Helen FieldsScience Writer

From the British Museum in London, I bring you a lady spinning fleece into yarn:

The label says it was made in Athens around 490 BC. Some people who make their own yarn still spin this way, with a drop spindle. You hold the wool in one hand and spin the yarn around with the other, just like the nice lady is doing on the vase.

This was in a section on daily life – apparently Ancient Greek ladies made their families’ clothing from scratch.

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Today I went on an outing of the D.C. Science Writers Association to Patuxent River Park – a local park along the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We got a little archaeology tour and a boat trip. And a baby bird. Oh yes – a baby bird. That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you reading to the end.

My half of the group started with an archaeology tour of a place called Mount Calvert. “Mount” is, of course, a completely silly term in that part of the world. Yes, it is higher than the water. It’s even higher than some of the nearby land. But not by much.

It has a long and cool history. American Indians lived there thousands of years ago. In 1684, it became an English colonial town; in 1699, it was made the county seat of Prince George’s County, a position it held for just a few decades, but enough to litter the ground with colonial trash. Hardly anybody lived there; it was basically the place where you went because the court was in session. (The bars were also in session.) After the county seat was moved, Mount Calvert reverted to agriculture and was a tobacco plantation, worked by slave labor.

The plantation house from 1789 is still standing, with a little display inside on some of the items archaeologists have found there. It’s a lovely brick Federalist house. Being on a little rise does give them a bit of a view down the Patuxent toward the Bay.

Archaeologists were at work outside. The whole area is divided into a grid (with giant nails marking the corners). As they dig down, they dump shovelfuls of soil into a sieve to see what’s in them – the occasional bit of pipestem or a nail, but mostly rocks. In this pit, they’ve gotten through the loose soil and are now poking around trying to find the postholes from some old buildings.

Someone asked what they do when they’re done with one of the holes. They fill it in, but first, they often go to the bank, get a roll of 2010 pennies, and scatter them around so future generations of archaeologists will know they’ve been there. How cute is that?

Here’s some of the stuff they’ve dug up – presumably thrown away by residents, not buried by jokester archaeologists:

That’s a couple of pipestem fragments, a hand-forged nail, and a chunk of prehistoric pottery.

For the next stage of the trip, we left archaeology and turned to nature, with a boat tour of a little creek that feeds into the Patuxent. It’s a lovely place – all that water and all that sky, with a strip of green in between.

We saw a beaver lodge, lots of herons, and quite a crop of ospreys.

The guy who lead the boat tour, naturalist Greg Kearns, has been working at this park for decades. His job is park stuff – renting out kayaks and driving the boat and whatnot – but he’s also spent a lot of time making the area welcoming to ospreys. Ospreys are eagles that fish. They’re big. They have a wing span on the order of five feet. They’re supposed to nest in trees, but these days, they mostly nest on handy little nest platforms that humans build for them. So this creek is full of this guy’s platforms. At this time of year, the moms are sitting on the eggs. Both parents take care of the babies. This nest had two adults sitting on it:

Can you see their two heads sticking up? Actually, you can see a lot of the body of the one on the right; the other head is just to the left of that. (The thing poking up on the left is part of the nest.) Kearns is involved in bigger osprey-saving programs, too; he’s sent osprey chicks off to other states to help get populations back. Ospreys, like all birds of prey, were in a lot of trouble for a while there because of DDT. But now they’re back. I saw one fishing in the Tidal Basin when I went to look at the cherry blossoms.

So we’re going along, seeing all these ospreys sitting on their nests. With binoculars, I could see their big yellow eyes up close. But then we came up to this one nest, and he said, oh, that one’s got eggs – he checks them all regularly. Since it was high tide, he could take the pontoon boat right up to the nest. He stopped the boat, climbed up on a bench, reached his arm in, and pulled out…this:

It’s a baby osprey! Hatching!! Saying “peep”! It’s been living off the yolk its whole life. It just has to do that for a little longer – tomorrow it should finish hatching and be ready for fish. You can see its little white egg tooth, the spot on the beak that birds use to break out of its shell. The mother flew around being annoyed while we were checking out her baby, but Kearns said they aren’t particularly bothered about people. Indeed, she landed on the nest again right after we left.

UPDATE: I added the naturalist’s name.

