Garry's Blog

Notre Dame
A beautiful cathedral - sadly gravely damaged. Its glory was always its superb location and exterior. These survive and from photographs the vaulting is somewhat damaged but let's hope not too severely. The spire should be an easy rebuild.

There must have been a lot of small timbers in the roof for it to have burned like that - large timbers char and burn very slowly. The reconstruction can use timber, but it must be wisely and have protections that modern buildings have.

For visitors to France do not be deterred. Sainte Chapelle and Saint Denis are still in Paris, even Sacré-Cœur if you like the style or at least the view if you don't. The rest of France is well endowed with cathedrals. Avoiding the tourist crush at Notre Dame is perhaps a small plus.

Popular posts from this blog

Quotes for Archaeologists I used to have these in the page formatting of this blog - but it didn't work on iPhones and the ilk so took it down. Here they are as a post instead.

Some years ago I bought a copy of Peter Buck's printed Cawthron Lecture - The Coming of the Maori.Tucked inside it was a printed postcard of two Maori men. It was not the usual subject for a Maori postcard - usually they were tourist scenes. The two intrigued me - the sitting one clearly of higher status and unusually well dressed for the period. It seemed an unlikely subject. The card was tucked onto a bookcase shelf and has sat their occasionally attracting my attention ever since, until I recently watched a Shipwreck TV programme about the 1863 wreck of the Delaware near Nelson. It was the well known story of the rescue of most of the crew by the "New Zealand Grace Darling" Huria Matenga. You can read her story and more on the wreck here: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nzbound/delaware.htm http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/matenga-huria-te-amoho-wikitoria http://www.theprow.org.nz/maori/maori-rescues/ ...

This quote struck me in a compendium of quotes about archaeology: “Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.” Jim Bishop, American, Journalist, 1907–1987. Excuse the sexism – of its time I guess – when the stereotypical archaeologist was male. Ther rest connected with me because I had just been reading How Archaeologists Can Solve The Earth’s ‘Wicked Problems’ Scoop News – attributed to “Human Bridges” The guts of the thesis is: “…. archaeology is essential to the future of humanity and planetary health. This is for three main reasons. First, archaeologists have the capacity to think about and to understand humanity of the past, and to project that insight into the future. Second, archaeologists are uniquely placed to comprehend the many and complex ways in which humans, over time, have related to their environment and environ...