The Pleasure of Ruins

When I was eight years old, my mother bought me a copy of the Thames and Hudson 1964 version of Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins with wonderful photographs by Roloff Beny. I poured over the images, especially the black and white ones. It was not until much later that I noticed the text being special as well.

Dame Rose Macaulay was famous as a novelist and academic but also for a series of books which celebrated the pleasures of the everyday: Personal Pleasures (1935) followed by The Minor Pleasures of Everyday Life (1936). It was natural for this avid travellor to follow these two with Pleasure of Ruins in 1953. This was by far her longest book and she took 4 years to write it, travelling to her favourite sites in the Mediterranean, Near
and Middle East. Even before her death in 1958 she had discussed creating a pictorial version of Pleasure of Ruins, with an edited version of her text combined with photographs by Roloff Beny whose book The Thrones of Earth and Heaven (1958) she had greatly admired. In collaboration with Macaulay’s executor Constance Babbington Smith, Beny produced this new version. He expanded the focus to a worldwide gazeteer of sites and spent a year circling the globe creating the images.

Roloff Beny was born in Medicine Hat and went to the University of Toronto and spent the last 30 years in a flat overlooking the Tiber in Rome. He was a gifted artist in other media and it is this artistic sensibility which infuses his photographs with poignancy and emotion. He knows how to perfectly capture the beauty of the ruined fragments of the past.

Both Macaulay and Beny were interested in the intersection of history and ruination which ancient sites displayed. Both evoke the sensation of visiting these sites today and seeing nature reclaiming the land. When reading and viewing their books, one feels that they are taking you by the hand and guiding you through places which
have not been seen by man for millennia.

Happiness is a Pile of Rocks

Recently a friend* asked me “What makes you happy?” At first I was stymied and my mind drew a blank. Then a myriad of images flooded my mind. Once I had sorted through the images of friends, family, beloved pets, sunlight on water and dewdrops on roses, by far the largest category left were memories of happiness found on archaeological sites

What is it about ancient sites and even not so ancient ones that elicit so much pleasure? They are often intrinsically beautiful, often dramatically situated. Sometimes it is the very age that beguiles. One wanders through their spaces and feels surrounded by the people who have been there before, the original builders and inhabitants as well as the archaeologists who reclaimed them.

One of my favourite happy-inducing sites is the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi in Greece pictured above. I have had the pleasure of travelling there first as a teenager with my mother. I have been there alone and with groups. I have been there in blistering sun and blustering rain. I have been there when the fog rolled in and one had no trouble imagining the god speaking to his priestess. One glorious afternoon I sat on the steps of the god's temple and watched nesting falcons feeding their young on the cliffs towering above. At all such times the academic facts and figures slip away leaving one in a place where past and present meld.

Notes

*My friend is Victoria Ollers, the Associate Publisher of the new magazine in development What Makes You Happy. The first issue will be released before Valentine’s Day 2012. Check out .the information at http://happyhappyhappy.ca

UofT Fieldschool Revisited - YouTube Links

Check out the two videos which have been created by the Archaeology Centre of the University of Toronto, highlighting the LimeRidge Memorial site on the University of Toronto campus. Ted Banning is interviewed and speaks about the nature of the site in one, and the workings of the fieldschool in the other. They were filmed by Matthew Walls and Joanna Pokorny.
They can be found on the Canadian Archaeological Association's YouTube group canadianarchaeology. Look for:

Ted Banning Interview June 2011 UofT,
ANT 306 Field School UofT.mp4

Thanks to Mima Kapches of the Ontario Archaeological Society for directing me to these videos.

University of Toronto Fieldschool

Two weeks ago I visited my friends Sally Stewart and Ted Banning who were co-directing a fieldschool on the University of Toronto St George Campus. It was an Archaeological Methods and Theory course offered by the Anthropology Department and the Archaeology Centre. This year they were digging behind the Gerstein Library, on the western edge of Queen's Park just above the Taddle Creek.

This grassy knoll is the site of the Limestone Ridge Memorial Monument, commemorating the seven UofT students who died on June 2nd, 1866 in the Battle of Limestone Ridge, also known as the Battle of Ridgeway.

The Battle of Ridgeway was a victory for the invading Fenians, largely veterans of the US Civil War, against a Canadian force of largely inexperienced militia from Toronto and Hamilton. The monument was dedicated on July 1st 1870, a fitting Canada Day celebration as it was the first time that a fully Canadian force defended Canada from a foreign invader.

The 17 UofT students were trained in procedures in keeping with Ontario's Heritage laws and so did survey, mapping, shovel-shining, drilling and controlled stratigraphic excavation in one-meter squares. Amongst the finds were coins including a 1880's dime, pottery, and animal bones including a quantity of lamb bones in one square. A pipe stem fragment is decorated with a Mason's symbol. This is early in both the exploration of the site and in the analysis of the finds but the finds may represent a farmstead on the banks of the Taddle Creek, commemorative feasting in the vicinity of the monument or merely composting of gardens associated with the monument.

This is the second time that Ted and Sally have been able to dig on campus, allowing students to incorporate getting field experience with their regular lives. Hopefully they will be able to dig here again next year and further our knowledge of this intriguing part of the UofT St George Campus.