Tag Archives: antiquities

Portrait of a stone

Ten thousand years before now, or twelve, or fifteen: this area of deciduous trees and low shrubs on the calm shores of the Ionian Sea, rich with wild animals and migrating birds, is seeing the seasonal change to cooler temperatures as Autumn progresses. There is a clearing in the woods, near the top of a hill which looks out over a deep streambed, where a small group of people are sitting around a crackling fire at dusk. There are accumulations of husks, stones and plant matter nearby, and a few low huts built of mud and stones where children are sleeping. There is softly-spoken sporadic conversation, and the air is filled with the steady click-clicking of stone on stone. After the evening meal, a few people are patiently hitting flinty stones together and shaping essential tools for their survival.

The gulleys are filled with large spherical river stones. Ground to a smooth roundness, they have been shaped by millions of years of moving water, the same water that has patiently carved out the deep ravines which distinguish this territory. One of these stones, the size of a small loaf of bread, is carried to the fireside and considered, turned over and weighed in the hand. Repeated blows with another stone gradually create a small concavity at its center, one on each flattish side. There are almond trees in the hills, and the fruits of these are an important part of their simple diet. The stone will serve as a stabilizer for the task of cracking the nuts and extracting the meat. Placed in the small indentation the almonds will not carom away when hit by the cracking stone, a vital factor in the speedy production of valuable nutrition.

Seasons fly by, and the people around that fire move on and new generations of people come and go through the area. The stone lies forgotten in an area of darkened earth, rich with accumulations of organic material, stone chips and animal bones. Leaves drift over the campsite, rains wash drifts of fine sand over the stone, and it moves toward a deeper sleep in its bed of soil.

Some of the nomadic peoples become organized, begin to cultivate crops, civilization progresses.  Groups of human beings arrive and then move on.   Egypt rises and then gradually fades. The Greeks cross the sea to discover that this fertile terrain can become a breadbasket for them, and trees are felled in amazing numbers to build the ships which allowed Greece to dominate the ancient world.  Wheat fills the cleared fields as Magna Graecia grows to its full power.  Beautiful pottery is made of clay from these bluffs, farmhouses are built and then fall into disuse as the ages progress. Deeply-rutted footpaths are worn into gulleys which lead down to the original river bed, and goats are led along these paths continuously over the generations. The trails grow ever deeper, carved by animals, people, and rain. The stone lies undisturbed.

It waits, contemplative, as ever more people gather on the hilltops  for protection from roving invaders and mosquitoes.  Walls are built, winding goat paths become roads carved spiraling around the hills, crops are planted. Roots of trees, oak and olive and almond, sometimes nudge the stone as they grow and then die, shifting it slightly where it lies. Wars are fought, masterpieces of art are created, and enlightenment is followed by darker times. Pestilence thins the population, but there are new arrivals from northern Europe, northern Africa and the East.

Technology advances toward a crucial change: modern plowing techniques will rouse the stone from its sleep. This countryside is now part of a modern nation, Italy, united in theory if not in fact. Families move away, migrating in large numbers to the “new” continent.   World War One leaves its grim mark, and World War Two follows shortly after, as the century of amazing progress and breathtaking suffering rolls on. Children of emmigrants return to re-establish their roots. The last mule-powered plows are disappearing in the second half of this century, and tractors are endowed with ever more powerful equipment.

The stone is suddenly pulled from its resting place and deposited in the sun in a field of wheat stubble. It is bumped and nudged, clanging against the iron plows and harrows which pass over it, moving here and there over the surface of the field as the years go by. It is primarily an irritation to farmers. Other stones and pottery fragments gradually are broken down by the constant grinding of farming equipment.

One day a hard rain falls on the newly-plowed field and washes the surface of the stone, leaving a light-colored surface which shines like an egg in a nest of brown soil. A woman walking with her dogs, eyes to the ground, picks it up and realizes that she has found a special piece of history. Excitedly, she carries it home and washes away the remaining dirt, reveling in her stroke of good luck.

And so the nutting stone has found a new, if temporary, home. It occupies  the place of honor on my mantlepiece, a mute but powerful testimonial to…what?     Time, tenacity, permanence, impermanence?   Any of these, or none:   for me, it is simply magical.

Image

                                     “River”  pencil on paper

Underneath

Traces of the past and clues to the present are hidden just below the top layer of the soil.  The surface yields clues to recent events as well, and because of this, I am always looking for more, eyes to the ground.  I might have been a tracker, and I know if someone, or something, has passed by recently.  Wet trails in the dewy grass,  small paw prints,  a pile of warm feathers left by a fox.  A darker patch of soil.  Trash and treasure are  both hidden,  but  near, waiting for discovery.

