Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Layers...
I have been thinking - and Niki's comment has prompted me to write it down - that the layers of history are very evident in the York built environment. Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman... and that only takes us up to the 12th century. All those centuries of invasion and disruption, of destruction but also of regeneration. I find it disrupts my notions of nationhood. Perhaps we are too precious about our nationality, since we are all hybrids. I guess we just have to settle for a fluid nationality and an identity that is always in the making...
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Those layers exist only because each was a sufficiently long period. Much like our sedimentary rock layers. Even some of the big layers may be composed of multiple floods and the ash of multiple volcanic eruptions. Our NZ layers are there. The middens, the rubbish tips in the backyards of the early bigger landowners. They are just not as obvious as our NZ time periods are not distinct enough and of course - invasion tends to lay waste to what is there. However even invasion can use what's there. Crete where the ground floor of an old house may be Venetian and the second story Turkish - or was it the other way! John O
ReplyDeleteSpot-on John. I edited a great history PhD thesis which was concerned with 'reading the landscape' from a Maori perspective - with a particular focus on central Wellington. Layers there if we only know where to look...
ReplyDeleteAnd all my childhood my mum would dig up items in the garden from the big house that must have given Richardson Terrace its name. I still have them - pieces of china, bottles, a dog tag...