Today in my Medieval Lit class, we watched part of a documentary called "Story of England." It discusses a project done in an area in England called Kibworth. The town (village? hamlet? I don't really know what the distinction would be) had a large quantity of really old documents, and they did a bunch of small archaeological digs and used some really cool equipment that detected magnetic changes in the quality of the ground to find remnants of ancient buildings and roads. What they found is that there was a settlement in the area predating the arrival of the Romans in the first century. The first century! I can't even comprehend that length of existence! As was mentioned in class on Wednesday, the US is extremely young, and we simply don't have the same kind of history that England does—Chicago and LA certainly aren't sitting on ancient Roman settlements. It's exciting in a way that I haven't thought about before. I've been so caught up in modern and early modern England that I haven't even considered the more ancient history that will be there all around us. Or, you know, under us. It also gave me more of a feeling that there's going to be so much to find in England. Granted, I'm no archaeologist and I'm not at all likely to make any ground breaking discoveries, but there's simply so much there to be discovered (and, in my case, mostly rediscovered!). I just can't wait to go!
No comments:
Post a Comment