Speyer and the Vikings - again

I decided to go and see the Viking exhibition in Speyer one last time. Since you can't take any photos I wanted to burn an image of the most beautiful pieces into my mind. So we arrived at a cloudy day. Here is a glimspe of the cathedral's towers through the trees.



Just across the cathedral's square is the Historical Museum of Speyer.

Well, I can't show you Viking age artefacts, but we also went into the general exhibiton and here I finally could bring my camera to good use.

Here is a nice piece of a pot from the La Hoguette group. This group is interesting because it too used pointed-based vessels so uncommon for the Linear Band Keramik (LBK) culture and they formed the Western frontier to the incoming LBK. It was under a megalithic grave that they found this type of pottery for the first time. It also has very early dates (at least as old as LBK or older) and a lithic tradition that is clearly local and mesolithic. That's why I love this culture group. They used crushed bones as temper for their pottery and that's why I don't love 'em too much. Interestingly there was pottery from a megalithic grave in England with bone tempered pottery, too.




a whole pot would have looked similar to this one:

Lüning et al. 1998

The dots represent sites with finds from the La Hoguette group; The shadowd areas are the LBK culture and the Cardial group, respectively.

http://www.archaeologie.bl.ch/Pages/Museum/auston/auston_2_2.jpg

Ok I, I get the message, you are slightly bored by my 'very interesting' artefacts, so I just quickly show you some very beautiful items.

A lided container (early bell beaker culture) from Ludwigshafen-Mundenheim:

The famous golden hat from Schifferstadt:

An Iron Age bangle from Rodenbach (460-400 BCE) :

Wine harvesting with Bacchus, a scene from a Jupiter column from Roman Speyer:

And a bottle of Roman wine, vintage AD 325:

On our way back to the car park, I saw a playground with a brilliant - no, not a merry-go-round but a giant ant. A superb method to avoid insectiphobia in children:

And what for dinner? A caramelised onion and lentil wellington from uk-tv food (http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/516620). Good to prepare and then just pushed into the oven. In 20 min dinner was on the table together with new savoy cabbage and carrot veggies and a wild rocket salad. Yeah, I know, the photo doesn't look very nice. I took when it was still on the baking sheet fresh from the oven. But believe me it was really really tasty.