I suppose this is really a PSA to save me from having to tell everyone individually: I recently accepted a job offer for a postdoc – still in glacier modelling – at the University of Lausanne, so my partner and I will almost certainly be moving to the expensive-yet-scenic shores of Lake Geneva come late August. I’m very excited about this – the project should be really cool, and living in Switzerland will be interestingly different. If nothing else, a bit cooler in summer and a bit less air pollution will both be things that I very much welcome.
So, if you enjoy posts about me beating my head against international admin[1], you’re going to have a great summer and autumn.
If you don’t, you may not enjoy the year so much.
This is maybe therefore the place to reflect on my time in France, but I’m not going to do it, given I’m still here for a few months and it makes more sense to write that post when I’m actually about to leave, I think. So I’ll stick with this just being a PSA for the moment.
[1] Problems I’m already foreseeing: my French tax declaration for 2022, moving to somewhere that’s sort of EU-ish now we’re very definitely not in the EU, pension consolidation[2], finding out if Swiss government offices are open at sensible times, EUR-CHF exchange rates, what colour Swiss postboxes are.
[2] To be fair, that one’s been in my head for years already. I mostly avoid thinking about it if I can.
Along with a couple of history-nerd collegial friends – Etienne and JP – from the office, I went to Vienne, in the Rhône valley, for a day trip recently[1]. Vienne is not that far from Grenoble, but the way the rail network is set up means that getting there takes a stupidly long amount of time. Consequently, me and JP took the very short train to Moirans, a bit outside Grenoble, where we were picked up by Etienne, who drove us the remaining hour to Vienne[2]. After several days of bad weather, we lucked out and had a wonderfully warm and sunny spring day to explore the city, which meant the whole thing felt like a miniature summer holiday.
First, though, I should maybe explain why we were visiting Vienne, it not being all that well-known. These days, Vienne is a small provincial city of 30,000 on the Rhône, not far from the much larger conurbations of Lyon to the north, Grenoble to the east, and Valence to the south. A bit over 2000 years ago, though, it was the capital of the Gallic tribe of the Allobroges, and subsequently and consequently became one of the major cities in Roman Gaul. It also remained an important ecclesiastical centre well into the medieval period[3], but modernity relegated it to a back seat in favour of more industrial cities. As a result, the city has an extremely rich set of Roman-era monuments that remain standing, as well as extensive archaeological remains. And that was what we were there to see.
The archaeology is particularly rich, because of the fortunate urban development of Vienne. The original Gallic settlement was on the higher ground on the left bank of the Rhône, on the outside of a meander. Under Roman rule, the city expanded very rapidly, all along and inland from the left bank. But it also expanded across the river, to the low floodplain on the inside of the meander on the right bank. In the less-urbanised, post-Roman world, the city shrank back to its left-bank core area; the right bank was abandoned for centuries and later became the site of a couple of small medieval villages. Consequently, the buried Roman ruins were essentially undisturbed until the modern era, when they were able to be excavated using modern techniques. Many Roman finds had turned up in the area for centuries, and it was known that there were Roman remains on the right bank, but no one had really looked properly and it was assumed that there were a few isolated villas at most, not an urban area. So everyone got a bit of a surprise when modern building projects showed just how much archaeology there actually was! And, of course, the right bank being on the inside of the meander meant that the archaeology was protected from erosion by the river[4], which helped too.
So, we were quite looking forward to visiting all of this. After a slightly prolonged search for a parking space – it was the day of the first round of the French presidential election, so the centre was busy with people going to vote – we started with the Roman theatre of Vienne after a brief detour past the ruins of the Temple of Cybele[5]. You can buy a combined 48-hour ticket for all the city’s Roman sites for only 8 euros, which we promptly did, because it’s very much worthwhile. The theatre is very impressive – it’s cut into the side of one of the city’s hills and the acoustics, as I can confirm from some experimental archaeology with my colleagues, remain very good. It is, apparently, one of the largest Roman theatres remaining, and is also still used as a venue for concerts, plays, etc. That is an experience I would like to have! The town also had an odeon – essentially a smaller, more intimate performance space – the remnant depression of which you can see on a nearby hillside from the theatre. A circus also existed south of town, though the only remaining above-ground evidence is a single stone pyramid, but no evidence has been found that the city had an amphitheatre.
