Poetic Stones
Summer months may be gone, but that doesn't mean the memories are over.
One of the best places I’ve been this year in the summer was the Northern Archaeological Depot in Nuis (NAD), in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands.
NAD manages archeological findings and associated information in a sustainable manner. In addition, the depot makes findings and research documentation available to independent research, groups, and organisations either for investigation or exhibits—a treasure for archeologists exploring Stone Age Archaeology.
Have you ever been somewhere that you would go to that place over and over again without getting bored?
Archeological places do that to me.
I’m very fortunate to have been born and have spent most of my childhood in a place full of archaeological gems. My favourite of the more than 29,000 archaeological sites in Mexico is the ‘Templo Mayor’ (Main Temple), at the heart of Mexico City’s downtown. Its significance to me is enormous as I was born there, and because I spent several summers of my childhood with my siblings as our parents took us around Mexico. These family travels have allowed me to appreciate archaeology since.
The Anthropology Museum of Xalapa (picture), has amazing pre-Columbian relief stones. Among them there is a system of hieroglyphics in the form of animals, as birds, and more abstract symbols that continue to be deciphered by scholars in North America.
Which prompts why archaeology is linked to poetry.
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The answer is rather simple, since archaeologists are experts to use poetry for their interpretations of the past because it imitates memory and it provokes nostalgia. That bittersweet emotion often defined as a strong desire to be close to people far away, or because we live far from a special place to us.
Such feeling tends to inhabit our memories and is the one we experience most intensely when we think of the past. Such bouts of nostalgia are for psychologists part of positive emotions—although englobe tones of loss.
The other images above and below are of another great place in the Netherlands: the Neolithic and Megalithic stones in Havelterberg in Darp numbered D53 and D54.
?? What else I’m thinking about:
#archaeology #archeology #stoneage #research #documentary #travel #tourism