Meeting Our Past

Just last week some neighbors "discovered" a covered dolmen in the woods behind our village. I put in the quotation marks because those same neighbors and others throughout the years already knew the area. They had played there when they were children and had never realized just what they were playing in until one of them took a walk through the woods the other day. It had never come to the attention of the authorities, so it has probably been untouched, except for unknowing children, for hundreds of years. 

The strange thing is that it's almost intact. The only uncovered area is the entrance, where the stones are still standing, holding up the dirt around it. It's only missing the cover stone. Of course, it may have been dug up hundreds or thousands of years ago. Nearby there are some other dolmens that were examined by archeologists about forty years ago. All were empty except for one that had a Roman spear abandoned in it.

We're surrounded by history here. When I first moved to Spain, even though I already knew it, it still knocked me back. I grew up in Boston, founded in 1630; the oldest building in downtown Boston is Paul Revere's house, built in 1680; the oldest city in the U.S. is St. Augustine, which dates from 1565; I attended the oldest public school in America, founded in 1635. I was surrounded by history as I grew up, but when I moved here I was surrounded by even older history. Our parish church dates from the 1500's; there are dolmens in the surrounding hills that date from thousands of years ago; Napoleon's soldiers marched through these hills; Roman remains were found in our town, underneath a house that was being renovated; there are Celtic hillforts in nearby towns; the cathedral in Santiago was begun in 1075, after an earlier church built on a Roman and Celtic necropolis was destroyed by Al-Mansur, Moorish invader. A farmer digging in a field a few kilometers away uncovered a gold head covering fifty years ago that was thousands of years old. Dig and you can find almost anything. My husband once found a prehistoric stone ax.

For many years I took my daughter on some summer mornings to an ongoing excavation at a hillfort nearby. She was entranced by the history students from other countries digging and bringing up pieces of earthenware. She was allowed to join and help and was shown how to carefully dig. After that she spent many years saying she wanted to study history and become an archeologist. Until she discovered a talent for drawing. She still likes history, though, and she was always excited when she found something. She even found a Roman fibula once. That hillfort turned out to be quite extensive and continuously occupied over a period of about a thousand years. It's a little mind-boggling standing in a clearing among pine trees, looking out over the water to another town and realizing people once stood there almost three thousand years ago looking at the same shore I'm looking at, but which had a completely different appearance. 

I suppose that's one of the perks of living in Europe. You haven't seen old until you touch the pieces of an earthenware bowl that were last in the hands of someone who lived over two thousand years ago. It's also humbling. Some day someone will dig up our houses and ask themselves how our lives must have been. We will become as forgotten as the people who once walked this land and who thought their way of life would last forever.