I would like to wish all my readers a Very Merry Christmas, wherever they are and whatever they are doing over the holiday. It's a time of reflection, of looking back at the year that is passing and that which is to come. Let us look back and remember all the good things that have happened in 2023, and look forward to the hopes and opportunities that 2024 will bring. Let us resolve not to squander them.
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| The Adoration of the Shepherds, second half of the XVII century, Lviv region (Ivan Honchar Museum) |
The illustration is of a Ukrainian icon that well illustrates a trend characteristic of this period, it moves well away from the schematic rigid, repetitive two-dimensional diagram-like forms of Russian post-Byzantine iconography. Here the figures are depicted as flesh and blood, modelled in the round with individual features in settings that have a real-life character. Like the cotemporary "Cossack Baroque" this art is an adaptation of western forms overlain on native material culture, and like it, with a reduction of the fussy ornament. It is a form specific to the regions of what is now Ukraine. This cultural separateness from that of Muscovy beyond the Polesian forests persists in time from the deeper past, and preserving that as a living culture, and not just a memory is what is keeping hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians out in trenches in the sleet, snow, fog and chill defending their territory with their lives from those that would deny them that. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers. Слава Україні!
2 comments:
Jesus H. Christ!!! an archaeologist. refuting online for all to see, the basics, the fundamentals, the very tools of his profession, defined as the ''study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture,'' by venturing into the world of mythology, superstition, and indoctrinated religious bullshit. Paul, are you serious? Come on, tell us it is all a joke...
De William Shephard is a metal detectorist. In the UK, metal detecting is associated with a particular state of mind, as we see reflected here.
The repetition of occurrences of this kind of cognitive disconnect in the online contributions of metal detectorists from Britain I think undermines the whole concept of treating artefact hunters as a whole as "citizen archaeologists" or "responsible and responsive metal detectorists" who are capable of observing and analysing occurrences of material culture in narrow blindly-dug detectorist hoik-holes and contribute to archaeology. Some of them are too far gone to be able to analyse anything at all.
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