on its chain halfway up the side. By this time the archaeological team was lined up on the other side of the hole, watching the problem with professional interest. And then, before our astonished eyes, a man climbed down the slope, carrying a pneumatic drill, stood on the slab and began to cut it in half. Have you guessed? He was making the cut between the place where his feet were and the chain that was holding it up. And when he finished cutting, the bit he was standing on fell down into the bottom. Fortunately he managed to leap clear and cling onto the side of the hole, dropping the pneumatic drill, which by great good luck didn’t fall back onto him. The rest of the concrete was then light enough to be pulled out of the hole.

I have never before or since seen such a piece of mind-blowing stupidity.

Most of the things I dug up or picked up during my years as an archaeologist in the field were broken pieces of things, sherds from pots, smashed roof tiles, butchered bones. If they weren’t broken when they were thrown away, they were crushed by the shifting pressures of the earth and buildings under which they were buried, or smashed by some archaeologist pulling them out of the ground in the gathering dusk as the bulldozers moved in. But I remember one find that startled me so much when I found it that I actually yelled out loud, because for once it was complete and unbroken.

I was working on the site of a Roman villa just outside my home town. This was in the late 1970s. It was a research dig, so we had all the time in the world (within reason). The trench and the diggers’ campsite were in a piece of perfect English countryside, in the tree-lined avenue of the local stately home, with fields of ripe corn and contented cows on either side. It was high summer, so the days were sunny and warm, with a breeze that sent ripples across the cornfields and rustled in the leaves of the towering horse chestnuts. The lane leading to the house was fringed with frothy white flowers of cow parsley, and birds sang in the hedgerows. In the evenings, after the usual water-fight by the horse-trough, where the more boisterous members of the team threw saucepans of water over each other, some of the staff played chamber music on their recorders in the tool shed. The others went to the pub. So English!

I was poking the point of my trowel into the earth, which I should not have been doing – I was supposed to be scraping carefully with the side – and suddenly the earth just fell away to reveal a little Roman brooch. It was a cheap bronze trinket without any decoration, of a kind made in large numbers for ordinary people to fasten their clothing with in the days before buttons. The metal was bright green from the corrosion products of the copper, but when it was worn it must have been either a reddish-bronze colour or perhaps a brassy gold-yellow. And it was complete. That one was a special thrill.