From my diary

I’m very busy with the Mithras site, uploading more data about monuments.  Last night I worked on the page on the Caernarvon Mithraeum, adding information from the excavation report.  It was discovered in 1959, during preparatory work by a jerry-builder developer, and is now a set of rather dreary-looking 50’s houses.  Today I’ve been looking for images of the finds, and failing.

On my last visit to Wales – to Swansea – I stopped at Caerleon, and was very sad at the obvious poverty there.  Judging from Google Street View, north Wales is the same.  There used to be a purpose-built museum at the site of Segontium, the Roman fort at Caernarvon.  The council handed over responsibility for running it to a local trust, and then, a few years later, removed the council funding.  The museum is now closed.

I have been trying to find out what became of the finds from the dig.  This itself is not easy.  That the council anticipated the final outcome seems obvious to me; the trust was merely a patsy, to take the blame for the inevitable council-driven closure.  It is very sad to find a town with so little civic pride that it closes its museums.  Shame on the town council.  I doubt the cost was much.  Other councils are playing the same game and closing down public libraries.

I wonder how long the one in my own town will survive such maneouverings?  The running of the library has already been outsourced.  How long before the council funding is chopped?  A volume on Roman Koln awaits me there this weekend.

I’ve also been looking at an entry in the CIMRM, on a tauroctony from Fala castle, in what is now Slovenia.  No trace of this item, or of any museum in the area, to be found online!  It is remarkable how archaeology just disappears!

The National Library of Wales is digitising Welsh publications – well done.  Among these, according to Wikipedia, is Archaeologia Cambrensis, in which the Segontium Mithraeum was published.  But … it is not on the website.  I do hope that journal owners are not being obscurantist.

I have been impressed again today with how easy it is to find older publications online.  Despite the barriers of copyright!

The Origen book has a load of formatting errors, and needs rework.  I shall print it off on sheets of A4, and mark up the sheets in red ink, very precisely.  Otherwise we will be at this in a year’s time!

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