Archaeological highlights of walk along old Hispanic military frontier

From the baldie:

• Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain to all who wish to know how to climb over this without severing goolies, and a colony of griffon vultures circles in case they are wrong. No buckets, though, and droppings suggest foxes have taken up residence.
• A grandad, not archaeological material himself, but who in the 1940s looted an Iberian settlement. Apparently he has a bronze figurine at home which I have promised to visit next time. Someone should be given a scooter and sent round to all villages like this to negotiate with the old men, because their grandchildren will most assuredly throw everything like this and the fridge into the nearest ravine.

  Apart from recovering plunder, there’s also a wealth of stuff out there that doesn’t turn up in the cosy municipal ethnographical museums (typical contents: a couple of ploughs, a milking stool, and a colourful scarf) or in the few academic studies. But with even Spanish army maps frequently getting place names wrong there’s little reason to hope the authorities will do anything remotely useful.

(Southern European military maps are generally dreadful, and it’s a wonder that the parties in the Spanish Civil War managed to find one another at all in order to engage in combat. I believe the French suffered calamities of this nature in the 1800s. My theory is that where the British sought to handicap the enemy by destroying maps and street signs, the Spanish, Greeks and Italians took the more lateral route of creating defective ones.)

Trevor @ 5 September 2007 7:19 AM

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