Second paragraph of March chapter in original German:
Meier-Graefes Haus in Nikolassee atmete französischen Chic, hatte Eleganz und eine gewisse Behäbigkeit, es war perfekt zugeschnitten auf den gerade 50Jahre alt gewordenen Meier-Graefe und seine Ehefrau (ein paar Jahre später übrigens wurde dann der Architekt Epstein post mortem sein Schwiegervater, weil Meier-Graefe in dritter Ehe dessen Tochter Annemarie heiratete, aber das verwirrt jetzt nur). Hier, im Kirchweg 28. »draußen auf dem Lande«, wie Meier-Graefe in Briefen an den Maler Edvard Munch sein Haus lokalisierte, entstand 1913 ein zentrales Werk der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung: »Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst«, die ab 1914 erscheinen sollte.
Meier-Graefe’s house in Nikolassee exuded French chic, had elegance and an air of cosiness, it was perfectly tailored to Meier-Graefe, who had just turned 50, and his wife (a few years later, by the way, the architect Epstein became his father-in-law posthumously, because Meier-Graefe married his daughter Annemarie in his third marriage, but that’s just confusing). Here, at Kirchweg 28, ‘out in the country’, as Meier-Graefe described his house in letters to the painter Edvard Munch, a central work of art historiography was written in 1913: ‘The History of the Development of Modern Art’, which was to be published from 1914.
My translation because this section is missing from the English version that I bought.
I picked this up cheap in a Leuven bookshop a couple of weeks ago, partly out of interest in contrasting it with a similar book by my friend Charles Emmerson. Both of them look at the world in 1913 through contemporary records, with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what was around the corner.
Florian Illies’ book looks mainly at the German and Austrian empires, from Kiel to Trieste, with occasional excursions to Britain, France, Italy and America. It’s a fascinating delineation of the links between politics, science and the arts. Stalin and Hitler are both known to have enjoyed strolling in the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna that January, and may have tipped their hats to each other as they passed. Franz Kafka had an on-and-off relationship with Felice Bauer. Thomas Mann was coming to terms with his own sexuality. James Joyce was teaching and writing in Trieste. Rilke was loving and writing. Freud and Jung were treating people. The Futurists were starting. Proust self-published Du côté de chez Swann. I had never heard of Der Tunnel, in which a tunnel is built connecting America and Europe. The Mona Lisa, stolen in 1911, was found in Italy in December. There were school shootings in Bremen and Württemberg. Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler launched into their passionate affair, commemorated in Kokoschka’s art.
I found a lot of new names here, particularly literary women who had previously escaped me – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Else Lasker-Schüler, Coco Chanel. There are lots of elements all adding up to a thought-provoking portrait of a time and several places, from an angle I don’t know as well as I thought I did.
I was dismayed to discover that my translation has been cut by around 20% – the German original has 324 pages, my English version only 267. There is no hint of any abridgement anywhere in my copy. That’s frankly deceptive on the part of the English language publisher.
I had to disqualify a lot of books here because less than half, sometimes none of the book at all, is set in the right country, even though LibraryThing and Goodreads users tagged them with the tag “Germany”. From the top, the disqualified were Slaughterhouse-Five (also set in Belgium, Luxembourg, the USA and the planet Tralfamadore); The Diary of Anne Frank (entirely set in the Netherlands); Night, by Elie Wiesel (mainly set in today’s Poland, also in today’s Romania); All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (more than half set in France); Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (set in a fictional India and Nepal); The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (entirely set in Czechia); The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (entirely set in today’s Poland); All Quiet on the Western Front (mostly set in France); Perfume, by Patrick Süskind (entirely set in France); The Magic Mountain (set in Switzerland); and The Tin Drum (mostly set in today’s Poland again).
Next up: France, but I will skip next weekend so it will be on 8 September.
One of the things that has puzzled me about the stucco artist Jan Christian Hansche is that there are very few other examples of ceilings with his sort of sculpture anywhere. He told the Brussels authorities in 1661 that his work was admired in Germany, Austria and Italy; but where?