The remnants of the Temple of Cybele (my photo)Looking up at the theatre (my photo)And looking back down (my photo)
We then headed back into the town centre to see the temple of Augustus and Livia. This is a very rare example of a Roman temple surviving essentially intact in situ. This is largely because it was turned into a church and the spaces between the columns filled in in the medieval period, allowing it to be restored to its original state in the 19th century by simply clearing out the added material. It just sits in one of the town squares, surrounded by café tables in a rather incongruous manner. It’s quite impressive, I must say.
The Temple of Augustus and Livia. Actually quite small, but impressive nonetheless (my photo).
This being France, we were now approaching the time when everything would be shut for lunch, so we decided to spend our remaining half hour of the morning in the archaeological museum[6] on the left bank. The main archaeological museum is next to the excavations on the right bank, but the museum on the left bank exists because of a quirk of local politics: modern Vienne, and the left bank of the river at this location are in the département of Isère. The right bank is, however, in the département of Rhône. So the Isèrois authorities, not wanting to cede all the reflected Roman glory to those heathens in Rhône with their big archaeological site, made sure they got their own museum too. It is quite a small museum – three rooms in one of the central municipal buildings – but it is, to be fair, very well thought out. The first room has a selection of archaeological finds covering the entire history of the city, from prehistoric to modern times, as well as a useful chronology and artists’ impressions of what Roman Vienne would have looked like. Particularly notable finds are set apart in the middle of the room and picked out with their own information panels[7]. The second room is basically filled with porcelain – as Etienne remarked, there’s always one room like this in any museum – and the third room has a selection of local paintings. We were there for the first room, but, generally, the whole thing was well set out and gave you enough information to understand what was going on in the city across history without overloading you.
The RhôneAlso the Rhône, but going the other wayThe Tour de Valois – a remnant of medieval Vienne.Some non-Roman things in Vienne (my photos)
We then stopped for lunch, briefly inspected a section of excavated Roman road, and then crossed the river to go to the main museum and excavation. The museum is big, modern and very enjoyable to visit. There are a lot of mostly complete mosaics on display, as well as sundry other finds and a wide range of very well done model reconstructions of the buildings found at the adjoining dig site. You get plenty of information about the Roman world and culture, and Vienne’s place in the empire. But not to the extent that you feel as if your head has been stuffed full of facts. The only criticism we could really make was that the information provided was exclusively in French: audio guides were available in other languages, but all the printed text was in French. And sometimes the ground plans that the models were representing weren’t in the same orientation as the models, which required a certain degree of mental gymnastics to interpret. Otherwise, it’s great.
MosaicAnother mosaicA model (Vienne as a whole)Another model (the dig site)Mo’ mosaicsMo’ model (the warehousing)Things in the museum (Etienne’s photos)
After you’ve been through the museum, you head into the archaeological site itself, where you can see the ruins that have informed the displays you’ve just been walking through. Which is pretty cool. The site is extensive, so you can easily spend another hour walking around it, with convenient labels to help you interpret the maze of walls and roads that you can see. There’s also an experimental archaeology part, where reconstructions of Roman pottery kilns, vines, gardens and so on are studied and are able to be visited. It’s all really interesting to potter about in in good weather. What has been found at the site shows what we might call a mixed-use urban area. There are some grand villas – where many of the mosaics were found – next to smaller shops, workshops, and a frankly colossal waterfront logistical operation. Vienne was one of the major nodes in the Roman transport network, so was a key entrepôt for goods from the surrounding region and Gaul more generally, as well as trade coming up the Rhône from the Mediterranean. Etienne compared the warehouses to a Roman version of Amazon, and I don’t think he was far wrong. So you really get a sense of how a Roman town was set up, which is not something you often find outside of a trip to Pompeii.
