HISTORY

Indonesian shipwreck auction closes with no sales May 5th, 2010 Nary a single Imperial porcelain dish of the $80 million treasure sold at today’s auction. In fact, nary a single bid was received for any of the lots. Some 20 collectors expressed interest (thanks to Bingley for that link) in bidding for pieces the day before the auction, but since the auction opened and then instantly closed, that means none of the interested parties were willing to cough up the enormous $16 million deposit required from all would-be bidders.
So what now?
Fadel Muhammad, the Maritime and Fisheries Minister and chairman the National Committee of Excavation and Utilization of Precious Artifacts from Sunken Ships, said the committee, which oversees the auction, would need weeks or a month to decide what to do next.
“The next step is we will have a meeting among the committee, and then we will decide what we will be doing according to the regulation…of course we will consult with the president,” he said. I imagine they’ll reschedule with a less absurd deposit requirement. However, this delay also gives the burgeoning protests time to burgeon even more. Archaeologists, as usual, vocally oppose the sale and dispersal of rare and precious cultural patrimony, but they’re not the only ones who have a problem with this auction. No less a personage than Sultan Sepuh XIV Pangeran Raja Adipati Arief Natadiningrat of the Cirebon Sultanate (the shipwreck was found in Cirebon waters) has expressed profound dismay.
“The big family of the Cirebon Kasepuhan Sultanate grieves deeply over the auction plan. The late Sultan XIII tried to prevent the auction by sending letters to the President and the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister, but he did not receive any response,” the [current] sultan said.
Pangeran Raja Adipati Arief said he was saddened by the thought that Indonesian students would have to go abroad to learn about their nation’s history because the auction was bound to attract foreign buyers. The government obviously was as little swayed by appeals from royalty as they were by appeals from scholars, but now that the big money buyers have failed to materialize, there may be an opening here. Rare Roman neck guard found at Carlisle Castle May 4th, 2010 Carlisle Castle was first built by William the Conqueror’s son on the site of an ancient Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in 1093. It was part of Scotland back then — now Cumbria is part of England — and it has seen many a battle and intrigue over the 900 years of its existence. Mary Queen of Scots was even locked up there for a few months.
Over the past 10 years, there’s been an extensive archaeological dig on the castle grounds. The dig has just officially ended, and the final tally of Roman artifacts uncovered is a staggering 80,000.
Senior executive officer for Oxford Archaeology North, Rachel Newman, said: “The area was very damp 2,000 years ago, and therefore rare evidence survived for how the Romans and their medieval successors lived, in the form of the foundations for their timber buildings, as well as parts of Roman tents and saddles, their shoes, and wooden and leather possessions.
“Many thousands of objects were excavated, including less fragile material, such as pottery, metalwork, both jewellery and everyday utensils, coins, and stone objects.”
“All this evidence provided a wonderful glimpse into how people lived 2,000 years ago, and also in medieval Carlisle, more than 1,000 years later.["] Some of the everyday items include nit combs, one with a louse still embedded in the tines, and large numbers of beef bones. Roman soldiers stationed in Carlisle were partial to beef shoulders, apparently. The articulated neck guard, on the other hand, is an extremely rare find.
[Image]The huge collection of artifacts from this decade-long excavation will go on display in the new Roman gallery of Carlisle’s Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery next year. The Tullie museum already has some Carlisle Roman artifacts on display which you can browse in their nifty iRomans website.
I particularly like the Roman version of military dogtags, a bronze disc with the soldier’s name on it worn as part of the armour. I’m also delighted to see wooden tent pegs from the earliest period of Roman habitation before they constructed the permanent fort. For some reason I can’t explain, I’m completely fascinated by ancient tents. Some of those officers’ tents were seriously fancy digs. 13th c. Tunisian found buried in Ipswich May 3rd, 2010 A 13th century skeleton buried on the grounds of a friary in Ipswich, England, is of Tunisian origin. Nobody knows how he got all the way to England, but he lived there for at least 10 years before he died of a spinal abscess. The body was discovered in the 1990s. It’s only now that analysis has revealed his unusual background.
“It’s not just the skin tone; it’s a question of bone structure,” said Xanthe Mallett, an expert at the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee. She said the size of the nasal bone or the shape of the orbits differed depending on whether skeletons were European or African.
“You can have an idea of where somebody is from by looking at their skeletal features,” she said.
Researchers were able to pin the man to Tunisia using isotope analysis, a technique which looks at the mix of elements that build up in a person’s teeth, bones or other tissues. Since people from different areas tend to accumulate such elements in different ways, analysis of their remains can sometimes pinpoint where they grew up, where they lived or even their diet.