Via the Internet Archive, I’ve found a 1903 article about stucco ceilings in a building called “Weißer Engel“, “White Angel”, in Quedlinburg in eastern Germany. The article was published in a journal called Die Denkmalpflege, and is by Paul Schwarz who describes himself as “Oberlehrer”, a senior teacher, at the Quedlinburg Gymnasium (grammar school). Schwarz leads off by comparing the stucco in Quedlinburg with the works in Kleve, now destroyed, which he knew were by Hansche. The Quedlinburg stuccos have survived, and the Weißer Engel haus is now a home for people with learning disabilities where you can hire the room with the stucco ceiling for events. Here are two nice photos from the local websites:
Schwarz says that the house was built in 1623, and believes that the stucco panels must have been installed at the time of construction. There is no date and no signature, which would be unusual for Hansche who usually did put both the date and his name or at least initials somewhere on the ceiling; and 1623 would be too early for him, as his earliest surviving work is dated from 1653 and he continued working until the 1680s. And Quedlinburg is 300 km east of Olfen, Hansche’s birthplace, and 350 km east of Wesel, the easternmost known work that he did. But there is a striking similarity of execution.
There are two rows of six panels in Quedlinburg, and Schwarz’s article include photographs of seven of them. The first six tell the story of Tobit – an interesting choice for a traditionally Protestant town; Tobit is accepted as canon by Catholics but not by most Protestants.
Tobit is blinded by a bird defecating into his eyes. Lots of domestic details.Tobit’s son Tobias bids farewell to his parents, to travel to Ecbatana with the disguised angel Raphael.Tobias is greeted by his relatives in Ecbatana.
Five of the other six stuccos show the five senses, and again Schwarz has published photographs of three of them, and we can see a fourth in the tourism photos:
Taste
Also visible in one of the more recent tourism photos above (here rotated 180 degrees)
HearingSightSmell, from the tourism photos and rotated 180 degrees.Also from the tourism photos, Taste, Smell and Hearing.
And the sixth in this row is a bird packing at its own breast, with the motto “Nosce Te Ipsum”, “Know thyself”.
Schwarz says somewhat sniffily that the Quedlinburg stuccos much better executed than the ones in Kleve; I agree that they are a bit more adventurous and better framed, and it seems to me that the distance, the likely date and the lack of a signature all point to these being by a different artist. But there seems to be no information about who that could have been.
Quedlinburg is a good five and a half hours drive from here, and not really close to anywhere else (almost exactly half way between Leipzig and Hanover), so my opportunities for a site inspection are limited.
From the upper windows of the Golden Court, Brunhild saw not just the river Moselle and the bridge spanning it. She could also see straight down into a small amphitheatre inside the city walls. Gladiator games had long been outlawed, but exotic animal hunts and bear baiting were still held there. These, sadly, seemed to be the main entertainment. The new queen quickly discovered that even what luxuries the Merovingian courts offered left something to be desired. There were mimes and actors in residence for instance – predecessors of the minstrels and jesters later found in medieval courts – but mostly, these performers recited long-winded national epics.
This is a book about two queens of the sixth century, both probably born in the early 540s: Fredegund of Neustria (died 597) and Brunhilda of Austrasia (died 613). You may not have heard of Neustria or Austrasia; these were old kingdoms of the pre-Charlemagne era, the tail end of the Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis, King of the Franks, in the late 5th century. This is a period which we learned nothing at all about at school in Belfast, and if your native language is not French, Dutch or German, you’re probably in the same boat. My previous exposure to it amounted to a 2021 exhibition of Merovingian metalwork in Mariemont, off to the south of Belgium.
Neither of the two queens was in fact a Merovingian by birth, but they married two brothers, grandsons of Clovis, who ruled between them large chunks of what are now northern France, central Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of the Netherlands, with Burgundy also in the mix at various times.
Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess from Spain, who married Sigebert of Austrasia (the eastern bit) in 567. He was murdered, probably on her orders, in 575 and she ruled in Metz off and on, in her own right and as regent for the next generation, for four decades. Fredegund was a slave girl from the western chunk, Neustria, ruled from Soissons; she caught the eye of Chilperic, the local overlord, and replaced his wife (Brunhilda’s sister) as queen.
