Traipsing Around in the Muckity-Muck

Really Tuesday now, so the long day felt appropriate...or it would have, if I hadn’t lost all track of days since we left for this trip on Friday. And of course, there are still three more to go before we get back to Rome to start our Fall Break!

We woke up to a very misty morning up in the mountains, which my friend Will described as “traipsing around in the muckity-muck”. Apparently it’s a quote from a movie, so I shamelessly stole it for my title. Our first visit was to the museum in Aidone, a tiny little town near Morgantina (which is also tiny, but you might actually be able to find it on a map). The museum sits at the top of a hill, so we left Fabio bus down at the bottom and wandered up several small streets.

This is what our morning looked like. Also, you can see our new little friend coming to greet us

This is Bart, who is actually a girl, but I don’t think Professor Scott knew that when he named her. She accompanied us the rest of the way up to the museum, happily running back and forth in our group, acting quite adorably as an escort. When we actually got to the museum, she tried to come inside with us a few times (sadly I couldn’t get my camera out in time), but the museum staff didn’t appreciate that and we had to leave her outside

Once actually inside the museum, we had a very quick lecture, and then a very interesting discussion about ethical archaeology (and yes, I’m going to get into the philosophical discussion here—if those sorts of things make your eyes glaze over, you're going to want to skip the next few paragraphs). The museum has as its main exhibit a set of acroliths (statues made of marble for the flesh elements, and then a different material, typically bronze, for the drapery) that were stolen from the Morgantina site and sold on the black market, traveling all the way to the United States before they were recognized. The statues were repatriated (returned to Aidone) fairly recently, and have pride of place in the museum—but their return is bittersweet. The major problem with black market artifacts is that once removed from their find site, it becomes nearly impossible to get any useful archaeological evidence about ancient cultures from them, and they become simply pretty objects.

Obviously it’s easy to say that the black market dealing of artifacts is a bad thing, but the subject of repatriation is a bit stickier—who has the rights to show artifacts found at a site? Should it be the person who discovered the artifact (often an archaeologist from a different country) or the government of the discovery site? It becomes an even more difficult discussion when you consider that often the discovery sites are very small towns like Aidone and Morgantina—who is likely to see these artifacts when they’re hidden away in tiny museums? Would it be better to put the artifacts in a major museum, possibly in another country, where the most people possible can have access to them? Speaking just for the United States (which doesn’t really have much ancient history), certainly it’s a lot easier for Americans to afford a trip to New York to see the exhibits at the MOMA than it is for those same Americans to hop on a plane to Italy and then find their way to a tiny town in the mountains.

We also had some interesting discussions about respect—if you discover a tomb from the 6^th century BCE, is it appropriate to dig up the grave to learn all that you can about it? If you do, should everything then be re-buried with as much respect as possible, or should the artifacts and possibly the skeleton be placed in a museum? What if the grave in question was a 3^rd century CE Christian tomb? All in all, it was a very thought-provoking discussion, and honestly (and cowardly), I’m glad I’m not an archaeologist so that I would have to make those sorts of decisions. (On an interesting side note, as we were leaving the museum, the discussion had mutated to questions like “If you had to sacrifice a single human life or the Colosseum would be destroyed, would you do it?”) I’d love to hear your input on these issues—what do you all think?

Anyway, back at the museum—we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the acroliths (boo), but I have pictures of lots of stuff from the rest of the museum...including the very nifty stairs to the second floor. I’m easily amused.

See? To get down from the second floor, you stepped out onto the long middle platform, then chose a side to go down. I was really ridiculously fascinated by these.

More cool beads--The ones in the background (partially hidden by the plastic stand) are clearer, but I was trying to get a shot of the one bead up front, on the plastic stand--it's a little on the blurry side, but hopefully you can make out that it's a really cool little glass bird pendant.

Some of the pottery found at the Morgantina site. I'm not as interested in pottery as I am in sculpture and architecture, so I don't have many pictures (or explanations) of them, but I thought some of you might be interested.

Various tools, presumably most of them are craft needles of some sort. Sadly, my Italian is not advanced enough to be able to decipher the didactics for these. On the other hand, I do know enough Italian to know that these tools are made of bone, which is kinda cool.

Some clay wings, which if I recall correctly had something to do with a figure of Eros. I just like wings, and they're nicely made.