One spring, as I marked out rows in the garden, my heavy hoe kept bouncing back up at me instead of sinking in the soil.  Strange.   I spied a pinkish smoothness, and hooked my hoe under it to pull it out.  A root?  It was a scary thing to find underground, and my thoughts sidled spider-like toward all things Mafia.   It was about three feet long and rubbery, fresh.  The dogs were suddenly attentive as the cow’s trachea came into the light of day.  How did it get there?   A canine trophy, carefully buried, to be enjoyed later.

I found a five-cent coin, dated 1885,  in my vegetable  garden.  It was  badly corroded and hardly legible.   The Lira was originally divided into cents, with one hundred of these comprising one Lira.   At the twilight of the currency, fifty-thousand Lire might  fill  half your car’s gas tank.    I thought of the poor farmer who lost it;   it must have been disheartening, so long ago.

A tractor pulling a large  plow scraped up some terracotta tiles;  roof tiles, larger and flatter than the curved kind used in recent centuries.   I know from my experience with excavations that where there are roof tiles,  there are often tombs.    In fact, Greek tombs were commonly made from  these.     The countryside where we live was divided into neat plots of land in 500 B.C., and people often buried their dead close to home if they weren’t grand enough, or near enough, to be included in the organized necropoles closer to the ancient town center.  Up the hill from this  area there is a large area of  rich  dark soil, and an extensive  jumble of broken pot shards.  It represents the farmhouse that belonged to the occupants of this parcel of land, and so it would follow that family burials would not be far away.   Around  the broken tomb  I found a beautiful and simply-painted lebes gamikos, as well as pieces, broken long ago, of other ceramic objects.    The pot is not nearly as old as my lithics are,  some of which  date back as far as twenty thousand years,  but it had been lying in its forgotten grave for five hundred years by the time Christ was born.  It is a sad fact that  the advent of mechanical farming has led to a swift and relentless  fragmentation of all antiquities which lie  in the uppermost layers of soil.  A large plow can reach as deep as five feet and damage or obliterate all it comes in contact with.  And there are also bulldozers, and a thing which is called a ripper, which describes its effect poetically.

River stones lie beside the roads, this having been the site of swiftly-moving water  millions of years previously.  All of the stones are rounded and smooth, but once in a while I will find one which has the shape of a cork from a wine bottle, larger at one end and narrowing in a pinched arc toward the other.  I imagine how it was shaped, trapped in an eddy of the stream, turning dizzily, rubbing continuously against its brethren which surround it on all sides.   Ground to a distinctive shape over years, these stones are an illustration of persistence, and movement, and transformation over time.

One Spring day as I was hacking out crab grass, I moved my wedding ring onto my smallest  finger, the better to grasp the handle of my hoe.   As I was throwing the weeds away I accidentally tossed my ring away as well.  Hours of searching produced no results, and within the week my husband and I went and picked out another one for me to wear.  Years later, again pulling weeds, I found it again, shining in the newly-turned earth.  Now I have two, should I ever need a spare.

This is the dwelling place of giant toads, some as big as broiler chickens.  They are reserved and single-minded, as they search for insects in damp places, and often hide in corners of the yard where weeds have grown tall.  We are careful when mowing the grass not to tip the machine up and lower it onto these weedy islands, as two have come to a tragic end in this manner.  One day I found a dead toad, poor soul, and I buried it in  a secret corner of the compost pile.  A year later I  gathered its bones and bleached them white.  I keep them for use in my art, and fondly  remember their original owner.

Following the sheep paths which criss-cross the edge of our  fosso,  there are bits and pieces of ceramics and glass, rusted iron agglomerations and bones.  You must watch your step close to the edge because you can fall twenty feet to the stream bed below if you are careless.  Along this edge I spied a small crusted object, a glint of blue and yellow paint.  Pocketed, carried home and washed, I found  I had two joined pieces of a century-old puzzle,  pieces from a vase which had been broken a hundred years ago.  Mended carefully with strips of lead, these were threaded through small holes in both sides of the break,  metal laces in a ceramic shoe.   It must have been a favorite, and the loss of it must have seemed unacceptable to its owner, such a long time ago.

My shelves have space, openings available to display new finds.   I often wonder what random bits of our lives,  hundreds of years hence, will be carried home and treasured by our descendants in their wanderings.

“untitled,”    wood, paper, bone, shell, Mylar, beeswax, oil, brass   11 x 7 x 2 inches,  2009

(above)  “Sotto San Costantino Albanese,”  oil on canvas,  14 x 14 inches, 2004