New Tour Dates Announced: Bulgaria – Thracian Treasures and Mountain Monasteries, 3rd – 14th October 2012
Written by AdministratorAnother chance to book on this wonderful tour exploring the fantastic riches of Bulgarian archaeology. Early October is the perfect time to visit Bulgaria: the crowds have gone from the Black sea coast, while the weather remains pleasant (and certainly much warmer than an English autumn!). The tour follows the same itinerary as our September Bulgaria Tour and is led by Katya Melamed, a professional archaeologist who works for the Bulgarian National Institute of Archaeology, and has directed many local excavations. Katya is a fluent and very confident English speaker with a clear tone that’s very easy on the ear!
At the Eastern edge of Europe, Bulgaria is a country whose history is as spectacularly varied as its landscapes. From the extraordinary Neolithic houses of Stara Zagora, to a beautiful Byzantine monastery set high in the Rila Mountains. During the tour we visit no less than 5 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We also have special access to the Thracian Tomb of Kazanluk, with its astonishing 4th century BC frescos. While the Black Sea is now a popular destination, Bulgaria’s rural interior remains gloriously un-touristy. Many archaeological sites are remarkably intact, nestling in remote valleys and on hillsides – just waiting to be discovered.
Guide Lecturer Tony Wilmott nominated for prestigious archaeology award
Written by AdministratorCongratulations to our Guide Lecturer Tony Wilmott, who has been nominated for Current Archaeology’s Archaeologist of the Year Award 2012. Now in their third year, the awards recognise individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to British (and world) Archaeology. The overall winner is decided by online vote and the final result will be announced in the April.
A Senior Archaeologist at English Heritage, Tony is a leading authority on Roman Britain. He has directed excavations all over the UK and published widely. His latest book, The Roman Amphitheatre in Britain, was praised by the Association for Roman Archaeology as “a very informative and attractive introduction for the general reader”. Tony also has an enduring (and highly infectious) enthusiasm for naval and maritime history, and has crewed tall ships all over the world.
Still relatively new to Andante, Tony began as a Guide Lecturer on our Wales and the West Tour – introducing guests to the spectacular Roman remains at Chester, where he himself directed excavations. This year, Tony is Guide Lecturer on two further tours: Pompeii, Herculaneum and Classical Campania in May, and England’s Southern Defences in September. He is also running two Maritime Portsmouth Study Days. So, plenty of opportunities to meet the great man and find out what all the fuss is about! Meanwhile, why not pop over to the Current Archaeology website, and cast your vote…
Back by popular demand: South-East Turkey: Between the Tigris and the Euphrates – 10th-22nd October 2012
Written by AdministratorWe are delighted to announce we are now running a second South-East Turkey Tour – arranged after the first tour sold out in record time! The tour will follow exactly the same itinerary as the September South-East Turkey Tour exploring the spectacular, and hugely important, ancient sites situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
We’re very lucky to have Dr Geoffrey Summers acting as guide leader on this tour. Recently awarded an MBE for services to archaeology, Geoffrey has spent many years living and working in Turkey. He was Assistant Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara for 8 years, and directs on-going fieldwork at the site of Kerkenes in central Turkey.
This year we’ve introduced some “new and improved” features into the South East Turkey Tour. Excitingly, the tour now includes an extended visit to the brand new (and by all reports stunning) Museum in Gaziantep, which houses the spectacular Zeugma Mosaics – rescued from the (in)famous flooded dam sites on the Euphrates.
The enduring popularity of the South-East Turkey tour is testament to the truly outstanding archaeology of this region. As a guest on last year's tour put it:
“Gobekli Tepe was a highlight, but then to have a picnic by the Tigris and lunch by the Euphrates; to stand on a terrace at Mardin and look out over the Great Mesopotamian plain stretching out to infinity – each day brought a new gem.”
New Albania Tour Announced – 14th – 22nd September 2012
Written by AdministratorWe’re pleased to announce our new Albania Tour is now up and running. Scheduled due to popular demand, the tour follows the same itinerary as the Albania - Land of the Eagles Tour: exploring over 2000 years of (largely untouched) archaeological heritage, set in spectacular unspoilt landscapes.
The tour will be led by Carolyn Perry, a new addition to the Andante Team. Carolyn is an archaeologist with long experience of the Mediterranean World having excavated widely in Italy, particularly at Gravina in Puglia and Lomello. She lectured in Greek History and Mythology for the University of London and was formerly Education Officer of the British Museum’s Arab World programme where she led one of the first UK groups to visit Saudi Arabia. She is now Director of Development at the College of St. George, Windsor Castle. Carolyn has led several tours to Albania and describes the country as "a really fascinating and beautiful place with some fantastic sites: Illyrian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Communist era – it has something for everyone.”