This thing is a interesting Roman custom--it's a curse tablet, with a curse on a certain person inscribed on a thin lead sheet, which was then rolled up and typically placed either in a temple or thrown down a well. Justice in ancient times often depended on having enough money to go after the offender yourself, so the common people typically requested the gods for vengeance, and as a result these were nasty--this one didn't have a translation, but they tended to be something along the lines of "make sure this person dies a horrible death in abject misery, plz kthx".

There were a lot of terra cotta sculptures from the Morgantina site, and somewhat unusually, the vast majority of them were of women, Demeter and Persephone in particular. The acroliths I mentioned above are also figures of these two particular goddesses. The reason that so many of these statues are female is because according to ancient tradition, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades right around this site, so the statuary and art tends to reflect that. Anyway, the main reason I originally took this picture (although the sculpture is certainly nice), was to show how much of the paint has survived, which is always a pleasant surprise.

Finally, this is exactly what it looks like--it's an ancient cheese grater. Okay, possibly not for cheese--but it's definitely a grater. We were all inordinately amused by this--seriously, I think this is the thing we were all talking about the most as we were leaving.

After the museum, we were off to Morgantina proper, to see the site where the museum artifacts had been found. Unfortunately, the fog hadn’t burnt off, nor was it going to as the day went on, as we were graced with rain instead of sunshine. Therefore, my pictures of the site tend to look like this:

Instead of this (courtesy of a previous Centro student, found on the Duke website):

Aside from being wet (and a little on the cold side), I didn’t mind the fog so much—there’s something eerily majestic about seeing these ruins rising out of the fog. It just means that my pictures are a little on the fuzzy side, and I don’t have as many as I might normally. Our visit to Morgantina consisted of a short lecture and another “run around and identify these buildings based on the remains” assignment—which the fog did not help with, but our professors obviously understood that and were very accommodating, even postponing the discussion of what buildings they actually were until we were somewhere warm and dry. Actually, one of the most amusing parts about the assignment was that in the time between when the professors had visited to scope out the site and when we visited today, signs with descriptions (in English as well as Italian) had been put up at each of the buildings! Our professors basically said “...well, we trust you, please don’t look at the explanations unless you’re completely stuck” and I think for the most part we all behaved. Of course, that didn’t prevent us from taking hints from other non-site-related sources—we’re all bright students, and after the first few sites it became pretty clear that each professor has a specialty. Therefore, at one point the group I was with collectively decided that while the ruins we were seeing looked vaguely macellum-like (essentially a Roman mall), our definitive proof was that Dora was hanging out to answer questions, and shops/commerce is Dora’s field (and yes, we were correct on the identification).

Also, a note from the future (Thursday): Professor Scott told us that the people at whatever organization runs the Morgantina site were amazed at our dedication in exploring the site despite the conditions. They said that Italian students would have given up and left rather than deal with the fog and rain, and that they were very impressed by us. Happy feelings of pride for everyone!

This is the Greek theater of the site, with Professor Serfass hanging out at the bottom. That was another one of our handy little clues, as he's always the one around the theaters. Not that we needed it--the theater is pretty distinctive.

So, yeah. Lots of fog. But it was pretty!

Some of the ruins we saw--this was part of a granary.

This was one of the really cool ones (and one of the most complete structures). Sadly, it was also one where I had to look at the didactic--I never would have been able to guess. This is a kiln, one of the largest in Magna Graecia. It was used to make (among other things) the huge sections of terra cotta piping that we saw all over the site.

These are (somewhat tentatively) identified as administrative offices, due to their close proximity to the ekklesiasterion (the large, oddly-shaped seating area that you can see in the foggy/not foggy comparison pictures).

I’ve decided that the non-classics theme of this week is animals (The classics theme of the week, in case it’s not obvious, is Greek colonial architecture in general, and Doric temples in particular). I think I have a picture of a dog or cat from each place we’ve visited so far (yes, including yesterday’s post—I have a picture of a kitty we saw, but I think we traumatized the poor thing. He was a very shy kitty, and we happened to be taking up most of the path that he was trying to get past, so it’s not a good picture and he doesn’t look happy). At this site, I have lots of dog pictures, and a special surprise!

This dog was hanging out in the parking lot, presumably with whomever was the gatekeeper for the site.

These dogs were busy showing off their balance, and also turned out to be guarding/herding these guys:

We saw a flock of sheep! With sheepdogs! And a shepherd! Yes, I am unreasonably excited about this—I told you I was easily amused.