Brunhilda and Fredegund feuded bitterly until Fredegund’s death in 597, but eventually in 613 Chilperic and Fredegund’s son Clotaire managed to conquer both kingdoms, and Brunhilda (who must have been well into her 60s at this point) was executed by a gruesome method which remains obscure but definitely involved horses.
Both women have been largely written out of history. Clotaire emphasised his own legitimate descent from Clovis, not his usurping aunt or indeed his low-born mother. No men wanted to commemorate women who had survived and ruled for many years. The major contemporary witness, Gregory of Tours, is very partisan and clearly incomplete. Fredegund’s tomb has an image of her whose face has been erased. Brunhilda’s tomb has been lost, apart from two chunks of marble.
Shelley Puhak has done an entertaining job of pulling together the threads of history and legend to tell the story of the two women. She occasionally falters under the weight of detail, and at other times is forced to adopt a very chatty style to compensate for the absence of reliable sources, but one feels that she has done her best with what is available. I got what I wanted from The Dark Queens; you can get it here.
The largest menhir in Belgium is known as the Pierre Brunehaut; I visited it in February 2021. It is near to one of the many old roads known as chaussées Brunehaut in northern France and southern Belgium.
The Pierre Brunehaut near Tournai, which I visited in February 2021 with my friend J, who gives it a sense of scale.
Some speculate that the chaussées Brunehaut are the paths supposedly taken by the horses participating in her execution, but there are too many roads for that; I prefer to think that in her many years as queen, she dedicated state resources to the upkeep of the transport infrastructure, and (rather like Mussolini making the trains run on time) this has been dimly remembered by local lore. There are worse possible memorials.
As previously noted, we took the Whitsun / Pentecost / Pinksteren weekend in the Netherlands for some low-key tourism, the most high-energy part of which was the Amsterdam church tour recommended by Cate Desjardins. To get the basics oout of the way:
We stayed in the Schiphol Airport Hampton by Hilton, in the outskirts of the town of Hoofddorp, across the road from the railway station and just off the motorway. Very comfortable room and decent breakfast. Half the price of similar hotels in the city.
Friday dinner: nipped across the road to the Novotel for the Gourmet Bar, very acceptable. Saturday coffee:Aran’s Irish Pub, between Max Euwe Plein and Singelgracht. Saturday lunch: McDonald’s, I’m afraid. (Damrak 8, near the Nieuwe Kerk) Saturday snack:De Koffieschenkerij, beside the Oude Kerk. Saturday dinner: we ventured into Hoofddorp which turns out to be an atrtactive enough dormitory town, and ended up at the Tandoori Lounge which was absolutely fine. Sunday coffee: at the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam Sunday lunch:De Wachtlokaal, a cheerful cafe near the station in Haarlem; my salad was huge. Sunday snack:Cleef Frans Hals, the museum cafe in Haarlem. Sunday dinner: I was determined not to leave the Netherlands without a rijsttafel, and found one at Sari in Heemstede, 10 km from our hotel. Monday lunch: Fantastic pancakes at ‘t Hoogstraatje on a square in Nijmegen. Monday snack:Eis Cafe Riva in Kleve.
On Saturday and Sunday we travelled to Amsterdam and Haarlem by train, and then drove to Heemstede that evening, and Nijmegen and Kleve on Monday.
So, what did we do? One thing that didn’t work out was my original plan to visit the Rijksmuseum. We had already completely missed the Vermeer exhibition, which apparently sold out in a couple of hours after the tickets became available. And it turns out that the rest of the Rijksmuseum is so popular that you need to book several days in advance just to get to the permanent exhibition. So we struck out on both Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday, as mentioned, we did the church tour and on Sunday we went back to the English Reformed Church (which is in fact run by the Church of Scotland) as it had been closed the previous day, and mingled with the congregation drinking coffee.
We then took the train to Haarlem, to visit the Frans Hals Museum. Misleadingly, it doesn’t have all that much art by Frans Hals, though it does have some, including all of his surviving group portraits (one currently on loan from the Riksmuseum). It does have a very rich store of European art from his day onwards, including this Bosch-like Temptation of St Anthony by Jan Mandijn:
From more modern times, I very much liked this Standing Nude by Theo van Rysselberghe, a Belgian painter who tried pointillism and then tried nudes, this one dating from the crossover point. (I have not found another image of this particular painting online, though there are plenty of the same model painted nude by van Rysselnerghe in different poses.)
