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.)
