Studenda Mira

Anyone planning on visiting Hadrian's Wall this Saturday may want to note this bizarre little news item so that they can plan their visit accordingly. I have no pretensions to being a travel consultant, but my humble advice to such folks would be to schedule a late lunch: Choirs, including Carlisle’s Margaret Frayne Singers, will be accompanied by loofahs, bath toys and shower caps. That said, if anyone reading this is in the vicinity, I'd love some photos or video.

The summer solstice brings us new Prehistoric and Roman Britain galleries at The British Museum , and the Guardian celebrates same with a nice tie-in piece about the death and times of Lindow Man: A single brown fingernail lies on the leather bag of his chest, which tapers to nothing where the peat-cutting machine chopped him in two. His arm lies next to him, but these fragments of a body would mean nothing, were it not for the look on his face. A face that is 2,000 years old is not expected to have a "look". Death destroys individuality - but not his. When the remains came rising out of a Cheshire bog in 1984, that deflated torso would turn out to be packed with biological information, clues to a violent death, but it's all there for anyone to see, the full horror of it, in his face. It is the face of the eternal victim, bound and garrotted and thrown into the marsh. Full article is at the Guardian.

A quickie as I head out the door this morning... Archaeologists working on the medieval castle in Rochester, Kent—founded by the Romans as Durobrivae shortly after the invasion in 43—have stumbled upon the remains of a Roman-era city wall . Graham Keevill, an archaeologist on the dig, was enthusiastic about the condition of the accidental find: "We don't have many Roman city walls surviving in England. To get an unexpected one like this is fantastic. It is also a perfect example." He said the wall had "high-quality" facing stones on each side, and its rubble core, made up of stone, flint, sand, and gravel, would have been poured in "to set hard almost like concrete, to bind the whole wall together".

Mary Beard has some additional observations on the Chester amphitheatre buzz, and I found myself nodding to this excerpt: "But my main argument was that historians and archaeologists, as well as journalists, have wildly over-estimated the importance of gladiators in the ancient world. It’s us who is obsessed with the arena, not (so much) the Romans...The inhabitants of Roman Chester would have been lucky to see a handful of B team gladiators twice a year. The more interesting question for us is what went on in these amphitheatres on the other 360 or so days." I think this rings true, but on the other hand, we wouldn't make such a big deal of the Super Bowl (the annual American football championship game) if it were held on a monthly basis. Infrequency doesn't translate to a lack of interest, and it may have had the exact opposite effect, ensuring that the place was packed to the rafters with excited fans when those poor B-team gladiators filed in. ETA : Tony Keen co...

The Roman amphitheatre in Deva (modern Chester, England), constructed in the late first century, was the largest amphitheatre (that we know of) in Roman Britain. It may have been used for as little as 20 years before being converted into a municipal trash pit, then enjoyed a renovation and brief period of reuse in the late third century. Local amateur historians have entertained the idea that the site hosted gladiatorial combat, but this morning, the Telegraph reports official confirmation of that purpose from the archaeological team that's been digging up the site for the past couple of years. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the site last summer, and I took the photos below. Please compare them with the artist's conception in the Telegraph story; it's a good study in the kind of imagination one needs to use when visiting some of these sites.