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.

Good Earth Floors--a How-to

Now that I'm exploring the wonders of Twitter, I come across tons more stuff. Just what I needed, right? Only, since tweets are limited to a couple of lines, I don't have to read through much, just skim. Like scanning a counter full of scarves for a color that jumps out at you.

Here's what jumped out today: an article from England about putting in an earthen floor.

Once as ubiquitous as thatch roofs, over the centuries earthen floors have gone the way of ... um ... earthen floors.  Dirt is something you shake off as you walk inside, right? Not what you walk on inside the house.

Looking for pictures, I found a site called Build and Rebuild. Their "Earthen Floor" link sent me here, which is where ia found the picture and step by step instructions for the home builder.

I recall reading about how wonderful earth floors were, in The Horse of Pride. Helias recalled how his mother swept it--swept the dirt off the dirt floor, an image hard to shake. And as the UK Tobias Jones piece shows (the same one referenced above), a well-designed earth floor hardens into a rich, beautiful surface...eventually.

In the meantime, though, you're dumping sand (or straw or ash), manure, and clay together. In this modern effort, Tobias Jones laid in a gravel subfloor (I doubt that our ancient ancestors did that) and uses a cement mixer to toss his ingredients together.

Lacking a cement mixer, I wonder how the Celts put together their floor. In small batches, perhaps, mixing sand, manure, and clay in a vat and then dumping it on ground? A plot of ground cleared of large rocks, foliage, roots, etc...I don't recall ever reading about the construction of an ancient floor. A gravel subfloor makes so much sense, but has such a floor ever been found?

Tobias points out a couple of real advantages to the earthen floor. Flaws--cracks, dips, etc--can be so easily fixed. Second, there are no health risks--no asbestos hiding in the mix, no chemicals, no skin irritants, etc. That is surprising--isn't manure a prime ingredient? Not that I'd be setting food on the floor, but  isn't manure rather aromatic in an unpleasant way? Tobias never mentions a troubling smell.

He finishes with his plans to finish the floor with a layer of beeswax, although linseed oil is another option. Linseed oil, I learn from another blog (I love cob), is combustible, so be careful with that. This picture--of an earth floor after being treated with linseed oil, came from that blog as well.

An expert called in to consult on the floor was a felow called "Old Boar": Eddie Wills. His expertise is in Iron Age crafts, among other things, and he's trying to set up an Iron Age Lake Village. Another name to run through Twitter!

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.

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?

The Archaeology of Caesar's Gaul

Just came across this webpage in BurgundyToday, which shows the sites linked to Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul--the later years, anyway.  Vercingetorix, Alexia, that sort of stuff.

I learned that three sites vie for the honor of being the site of the siege of Alesia, which surprised me. My old, dog-eared copy of Caesar's writings states unequivocaly that Alise Ste. Reine stands on old Alesai. According to Burgundy Today, two other places make that claim. Chaux-de-Crotenay is one; dunno about the other.
The Battle of Alesia, pitting Caesar (with Roman Legions) against Vercingetorix (with a loose confederation of Gaulish tribes), was the defining fight of Caesar's eight-year conquest. Many huge fights occurred before it, and other rebellions and uprisings followed, but Alesia--because of Caesar's writings--is seen as the key fight, and the one that ultimately decided the fate of Gaul. Livius.org presents a description of the fight, and I borrowed this picture of the Alise Ste. Reine site from their website.

Musing on Celts and Written History

Most folks think Irish when they think Celts, and that's fine. Ireland, after all, is still the only Celtic country never conquered by Rome. When scholars and others speculate about Celtic society, they use records found in Ireland because those are the oldest available records about Celtic customs.

The earlier Celtic people of Ireland, Britain, the Iberian peninsula, France (Gaul), Switzerland, Eastern Europe, etc., did not write down their history. They considered history far too important to commit to writing. Instead, it was memorized by the educated classes--the druids--who could interpret it properly.

Buggers. Even that previous paragraph contains a ton of untestable assumptions--about the druids' roles, and the reasons that histories and beliefs were not written down, f'r instance.

Since there are some examples of these ancient tribes using Roman or Greek letters to note very mundane things--like accounting records or praises of deities--we know that the Celts used writing. Julius Caesar (not an unbiased source, IMHO) says the druids would not put their beliefs in writing for religious reasons. Unless we unearth a 2200-year-old history etching somewhere, I guess we have to settle for that explanation.

And that leaves the writings of Celtic Ireland, both pre and post Christian, to give us a clue to earlier Celtic beliefs. But the oldest existing records of ancient Irish history are still about seven centuries removed from the days of an independent, non-Romanized Gaul, and seven hundred years is A Long Time. Not to mention the geographic distance...