The sort of thing you find on the dig site. I think this was an excavated pottery kiln (Etienne’s photo).
With that, we finished off our day in Vienne. We’d been walking around a lot and were all quite tired and ready to go home. We did, however, make one final stop, as it was on our way back to the car: we stuck our heads inside the cathedral, dedicated to St Maurice, a Roman soldier, whose body was nominally found nearby in the Rhône after his martyrdom. Due to Vienne’s medieval ecclesiastical importance, this is rather bigger and grander than you might expect for a small town, and includes some information on the medieval history of the city, making it a nice complement to the Roman sites.
After that, we really did finish and go home. I can thoroughly recommend Vienne as somewhere suitable for a day trip or weekend if you’re in the area. The town itself is just generally quite pretty and pleasant to explore, independent of the historical sites, and we left enough sites in the can that we could happily have filled another half a day. Being on the main Rhône valley railway, you’ve got good connections to plenty of other interesting places, so you could stay in Lyon, Montpellier or Avignon, for example, and take a day trip out to Vienne without too much trouble. It’s worthwhile.
[1] I cannot claim to have been the instigator of this trip; Etienne suggested it.
[2] If we’d got the train, it would have taken two-and-a-half hours; this way knocked a good hour off that.
[3] Perhaps most notably it was the site of the church council where Philip IV of France persuaded the Avignon papacy of Clement V that the Knights Templar were all thoroughly bad people and should be condemned, such that a nice person, such as Philip, could have all their money and property. But this had nothing to do with that and was all about the Templars being horrendously heretical. Honest.
[4] To take you back to GCSE Geography: the water flows faster on the outside of a meander or bend and slower on the inside. So rivers erode the outside of bends and deposit sediment on the inside, which leads to the bend becoming ever more pronounced. Eventually, you end up with such a pronounced meander that the river stops bothering and cuts across the neck, leaving you with that most famous of geographical landforms, the oxbow lake.
[5] And I really mean ruins here. There’s not much left above-ground – the area is a park.
[6] Actually, the Archaeology and Fine Art Museum.
[7] We were all very taken with the bronze statue of Pacatianus, a local man, who rose to become one of the most influential men in the empire in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD.
To meet up with a friend, I had a day trip to Annecy recently, a small city by its namesake lake in the Savoy region of France, not far from the Swiss border and Geneva. As you might expect, the town has something of an idyllic alpine setting, with the lake surrounded by mountains. It was, in fact, the second time I’d been, but the first time I actually had the opportunity to look round the place substantially. Slightly unfortunately, I’d managed to go there on the weekend where, after a very pleasant fortnight of spring weather, winter roared back with a vengeance, so it was rather colder and greyer than I’d hoped it might be. It did, at least, not actually rain or snow that much during the day.
Given the rather unprepossessing climatic conditions, we decided to focus on the town’s indoor attractions, rather than doing what we might otherwise have done: walking around the lake. We also spent a lot of time wandering around the very pleasant historic city centre, which is very much set up for tourists – every shop is either selling knick-knacks, is a restaurant or café, or is a hotel. But it’s pretty to look at, with small canals and nice buildings. And we did have a nice lunch before we started looking around, so that’s certainly an advantage of the tourist-centrism.
In terms of the indoor attractions on offer, the two main ones in the city centre are the château and the Palais de l’Île. The château is fairly self-explanatory as a concept: it’s the old medieval castle, rebuilt with various additions through the centuries. We were expecting to find some sort of historical museum, instead, on entering, we found ourselves in a contemporary art exhibition. Making our way rather rapidly through this[1], we found ourselves in some non-contemporary art, which was a major improvement, particularly the depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Brueghel the Younger[2], and some nice mountain landscapes by various French artists. Along the way, there were some information panels about the history of the castle itself, but they were relatively few and far between, and they lacked a bit of context. They sort-of assumed you already knew the history of Savoy to some extent, which was a pretty dangerous assumption in our case. That history was exactly what we’d been hoping to find out about – I had at least some idea of the general thrust of Savoyard history, but there were (and are) a lot of gaps in my knowledge.
