Irreverence for the Past, Hope for the Future

I returned to the same street as Monday to the Catalunya Archaeological Museum, which is right across the street from Teatre Lliure (but, sadly, closed on Mondays).

I had heard that it wasn't the most exciting museum in the world, since it tried to focus on archaeological discoveries JUST in this region, but I decided to check it out.  After all the museum wasn't that expensive (about 3 euros when I checked online), and I like seeing old stuff that people have dug up.  Archaeology has always seemed like the cool adult version of playing in the sandbox as a kid.  When I arrived, escaping from the heat into the cool, quiet expanse of the museum, I was surprised to be handed a ticket - free of charge - as soon as I flashed my student ID.  I swear, that card is worth its weight in gold.

Since I enjoyed writing about the MNAC in a tone of utter irreverence, let me now treat you to Jess's Totally Irreverent Guide Part 2: The Dawn of Man.

The rooms, as in many museums of this sort, were arranged fairly chronologically.  The first room was a series of broken bones and stones and this gem: elephant teeth.

 These chompers are thousands of years old but pretty darn well preserved.  And enormous.  Sadly, there were many things in this museum I wanted to show the scale of, but all my amateur attempts at photography failed to convey a sense of size.
Next came cave drawings/paintings/carvings of giant beasts.  I think it's pretty cool that people figured out ways to express themselves in the days before fashion and blogs and poetry (haikus of grunts excluded, for the sake of this argument).  On the other hand, I have NO idea how archaeologists find some of this stuff.  Picture this: you're walking along among a rocky mountain and you see a cave.  Hey, nature made an indentation in a rock and someone probably took advantage of that, you might think to yourself.  You go to check it out, armed with your archaeologist utility belt of paint brushes, chisels, and a flashlight.  In the middle of this dark cave of shadows, you somehow notice the teeeeeeeensiest outline of a giant beast, or the faded colors of prehistoric paint.  I could barely see these outlines through the glass under carefully arranged lighting (these photos make it easy for you guys compared to actually looking at them, I swear).  Maybe on your archaeologist resume you have to have superhuman vision or the ability to rock microscope glasses.

 You know how they always portray cavemen as really grumpy, slouching people?  Well, the slouching seems to be part of their we-evolved-from-monkeys-so-we-must-like-to-bend-over-still thought process, but the grumpiness?  I finally figured it out.  I was looking at these tools and realized, hey, if I had to hack at a giant piece of wood for hours using a little piece of wood to get anything done, I'd probably be really grumpy, too.

 And for thousands of years!  I might not know how it could be better, but I'd be grumpy all the time out of sheer exhaustion (if you have ever seen me just before my 10 PM bedtime, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about).
Also, just so you know, this is what your casket would have looked like a long time ago: they would have shoved you in a giant spare pot and stuck you underground.  I guess it sort of looks like a giant adult womb or something.  I'm not sure how that's comforting; I was glad to have escaped the first time.

 People these days always talk about how anything you put online can be found and traced to you and can potentially ruin your awesome, high-powered career (if you're an aspiring politician, I'm looking at you).  Nobody seemed to warn artists that anything that could last several hundred years, and not just their best work, would someday be displayed for thousands of people to see.  This artist, for example, clearly made this statuette before learning what a woman really looks like naked.  Otherwise, there were some strange women back then.  My glimmer of hope that this was pre-seeing-women-naked is the carefully done face and the seeming disregard for a realistic shaping of the rest of the body.

 As time went on, people got a bit fancier with their decor.  Particularly on Mallorca and Menorca.  What? You've visited those islands?  If you're one of the thousands of young coeds who flock to the island for the all-inclusive beachy boozefest, you may have overlooked that Mallorca and Menorca have a history, thankyouverymuch.  And, apparently, they had progressed by about the 13th century to the point that Texas has reached today:

 Yep, bull horns and the heads of other animals hung proudly on the wall as the main adornment.  In Mallorca, though, these were often found in sanctuaries and had religious significance relating to the farming cycle or paying homage to ancestors/famous warriors.  The bull was a pretty common one.
This museum also loves recreating scenes.  They had posed cavemen, videos of modern people dressed in animal hides and gossiping and tossing their hair at a prehistoric party (hilariously worth watching), little tiny village replicas (the tiny figurines they managed to find were oddly wearing colonial dress), and lots of little tiny buildings.  This one, the Tudons "Naveta" is representative of the collective mausoleums on Mallorca.