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but think about it. Seven hundred years ago, chances are the city/town you live in did not exist. Maybe your country did not exist. Seven hundred years ago, Europe was still recovering from the Black Death that wiped out a third to a half of its population. The Inquisition was just ramping up, so free thought was not only outre but downright suicidal. Most people in Europe were illiterate peasants who lived on the verge of starvation. How much have we changed since then? An immeasurable amount.

What's the point? Just that it seems awfully tenuous to me to speculate about the B.C. Celts and their society based on early Irish texts, such as a law code (the Brehon) first codified in 438 A.D. I'm not sure how old the oldest examples of the law code are--certainly more recent than 438--but tradition says that the laws date back to the 8th century B.C.

Tradition is very unreliable. My own family tradition handed down the story for 2 or 3 generations that a great-great-great grandfather of ours was a judge in the old country. Guess what? Someone did some Real Research and found out the tradition was completely bogus. No judges, only farmers and seed merchants. Period. So if tradition can be fictionalized within sixty or seventy years in one family, what can happen over seven centuries?

OTOH...This was a society that trained men and women to memorize long histories, we are told. And if the histories were sacred to them, would anyone dare screw them up? But OTOH...even written histories get warped over time. Every re-writing changes something very subtly, doesn't it? Language changes, and those who study this claim that it changes at a measurable rate.

I got into an argument with an engineering type person a couple of months ago about that. He was irate that language changed. He felt that someone should stop it from changing. He truly believed that was possible, and he felt that due to a lack of conscientious effort on the part of English professors, he had been cheated out of his right to comprehend and enjoy Shakespeare and Chaucer in their original words.

I thought he was crazy, though I didn't say so. Still, he grew quite heated over his points, and I can only assume that most people don't bother arguing with him often.

I digress. But this is a blog; I'm allowed.

Everything You Want to Know About Druids

There are several books with the title "Druids," including a novel by Morgan Llywelyn which I sorta reviewed here. Tons o' fun.

A digression:

You know that when you read a novel, the author is allowed to Make Things Up, right? This picture, for instance, represents a lurid, fictional scene. Not Real.

With non-fiction books, the author is not supposed to Make Things Up. Some of them do, though. How can the reader beware of this practice?

Your best bet is to look at the credentials of the author.

If s/he is a university professor, chances are the information in the book is carefully researched. The author has an academic reputation to uphold, and that probably is more valuable to him or her than the success of the book.

If the author has no real credentials, and especially if the book is self-published or from a publisher you never heard of, be careful of taking the words to heart.

Digression over.

The nonfiction books with "Druid" in the title fall into two categories: those dealing with the historical, Celtic Druids, and those devoted to neo-druidism.

The two categories are completely separate. Neo-druidic books that promise to teach druidism are promoting a philosophy, religion, and lifestyle that was invented in modern times, and uses impressions of ancient druids as its inspiration--like the happy couple to the right.

Look, no one knows what ancient druids believed. They left NO written record, and the writings about them are filtered through Romans and Greeks. Those authors may have been lying, or misinformed, or faithful reporters...we don't know.

That leaves a handful of books by scholars and historians about druids. Of these, I recommend Peter Berresford Ellis' book, The Druids -- or, as Amazon bills it, A Brief History of the Druids (The Brief History). Even though it features Stonehenge on the cover (a construction that preceeds Druids and Celts by a coupla millennia), it's the most recent book that gathers together all that we can know about Druids--from archaeology (including Lindow Man), ancient writing, and Irish and Welsh traditions.

Ellis takes the position that Druids were the educated segment of society--the doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, and yes, priests. He compares them to the Brahmins of India. He makes conjectures, sifts through the evidence. If you read a book by a different expert, s/he might have different opinions.

Druids are mysterious. They were the elite and guarded secret information. That information died with them, though.

I'm reminded of a line from the book Indeh by Eve Ball--a book about the Apache...a line I can't find right now! Dang. I hope I don't butcher the quote, but one of the Apaches who was telling his history turned to Ms. Ball and said, "You white people, you keep everthing up here in your head, and nothing in your heart."

Why didn't they write anything down? I imagine they didn't want their most sacred information being poured over by whatever enemy got their hands on a scroll, but that's my opinion.

The Original Spinners and Weavers

There are three fat spiders in this picture. The wind was blowing one of them (top leftmost), but you can still see her.

I don't like spiders, but I am grateful to this trio who inspired me to compare weaving with web spinning. If spiders are sloppy with their webs, they don't eat. If they don't repair the web, food gets away.

I compared them to a hardworking woman of the Iron Age in my novel, and the first few chapters are now online. Go, me! The entire novel is complete, so if anyone knows an agent and would like to get me out of a hundred slush piles, please drop me a line!

