“Bogs and Butter”
by Heidi Carlson
Claremont McKenna College
My piece describes the academic lessons I learned during my Archaeology class, as well as the life lessons I learned when I was frustrated by signing up for classes at University College Cork in Ireland.
18 September 2010: Prehistoric Ireland
So first thing is first: the bog.
A bog is a wet, marshy area that’s teeming with vegetation. In Ireland there are primarily “blanket” bogs (hmmm cozy). Prehistoric communities in Ireland started depositing objects-and sometimes people-into the bogs. During the Late Bronze Age, they just started throwing everything they could get their hands on into the giant puddles. Except gold. As Eion informed us, they liked to keep that on dry land.
During this period, Late Bronze age man (Brian) figured out that he was better than Early Bronze Age man (Martin). To demonstrate Brian’s newfound sense of superiority, he built his house on a hill, made himself chief of the land, and bred special cows. Martin had to start paying tribute to Brian, treat him like a god, cook him fine beef stews in his falucht fiadh…
Perhaps the other thing that made Brian so different from Martin was that Brian wanted to be a class A warrior. Leather shields, leaf-shaped swords (perfect for slicing), chevaux-de-frise outside his house. He was better at making things out of metal than Martin. Martin’s stone mould was nothing compared to Brian’s clay mould. Of course this only made Brian feel even more superior. “I think I’ll make crotals, and trumpets, and ear spools, and dress fasteners!” he would yell from his hill. Mostly silly objects that we now only attribute to having a ritual purpose… like a fish slice.
Brian traded his dress fasteners for sunflower pins and amber from Scandinavia. The Scandinavians didn’t think they were silly, but then again Scandinavians are silly. I think they ended up giving the dress fasteners to England. The English probably just stared at them and used them as egg cups for their soft-boiled eggs.
Brian died at the ripe age of 30. Although Martin would have preferred to build Brian a grand tomb (he was his chief afterall), Martin thought that he should bury Brian the way Brian would have wanted… i.e. in a boring old ditch by himself without his fancy ear spools. So Martin made a barrow, built a stone circle, and threw some junk (but not golden junk) into the bog next door. And with that, Martin brushed the dirt from his hands off on his trousers- I mean robe… the Vikings haven’t come yet to popularize trouser-wearing… and cried “bring on the Iron Age!”
Looking back on this journal entry, I realize that my Archeology course taught me well about the prehistoric days of a country I’ve come to love. In hindsight, I suppose I expected to learn a great deal during that first month in Ireland. At that time, I was only taking one course, and it was packed with field trips and I was eagerly grabbing at any ounce of knowledge offered to me in order to help me make sense of this country. Yes, by September, I seemed to have figured out the mysterious bogs and I had become an expert when it came to ritual deposition. I learned that Vikings brought trousers to Ireland, and I learned that butter was just as much of a staple food item as potatoes (this last fact was drawn from my own personal experience at restaurants with buttered tuna sandwiches). However, there were several aspects of Ireland that continued to baffle me. This becomes especially apparent when my summer Archeology course comes to an end, and I finally enter the real semester at my University. Especially this week as I sign up for classes. My newly acquired “bog knowledge” is failing me and I’m learning the meaning of the phrase “An Irish solution to an Irish problem”.
Let me explain:
Classes at my Irish university are usually twice a week, but they are at two different times, and in two different rooms. In order to figure out this system, you are directed to the timetables on the website. Each schedule is spilt up into departments. But sometimes the department you’re looking for will be called something entirely different. Ex: Celtic Civilization is now Early & Medieval Irish. And don’t look for the travel-writing literature class under the Literature department, it’s under Italian. Duh.
And then sometimes the classes in the course catalogue don’t exist in the timetables, or they’re misnumbered, or sometimes the entire timetables website is on coffee break.
I have a feeling the Irish would greet this system with a shrug and take a coffee break with the timetables website. Maybe eat a muffin while the rainbow swirly continues to spin (assuming they’re Mac users). If the system isn’t that broken, why fix it? It works well enough.
And the American in me screams, “This is so stupid! Why won’t someone fix this NOW?”
My frustration only grows. Things here don’t run on a “first-come, first-serve” basis. They run on a “let’s see a show of hands, and have a raffle!” basis. What madness. This wouldn’t happen in Germany.
But, I’m not in Germany. I’m in Ireland.
I need to stop screaming. Tuck the American flag back into my purse for a bit, and take a coffee break with the timetables website. Not everything needs to be go-go-go all the time. The Irish solution seems to coo, “don’t worry, you’ll be grand”. Maybe that’s why this country loves butter so much. Churning and churning. Patient, slow, relaxed. We’ll get there when we get there.
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Rudy Maxa and Allan Comport judged the RateYourStudyAbroad.com Fall 2010 Travel Writing & Photography Contest. Rudy Maxa is the host of PBS‘s RudyMaxa’s World, a former Washington Post reporter and the former host of NPR‘s The Savvy Traveler. Allan Comport is a professor of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
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