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In the summer of 1998, I spent a few weeks traveling around Turkey with my mom. It’s really easy traveling in Turkey – the intercity bus system is very reliable. Western Turkey is full of ancient Greek ruins, and my mom had planned our route to hit the maximum number. We went to Pergamon and Ephesus and even Troy – it’s not known as the most exciting ruin to visit, but we had to take this picture. (Caption: Helen in Troy. Get it? Get it?)

So it was pretty cool to learn more about the region from Deborah Carlson, a National Geographic grantee who does underwater archaeology. There were two things her parents made her do as a kid: take Latin and learn to scuba dive. And now she’s studying a huge ancient marble column in 150 feet of water, in a shipwreck off the west coast of Turkey.

The story is pretty darn interesting, if I do say so myself. Read it here. Check out that beautiful picture – archaeologists have to move big things underwater very, very gently. How do they do it? They inflate a balloon with air. So clever!

photo credit: my mom, 1998

On Friday I finally made it down to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit. I visited Pompeii in the summer of 1998, and it was really cool – lots of halfway-standing houses to run around in – but hardly any of the artifacts are at the site. So I was excited to actually see the stuff, and it’s lovely. Lots of marble portraits, some frescoes, a funny set of frolicking bronze animals.

It turns out the Romans were really into their fish. The exhibit had a little corner on seafood – a couple of frescoes and a reproduction of a mosaic with fish, octopus, and so on. But that stuff wasn’t just for eating. From the text on the wall:

Many proprietors of villas owned fishponds that provided a ready supply of oysters and other delicacies. Private fishponds were a status symbol that was pursued to absurd lengths. Cicero complained of senators who lavished more attention on their mullets than on affairs of state. Anecdotes tell of villa owners treating their fish as pets, adorning their favorites with jewels and gold rings and weeping over their deaths.

You have to love the Romans. They didn’t mess around. They were just straight up decadent. The exhibit closes March 22nd and will be at the L.A. County Museum of Art from May to October.

Photo credit: me, 1998.

It’s always so satisfying to ask smart people stupid questions. I wrote a story recently about some archaeology along the west coast of Turkey, and the editor asked me some stuff I didn’t know. So tonight I called the researcher to ask some really basic, dumb questions. The kind of thing I felt kind of sheepish about not knowing.

Like: Who lived in western Turkey in the first century B.C.? I thought she’d say, “Greeks” (or whatever) and we’d move on. No, instead she gave this whole explanation of how Alexander the Great conquered the region, but then he died, so his generals carved up his empire into little kingdoms, so they were Greeks, but the people they’d conquered were Persians, but then the Romans started moving into the area, but people resented them, so then there was a big thing where a local king, who may or may not have identified as Persian, orchestrated the massacre of tens of thousands of Italians.

What I loved was that she kept saying she was totally shaky on the details – a seriously competent specialist who does cool work in this area and just doesn’t happen to have to explain the politics of first-century-B.C. Asia Minor in her daily life. One of those nice human scientist moments, and it made me feel less sheepish about not knowing the answer myself. She checked a book while we were on the phone and she had gotten all the major details right.

(In case you thought “Who lived in western Turkey in the first century B.C.?” was like “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” – Turkey wasn’t Turkey yet. The Turks came to Turkey from central Asia in the ninth century A.D.)

I blogged again! This one is about using synchrotrons to look at ancient things. A synchrotron is a really bright x-ray machine the size of a football field. If you point it at a bug in amber or an ancient scroll, it’s like x-raying the sample, except way stronger. (I mean, you are x-raying it. Your x-rays are just super bright.)

I went to the synchrotron press conference this morning expecting it to be mildly interesting and found out that, wow, they can do crazy stuff with these really bright x-rays. One guy had all these bug models that combined *two* crazy pieces of technology: the synchrotron, which zapped amber and made 3-d images, and a 3-D printer that turned the computer version into a plastic model that you can hold and scare people with. (The real bugs are teeny; the models are the size of your hand and off-white.)

Another person talked about a new project that’s just starting, on figuring out how to read scrolls without unrolling them. Turns out the x-ray technology isn’t the problem – it’s the insane quantities of computer power you need to put the image together.

Anyway, totally cool. Read all about it! (Oh, and for more about the Archimedes Palimpsest, that project has a great website.)