Tesserae

In the space of fifteen minutes last night, Deborah picked these five stone cubes from the surface of the grounds here in part of a field turned over to provide water channels around the olive trees; interestingly, at the same time, my eye failed to pick out any.

Like the coloured tesserae used to construct mosaics, these plain ones would have been used to make a floor, probably for an olive press of something similar, at an earlier stage of the inhabitation of the hill top on which our institution in which we are staying was built in the 1970s.

Others have picked many of these out before, and this cross, which hangs in one of the corridors here, is an artwork created with some of them.