But wait! It turns out there are, in fact, two museums in the castle. After coming out of the main one, you go across the courtyard into one of the other bits of the castle, where you encounter the second museum. Would this be the historical overview we were looking for?
No, it wasn’t. Instead, it was a biological-ethnographic-historical museum about Lake Annecy itself. A lot of it reminded me of GCSE Geography – there was a substantial amount on eutrophication, for instance – and there was some interesting stuff about the Neolithic history of the area, but, again, it wasn’t really what we’d been expecting. That doesn’t mean it was bad, just a very odd thing to find in a castle.
After that, we headed down to the Palais de l’Île, which is actually a fairly small building – it’s not a big island, ultimately. The key thing to remember about the palace is that it was where the prisons were, except for during the 50 years of the 14th century when it was a mint[3]. Variations on this fact are presented in each room on the ground floor of the palace, which, generally, has something of a National Trust vibe – many of the rooms have been left with period furnishings and objects, as in many of the stately homes in the UK. But, once you’ve absorbed the single fact about the uses of the building, there’s not much else of interest that you get told. It’s nice to have a look around too.
The top two floors of the palace were, again, very unexpected. There was some more contemporary art and a very detailed history of the growth of Annecy in the 20th century, which seemed pretty well done, but, frankly, wasn’t of great interest to us. We didn’t have the basic knowledge necessary to appreciate the details. But, still, it was an interesting little visit. You can get a combined ticket for both the palace and the castle for a smidge over 7 euros, and get round both easily in three hours, so it’s very convenient for a cold, rainy afternoon.
So yeah, Annecy is worth a visit for a day, but it does help if the weather’s good if you expect to spend more than half a day in the town. There is a third museum, farther out of the city, on animation in films, so I suppose we’d have visited that if we’d had more time, so a full day indoors is just about doable. The lake, though, is really the big attraction. But, still, we had a good time. Annecy is worth a visit.
Did someone say Obe-liskworld? No elephants, but turtles….Blossom and snow – what a combo!Annecy from the castle.
[1] Neither of us were terribly interested in the contemporary art.
[2] Maybe not quite as good as his eponymous grandfather, but still pretty good.
[3] It also became the courthouse, hence the ‘palace’ moniker, later on, but it was still a prison at the same time, unlike when the mint was in residence.
Don’t worry: the pun will become clear when you get to the end of the post.
Whilst on my recent holiday to the UK, as is my wont, I stopped in at the British Museum with my friend Mark to catch up on the latest exhibition. In this case The World of Stonehenge. So, straight off, I will say this was a very good exhibition. I found it interesting and enjoyable throughout. With that out of the way, let’s get down into the details.
Perhaps the first thing to mention is the title. The actual content of the exhibition heavily majors on The World and less on the Stonehenge. That’s not to say Stonehenge doesn’t feature – it’s used as the central thread drawing all the different parts of the exhibition together, and there are plenty of artefacts from the site – but the exhibition is not a detailed deep-dive into the archaeology and interpretation of Stonehenge itself; Stonehenge is instead used as the entry point for a much wider overview of Neolithic through to Iron-Age (Western) Europe. Personally, I think this makes for a much more interesting exhibition, as you get a much better sense of what was going on at a larger scale and how changes at Stonehenge fitted into that wider picture, rather than simply considering the site in isolation. But, be aware that that’s where the exhibition is going.
