Edinburgh to Glasgow Part 2: (tour of Glasgow)

Glasgow Cathedral: 

This cathedral is fairly unique for Scotland.  During the Scottish religious reformation (16th century) most things catholic were destroyed.   The guy giving us the tour believed this cathedral survived the destruction because it was also being used heavily for business and town functions.   13th century cathedrals were built in the shape of a cross.  A long room, then a series of cross rooms, then a chapel on the far end to make it look like a cross in blue prints.

view of the main room

Example Floor plan

The person giving us the tour did archeology on the Cathedral because they wanted to add some heating ducts under the floor.  The floor of this cathedral (and I expect others) was large stone slabs,  placed directly on the earth.  To build the ducts they lifted the slabs and started digging.  He found and examined all sorts of burials directly beneath the floor as they were digging.

He described how wealthy towns folk needed to be buried, and the church being consecrated ground was a fitting place to put the remains.  The church would take their families money in exchange the deceased souls could be prayed for whenever your family was in the cathedral.   Because they were in the floor beneath them it was easy for the church to have special services for the deceased to help their souls move through purgatory quicker. 

When they built the cathedral they put small stairways in the walls so the workers could work on the top levels.  The leader of the tour said that when they were digging in the cathedral they let him walk up the passageways.  He said that when you get to the top (100+ feet) you recognize that 13th century craftsman did not build to OSHA safety specifications.

chapel stained glass examples

After the tour of the cathedral we went for a tour of the historic parts of the city.  Across the street was a stone house.  The stone had been walked on for so long that most of the steps were warn thin in the middle.  The ceilings were small but the house had multiple floors and a bunch of rooms.  There were about 20 archeologists on the walk of the city so some of this information came from conversations with non-tour guides.

At the time of the Cathedral the Bishop was the lead political authority in the region.  Priests from the surrounding parishes would come and provide favors to the bishop in return for political positions, Religious lobbyists.   The house we visited was a house that a priest had built.  He needed to be close enough to kiss bishop butt even though his parish was days away.

Most of the old town of Glasgow was replaced by newer 19th - 20th century buildings.  As a non-archeologist I looked at the stone buildings and found it hard to tell the difference between a 19th century stone building and a 16th century post-medieval stone building, but the tour was fascinating anyway.

Below is an example of a clock tower.  It was not originally built as a stand alone clock tower.  Originally it was built as a tower connected to the wall that ran around Glasgow.    The wall is torn down.

We walked where the wall was and found train tracks.  Below the train tracks was a pub.  Can you imagine the racket of listening to some punk music trying to be louder than trains going over head.

This was the section of town where the original Glasgow university was built. It is one of the oldest universities in the united kingdom.  

We came to a couple of protestant churches that were built in the 16th century.  they had 12 over 12 windows.  In America 12 over 12 meant the house was built in the 17th century in Scotland it means it was built 15th - 16th century.  Archeologists need to know how to count, and they also need to know where they are to interpret the numbers.  Luckily I only know of 12 over 12 windows so they do not need to know how to count past a bakers dozen.

In Glasgow as the city grew the rich business people moved away from the city center.  They purchased long, narrowish plots of land that stretched towards the river.     At the far end of the plot they built 17th century McMansions.  I could not find the tartan design for the clan McMansion.

The Glasgow art museum is a good example of this type of building, but we went past libraries, and converted churches which were surviving buildings from this time frame.

I stopped in a store to buy a cell phone.  We bought a 10 quid phone then purchased an additional 10 pounds of air time (A quid and a pound are the same thing, similar to a buck and a dollar.  I was just being tricky).

The salesman was very careful to set the phone up properly.  I strongly recommend that before you leave the mobile phone shop you make a call to prove the phone works.  More on this. 

By this time we were a little tired from walking most of the day.  Luckily I kept track of where the bus snaked through the city.  Even though we were 10 streets over 6 streets down from where the bus dropped us off we were directly in it's path.  We boarded the bus.

We had to clean up quick to get ready for the guest lecturer at Nancy's conference.  The talk was about Disney world and Las Vegas but did not contain any graphics, rides or games of chance.  The lecturer had been positioned in South Africa for many years and for some reason he kept being sent to Disney World and Las Vegas.  

Disney World opened an animal exhibit.   They took animals from around the world and put them in a sterile environment so visitors could view them more easily.  In an effort to give the visitors the old world feel they also purchased an authentic archaic African head dress.  He did not say why he was going to Disney world so I am assuming they called in this archeologist to validate that the additional non-authentic stuff they created to supplement this one African head dress would be close enough to authentic that the visitors would enjoy without realizing everything except the head dress was fake. 

Not sure were Las Vegas came into the story but I was suffering jet lag and may have closed my eyes during that part of the talk.  I believe his point was that archeologists needed to be careful of interpretive fantasy, and should instead stick to physical real evidence.  As a non-archeologist I like interpretive archeology.  I find it interesting to visit places like Sturbridge village and Williamsburg and feel that even if it is not 100% accurate I feel I am more likely to understand what it was like than if I had a 100% scientific description of what it was like. I have never been to Disney Land to see the head dress so perhaps his experience with interpretive fantasy is different than mine.

His second topic was about archeologists and politics.  He was talking about the need to get public support so that archeology projects can continue to be funded.  He talked about how during the apartheid time they did historic archeology in South Africa, as in America, historical archeology is only a small percentage of the actual human habitation of the land. 

The archeologists in South Africa did not rock the boat they were science only,  it left the question in the public mind that archeology is the second most expensive way to find out what we already know (hiring a consultant is the first most expensive).

After apartheid he expected that the new South African leaders would recognize the opportunity to use archeology to discover the hidden past of the native peoples of South Africa but again the archeologists wrote purely science without a political slant, and did not get the opportunities to uncover the past as they could have with governmental support.  

After the talk Nancy got a chance to talk to some Foreign archeologists and I got to prove my ignorance.  Hanging out with Beloved Nancy Davis gives me the opportunity to mis-learn interesting things that I would not learn otherwise.  We primarily talked to the Cathedral Archeologist.  He was born near Washington DC, but went to college in Scotland, and now he is a professor at Glasgow university.  We did not talk about whether he was always in VISA compliance, but we did talk about 1st century Scotland.

Scotland was made up of Picts, Scots, Brits, Anglo Saxons,  Vikings, Celts, and Romans.  Romans were the only people who wrote any history, so they know more about the Romans than the other nationalities.  Wood, linen and human remains decay easier than stone, so archeologists can did up stone relics but they can not always interpret the stone without the written word to help.  He described the Scottish people as not embracing the written word because the thought it was a form of witchcraft (not sure how they knew this).  He described how they Scottish people for the next 700 years refused to create a written language for themselves.   He described how even though the rebelled against the Romans and their written word, they still embraced Catholicism.

For My information:

The Romans would push into Scotland but the Scottish people would push them back.  Then the Romans would build a northern wall and defend the wall (Antonine wall).  Then the scottish people would unite and fight the Romans and they would move their northern wall further south (Hadrians wall). 

He described how Romans called all Scottish people Picts because they painted their faces when they went into battle.  He mentioned that William Wallace (Mel Gibson in "Braveheart") would not have painted his face but he would have lifted his kilt to display the Scottish royal jewels to the English.