We spent most of the afternoon atthe museum and could easily have spent longer. The cafe was good too.
The next day was Open Church Day in the Netherlands, and we discovered that another church with decorations by Jan Dunselman was open for visitors in Nijmegen. This is the furthest from Amsterdam of any of his churches, the only other outlier being his home town of Den Helder.
In the Church of the Nativity of Mary in Nijmegen, Dunselman again did the Stations of the Cross, similar and also different to the ones in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Amsterdam. Compare the two takes on “Jesus Falls the Third Time”, Nijmegen above, Amsterdam below.
The walls are also decorated with various saints offering their approval. My eye was caught by the two St Catherines. Are you Team Alexandria, or Team Siena?
We walked to the centre of Nijmegen, past a lovely ruined chapel, and had lunch outside at a pancake restaurant on the square.
Our final stop was across the German border, at the Church of the Assumption by the Kleiner Markt in Kleve. This interests me not so much for what is there but for what is no longer there. The white building on the right is on the site of the inn “Zum Grossen Kurfürst” which featured several stucco ceiling by my favourite seventeenth-century stuccador, Jan Christian Hansche. It was destroyed during the second world war.
Anne *in* Cleves, not Anne *of* Cleves
There is some striking sculpture in the square, the “Fountain of Fools” in the middle:
And by the church, the Fallen Warrior by Ewald Matare, erected in 1934, removed and broken up by the Nazis in 1938, and restored in 1981.
The church itself is rather pretty inside, with some medieval artwork that must have survived elsewhere, but I don’t seem to have taken any photos. We had a little look around Kleve and had a final snack in a square whose fountain boasts another remarkable sculpture by Karl-Hennig Seemann, commemorating local legendary boy Lohengrin:
For our wedding anniversary trip this year, Anne and I went to Trier, not the nearest large German city to us (Aachen, Cologne, Bonn and most of the Ruhr are closer) but certainly the most ancient German city within easy striking range. I’ve been a couple of times before, first I think in 1986, and I always love going back to the Porta Nigra, the Roman gate which has mostly remained through the centuries.
The other place I particularly love in Trier is what is now the Protestant Church of the Redeemer, originally built in the early fourth century as the throne room of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity the official religion. It is the largest enclosed space to have survived from the Roman Empire, and thought to be the fifth largest constructed in those times (the other four, now destroyed, were in Italy). It is just amazing to stand there in a room constructed 1700 years ago for imperial audiences.
Trier is commemorating the fall of the Roman Empire this year with a massive set of exhibitions, and we went for the full tourist package, which I would actually recommend; details below. The basics are:
Accommodation: Holiday Inn Express, 15 mins walk from the Porta Nigra, very good breakfast and comfortable basic rooms. Friday dinner: Weinstube Zum Domstein, Hauptmarkt 5; more below. Saturday lunch: er, McDonalds. At least you know what you are getting. Saturday dinner: Restaurant Balkan, close to the hotel, nostalgia for Balkan days. Sunday lunch: Okoki Sushi & Grill, who have an attractive all-you-can-eat offer though in fact we went for the bento boxes before leaving.
The full tourist package comes with a ticket to all three major museums in Trier, also a Roman meal, a guided walking tour and a wine tasting. I should say that it is wise to book at least a week in advance with the Trier tourist office; my own booking got stuck in my Gmail spam filter, and a couple of glitches needed to be sorted out – however the tourist office were very helpful, taking into account that last weekend was a holiday weekend in Germany.
So. We started with the Roman meal, hosted by the Weinstube zum Domstein, a gemütlich enough place. This was a large set of small dishes based on the Apicium, a Roman recipe book attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius. No potatoes or tomatoes of course; for me the standout dish was the ham with myrtle fig sauce, but it was all perfectly yummy. You can have this outside the tourist package as well at the Weinstube zum Domstein as long as you order in advance.