“Each area has a different isotopic signature,” she said. Carbon dating puts the skeleton to 1190-1300 A.D., at least 150 years older than the earliest post-Roman records of black people in England. There were people of African extraction in England under Rome — some slaves and soldiers, the 4th century “Ivory Bangle Lady” found buried in York — but then there’s a thousand year gap before 3 black people are mentioned in tax records.
Since he was buried in the friary, he must have been Christian, possibly a convert brought to England by Lord Tiptoth, the founder of the friary, upon his return from the 9th Crusade.
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1000-year-old Indonesian shipwreck treasure for sale May 2nd, 2010 [Image]A mind-bogglingly huge treasure trove found on a 1000-year-old shipwreck by Indonesian fishermen is going on sale in Jakarta Wednesday. It’s the biggest treasure ever found in Asia, and comparable to the most valuable shipwreck ever found period, the Atocha, an early 17th century Spanish vessel found off the Florida coast.
On sale will be 271,000 individual pieces, including precious gems, Iranian glassware and Imperial Chinese porcelain all dating back to the first millennium A.D. The estimated value of the auction is a staggering 80 million dollars.
The pieces include the largest known vase from the Liao Dynasty (907-1125) and famous Yue Mise wares from the Five Dynasties (907-960), with the green colouring exclusive to the emperor.
Around 11,000 pearls, 4,000 rubies, 400 dark red sapphires and more than 2,200 garnets were also pulled from the depths by [Belgian treasure-hunter Luc] Heymans and his team of international divers. [Image]It took 22,000 dives to bring it all to shore. There was a great deal of trade between Arabia, India, Java and Sumatra back then, but even so, whoever was on that ship must have been a big shot. Heymans speculates that all the Imperial porcelain suggests there was an ambassador on board. There was so much of it that when he first dove to the site, all he could see was a mountain of porcelain, no wood from the ship structure at all.
Recovering the treasure turned out to be the least of Heymans’ difficulties. He had arranged permits for the excavation and retrieval of the shipwreck, but the Indonesian police still arrested two of the divers. They stayed in jail for a month while Heymans worked out the problem. Meanwhile, other treasure-hunters tried to poach the find, the Indonesian navy got all up in his grill and the government spent a couple of years drafting new legislation to deal with the discovery.
Finally he cut a deal: the Indonesian government declared some of the treasure national heritage and therefore not salable, and it gets 50% of the sale proceeds from the rest of the treasure. So Heymans and his backers will have to settle for a mere $40 million at minimum. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum puts its collection online May 1st, 2010 The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has created a large online database of 3000 items from its collection. Now you can browse the entire database or search for a specific piece among the thousands of images of O’Keefe’s art and photographs from the Museum Collection, plus correspondence and other archives from the Research Center collection.
There are over 900 Georgia O’Keeffe works in the database, from her iconic flowers and bleached desert skulls, to nudes, landscapes, cityscapes, abstractions, and more, ranging in date from 1901 to 1984. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center archives photographic collections, study materials, and the Georgia O’Keeffe General Correspondence collection, among other things.
I’m particularly fascinated by the Personal Tangible Property collection, which contains O’Keefe’s personal art materials like brushes, easels, frames, and paints, found objects she used in her works like bones, rocks and shells, plus her clothing and household furnishings. It’s neat to catch a glimpse of how she lived and worked, of the things that she surrounded herself with, that inspired her art.
[Image]The images are all high resolution, so you can zoom way, way in to her paintings and see the most minute detail. Here’s a 1919 piece, Series I White & Blue Flower Shapes, for example. The picture as you first see it is only 12.5% zoomed in. Go up 100% and drag the little square in the thumbnail to see the brush strokes, even the individual brush hairs.
Interesting tidbit about O’Keeffe’s flowers which I just learned from the museum website: she was annoyed that critics saw in her extreme closeups of the sexual anatomy of flowers (and in her other works, for that matter) an expression of her gender and sexuality.
In 1943, O’Keeffe finally responded: “Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.” (In Ernest W. Watson, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” American Artist [June 1943]:10.) Those critics were projecting, in other words, and so have I been. [Image]
The museum will continue to add to the online database, so check back regularly if you looked for something and couldn’t find it. The Noah’s Ark plot thickens April 30th, 2010 A member of the ark-hunting team who made the purported discovery has expressed doubts about the veracity of the find. Not just about its being the Ark itself, mind you, but about whether the whole thing is a deliberate hoax.
