love could be as fragile ... as a broken bead of glass
May 1, 2017 8:46 PM   Subscribe

Making Love in an Iron Age: "The gulf between unspeakable feeling and meaningful action is ever present in the archaeological record. Behind the plexiglas and placards of museum displays are artifacts taken from cemeteries and graves. These are traces of people who gathered together for a final opportunity to express the things that words could no longer say. As a scholar who works with these artifacts, it’s often hard to know exactly what they mean—but sometimes it’s all too clear."
posted by steady-state strawberry (7 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for this.

Tutankhamun had a lock of his grandmother's hair in his tomb. There might be some esoteric magical reason, but there is no need to imagine one.

When my grandmother was buried, I remember that I found it strangely disturbing to see her name and dates of birth and death on the plaque on her coffin lid. Later, I realized why this was. The same name and dates are on the headstone, which is seen by strangers every day, and by family visitors often. But the plaque on the coffin is for a future, a people, that we do not know. Who are the men and women who will ever see that coffin again? The least dramatic answer is developers, or rather the workers of a company hired by developers in another 50 or 100 years to move the coffins out and take the real estate. Still, it's an unknowable future, and our love for the people in the coffins will be unknowable to them - perhaps not even an object of curiosity any longer.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:18 PM on May 1, 2017 [22 favorites]


The article had a great concept, but I feel it stopped just as it was getting interesting. To be honest, I was mainly taken aback when the "Iron age" mentioned in the article was the "late Iron Age in central Sweden, c. 600- 1100 AD" (wait, shouldn't it be CE?).

Anyway, before I read the article, I was imagining something happening thousands of years earlier, more in line with the great 'bog people' post from earlier; but instead we're talking about basically late antiquity/the middle ages. 900 years ago. The twelfth century! That's not too long ago, even in terms of recorded history. There are family trees that go back that far. This doesn't feel like some distant unknowable era to me. I can easily imagine people in medieval Europe missing their loved ones. Now, if we were going further back in time a few thousand years, that would be a bit more interesting for me to imagine, because the culture would be less familiar.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 2:12 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

posted by Segundus at 3:15 AM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


An Ancient Dog Grave, Unearthed During Construction of the Athens Metro

It is not the curled-up bones, nor even the grave
That stops me, but the blue beads on the collar
(Whose leather has long gone the way of hides),
The ones to ward off evil. A careful master
Even now protects a favorite, just so.
But what evil could she suffer after death?
I picture the loyal companion, bereaved of her master,
Trotting the long, dark way that slopes to the river,
Nearly trampled by all the nations marching down,
One war after another, flood or famine,
Her paws sucked by the thick, caliginous mud,
Deep as her dewclaws, near the riverbank.
In the press for the ferry, who will lift her into the boat?
Will she cower under the pier and be forgotten,
Forever howling and whimpering, tail tucked under?
What stranger pays her passage? Perhaps she swims,
Dog-paddling the current of oblivion.
A shake as she scrambles ashore sets the beads jingling.
And then, that last, tense moment — touching noses
Once, twice, three times, with unleashed Cerberus.

--A.E. Stallings
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:32 AM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]


I love the story of the beads. But echoing suburbanbeatnik, that period isn't so long ago. I've traced my Dutch ancestry back almost that far using written records. In the grand scheme of history, 900 years ago is practically yesterday. We've seen stone age burials, from the dawn of agricultural man, that offered similar insights.

Humans love. Humans suffer loss. Humans grieve. This has not changed since we came from the water. It has ever been so, and as long as we retain our humanity, it will ever be so.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 11:06 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well I liked the article. "It wasn't far back enough in time" is a bizarre criticism. I thought it was more about how motives and universal emotions can be read indirectly rather than like BEHOLD THE LONG AGO.
posted by bleep at 11:42 AM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm stunned that these excavations were carried out with enough attention to detail to note that two pieces of broken bead recovered from separate sites actually were halves of a single bead. How many thousands of bead fragments must the archaeologists have gently loosened from the soil? How many dozens of hours were spent looking at and cataloging each one? How rarely do such small details connect in someone's mind, that this little bit and that little bit have a history?

Earlier this year I dropped a gold dollar coin on a very white, seamless concrete floor in a room without furniture to hide under. I lost it. Totally lost the thing. Searched for twenty minutes and couldn't find it. But these two bead halves have been reunited after 900 years underground, buried separately, with one fragment being handled and carried about for some number of years after the other fragment had already been buried. "Practically yesterday" I couldn't find a valuable piece of shiny metal that I knew was within a few feet of my person. That was mundane. This is fascinating.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 2:48 PM on May 2, 2017 [9 favorites]


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