My first stop was another play, this time a one act, two actor play from Venezuela. It was quite good, and also only 45 minutes long, the perfect length. I really enjoyed it.
My second stop was a spur of the moment visit to the National Museum of Scotland. Apparently they are doing some kind of renovation on the building, which is a block long, and only a fragment of the museum is open right now. But I spend almost two hours in there, and I barely got through one floor, so I think they have plenty on display! It is also completely free, which both I and my wallet appreciated.
I saw the lower level, which was the early inhabitants of Scotland. They had an interesting layout: There is a separate room for the prehistoric peoples, but once you hit the early historic period, all of the factions present in Scotland are mixed together - the Romans, the Picts, the Scots, and, my favorite as always, the Vikings, even though they came a lot later than the Romans. But it ended up being a great exhibit, because it showed how much each of these peoples influenced each other, either by trade or gifting, or just cultural assimilation. There was a whole section on items worn to distinguished elites, and a number of areas devoted to the methods of craftsmanship, from ceramic to stone to metal, and even textile.
There were some very cool items as well - seriously, an archaeologist's dream. My favorite was an ornate, probably ceremonial Viking sword hilt. But there were also a number of hoards, which were cool to see; the Falkirk coin hoard, which is a rather famous image.
They had a few other item hoards too, which was neat to see because my first tutorial for Archaeology of Scotland was on hoards. They had all different kinds of hoards at the museum, and after reading so much about them, I was finally able to see them and get some physical evidence that what I had read was true. There were a lot of axes, for instance - apparently axes, being a chief symbol of power, were very common to find in hoards.Mostly I was interested in seeing what are defined as the two kinds of hoards. One is the votive hoard, in which the items were buried as gifts to the gods. These hoards are often found in places which are hard to get, because they were not intended to be recovered. The museum had a few of these, one of which was of particular interest because almost all the items were broken, a somewhat common occurence - the hoard's contents are considered an "item sacrifice," and are broken to represent their "death," or end of use.
The other kind of hoard is one which was buried by someone for safekeeping, with the intention of recovery, but they never came back for it. The museum had a coin hoard found at the monastery of Iona, which was thought have been intended for recovery. The sign theorized that this hoard was buried by a monk who was then killed during one of the many raids on Iona by the Vikings. A story like that puts a whole new perspective on these kinds of artifacts for me; I could just imagine that anonymous monk, hastily digging a hole and tossing in his entire fortune while dragon ships bore down on his monastery, not knowing he wouldn't survive the attack, or that his coins would remain lost until over a thousand years later, when they were discovered by archaeologists.
I also, as could probably be predicted, really enjoyed the warfare section of the museum...there were a lot of very cool swords and axes, and there were even fragments of a Roman tent recovered from one of their military camps. How cool would it be to find part of a 1700-year old tent!
After the museum, I went to see The King's Speech, which I really enjoyed. I saw True Grit earlier in the week, so it was interesting to see them close together, as they are both receiving such good reviews.
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