Secrets and Hidden Stories

I don’t know if you know this about me, but I have a BA in Anthropology, specializing in Archaeology. For a while, I was an archaeological assistant at an internationally-acclaimed museum, and I looked after the Archaeology Collections, which included things like prehistoric tools, remarkable works of art, and human remains. It was one of those jobs that I didn’t fully appreciated until I left, because I was too young to realize that not everyone is given such an opportunity in their early 20s. C’est la vie.

While I am no longer working in the field of archaeology, I still love prehistory, and anything hidden below the surface of the soil has a tendency to set my heart all aflutter.  I first realized this passion for the old and dirt-encrusted during the mid-1980s, when I watched a BBC documentary called ‘The Celts’. I taped it (oh, VHS!) and watched it so often that I actually broke the tape. I loved it.

You can watch the whole series on YouTube, and never ever wear it out!

In the years that followed, I became fascinated with the pre-history of Britain, and eventually went to the UK where I met all sorts of people and visited all sorts of museums and had a very merry time.  The first time I visited Stonehenge, I stood and counted all the burial mounds; it gave me shivers. Here’s a really spectacular documentary about the landscape around Stonehenge, which also gives me shivers. Next time I went to the UK, in the mid-90s, I took my new husband with me, and forced him to visit all manner of sites and barrows. I spent a lot of time running around fields, all giddy because ‘there used to be a huge Celtic settlement here!!!!’ and he was rather unimpressed that I only wanted to visit things that didn’t exist anymore. If he was having a terrible time, he was very gallant about it. We met lots of archaeologists, Celtic enthusiasts, and scholars.

So yesterday, I figured I’d watch The Celts again (no doubt inspired by the whole Scottish Independence hullabaloo that’s dominated my television and internet feeds). It was the first time I’d watched the program since 1988, when the tape broke. I squealed in delight when I discovered that many of the archaeologists and scholars we’d met in the 90s had been interviewed for the documentary — a strange moment of realizing, 20 years later, that I’d met people who had been so formative in my own archaeological pursuits, and I hadn’t even realized it at the time. Life is weird.

Y’know, in retrospect, it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t figure it out, because I would’ve been all tongue-tied and fan-girly. I would’ve embarrassed myself terribly.

Stonehenge, circa 1877.