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The last night of wild camping I slept in this private graveyard. Two brothers who died round 1904 age 37 and 41. At the campfire some neighbors came over along with about two million midges and said that those brothers were heir to a fortune and drank themselves into the grave.

Even though it was such a gothic spot for the hammock I felt a bit disappointed in the tree itself. However lying there that clear night I saw the branches fabulously twisting upwards like corkscrews. Once again my vision is so sadly small!
In Sanscrit the word for demon is ‘Asura’, meaning ‘One of highly limited vision’. The Sanscrit word for god is Sura or ‘One of unlimited vision’.

Hey, as Geoff would have said. Let’s face it I have demonic tendencies. Like the way I think about archeology is that it’s boring. Actually part of my mind has opened up the last years to the realization that it possibly isn’t but most of me is still closed. So I asked Malcolm if we could have a session on a hill fort really seeing if we could feel the past. What could we actually sense, is there anything there? It was hard. Most people lay down and had a bit of a kip. But we did try too.

And it was hard in just the way that storytelling can be hard. I kept getting a picture of a fake paper mâché Iron Age dwelling, or some corny film. And I realized that so much of what is meant to take me back to my ancestors actually stands in the way. Then the larks were singing particularly loudly and I wondered if anyone had lived up there who could interpret the language of birds. Got glimpses into the skills as Wilf said. Untold dimensions of unwritten skills they kept alive. Steve saw a pointed hill in the distance. He sensed that to live all your life outside in the constancy and connection with
that landscape may bring a quite other security.

There’s no time to tell of the jeweled meadow, the singing path, the fiddle played in the distance. So I settle for one last picture. The final night we congregated in the upstairs room of a pub in one of the many incredibly cute (sorry I am a crass romantic foreigner in these parts) towns we encountered. We got ‘latterkrampe’,a Norwegian word meaning laughter cramps, from watching ourselves on video walking so solemnly and weirdly. Then someone suggested the bee song Eka had taught us. It’s African and we all started humming away. And it just went on and on. And we were linking and buzzing this way and that. Buzzing and buzzing, each with our own buzz but each part of the bigger buzz. And then James dragged Malcolm into the centre and we buzzed round our queen. And it seemed like the perfect metaphor. I remembered my bees the week before, how as one dies two others instantaneously pick up the little body and remove it for the good of the hive.

Without the contribution and the willingness of each of these different walkers and supporters this magical journey could never have taken place.

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One thought on “Archaeology is so boring

  1. It really is practically unthinkable to see well-aware people on this matter, unfortunately you appear like you realize those things you’re preaching about! Appreciation

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