Dr. Randall Price, an evangelic Christian professor at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, was the sole archaeologist on the team in 2008 when they first discovered the wooden structures on Mount Ararat. He wouldn’t get into specifics with the Christian Science Monitor, but he did tell them that he had “difficulties with a number of issues related to the evidence at hand.” He also confirmed that he had sent a certain email which has now leaked in which he claimed the wood was planted.
From the email:
I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be the inside of the Ark. I and my partners invested $100,000 in this expedition (described below) which they have retained, despite their promise and our requests to return it, since it was not used for the expedition. The information given below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details).
To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut’s men to the site saw the wood, but couldn’t get inside because of the severe weather conditions. During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film. As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in Dogubabyazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it. Damn, yo. If true, I have to give the expedition credit for commitment to their con. Dr. John D. Morris, a consultant to the Chinese team and president of the Institute for Creation Research, declined to join the press conference and is withholding judgment until he sees some real evidence, but he points out to the CSM that hauling all that wood up 12,000 feet of snow-covered mountain then cramming it into the ice would be a dramatic feat. You’d need major heavy machinery to accomplish it.
It seems to me the con could be a lot more simple than that: pocket money from avowed Ark-hunters, take pictures and video from other sites, make a big splashy announcement with zero confirmable information and enjoy the publicity and further riches that inevitably ensue. If they disappear from this point onwards, the story will just fade away, one of a million media microfurors that get zero follow-up. The Noah’s Ark kerfuffle April 29th, 2010 A team of Chinese and Turkish explorers from an evangelical Christian group called Noah’s Ark Ministries International announced earlier this week that they’ve found the remains of Noah’s Ark on top of Mount Ararat in Turkey. The news instantly spread around the world via wire service (AFP seems to have been the primary source) and a remarkable number of mainstream media outlets reported the claims virtually uncritically; see this absurdly definite headline from ABC, for example.
The basics are as follows: at an undisclosed location on Mount Ararat, the team claims to have found seven large wooden compartments, plus some fragments of wood nearby, in 2007 and 2008. In October of 2009 they returned with a film crew. They say they’ve carbon dated the wood and the results indicate the wood about 4,800 years old, which is kinda sorta when Noah would have been awaiting the rainbow sign, give or take 500 years going by Bishop Ussher’s chronology.
[Image]Filmmaker Yeung Wing-cheung from the 15-person team went so far as to say “It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it.”
In support of their claims, they offer the remote location which precludes human habitation as a source of the structures, some unauthenticated footage and a couple of pictures. Oh, and also the presence of tenons in the wood, which of course only existed before nails were invented. (Any mortise and tenon joints you might have encountered on your post-Noah furniture secretly include invisible nails.) The group refuse to disclose the location, for its protection, of course. They also say Turkish officials present at the press conference will ask the government to submit the site to UNESCO for World Heritage status.
The Turkish government doesn’t seem to be quite on board with the plan, however, because they’re actually initiating an investigation into the regional officials involved and into whether the team actually had permission to do any research on Mount Ararat and remove artifacts from the country.
Also displeased are Creationist scholars who point out that if radiocarbon dating is accepted in this case, then it would have to be accepted in all the other cases where the results are older than the 6,000 years of the earth according to Biblical literalists. If you recalibrate all carbon dating results so the maximum is 6,000 years, then of course the 4,800 years of this find make it way too young to be Noah’s wood. Also, it’s cedar wood, not gopher, so yeah, literalists not happy.
Meanwhile, actual archaeologists point out that even if this find is real and the dating is accurate — two huge ifs — that proves exactly nothing. The wood could be on Mount Ararat and a) not be from a ship, b) not have been used in construction right when it was harvested.
“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York state, told National Geographic.
The evangelical group says it found wood structures on Ararat, and carbon dating placed it at 4,800 years old. But even this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Noah’s Ark – or that the “structure” they found is that old.
“All that we know at the moment is that the expedition members are showing us pictures and samples of a structure made out of wood,” Cline told The Christian Post.
“It could be ancient, it could be medieval, it could even have been constructed last week,” he said. “Even carbon-14 dating will only tell us how old the wood is; it will not tell us when the structure was constructed.”
“If the finds are published in a full and comprehensive manner, one will truly be able to assess it,” Dr. Aren M. Maeir, a professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, told The Christian Post. “Meanwhile, it joins many other such discoveries – and sound quite hard to believe.” There’s also zero geological evidence of a flood in Turkey 4,000 years ago, and Biblical scholars point out that the Bible says the ark landed in Urartu, a kingdom in eastern Turkey. The Mount Ararat location only became the prevalent theory in the Middle Ages.
So, in other words, the “find” is pretty much meaningless at this point. The articles quoting the team unchallenged are succumbing to the allure of Bible-related discoveries. We’ll see if there’s any fire to all this smoke should the discoveries ever be published.