We have been delighted with the popularity of our Albanian Tours (which were recently recommended in the Telegraph travel round-up. We hope very much that this latest addition to our schedule allows even more people to discover this wonderful, relatively unexplored, corner of Europe.
The tour runs from 14th-22nd September 2012 with flights direct from Gatwick to Tirana.
Last Thursday I travelled up to London to attend the launch of the final report on the excavations carried out at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the region of Molise in Italy. Some Andante guests may remember visiting this site where the great Carolingian abbey with its remarkable painted crypts dating to the 9th century AD had been uncovered. It is one of the most important early medieval sites in Europe, and certainly about the only place where it is possible to appreciate the central importance of monasteries as places of worship, power and production at this time when the dynamo of the European economy was beginning to turn again after the continent-wide recession following the collapse of Roman power.
Some of you may also remember the three remarkable ladies depicted above, Mother Miriam, Mother Superior and Abbess of San Vincenzo, flanked by her two senior sisters, Mothers Philip (the abbey's archaeologist) and Agnes (a world-class artisanal bookbinder). They are seen here standing in front of the ‘new’ abbey of San Vincenzo, actually dating to the 12th century but rebuilt in the1960s after a visit by the United States Air Force during the War left it in ruins and reborn as a working abbey in 1990. You can see their website here.
The excavations of San Vincenzo began back in the 1970s When Professor Richard Hodges visited the sleepy little village to begin the excavations and, as he recounted, was nearly arrested as a German terrorist by the local Marshal of Carabinieri. I only became involved in the early 1990s but worked on the excavationt until the projects effective end of the collaboration in 1998. It was one of those projects that took on a whole heady social life just of its own, which still provokes tales in the mountain village of San Vincenzo where we were based. The book launch in London was attended by numerous luminaries from British universities who had cut their teeth on the hard travertine stone of San Vincenzo and had come to see the final success of their endeavours.
The site is actually two abbeys, the ancient foundation, built around a dilapidated Roman villa by three young Lombard nobles in the 7th century and expanded to become one of the largest complexes of its kind in Italy by the Carolingians in the 8th who used it as a geopolitical weapon to control the restive Lombard Princes of southern Italy. These temporal powers gave protection and land and in return received from the abbey both spiritual help, prayers and saintly intervention,and practical resources the fine objects, swords, harness, books, carved reliquaries, fine stone working and glass which skilled monks produced in the abbey workshops. Ultimately too many of them may have ended their days in the abbey's special cmemetery for distinguished sponsors, in proximity to the relics of St. Vincent that had been brought especially from Spain to grace the mighty new church. The ‘new’ abbey lies across the River Volturno from this older complex, having been moved there following the destruction of the great Carolingian complex by a jealous Neapolitan bishop and his Saracen mercenaries in 881.
Publishing a twenty year archaeological project is no mean undertaking producing huge volumes of finds and endless volumes of written data, thousands of photographs and similar raw data which clog archaeological archive everywhere. Perhaps it is for this reason that so many large-scale projects never see the light of day as publications of any sort? By any standards the terrible lack of proper publication, be it on paper or electronic, is one of the on-going scandals of the archaeological world. Archaeologists complain (justly) about the looting and destruction of sites worldwide, but in many cases are just as culpable. ‘Publish or be dammed’ wrote Barry Cunliffe, the prolific archaeologist of the Iron Age many years ago, and his words are just as relevant today.
Resources are always the big problem, that and ambition and a natural human desire to always achieve more, even when the budget falls short. All help is welcomed and Andante Travels has contributed to numerous publications through its annual Archaeological Award.
So, it was all the more heartening to see the great doors of San Vincenzo finally close, putting all the hard work of digging and processing into the public sphere to be argued over and finally written into textbooks. For that is after all the archaeologists’ ultimate aim, making history.
I recently attended a fascinating 3 day conference on sustainable heritage organised by the British School at Rome (BSR) and the American University of Rome, in Italy. It was in part sponsored by Andante as part of their commitment to a responsible approach to tourism and archaeological sites. More people than ever are visiting the great sites of the world and many are showing the effects of overuse. The situation at Pompeii is well known but even Angkor Wat in Cambodia has to close its doors due to pressure of visitors.