I was particularly interested by how the exhibition linked the decline of Stonehenge as a ritual site to the emergence of metallurgical technologies as the Neolithic gave way to the Bronze Age. The argument is that metalworking gave people the ability to create and carry portable, individualised wealth – necklaces, bracelets, ornaments, weapons – that just wasn’t possible before. If your main material is stone, everything is heavy and carrying large amounts of it on your body just isn’t practical. So, it’s much harder for individuals to accumulate and express wealth in any sort of meaningful amount, with the result that wealth display is focused at the communal level, rather than the individual. The upshot of this is that Neolithic communities were much more interested in investing in large-scale communal projects like Stonehenge, whereas Bronze Age communities lost interest, because they could express their wealth and status as individuals, with fancy metalwork, rather than needing to muck in on community-scale projects. This is something I’d never considered before, but, as a theory, it explains very well why all the Neolithic stone monuments show abandonment or significant changes when metal arrives on the scene.
You can do a lot with stone jewellery if you wantGROOVED WAREMace heads sculpted into faces. Yum.Take a guess as to what the thing on the right is.STONE BALLS. SO MANY.AXES! And stone knives cleverly sculpted to look like metal ones in a clear bit of ‘if you can’t beat them, try to join them’.BIG AXEThis is why stone became less fashionable.The Nebra Sky Disc. The earliest known representation of the heavens. Also shiny.Things in the exhibition
I was also very pleased by the display case containing two very ornate gold hats, dating to about 1500 BC, and likely used for ritual or display purposes. This is clear proof that my Theory of the Ancient World in Hats is extensible to the prehistoric period. Evidently, people have recognised the importance of hats since very early in human history, and I confidently await the discovery of some sort of Palaeolithic Ur-Hat[1] in East Africa or similar to prove that all human social structures can be explained in terms of hats.
HATS
In terms of critiques, I would have liked to see more acknowledgement that the vast majority of the exhibition was, essentially, a matter of interpretation of archaeological contexts. A lot of things were presented as factually correct, when that’s just not the case. Sure, they’re probably correct, or, at least, they’re more likely to be correct than the alternatives, but very little of what the exhibition was saying is ever likely to be provable as fact. A minor question of linguistic emphasis, but one I feel is important. On a similar theme, and I’m not sure if I’m correct here – I’d have to go back and re-read the information panels – but I got the impression that the exhibition kept talking about Neolithic peoples on either side of the Channel as English and French. Which, obviously, are meaningless labels that far back in the past. I think I’m misremembering references to England and France as convenient geographical shorthands, but it’s possible the demonyms pop up a few times. Even if they don’t, though, using the geographical labels, even if convenient, does tend to reinforce the idea of separate identities across the Channel, which, again, at this point, doesn’t seem very true. Possibly using ‘Britain’ or ‘the British Isles’ and ‘the continent’ might have been a better choice, though I’m not sure it would have made that much difference. Still, I feel something more satisfactory could have been devised.
I forget the significance of this one.Shiny bronze.Why not get your child a scary Danish doll? Complete with staring eyes and detachable penis!So yeah, violence still happened quite a bit back then.This is pretty much the best thing you could have in the Bronze Age in terms of clothing.Yes, it’s a prosthetic hand.SHINY GOLDMore things in the exhibition
However, there was one omission that the exhibition made that I feel is absolutely unforgivable: there was no reference to the excellently bad film Stonehenge Apocalypse. Quite why the exhibition did not engage with the heterodox hypothesis that the only thing we know for sure is that Stonehenge is a terraforming device built by aliens from another dimension I really can’t fathom. Are they hiding something?
No, obviously not. The film is extremely silly. But, possibly, a final closing section on Stonehenge in popular culture might have been an interesting way to end the exhibition on a slightly lighter note. This isn’t a strong criticism, though, but I feel it would have been quite fun if there had been a section on the topic.
Overall, then, apart from some very minor linguistic quibbles, I thought it was a really good exhibition and really set out the connectivity and dynamism of Neolithic Europe. Unrelatedly, I really want to go to Orkney on holiday now too….
Aiya Helcarda 