It’s been a while since I wrote a Batavia post. It has also been a while since Beacon Island (Batavia’s Graveyard) has been vacated and the fishing shacks removed. With those impediments to a proper investigation out of the way, teams of archaeologists and anthropologists are getting down and dirty, excavating the island for more…
I read today in a newspaper article that systematic excavation of Beacon Island in the Abrolhos group off the West Australian coast has begun with the discovery of a new grave. That might not mean much to many of you, but it does to me. Beacon Island is the modern name for Batavia’s Graveyard, the…
When you’re writing about a particular time in history, it’s important to get the details right; what people wore, how they thought, what they ate. The life of the Dutch in the seventeenth century is well documented through the wonderful artists of the ‘Golden Age’ – painters like Rembrandt, van Dijk, Brueghel, van de Velde…