The conference was dealing with these and other issues, speakers from all over the world, Italy, Ghana, the UK, Australia, Turkey, all brought up similar problems and the challenges facing us in an ever tightening economic climate.
The British School is an extraordinary institution, founded at the end of the 19th century it moved into its present premises after the 1911 Rome World Fair (click here to see the BSR website). The grand building is by Edwin Lutyens, who much to his disgruntlement was told to copy the upper order of St. Paul’s cathedral, which is why perhaps it always looks so familiar. However, in a cunning act of rebellion he completely redesigned the classical order and thus in effect made a new building, though to outward appearances it is an exact copy.
The school is part funded by the British taxpayer but makes heroic efforts to raise matching funds from outside sources. It has always been a centre for artists (Barbara Hepworth was one of its grantees), writers (they helped Lindsey Davies crawl down the Cloaca Maxima in pursuit of Marcus Didius Falco) but above all archaeologists.
The great days of the BSR came in the post war period when John Ward Perkins, one of Mortimer Wheeler’s protégés, led the School and in essence invented modern archaeological field survey. Seeing the destruction wrought by the Italian agricultural revolution of the 1950s he worked in the area just to the north of Rome, South Etruria, and was able to plot the development of the landscape from earliest prehistory until the late Roman period. In passing he and his many assistants (now eminent archaeologists) discovered the early middles ages and laid the foundations for their study in Italy. For the first time it was possible to put flesh on the bones of historical accounts to provide countryside complement for the work done in great urban centres. After all, for all its cities the ancient world was a rural place.
The BSR’s work was also expanded to take in the Roman countryside further afield, studying the Roman villa colonisation of southern Italy, colonial villas near Naples and conquered towns in Puglia. These are initiatives that have been sustained in the modern era as BSR has grasped one of the most painful nettles in the heritage world by supporting a research project inside Pompeii and even more having acted as the initiator of the huge restoration programme at Herculaneum generously funded by the Packard Humanities Institute in California. The latter is the reason why so much of Herculaneum is now open to be visited, as recent Andante visitors will attest.
The picture that this ground-breaking work produced was the epic rise and fall of a Roman landscape. It was clear that before the Romans settlement pattern was relativelt sparse. From these limited beginnings in the Bronze Age, through the Etruscan Iron Age, a massive expansion under the Romans marking their establishment of peace, prosperity and order, albeit by the point of a sword, making an offer that obviously no-one could refuse. Their genius though was making sure that everybody got something a piece of the pie, linking them all to the progress of the greater Roman project.
In 2012 Andante Travels will be running an exciting tour that covers the creation of the Romans based on all this new archaeological work (click here to see the details). We shall look at the making of the Romans, from the birth of the City through the early centuries of expansion under the Kings and Republic, through the making and consolidation of the Empire. It is a unique programme which will visit many of the iconic sites of the Roman epic as well some of the least known landmarks in Rome’s story.
'Earliest modern humans' in Europe identified by Oxford Researchers
Written by Administrator
The question as to whether Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe before the extinction of the Neanderthal race around 30,000 years ago has long been debated. It has even been suggested that competition from our species was partly responsible for their extinction. New light has now been shed on this relationship by Oxford University researchers who have now provided important new radiocarbon dates for two milk teeth and a jawbone, suggesting a new date for when the first modern humans arrived in Europe.
The techniques of Radiocarbon are long established, measuring the known rate of decay of the Carbon 14 isotope. The new dates, established by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, at Oxford University, are hugely significant as they suggest that modern humans arrived in Europe much earlier than previously believed. This means that anatomically modern humans are likely to have co-existed with Neanderthals in this part of the world for several thousand years.
Dr Katerina Douka is part of the international research team re-examining the two infant teeth excavated from a prehistoric cave in Italy. A new shell preparation technique she developed has allowed this early modern human site in Italy to be re-assessed.
If you sign up to the Andante Travels Study Days on 3 April or 20 August 2012 you will get the chance to see the unit where this and other pioneering work has been undertaken. We are very privileged to have Dr Douka, along with Dr Mike Dee and Dr Richard Staff, lead these Study Days in 2012.
Come and see the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator. An exciting opportunity to spend the day in the labs with these experts, and gain an insight in to their workplace!
Please follow this link to read the full article:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110311.html
Tuesday 3 April 2012
Monday 20 August 2012
Places are limited, so if you would like to book please contact Andante to find out more, and make a reservation.
