Aerial Archaeology and New Pyramids

The BBC says infrared imaging from satellites has located 17 new pyramids in Egypt, along with thousands of tomb/home/town sites. The Week has a concise summation and video here.

Two of the new pyramids are near Saqqara, and excavations are underway to prove/disprove their existance. (that's Giza--not Saqqara--in the pretty picture.)

Dr. Hawass is not happy and is very critical of the new documentary based on the satellite research. Here are quotes from him, along with more details about the discoveries.

It's all led to a 90-minute BBC special called "Egypt's Lost Cities." (Bummer! I don't get the BBC station anymore.)

Aerial archaeology is almost as interesting as underwater archaeology, huh?

All this seems a very natural outgrowth of aerial photography--the kind that discovered many ancient sites in the Picardie region of France, forty or fifty years ago.

Roger Agache plotted out hundreds of Roman and Celtic homes and farms by taking pictures from a plane. Those photos revealed the patterns of buried ruins. That's one of his photographs at left, showing a Bronze Age funerary site at Noyelles-sur-Mer.

Sometimes a dusting of snow made the outlines of old fences or walls clear; sometimes it was the patterns or color in the grain.

Just in the last couple of years, the research is available online and in English, describing not only the pictures, but the on-the-ground excavations. Here's the site.

Many other researchers carry on aerial archaeology, but I'm more into Gaul than Stonehenge. So Agache's work and the excavations it inspired interests me more.

The Tromenie: a Breton Pardon with Gaulish Roots

In my humble opinion, Brittany is one of the loveliest areas in France. I offer as evidence my only picture of Locranon, a town with bodacious hydrangeas.

The Breton peninsula is particularly Celtic, being the land of the Veneti, Osismi, Coriosolites, and other tribes of Caesar's day and before, and being repopulated in the 5th century or so by people from Cornwall.

Brittany has a lot of Catholic processions and fests, called Pardons, but one--the Tromenie--dates back to the Celtic times before Caesar. The Tromenie takes place on the second Sunday of every July, outside the village of Locranon--a place which you may have seen in A Very Long Engagement. The idea is to walk the route of St. Ronan, who founded Locranon.

Pilgrims walk to a little chapel where St. Ronan's supposedly lived and have an open-air Mass.
That's the Petitie Tromenie. Here's a pretty comprehensive site with its history, some music, and lore. It's documented to have gone on since the 11th century, and since St. Ronan lived several centuries before that, my guess is that the practice is much older.

Every six years, though, folks make the Grande Tromenie--a map of that route is on the site, at the bottom of the page. The next Grande Tromenie will be in 2013. These 19th-century postcards show the area--it hasn't changed all that much.

The Grande Tromenie route follows a much longer path from the village well to a clearing called Le Nemeton. That word--Nemeton--is Celtic for temple (that's pretty well documented, even though a lot of the Gaulish language is lost). Twelve markers are passed during the seven and a half mile circuit, representing the twelve months of a lunar calendar. Or, if you prefer the Catholic version, the markers are twelve stations of the cross. It's anyone's guess whether a sacred walk was made yearly during the B.C. years, but I wouldn't bet against it. I was told that some of the markers date to pre-Roman times.

When I went looking for links, I was surprised to find this 1959 article from Time Magazine, describing the Tromenie. An abbreviated version of the legend of St. Ronan and how the walk started, and what the author saw in 1959, is very interesting.

Ancient Herbs 'n France..s

A bow to Respighi in the the title.

When you get sick, you seek out the person who can make you better. Today, that may be the clerk at RiteAid, but before the 20th century it was very often someone who knew plants and made medicines from them. In Death Speaker, my novel of ancient Gaul, the heroine is raised by a woman who heals with plants, so I had to do a bit of research on them.

The pretties on the right are Aconitum, aka Wolfbane. If you know your Harry Potter you know it's poisonous. Information on it and how it works on the human body is all over the internet. A decent place to start is here at Thinkquest.org, but there are plenty of other spots as well.

Not surprising that poisonous plants are well-covered on the net, is it? Death is sexy. We love that stuff. There's even a TV show on SPIKE called 1000 Ways to Die. The commercials turn my stomach so I won't include a link.

But even finding information on non-lethal plants--like this comfrey--gets easier every day, as herbalists, nurseries, and agencies in every state and country put their plants online. When I check several sights and they all agree on a how a plant grows and how it affects people, I'm pretty comfortable using that information.

