Liminal places

[Constantine]

Oh shit.... think I found the ancestral work from Greece that this merlin story developed put of. I've been hand copying Xenophanes of Colophon's fragments today and it mentioned Epimenides, so I looked him up and he has a very similar story. I've been tracking merlin on the basis of seperate bronze age myths and never suspected the druids had this greek strain of thought.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides

I'd have to confirm it better and track down parallel texts from the Greek and Latin prior to Claudius, as well as welsh myths but yeah. Looks damn similar.

[Gary Childress]

Having been on a number of archaeological digs when I was at school, and a few since, I can attest that the best finds are always found at the edge of things. Walls of buildings, property or field boundaries, even borders of ancient kingdoms, as indicated by ridgeways, for example. Some of the reasons for this may be purely practical, of course. In the case of rooms, rubbish accumulates at the edges when floors are swept. With fields, the edges might be more difficult to plough over each year, and small, awkward areas might be missed. Borders, it goes without saying, are very popular venues for warfare, so we may more easily find evidence of ancient battles at or near them.

But I think something more is going on here. Rudston, Yorkshire, is just a tiny village with a massive megalith standing stone in its churchyard, which gives the village its name. There has been continuity of worship on this spot for at least four thousand years, maybe more. But the churchyard also contains a Roman sarcophagus, in an extremely bad state of repair, is has to be said, and located in a really inconvenient spot, right at the boundary of the churchyard, as indicated by a low medieval wall. Why put it here? This is obviously not the only example, and in fact, it's a common practice.

What is it about boundaries, the liminal areas, that seem to draw us? Humans are territorial creatures, even more so than cats, are we seem to care a great deal about boundaries, borders and limits. There's a lot of folklore associated with thresholds, and crossing over from one place to another, both literally and metaphorically. People might be said to be edgy, or on the edge. During the Neolithic period sacred enclosures are bounded by what archaeologists, rather confusingly, call henges, that is, circular embankments, that may or may not have stone circles in them. Ancient Roman religion also had its sacred enclosures, though these were usually rectangular, rather than circular.

In so many ways we seem to care more about boundaries than the actual things they enclose.

Good points. Perhaps boundaries between civilization and 'nature' are usually where people place rubbish and things they no longer use? In the end, the only thing that inhabits the center are things we are still using. The boundary is where we discard the rest over time. So that's probably where you'll find the most human artifacts, where they were discarded.

[Gary Childress]

A notable exception might be places like Pompeii which were literally frozen in the moment they were destroyed. Most other human habitations simply decline with a trash pile afterward. Then someone comes along and moves the trash to build something new and the process starts all over again. Only the trash most removed from civilization (places no one really maintains) usually remains more or less where it was left.