Meanwhile, here’s an entertaining YouTube of the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team doing their version of archaeology on the Ararat site. I particularly like the stumbling around in thick boots part.

// Surprising Viking necklace found in Ireland April 28th, 2010 [Image]Archaeologists excavating Glencurran Cave in Burren National Park in County Clare, Ireland, have uncovered an unexpected treasure: a 1,150-year-old Viking necklace. It’s surprising because the piece is highly valuable so must have been treasured by its owner, but Vikings never settled in the Burren area.
Some smaller, less significant Viking bead necklaces have been found in burials in Dublin. Nothing as glamorous as this, though.
[Excavation team leader Dr. Marion Dowd] said: “The necklace is the largest Viking necklace to have been found in Ireland. Normally, Viking necklaces that have been found have five to six glass beads, but this has 71 glass beads covered with gold foil.”
A leading expert on Irish cave archaeology, Dr Dowd said: “It is really bizarre how this necklace from a high-status Viking came to be in a cave in the Burren.
“There is no parallel for it in Ireland and it is puzzling on a number of fronts.
“The necklace would have been imported into Ireland from Scandinavia in the late 9th and early 10th century.
“Small numbers of these beads have been found with Viking burials at Kilmainham, Dublin, but nothing like the number found in Glencurran Cave. Such necklaces were worn by high-status Viking women and they might denote a woman’s cultural and religious affiliations. These were certainly prestigious items.” Dr. Dowd speculates that the necklace might have come via Limerick. There was a Viking settlement there, so they may have traded with the Gaelic inhabitants of Burren.
Glencurran Cave has produced other finds in the 6 years since excavations began making it an archaeological gem even before actual jewelry was discovered. The current team has also found the skeletal remains of a two to four-year-old Bronze Age child, placed in the cave about 3,500 years ago, which is currently undergoing DNA testing. In addition, they’ve found the remains of seven adults, two other young children and one baby, plus the 10,000-year-old scapula of a bear.
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New pictures of the ancient Greek DIY building April 27th, 2010 Discovery News has some neat pictures of the remains of a Greek building found with assembly instructions in Basilicata, Italy.
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[Image] The only new information I could glean from the slideshow (other than the pictures themselves, of course) was that the inscriptions found on the roof tiles note that the structure was built by Greek artisans from the Spartan colony of Taranto in Apuglia, the region that forms the heel of the Italian boot.
There’s a wee drappie more information on the overall design of the building.
This building was no small piece of furniture. The elaborate structure was built with large walls topped by a sloping roof and was covered in red and black decorations. The building also boasted an impressive colonnade at the entryway. Demolished: 17 great fallen train stations April 26th, 2010 I have a thing for trains and an even bigger thing for glamorous train stations from the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, many of them succumbed to the explosion of car travel and the highway system in the 1950s. They were destroyed, oftentimes replaced with parking lots, bunker-style government buildings or even vacant lots in the middle of some of the prime real estate in the country. Boggles the mind, really.
Today I came across an excellent list of 11 beautiful train stations that were demolished and the crap that went up in their place, plus a follow-up article with 6 more destroyed stations.
I have personal knowledge of the crap that replaced several of these stations. In Atlanta, a city founded as a train depot and one the largest rail crossroads in the South, the sole train station remaining is a pokey two-track one-room cottage that used to be a minor commuter station. It’s an embarrassment, frankly, especially when you consider what they used to have.
Built in 1905, Terminal was the grand portal to the city. It had two Italianate towers and a huge train shed behind. When the station was razed in 1970, it was replaced by a government office building. Then and now:
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And that’s just one of the dearly departed stations in Atlanta. The other was built in 1930, demolished in 1972 and replaced with a parking lot.
Then and now:
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The two stations in Chicago replaced with vacant lots will break your heart too.
Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago’s destiny has been a result of its transportation links to the rest of the country. As such, it had something of an abundance of train stations. Even while it still has four commuter terminals inside the Loop, knocking down impressive stations like Grand Central did not yield much for the city. The site of this former station, prime real estate on the banks of the Illinois River, is still a vacant lot after nearly four decades.
THEN: Located on the banks of the Chicago River, the beautiful station with ornate marble floors, Corinthian columns, and a fireplace. It served travelers to DC and many other cities.
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NOW: A vacant lot
[Image] I don’t even understand how it’s possible for such expensive property to remain vacant all this time. You’d think before they knocked down an architectural gem like that, they’d have some concrete plans or at least a vague notion of any benefit whatsoever that might accrue from the destruction.