Oddly, I didn't rely on books on herbs, mainly because there's so much dis-information around. Isn't that weird--I used to trust the printed word implicitly. But I've seen many books on "New-Agey" topics, like herbs and healing, which went into rituals and folklore...yet when I tried to learn more, I found nothing at all that could support the book's claims. No other books, websites, experts--nothing.
So if a book claims that a plant was once used to cure headaches, for example, but no other book or expert or website backs up that claim...well, maybe the author vetted their information, maybe they didn't. Maybe they just repeated something they heard anecdotally, and maybe they got it wrong.

If I've got a headache, I want something I KNOW will knock it out. And if my character has a headache, I figure she wants the same thing. So I try to find it for her. It's the least I can do.

Geography, 2000 Years Ago

Some musings about writing a historical novel:

One of the most difficult things to figure out in an ancient setting is the geography. The further back you go, the more things change. Seas rise and fall, rivers change course, beaches erode, hills get carved up by miners...stuff happens.

Of course, the good part about that is the further back you go, the less likely it is that someone may call you out on a mistake. ("You idiot! That lake is manmade--no one would have stopped there before 1972!")

My novel is set in France, 2000 years ago. France is unique in that it--more than most countries--has tamed its rivers. Who knows how the Loire ambled along in the BC era?  Well, there may be a few scholars of the esoteric who know, but not many. How about the beaches near Carnac? What were they like? And the fields, what sort of flowers would have grown wild there?

I did as much research as I could. Maybe I over-researched, but I think that's better than not doing enough. I even found a little book in a university library that was written for American soldiers in WWI, explaining in general terms the lay of the land in France. What a jewel that was! 

One thing I did learn was that the seas have risen over the past two milennia. Archaeologists know it. The many islands off France and other countries in Northern Europe have higher shorelines than they used to. Some disappear entirely, and yet there are carvings and structures that indicated they were used once, maybe 3000 years ago when the seas were lower.

An annotation on Caesar's Conquest of Gaul clued me into the fact that the Netherlands and Belgium and other coastal areas were more marshy than they are today.

The bottom line is that you do your best, which is the bottom line for almost everything in writing, isn't it?

Joshua Whatmough's Book

If you're going to write a novel set in Gaul the most wonderful collection of names can be found in a 1949 book by Professor Joshua Whatmough called Keltika, being prolegomena to a study of The dialects of ancient Gaul,.

Sometimes Keltica is part of the title; often not. Dunno why the "ancient" is necessary as there's no modern Gaul to confuse it with. Last bit of trivia--while the book was published in the 1940s, most copies seem to be dated 1970.

Need names? The Dialects has got you covered. I'm relatively certain that Professor Whatmough did not intend his scholarly work to be fodder for romances, but where else can you find such lists of Celtic names? Many come from pots, of all places, but potters signed their works using Greek or Roman letters to spell out their names--monikers that would otherwise have been lost. There's also place names and divine names--all sorted out by region.

Got a male character from West of the Rhine? Call him Maro or Firmus (now that's telling), Abbo for comic relief (well, Abbo sound funny to me), or even Voranus, if you're a fan of the HBO series Rome. Those are all legit names from the region.

As to what those names may mean in Gaulish--good luck! I've read that only 200 words of that language is known, but that may be an old figure. I'm not too sure what's known and what's guessed to be a word's meaning based on its similarity to Gaelic or Cornish, also Celtic languages.

I do have a Gaul-French dictionary, but a lot of words seem to be guesses. If someone wants to update me on the status of scholarly knowledge of the Gaulish language, I'd appreciate it.

As for Professor Whatmough, whose name I adore, I found this article on him and his work in 1963. Better, here's a charming portrait and anecdotes from a former student, along with a picture of the man. He wasn't just an expert in Gaulish, but in all Indo-European language families. He was fluent in 8-22 tongues, depending on how one defined "fluent." He died only a year after retiring.

Coligny Calendar

Just in time for Christmas, here's a neat-o site about the Celtic Coligny Calendar!

That's the calendar at left, or a piece of it, which sits in a museum in Lyons, France. The calendar dates to about the first century, but many experts who've examined it think it reflects computations made a thousand years earlier.

According to this site, last October was the month of Ciallos. I'm just juvenile enough to point out the resemblence of that name to a certain pharmaceutical product, and I should be ashamed.

Ciallos is not a month that occurs every year. The Celtic calendar managed to reflect both the lunar and solar time periods, and it did this by adding extra months every few years to keep us all in sync.

We're in the month of Semiusonna now. According to the Caer Australis site I linked to earlier, this (the 24th) is the last day of the month. Christmas Day marks the beginning of Equos--in 2009, at least. But not all calendrical geeks agree with Caer Australis, I'm sure. In fact, some think the Celts began their months with the dark new moon, while others assume the month began with the full moon...or something in between.