Celtic Languages: Cornish

There are 300 fluent speakers of Cornish--the Celtic dialogue of Cornwall--left, and they're working hard to ensure the language doesn't die. So says Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times on July 25, 2009. He quotes a native speaker relaying a folktale:

"Y'n termyn eus passys, 'th era tregas yn Selevan den ha benyn yn tyller cries Chi an Hordh. . . . "

Which sounds a lot like "In termenus passeus thur trigus 'n sleven..." You can hear it on the
Times site--just go to the insert.

The Cornish language was saved from near-death in the early 20th century, when scholar Henry Jenner gave a speech before the Celtic Congress, which was dedicated to preserving Celtic Culture. They had not accepted Cornish as a Celtic language, but all assembled spoke either Welsh, Irish, or Breton--all indisputably Celtic tongues. Jenner gave the speech in Cornish, and everyone understood. Ta-da!

Since Cornwall is in the utter south of England, and just north of ancient Gaul (France), it makes sense that their language, like Irish and the others, would share common words--enough to be mutually comprehensible.

Scholars like Simon James and Peter Berresford Ellis are in agreement on this much, at least: that Celtic was an Indo-European language (as were Latin and Greek and Sanskrit) that broke into several separate languages. The "Gaulish" tongue is largely lost--we know only a few hundred words. The language of Celtic Iberia is likewise a mystery. But several places managed to hold onto their language, like Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and yes--Cornwall.

Parts of Brittany also hold onto a Celtic language: Breton. The history of that tongue is unique. Although Brittany was considered part of ancient Gaul around 2,000 years ago, the Roman conquest and subsequent Romanization of the area did it damage--how much is up for debate. Many folks fled to southern England when the Romans moved in, and took their language with them.

Five hundred years later, migration moved in the other direction. Invading Anglo Saxons drove a lot of folks from Cornwall back to Brittany, with their version of Celtic-speak. The Breton language to day is derived from that--from Cornish--and not from ancient Gaulish.

Spinning at the Ren Faire

Ha! I knew I had pictures of spinning somewhere! This is from the 2006 Renaissance Faire near Irwindale, CA. The lady--she seems too demure to be called a wench--is holding a spindle in her right hand.

In the first picture, she's wrapping the spun thread around it. The spindle is actually upside down; when she gives it a flick and lets it go (as described in the previous post), the weighted end will be down and the little hook--which appears to be at the bottom now--will be at the top.

In fact, that's exactly how the spindle is positioned in the second picture. The reason that I went with a different picture to begin with is that it just seemed very rude to chop the lady's head off when she really did not do anything deserving of such a fate.

In the second picture, you can also see the distaff tucked in her belt--or maybe pocket. This stick holds the prepared wool. In the 21st century renaissance, the wool is all even, sparkly white, and lovely. In Ye Real Olde Days, the clumps of wool were not so nice looking.

Why am I writing about spinning? Well, this is what women did in Gaul and in almost all European lands. Spindle weights are found all over Europe, as are weaving looms or the remnants of looms. And where there's looms, there's got to be thread, which implies spinning. Some of the looms are over 5,000 years old. The stone weights are a little harder to date, I think, because stones can only be dated in context with other goods found near them--they're not organic, so no radio-carbon dating.

If you're writing about a woman in Gaul, or in any pre-Renaissance setting, she probably spent her day spinning. Even the wealthy.

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.

Own a 2000-year-old Celtic pin

Seriously. For $35, this can be yours.

Check it out at Gaukler Wares. Really.

And you don't even have to dig it up. Well, ok, if you want to bury it in your backyard and get the camera out and pretend you dug it up, go ahead.

Or you could buy Gaukler's reproduction of a Celtic brooch for $45.

Am I the only one who finds it weird that an ancient treasure costs less than a modern reproduction? If women can be divided into those who wear jewelry and those who would rather look at it in a display case, I'm in the latter category.

I don't know if anyone vets Gaukler's non-custom, really old stuff as authentic, but I imagine it's for real. After all, numismatic sites sell Armorican coins for under $100, so clearly not every treasure is winding up in museums.

Besides the custom, modern work (which is lovely and very reasonably priced), you can get artefacts of the ancient world--Rus, Viking, Medieval Europe, Byzantine, Roman, Iron Age, Chinese--it's all there.

Amiens Cathedral

I haven't written about Gaul lately, have I?

this is a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral of Amiens in the summer, when it is cleverly lit to look as it did when it was first built, and all those sculptures were actually painted.

Through August, the lighting starts at 10 P.M.; through September 21, at 9:45 P.M.--that's if I'm reading the website correctly. The spectacle ends then, until the Christmas holidays.

Amiens is a sweet, quiet town at the lowest part of the Somme, with just enough old world charm, canals, art and trendy shops to be well worth a visit. It's named for the Ambiani, the Celtic tribe that controled the territory way back when.