Most of the dogs were outside the site, but we ran into this one inside, and then just kept running into her. She was a sadly scrawny little thing, and I know several of us scrounged up snacks to feed her with, but she also seemed starved for attention--we'd move on to a new part and five minutes later she'd show up with the LOVE MEEEEE puppy dog eyes. We were very sad to leave her behind, and I can't tell you the number of times on this trip that we've had the "can we have a Centro pet?" conversation. (The answer is always no.)

Anyway, back to the actual classics part—after lunch (at the hotel from the previous night, so more fantastic food) we had a nice long bus ride from Morgantina to our next stop in Agrigento, which was conveniently long enough for my shoes and socks to dry (it wasn’t that rainy, but the grass was long and wet). As we drove up, we all got to stare out the windows at the spectacular silhouettes of the four temples we would visit tomorrow. But that was for tomorrow--for this evening, we had a visit to the Agrigento museum, to see various artifacts from the Agrigento archaeological sites.

This is what's known as a telemon--it's sort of a male equivalent to the caryatid (a female statue acting as a column), but these tended to be much more massive. I know the picture is kind of blurry (museums = no flash), but that's me standing there next to its feet. Just in case you wanted to know how friggin huge this statue was.

The really impressive thing about that huge statue? It was part of the temple that's been reconstructed as closely as possible (in cork, oddly) here--the Olympieion. This is one of the temples we'll see tomorrow (okay, the scanty ruins of it--this temple for some reason is in particularly terrible shape). Anyway, see the telemons on the top half of the columns in the reconstruction? Now look at the previous picture and at little ol' five-foot-tall me by the foot. Now try to imagine the size of this temple :)

If your mind is not completely boggled by that (I know mine was!), here's more stuff from the museum:

Not all clay work was hand-sculpted--the Greeks and Romans weren't stupid, and they made lots of molds. Here you can see the mold on the right, and the sculpture it would have created on the left. I really liked the way the exhibit was done.

This is a small marble sarcophagus for a child, which was somewhat depressing, but beautifully carved. And there's a plastic sheet in front of it so that people like me will go up to try to get as close a look as possible, misjudge the distance, and bonk their head on the sheet instead of the artifact itself.

This is not, despite its looks, a frying pan. I was somewhat saddened to learn this, as I was walking past, caught sight of this object, and said "Is that a frying pan?!?" It's actually a patera, a sacrificial bowl, from around the beginning of the 5th century BCE. And in case you're curious, I don't generally memorize these sorts of things--I've learned the handy little trick of taking pictures of the didactic next to the artifact, so that when I go through my pictures (three weeks later, say) I actually remember what it was and why I took a picture of it.

This is apparently a famous vase that is on loan to another museum, so it's not here. In place of it, in the fancy glass case in its own room, the museum has put...a picture of the vase. Nice try, but no. Just no.

Surprised owl is surprised! For those of you not so familiar with tired old internet memes, just look at the giant eyes on that owl. I can't look at this without laughing.

This is a brick, made from the local brickyards. It's mostly interesting because you can see the brick stamp on it, identifying where it was made--apparently for quite a while it didn't bother anyone that the stamp ended up backward and raised on the bricks.

This is a rainspout, probably from the top of a temple--the water would have come out of the lion's mouth. These tended to be made in all sorts of animal faces.

Finally, the museum had a truly impressive collection of coins--numismatics isn't generally my focus, but then again I've never seen such an extensive and well-preserved collection. The really nice thing about the exhibit was that they had a sliding magnifying glass so that you could look up close at any coin you wanted. I would like you all to admire my restraint in picking only two pictures of magnified coins along with the overall picture to post here--I took tons of pictures of these coins, and the only reason there aren't even more is because I was getting glares from other people who wanted to use the magnifying glass.

The case of silver coins!

Close up of one of the engraved coins--the crab was the symbol of Agrigento, so there were a lot of these. Can you imagine engraving this sort of thing by hand?

It's a pegasus. I had to take a picture of it. And isn't it lovely?

And here's the case of gold coins. SHINY!

The gold coins were smaller, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately this means it was much harder to get a clear picture of them, even through the magnifying glass. The detail on them is still incredibly fine though--this presumably the portrait of a ruler of Agrigento.

An eagle! Probably as the symbol of Zeus, to whom the Olympeion is primarily dedicated.

So, that's the highlights from the museum. Tomorrow, we get to actually go see all the lovely temples that this stuff was taken from.

Okay, you can have one preview picture ;) Temples tomorrow, whee!