Basically, the Celts divided the year into a dark and light half, the dark half (fall and winter) preceding the light half. The months had dark and light halves as well. All months had either 29 (unlucky) or 30 (lucky) days. It's all very complicated, but what I find interesting is that the big feasts do NOT correspond with the solstices or equinoxes (equinoxi?).

Or am I missing something?

Allee Couverte

Allee Couvertes are Neolithic era gravesites, usually short little tunnels made of stone. This one, the Allee Couverte du Morgau Bihan is in Brittany, France. Kids were climbing all over it. I guess it's pretty hard to hurt stone after the third millennia or so.

That's the top of a home beyond the stones, which stand on private land, I believe. People stop there all the time. Those giant slabs of rock have been resting on the standing stones since around 2,500 B.C.

There are carvings inside the allee couverte too, but my pictures didn't capture them too well. A shepherd's crook, and what looks like spearheads or tools, possibly. A descriptive sign (in French, of course) called them palettes.

These structures predate druids and Celts by two thousand years, and nothing really is known about the people who set them up--except they liked to raise incredible stone monuments. Did they disappear, merge with the Celtic tribes that came later? In the case of the Allee Couverte du Morgau Bihan, I think the Celtic tribe would be Ossismi, since the site is near Quimper.

1897 Lourdes Film

The World Digital Library has all sorts of online treasures, graphically searchable by continent or time line. Our own Library of Congress collaborated with UN agencies to compile it, making the world's cultural heritage (well, part of it) available to anyone. What have they got?

Ancient maps. The first printing of a letter from Christopher Columbus dated 1493. Photographs from all over the world. Recordings, including a bagpipe version of Amazing Grace. Manuscripts, including Christine de Pisan's 15th century book on etiquette and practical advice, translated into English in 1489 so that Henry VII's soldiers could benefit from her words.

Here's a film by the Lumiere brothers showing the procession at Lourdes in 1897. Neato!

Carnac Museum

I just stumbled across this website of Le Musée de Préhistoire à Carnac which, unfortunately, is not in English. Still, the pictures at the site of artefacts and jewelry are lovely. And it's all just an excuse to show off my own pictures of Carnac anyway.

Here's the Neolithic page, and the Proto-historic, or Bronze and Iron Age page. Scroll down to see the pictures. Iron Age is "L'Age du Fer." This last page includes the Roman period as well. That center picture between the skeleton is a stack of axes, btw.

Large portions of the Carnac stones (there are three fields of them) are fenced off, so if you want to go, compare tours. Some, like Elderhostel, can get small groups in past the fences for a half hour or so.

Rainbow over Paris

You must click here to see it, and scroll to the March 27, 2009 edition of Paris Daily Photo. Then do yourself a favor and click on the photo itself to see it in all its enlarged, enhanced, magical glory. Evening lights reflecting off the Seine, the fainter of a double-rainbow terminating at the Eiffel Tower...just breathtaking!

Lascaux Cave fungus

Neolithic art and fungus are not good bedfellows. Or wallfellows.

The black fungus that is creeping across the 17,000-year-old murals of animals and hunters in the cave of Lascaux, France, causes great concern. So the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee and other international experts met in Paris for two days to discuss solutions.

Apparently a fungicide was applied (I prefer the words "smeared" or "glopped" but scientists like to use more clinical terms) a year ago, in January of 2008. No one but scientists have been allowed to visit Lascaux since 1963 (tourists actually visit a replica cave), so the cause is a bit puzzling.

An air-conditioning system installed in 2001 seems to have kicked off the first mold. More details about that and the fungal progression are available in this News24.com article.

In this AP story from WTOP.com, the Committee chief, Marc Gaulthier, blames global warning for raising the temperature inside the cave, which interferes with the air circulation and allows the fungus to grow. A couple of solutions are floated in this story, too, which other news pieces lacked.

Paris Daily Photo

Parisdailyphoto.com. Oh, what a lovely and easy-to-read blog! I'm adding it to my favorites over on the right as well. Each and every day, a new photo taken in Paris. Some are whimsical (fashion faux-pas, for example) and others show well-known monuments.

I'll add my own--this picture of the statue of St. Rita in the church of St-Germain-des-Pres. I took this in 2004 and assume that supplicants are still writing their prayers all over lovely Rita with their Bics, in spite of the paper thoughtfully provided on a nearby pillar.

St-Germain-des-Pres exists today (after about 1500 years) mainly due to Victor Hugo. It was badly damaged during the Revolution, turned into a gunpowder factory, and many felt it should be demolished. But Hugo had a passion for Paris' old churches and rallied people to rebuild and preserve it. Read more about the history of St-Germain-des-Pres here.