On Saturday morning we went to the big exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier. They have pulled together a colossal assembly of artifacts from the Roman Empire, starting more or less from the time of Constantine (who reigned from 306 to 337) and ending with the successor states in the region. Two points to flag up: no photography is allowed, and it’s a lot more accessible if you have decent German (there is an audioguide in English but it doesn’t cover everything and is scripted as annoying banter between an uninformed man and an expert woman).
My breath was taken away by the very first exhibit: the scepter and insignia of Maxentius. Maxentius was the rival emperor to Constantine who was killed at the battle of Milvian Bridge outside Rome in 312. His imperial regalia were hidden under a staircase, and found in 2006, almost seventeen centuries later. They are the only surviving regalia of a Roman emperor. Normally they are in Rome but they’re in Trier until the end of the exhibition.
(No photography allowed in Trier – this is the photo from the National Roman Museum in Rome)
The whole thing is great, but three other things particularly caught my attention. The first was a fifth-century silver jug, engraved in beautiful detail with the apostles and the evangelists, found in Trier in 1992. It is believed to have originally been part of a hoard of Roman silverware found in 1628, 49 pieces weighing 74 kilos in total, which were melted down (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) by order of the ecclesiastical authorities. The surviving jug is a thing of wonder.
I was also particularly grabbed by a letter from a Roman official who had inside knowledge of a currency devaluation (“The divine fortune of our masters has decreed that the nummus will be reduced to half its value”), lent by the John Rylands Library in Machester; and also a reconstruction of the grave goods of Childeric, found in Belgium in 1653, but stolen from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and mostly destroyed in 1831.
The walking tour of the city was conducted enthusiastically by one of the city’s accredited guides. She took us over the highlights of the conflicts that have shaped the city (Napoleon – rather good; Prussians – rather bad; Prince-Bishops – a mixed bunch) and bemoaned the fact that the university was suppressed in 1797 and restored only in 1970. She indicated, but did not take us to, the large statue of Karl Marx donated by the Chinese government in 2018 to mark the bicentennial of his birth in Trier. We went back later to look at it.
Presenter: Well now we come on to our special gift section. The contestant is Karl Marx and the prize this week is a beautiful lounge suite. (curtains behind the presenter sweep open to reveal a beautiful lounge suite; terrific audience applause; Karl comes out and stands in front of this display) Now Karl has elected to answer questions on the workers’ control of factories so here we go with question number one. Are you nervous? (Karl nods his head; the presenter reads from a card) The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development? Karl: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie. (applause) Presenter: Yes, yes, it is indeed. You’re on your way to the lounge suite, Karl. Question number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle? A what struggle? Karl: A political struggle. (Tumultuous applause.) Presenter: Yes, yes! One final question Karl and the beautiful lounge suite will be yours… Are you going to have a go? (Karl nods) You’re a brave man. Karl Marx, your final question, who won the Cup Final in 1949? Karl: The workers’ control of the means of production? The struggle of the urban proletariat? Presenter: No. It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1.
The wine tasting in the Oechsle Wein- & Fischhaus featured white wines from all over the Moselle valley. Well, two from Luxembourg and a fair few from the Saarland. All Moselle wines taste like Moselle wines, though different from each other. I got a couple of bottles of Elbling.
The cathedral retains a small amount of the original Roman fabric, though most of the building has been rebuilt several times since. The façade just right of centre in my picture below, with a triangular pediment surmounting three windows with circular arches (and more with circular arches on the next level down) is more or less original from 1700 years ago. Wow.
Inside it is a lot more baroque. I need to look into the potential linkage between the western dome and my favourite stuccist Jan Christian Hansche. I hope this stereoscopic image works for you.
The Cathedral Museum has some fascinating religious art relating to the fall of Rome and the neighbourhood. There are some fascinating tombstones and grave goods – a third of all burials are of children; their shoes are interred with them; there’s also a grave inscription for the local woman doctor Sarmanna of the fourth century.
Hic iacet Sarman/na medica vixit / pl(us) m(inus) an(nos) LXX Pientius / Pientinus fili(us) et / Honorata norus / titolum posuerunt / in pace “Here lies Sarmanna the doctor. She lived around 70 years. Pientius, her son Pientinus, and daughter-in-law Honorata placed this monument. In peace.”
