Archæology
Builders are slow, aren’t they?
Christ Church Cathedral spire has been wrapped in scaffolding since the beginning of Trinity term (that’s summer term for those of you not fluent in unintelligible Oxford jargon) and only now has its top emerged. All they were doing was cleaning it! I’d've done it in an afternoon if they’d given me a pressure washer and a bottle of Fairy liquid.
And, as if Tom Quad (where the cathedral is) weren’t ugly enough with this admittedly rather impressive all-smothering metal-and-wood construction surrounding one of its more beautiful features, it seems that college’s maintenance policy is just out to spite me, looking as I am for a photogenic college to take pictures of, as they have also decided that now is the time to pull up the quad and install some new gas and water pipes. This too is rolling along slowly, as it has been since the beginning of Michaelmas (autumn) term.
Why can’t they get a move on?!
Well, in the case of the pipe-layers, there is at least an excuse: they keep on finding skeletons.
Before becoming Christ Church the undergraduate college of the University of Oxford, the site was home to a few monks and a little church. This little church, it would seem, had a graveyard under what is now Tom Quad. So they’ve dumped the builders and called in the archæologists who are now digging up the quad with little brushes and notepads rather than a mini-digger; a technique which comes at something of a speed premium, but is quite cool for the morbid voyeurs amongst us who get to see them pulling up centuries-old bones.
An archæologist examines the juvenile skull
Today’s haul is a “disarticulated juvenile” — a child whose bones have been disturbed since burial — but apparently there have been a number of adults and “neo-nates” (neo-natals…newborns… you probably didn’t need me to tell you that), some of whom have had articulated skeletons which have been sent off for analysis.
To the archæologists, it’s just another set of results — rather like an anthropomorphic version of my obtaining power spectra from the death of tiny bacteria — but to me, it’s another scary reminder of what a tiny piece of the tiny tapestry of humanity I form.
I’m barely a speck on a tiny, pale blue dot floating in deep space. I’ve not even got my own Wikipedia article.
Those skulls lived, loved, wasted time, ate, slept, cried…and all the time I’ve done the same mundane things walking over their disarticulated skeletal remains as I walk from one side of college to the other. Will my skeleton feature on someone’s 26th-century version of a ‘blog when I get in the way of a new quantum cryptography optical fibre cable someone’s trying to lay?
I bet my 26th-century counterpart will even look back with scorn on my attempt to high-techify gas piping: “Pah! Optical fibres! Quantum cryptography! That’s so twentieth-century.”
Ah, well. A speck on a dot I may be, but I still like to ogle the meticulously-exposed cranium of an infant. Better go back to see if I can’t get a picture with some eye sockets for Cherwell…