Bicycle Vandals of Paris

The rentable bikes of Paris get press coverage in every large city, because every large city wonders of fleets of bikes would work for them. Reduce air pollution and traffic? Yeah! But there are drawbacks.

A lot of cities (Los Angeles included) are simply not bike friendly. Here where cars rule, vicious violence against bike riders happen frequently. Things like deliberately causing accidents, slamming bike riders with hands or bottles, or spilling drinks on them. I wouldn't say it's common, but if you ride daily, it will happen.

Why? My guess is because you don't need to pass an IQ test or be sober to ride in the passenger seat of a car, from whence much of the violence occurs.

But in Paris, 42 million rides have been taken on the bikes--the velibs--provided by the city, in just 18 months of operation. Slide your credit card and go. Yay! Go green!

Sadly, half the original 15,000 velibs have been stolen or destroyed, and 1500 a day need repairs.

New bikes cost over $500, so the city is rethinking the system. Replacing all 20,000 bikes would cost $20 million, and at the rate they are being destroyed, that's about $10 million every three years. All per this BBC article, February 2009. And here's a YouTube video link called Velib Freeride.

And the vandals of Los Angeles, to whom storefronts and freeway signs are nothing more than fresh canvas for taggers, are probably thinking, "Eighteen months? Hell, we could destroy those bikes in eighteen days!"

The New York Times points out that their own proposed bike program has been put on hold.

Red, Red Wine

The French Paradox is common knowledge now, right? The French (who do get fat, btw) eat a high-cholesterol, high-saturated fat diet, yet suffer less from heart disease than Americans. We've all heard that red wine may be the reason.

A UCLA study breaks it down and even shows that red wine may fight Alzheimer's disease and certain tumors. Polyphenols, which occur naturally in red wine and "block the formation of proteins that build the toxic plaques thought to destroy brain cells, and further, ...they reduce the toxicity of existing plaques, thus reducing cognitive deterioration."

I'll drink to that! The study used polyphenol from grapeseed--how dull. Sticks in your teeth. I'll choose a nice Cab over grapeseed any day.

For the record, tea, nuts, berries, and cocoa also contain polyphenols. No one can prove that the polyphenols in Beaujolais are more beneficial than those found in peanuts. . . but do you want to risk your heart's health? After all, do peanut munchers at ballparks and dark bars where you drop the shells on the floor incur fewer incidents of heart disease than the French? I think not.

As for my crack about the French getting fat, I suppose I'd better back that up. Here's New York Times article from 2006 about the childhood obesity problem, which sounds a lot like the US' childhood obesity problem, with the same culprits identified: soda and snack machines at school, etc. The article also mentions that French women have less and less time to cook, and families have less and less time to eat together or linger in cafe's (which are in decline--see this post), and in short, the whole idealized French way of enjoying food is crumbling before a new paradigm of time-pressed workers grabbing high-calorie meals from fast food restaurants.

ABC News ran a piece about this in August 2008, which said, "An estimated six million French are obese, and 14 million overweight. France has an overall population of about 60 million. "

Decline of the French Cafe

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 600,000 bars and cafes in France. In 1960, there were 200,000 cafes in Paris alone. Today, there are less than 41,500 nationwide, and two more close every day.

Proprietors report business down by 20 to 30 percent. Daniel Perrey, the owner of a bar in Crimolois near Dijon, refers to the cafe as a "public living room," an image I really like and which other columnists have picked up

Bernard Picolet, the owner of the Paris cafe Aux Amis du Beaujolais, started by his family in 1921, says, “The way of life has changed . . . The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons . . . They eat less and spend less time at it.”

The reasons? Many. As the New York Times wrote: Not only are the French spending less, and drinking less . . .but on Jan. 1 of this year, . . . France extended its smoking ban to bars, cafes and restaurants. To this, add modern life. Cell phones, less downtime. The lure of trendier clubs. And, of course, "C'est l'economie, stupide!"

Is it overly romantic to lament this? I'll compare it to newspapers--an industry that also came into its own during the 19th century and reigned in its field through most of the 20th. Like the cafes, new technologies and lifestyles started to lure customers away over the last twenty years. During the last decade, young people especially view both cafes and printed newspapers as an old-fashioned product which will someday become downright anachronistic.

Viewed that way, I suppose all things run their course and are eventually replaced. Will a few historic and high-priced cafes survive for the tourists, so that we can sit and pretend that Hemingway or Picasso is scribbling at the next table?