I’m afraid that I broke the rules and took a photo of the reconstructed fresco ceiling from the house built for the Bishop of Trier by the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena. This woman’s eyes follow me through the centuries.
There is a lot about the necropolis of St Maximin, a large building which housed a thousand tombs in Roman times. I have not come across any other such arrangement on such a large scale for civil burials in any culture, though there is a First World War necropolis near where our daughters live. There’s also a nice exhibition about local bigwig, St Paulinus, whose skull was proven to have spent time in the Middle East by the presence in his nose of a pupal exoskeleton of an insect found only in those parts.
Finally, the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift has a lot of relevant art on display. I am sure I had seen it before, but in this context the Auzon Casket aka the Franks Casket really grabbed my attention – Anglo-Saxon, carved with runes, but referring to Roman history as well as Germanic legend.
The romantic story of the successors and challengers of the Roman Empire has inspired many artists. Here is Hermann / Arminius being crowned leader of the Germans by his wife Thusnelda, as portrayed by Angelika Kauffmann.
The collection includes a miniature version of Rubin Eynon’s Gallos, whose 8-foot original keeps guard at Tintagel:
But I must say that the other piece that grabbed me, not part of the Roman Empire collection but one of the pieces illustrating the history of Trier, was the bleak portrait of three women who had been transported to Nazi Germany as forced labourers, painted by the artist Mia Münster in 1944. There’s an awful bleakness in their eyes.
Anyway. A good weekend culturally, and on the way home we dropped in on my cousin J in Luxembourg, her children L, S and N, her husband D and my old friend M who I had not seen in 20 years and who now works with J. Small world.
Here I am, at the age of nineteen, at the bottom of a ditch. I spent four months in the summer of 1986 working on an archæological site near Heilbronn in Germany, in the village of Klingenberg, as a volunteer on the payroll of the Land of Baden-Württemberg. (Actually the only time in my life when I have been directly paid by the taxpayer, though I’ve had plenty of taxpayer-funded work since.)
The site was a promontory fort that had been identified by cropmarks in photos taken a few years earlier. Two curved ditches had cut off the end of the hill from potential invaders. The excavation, overseen by the genial Dr Biel, was to record and rescue the remnants of a mesolithic settlement of the Michelsberger culture before a housing estate was built on it. (Pictures are from Dr Biel’s article, which is in German.)
The field, incidentally, belonged to the Count of Neipperg, who died last year at the age of 102. In the summer of 1986 he was in his mid-sixties, and would occasionally drop by to keep an eye on things. His great-great-grandfather, the dashing Adam Albert von Neipperg, famously seduced and later married the Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife. (The Count who I knew was descended from Adam Albert by his first marriage.)
Archæology has a dreadful career structure. I was doing it to scratch an itch in my year off between grammar school and university, and never planned to go into it long term. But it’s truly fascinating to find artifacts left behind six thousand years ago. Some of the clay from buildings or ceramics still had visible thumbprints made by people who died a thousand years before Stonehenge was built. It makes you think.
The picture at the top was taken by my then colleague Jan Grabowski (who has since become rather well-known for other reasons) as we created a rather wonderful thing under the direction of Dr Biel: we took transverse sections of each of the defensive ditches, and then placed canvas against them, splashed varnish over the canvas liberally to make it stick to the exposed soil, let it set and then peeled away the canvas with the soil still sticking to it, to preserve the appearance of the transected ditch. The varnish fumes got quite overpowering and we were allowed only a minute or so in the pit at a time. I’m in the less exciting outer ditch; both are on display in the museum in Stuttgart.
It may not be clear from the above, but the end of the settlement at Klingenberg was not a happy one. The black marks from the inner ditch are the remains of a burnt palisade, which had broken and fallen inwards. At the bottom of the ditch we found an enormous aurochs horn, which mush have adorned the fortification as a show of strength to outsiders, ultimately unsuccessful. We found one corpse untidily dumped in a rubbish pit. A forgotten conflict, whose only remaining record was the marks in the soil and the charcoal in the ditches. As I said, it makes you think.