I'm International!

Huzzah!

My article "Resting on a Knife-Edge" is in the new issue of Ancient Warfare. Great illustrations, too.

The article is about Caesar's war with the Belgic tribes of Gaul in his second campaign year, and his near-disastrous run-in with the Nervians. Other articles in the magazine discuss aspects of Julius Caesar's strategy, his legions, the last stand of Vercingetorix in Gaul, and--leaving Caesar aside--Hoplite shields.

Hmmm...what's the dollar-euro exchange rate right now?

Go subscribe! Really, the synchronized diving finals can wait.

Caesar in Gaul

An exciting find in the Rhone River in France: a bust of Julius Caesar tentatively dated to 46 BC. That would be eight years after he put his finishing touches on the conquest of Gaul.

This AP pictures is copied from the CNN story. CBS and other outlets cover it, but all reports seem to be the same, original AP text.

The bust had been thrown into the river with other items, including a bronze satyr about 27 inches high, and a marble Neptune, 5' 9".

"The site has barely been skimmed," according to Michel L'Hour, who is in charge of the divers who found the articles a few months ago. More dives and research will be done this summer.

The site is near Arles, a city founded by Caesar. The Celts had a habit of making river offerings, but to throw a bunch of Roman statues into the river--from a city founded by Romans, who were probably hated--may have less to do with offerings and more to do with revolt. My guess. Since the statues aren't destroyed or broken though, who knows?

New Site in Brittany!

For nine months, archaeologists in Brittany have been studying 60 (so far) menhirs unearthed at Kerdruelland--about eight miles from Carnac (pictured). The stones were toppled around 2,500 years ago and have since lain in mud, which is good. The UK Independent has a story about this new discovery, but sadly, not too many other places do.

Professor Jean-Paul Demoule points out that the site was preserved because it was destroyed and buried, ironically . A 3000-square meter preliminary dig will soon be ten times larger. This is big news.

How come pagan and megalith fan websites and blogs picked up on this, but no mainline news agencies have? Geesh. Can't CNN stop watching Britney for five minutes to bring us important news on the real Brittany?

Neolithic Allee Couverte

The Allee Couverte Du Mouhau Bihan sits on private property in Finisterre Dept., Brittany, France. It wasn't put up by Celts (or Gauls), but by the Neolithic people that preceded them.

It's about 5,000 years old, and you get a sense of its size by the children climbing on the far end. The entrance is lined up with the north.

Some of the stones are carved inside with what could be spearheads, or shepherd's crooks...or may mean something else entirely.

Brittany is full of megalithic structures--from the rows of stones at Carnac to single menhirs, to allees couvertes like this. Legend says it was once the grave of a giant.

Very few guidebooks tell much about these archaeological wonders and I can't understand why; what could be more fascinating than to touch and enter a structure raised and carved 5,000 years ago? I've found one, priceless, thoroughly researched guide, though--not on the travel shelves, but something to request from academic libraries

The Archaeology of Brittany, Normandy and the Channel Islands: An Introduction and Guide by Barbara Bender. Only problem is that it's now 22 years old.

Battle of the Sabis

Seems like a thousand years (or a bit over 30 generations) since I had occasion to actually write about Gaul. Here, though, is Livius' marvellous website devoted to the Battle of the Sabis, the 57 BC fight between Julius Caesar's legions and the Nervian Confederacy of Northern Gaul (Belgium, they called it--but it was a much broader swath of land that what we call Belgium today.)

The pictures on that site--including my favorite here, which belongs to Livius & is © Marco Prins and Jona Lendering--are of the Selle River. As I understand it, other locations have their adherants, and no discoveries have settled the matter. No battlefield remnants have been found, IOW. I think the Escault River is another possible site.

Still, these pictures are great, very well researched, and fit all that is known about the Sabis River site. Except . . .

. . . well, the picture right above is, according to the site, a hill called Le Quesnoy, and the spot where Caesar's 10th Legion had parked. A hill? Seriously? The "slope" to the right leads down to the river.

Here is what Caesar says, according to my copy of The Conquest of Gaul:

"2:18 At the place that the Romans had chosen for their camp a hill sloped down evenly from its summit to the Sambre. Opposite it, on the other side of the river, rose another hill with a similar gradient, on the lower slope of which were three hundred yards of open ground. . ."

Sambre was the Roman's name for the river.

The Livius site says this last picture looks from the Nervian side of the river, looking toward where the 12th and 7th legions of Rome assembled. Here, yes, I do see a hill. However, most of the landscape in the pictures (and there are over a dozen) show land I consider pretty flat.

In fact, I will throw in the small version of a last picture, showing the Nervian campsite. Remember, this is supposed to be a similar hill, with 300 yards of open ground on its lower slope.

I guess the jury's still out.