 It's small entrance on the front facade is supposed to be the separation of the world of the living from the world of the dead.  Since it's been well-conserved, it has received the official title (from an unnamed source) of "Oldest Building in Europe."  I'm not sure all the other contenders know this, but the museum has to flaunt what historic superlatives it can.
After walking through rooms of bone shards and then some more "modern" (showing Greek and Roman influences in about the 15th century) art (not pictured here), you walk into this big open room and see lots of microscopes.  It's an interactive room where you can observe seed pods and plant leaves under microscopes to understand how top biologists could look into the cuts of mummified men and understand their diets and habits.
Other Museum Hot Artifacts included: the only completely preserved prehistoric axe in the world (This was almost certainly a replica, though)

 What, might you asked, inspired this visit?  Why, Otzi, the loveable caveman who wore fur leggings with no butt coverage:

 In case you're curious, this is what he really looks like:

 Otzi is a well-preserved natural mummy (read: he died and nature covered him up in ice as a precious gift to modern scientists) who was founed in 1991 in the Otzal Alps.  He's Europe's oldest natural mummy and is on display in Italy.  The people who spotted Otzi lying dead in the snow were two German tourists, who thought they'd stumbled across another mountainer.  Nope.  A little political war over the rights to the body ensued between Austria and Italy (why do these things always show up right on country borders?) but Italy won.
For those of you who are fans of the Paleo diet, here's a fun fact: Otzi's last meals (found in his stomach) consisted of red deer meat and herb bread, as well as some other grains and roots.  That's right, bread!  Now get off your high horse and leave me in peace with my baguette.
Some sobering news for the middle-aged readers out there.  Otzi was about 45, which means that scientists consider him super duper old, probably the oldest in his community, and they say that he looked like this:

 Aren't you glad you weren't a Similaun Man living in 3300 BCE?
On the way out of the exhibit, you enter a room of non-Catalan, non-regional artifacts given as gifts for permanent or temporary display.  You might be tempted to skip the room, which doesn't look like anything special, but DEAR GOD, DON'T.  Whoever was in charge of this room had a great sense of humor.  Case in point? The text accompanying this giant pot:

Entitled "Fill up my glass!", the text describes how this "king-size container" from the 4th century BCE would be used at a party.  "The host would already have filled it with a mix of wine and water, and participants in the symposium would come up to have their kylix (drinking cup filled).  To judge by the size of this crater, it must have been quite a party..."  It's like when you see a joke that they snuck into a textbook.  It's incredible.
Other things that I learned?  From "Oh Dionysius, what lovely wine!", I found out that the symposium was an erotic festival reserved for men (the only women allowed were dancers and courtesans) who ate, gambled, and drank for days.
And lest you think that I would write a post without mentioning Moderniste architecture (gasp!), you should know that Josep Puig i Cadafelch, the famous Catalan architect, was involved in the excavations that supplied art for this museum and in its founding.
Upstairs is a Roman section with mosaics,

 some serious art that looks like every other Roman statue, and this completely unexpected piece:

 Yes, that is Venus riding a giant male appendage.  I'm telling you, this museum is full of surprises.
There's also an exhibit on the Visigoths that's still being completed but that you can visit.  It had some beautiful old glass (I'm a sucker for glass stuff).

 After bursting back into the outside world, I headed down to the Barceloneta shore by Port Vell.

La Parella by Lautaro Diaz

 I had gotten a tip from a coworker that this replica Spanish Galeon was docked here, and I wanted to check it out.

While getting aboard the ship was a total rip-off (5 euros) because there wasn't much to see and you could take most of the cool photos from the shore, it was fun to imagine what it would have been like to sail in the days when that was the most incredible sense of freedom, the closest one could come to flying.

Cannons inside!

 The owners of the ship have tried to turn it into a museum for the 1812 constitution in Spain nicknamed La Pepa, which would have created a democratic society with national sovereignty, division of powers, universal male suffrage, equality of citizens before the law, freedom of the press, rights to education, and other breakthrough achievements  Unfortunately, it was cast aside after only a few months when the king that it recognized, Ferdinand VII, returned to the country.  Nobody protested.  How sad.

 You could take funny photos like the ones below only with a professional photographer who would charge you 5 euros for every photo you bought a print of later.  Scam!  But funny to watch people pose.

And just in case people needed to watch more sailboats go by, there's a Sailing Classic here in Barcelona this coming weekend.  Hurray for boats!

 Spotted: Interesting street art.

Street art - mostly in the form of graffiti - is everywhere in the city.  Some of it is constructive and decorates the metal doors pulled down over shop windows at night (I have seen every theme, from goth punk caricatures of rock stars to The Little Mermaid), while other times it is destructive and covers shop windows or billboards with scribble.  This was different.  It was hidden in a back alley, made of a sketch on paper that had carefully been cut out and stuck to the wall.  It was unprotected, so it had to have been put up recently.  And, unlike a lot of the street art, it was not angry or frustrated or calling for change.  It was hopeful.