February 12, 2022

Museum visit

If you like such places, I recommend a visit to Salisbury Museum. I went there last weekend and really enjoyed it.

They have an excellent new exhibition on for the next few months, 'Ancient Sites from the Air' by photographer David R. Abram - aerial photographs of ancient sites across the country. Each image was created by stitching together hundreds of individual photos taken from a drone moving over the site - so each one is really high resolution and super detailed. It's really impressive. Plus they're just cool photos anyway, quite abstract. 

Two of my favourite images in the Ancient Sites from the Air exhibition by David R Abram. You're encouraged to take photos in here (not the rest of the museum though), for personal use and for social media use to promote it. 

The state of the art Wessex Gallery of Archaeology is great too, which has thousands of finds from prehistory to the Norman period. The museum website says it's one of the most important archaeological collections in the country outside of London, with many artefacts from the Stonehenge landscape, Old Sarum, and Wiltshire as a whole, including the Pitt-Rivers Wessex Collection. Lieutenant-General Pitt-Rivers was the first to use a scientific approach to exploring and excavating historical sites, as opposed to just digging and looting without any method or recording, and so laid the foundations for modern archaeology. 

I really liked the largely intact 4th-century mosaic found in the village my family used to drive through regularly on the way to see my grandparents. I was impressed with just how much time and care it would have taken to remove it from the site and then put it together again. The website says the latter took 3 weeks. 

Out of everything in the Wessex Gallery, though, I think my favourites were the oldest objects in there: the 450,000-year-old stone handaxes. Simply because of how mind-bogglingly old that is. 450,000 years old! That's from an inter-glacial period, waaaay before Britain was permanently settled. 

What was just as mind-boggling was the meteorite in the corridor. It's just a 90kg ball of rock. But it's 4.5 billion years old. And not from Earth. If it was from Earth it would be one of the very earliest rocks. It's from outer space. The asteroid belt to be precise. Obviously I know that meteorites are from outer space, but I've not actually seen one before. So cool! 

Finally, the museum cafe does good lunches too - I recommend the mushroom lasagne :)

I've always loved history and archaeology but it's fallen by the wayside over the last several years. I was disappointed to find out I'd missed 8 series of 'Digging for Britain' when I watched the new one a few weeks ago. It's nice to be getting back into it all. 

This may have just been a load of waffle, haha. Next week I'll finally publish what I was originally going to post now - the first of two posts on the history of the countryside :) 

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