Art and archaeology

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History has opened a Paleo Art Web page featuring years of artwork from its collections. Its worth looking at if such things interest you.


I've been interested in archaeology since the first time i visited a museum around age 4 or 5 and saw a cist burial. [A cist burial is a Bronze Age burial within a sort of box made of stone slabs.

I remember my dad asked if i wanted to hold his hand as we were going to be seeing skeletons. However, I've always been fascinated by history, ritual and death, even at such an early age. Unfortunately the display is arranged differently so its hard to photograph [and one of the graves seems to have been 'mislaid'. The stones facing inward were carved with cup and ring marks and concentric circles and probaly reused from other sacred sites and it fascinated me that these were positioned like that for the deceased person to see as they lay in the grave.
As a teenager, I often went to the museum to visit these skeletons so they had a lasting impact on my psyche.