For more info, check out this November 08 piece in the New York Times or the same piece in the International Herald Tribune, a 2001 story from CNN, or this 2007 Eursoc article about both the cafes of Paris and the pubs of London, also in decline.

Sarkozy Voodoo

Time for a story of France! This comes from Expatica.

Noble leader President Sarkozy failed in his attempt to stop K&B Editions, the maker of a Sarkozy voodoo doll, from distributing the product. His reasoning was that he owned exclusive rights to his own image. Right, run for president and retain rights to your own image and all the privacy you desire. Not!

The case was dismissed, but the worst part is that when Sarkozy filed the suit--his 6th since becoming president (who else did he sue? Mask-makers? stand-up comedians?)--the sales of the voodoo doll went up precipitously! In fact, the doll, which comes with a set of pins, is the #1 seller on Amazon.fr! 20,000 have been sold--he might as well have hawked them on Oprah!

The sayings on the doll, btw, are little bits of "wit and wisdom" mouthed by Sarkozy himself. Cost is 13 euros--could not discover whether bits of Sarkozy's hair or nail clippings are included.

Wicked Absinthe

Thanks to a short piece in Wired (last August) I learn that we in the US get better absinthe than the poor connoisseurs of France. Here's a link to a longer Wired 2005 feature--the August piece was a short follow-up. And if you thirst for more, check out the Wormwood Society, from whom I purloined this lovely pictures.

According to the August blurb , the US has been very slow to permit the sale of absinthe. Only four brands are allowed: Lucid, Kubler, Green Moon, and St. George Absinthe Verte. The maker of one, Ted Breaux, says of absinthe in Europe: "80 to 90 percent is industrial junk."

Ouch. We were thrilled, five years ago, to find we could buy small bottles of absinthe in France and bring them home as gifts. We got the absinthe spoons, the whole bit. (you are supposed to put a sugar cube on the delicately-slotted spoon, set that over the glass, and pour the absinthe over it into the glass.)

The liquor has such a mystique about it--if you've ever read Hemingway, you want to taste absinthe. After WWI, only Spain continued to sell it--absinthe was considered to dangerous and maddening to be marketed in most other countries. It's made from wormwood. Sounds gothic.

Now scientists say absinthe got a bad rap, so it's legal again. Will it ever be mundane? Doubt it.

Willi's Wine Bar Posters

Since 1983, Willi's Wine Bar in Paris has released an annual Bottle Art Poster by internationally recognized artists. Willi's is at 13 Rue de Petits Champs, a little north of the Jardin de Tuileries...if you're in the city.

The first edition (left) of their Bottle Art Series was actually a 1935 piece of art by AM Cassandre which had never been published before. The poster was probably part of an advertising campaign created in the 1930s for another wine shop, Nicolas--and for some reason was never used, at least until Willi's Wine Bar selected it.

This year's release (right) is by Jean Charles de Castelbajac, and you can buy it online for around $80 (or $450 for one of the 200 posters signed by the artist), here. Some of the out-of-print posters sell for close to a thousand dollars, so that seems a fair price. (Trivia point: Castelbajac's first Parisian store sat next to Willi's in the 1980s.)

Many of the past years' posters are available on line and they include art by photographer Lyu Hanabusa, scultor Alberto Bali, artists Tom Fowler, Wayne Ensrud, and others.

2nd trivia point: in the late 1970s, Mark Williamson, owner of Willi's Wine Bar, worked briefly for Steven Spurrier at Spurrier's specialty wine shop, Caves de la Madeleine. Spurrier was the instigator/organizer of the 1976 "Judgement of Paris" tasting that put Napa wines on the map, and is played by Alan Rickman in the movie Bottle Shock.

And--this is really trivial--I went to Napa and just missed the movie location filming. Dang! Would have loved to get a menu or something signed by Professor Snape.

How do you say Boat Jousting en francais?

From the Los Angeles Times, which also ran an article on the boat jousting festival of Languedoc. in Sete, near Montpellier. Just to show that boys will be boys all over the world.

World's best hot chocolate

When the topic of "the best hot chocolate in the world" came up on an egroup recently (due, no doubt, to the fact that all of us were dealing with summer heat by imagining ourselves in winter's cold), the winner by consensus was Angelina's in Paris--though other places certainly had votes.

Angelina's website was thoughtfully posted. The first thing to be gleaned from it is that the century-old (est. 1903) tea shop was bought by Groupe Bertrand in 2005.

Am I a luddite for being disappointed by this news?

Not that Group Bertrand is trying to franchise the place, of course. . . oh, wait, they are.

Well, if you had the best hot chocolate in the world, wouldn't you franchise it? I mean, look at these pictures. Doesn't that belong in Disneyland?