The History Blog

If you’re anywhere near the Niagara Falls area, drop your sad little picnic-n-fireworks plans and haul ass up to Old Niagara Fort because they have the coolest events scheduled for the long weekend.

Old Fort Niagara has guarded the mouth of the Niagara River since 1726, and was in the eye of many a French, British, US and Iroquois storm. This year is the 250th anniversary of the Siege of Niagara, so to commemorate it the fort is throwing the history nerd shindig to end all history nerd shindigs.

More than 2,500 re-enactors plan to gather along the mouth of the Niagara River—more than doubling the population of this tiny village — to commemorate a war for control of North America.

They will wage six battles over the course of three days, attack a tall ship in the harbor and carry out a nighttime artillery salute, all to depict the scene in July 1759 when a British army, along with 1,000 Iroquois allies, laid siege to the Frenchheld fort. [...]

[Thomas Faith, chairman of the re-enactment committee] said that the Rangers and Native American contingents have been working for three years to present two scenarios to be performed in native languages — the French Embassy to the Native Americans at 11 a. m. and the British Embassy to the Native Americans at 2 p. m., both on Saturday.

“This is important because both countries competed on a daily basis for the loyalty of the Iroquois,” he said, adding that it also highlights the crucial role of the interpreters.

You can see the schedule of events here. Look at all the awesome packed into just the first 3 hours of events:

Friday, July 3

10:00 am: Battle on the Beach – A French hunting party from Fort Niagara discovers that British forces have landed east of Fort Niagara. Rangers, Native American warriors, and French troops engage in combat. Both sides are reinforced until a major battle unfolds on the shores of Lake Ontario.

10:00 am – Noon: Meet the British Engineer – Siege Works

11:30 am – 12:30 pm:18th Century Games – British Camp

Noon: L’Iroquoise Attacked - Cove Area
British boats attack the French schooner Iroquoise, anchored in the cove below Fort Niagara.

1:00 pm:Parade and Pageantry – Parade Field
The armies pass in review with over 2,500 reenactors, dressed as Native American warriors, French, British, and American Provincial soldiers.

An attack on a tall ship narrated by the descendant of Rene LaForce, the Iroquoise’s captain! Artillery bombardment/fireworks display! Three days of reenactment awesomeness, all for $13 bucks a head, kids under 6 get in free.

Be sure to check out the video of the reenactors being adorable here. If I could teleport to New York state I’d be posting from there right now.

It was carved from the bone of a griffon vulture approximately 35,000 years ago.

Archaeologists found it at Hohle Fels Cave in Germany along with a variety of other artifacts and stone age debris.

The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.

There are other similar instruments extant from other caves in the area, but this is the oldest found so far. It was lying in the sediment next to another historical first: the 35,000 year old sculpture of a buxom dame announced in May.

Now thanks to experimental archaeologist Wulf Hein’s reproduction of the flute, you can be transported back 35,000 years and hear what they heard.

Lovely, haunting sound, isn’t it? I bet it sounds really great in cave acoustics, too.

I figured after all this time I couldn’t just show up empty handed, so I come bearing a blog-warming gift: a 17th century bottle filled with urine, hair and nails. Just what you wanted, amirite?

It was found buried upside down in Greenwich, and is the most complete known example of a “witch bottle”, a device meant to combat witchcraft.

Its contents match a recipe in a late 17th c. Old Bailey court document given from an apothecary to a husband concerned that his wife had gone witchy.

Other witch bottles have been found before, but they were uncorked and their contents degraded. This one is still fully intact and packed with anti-witchcraft goodies.

CT scans and chemical analysis, along with gas chromatography conducted by Richard Cole of the Leicester Royal Infirmary, reveal the contents of the bottle to include human urine, brimstone, 12 iron nails, eight brass pins, hair, possible navel fluff, a piece of heart-shaped leather pierced by a bent nail, and 10 fingernail clippings. [...]

The urine contained nicotine, so a smoker produced it. Since the fingernails showed little wear, Massey believes the individual was “of some social standing.”

So you see you can’t say I never gave you nuthin’. Navel lint and fingernail clippings for all!

We haven’t known a great deal about Darwin’s college days because all we’ve had in the way of evidence are a registration record or two.

But this year, the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publishing of On The Origin of Spieces, Honorary Keeper of the Archives and Fellow Commoner, Geoffrey Thorndike Martin, uncovered six financial ledgers from Christ’s College, Cambridge, which include Charles Darwin’s itemized expenses.

They show that Darwin, who studied at Christ’s College between 1828 and 1831, lived the life of a 19th century gentleman and paid people to carry out tasks such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes. [...]

The books also contain accounts for the barber, chimney-sweep, apothecary [pharmacist], porter, brazier [who looked after the fires], glazier, hatter, laundress, linen-draper and painter, among others.

Back then, students purchased goods and services on account and the merchants applied to the college for payment. Then the college just billed the students for these expenses along with its own charges (ie, tuition) on a quarterly basis.

So now we know that the young Charles Darwin spent more on shoes than he did on books, and that he paid extra for a serving of vegetables with every meal. (The default rations were a joint of some sort of meat and a pint of beer. Srsly.)

The bills have been digitized and made available to all comers on Darwin Online. I get errors when I try to load the images and text on the site itself, but the pdf files work just fine. They’re image rich and high resolution, though, so they take a while to download.

It’s called “Poodle With Bow, On Table” and is at least one of the oldest, if not the oldest. It’s a daguerreotype from the 1850’s, photographer (and model) unknown.

Look at the cuteness:

How did they get that poor creature to sit still for the ages it took them to take a picture in the 1850’s? It must have been heavily sedated.

This photograph is one of thousands going on the auction block next Monday at Sotheby’s New York. There are some extremely famous names among the artists, including the likes of Ansel Adams, Robert Mapplethorpe, Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Edward Henry Weston.

Last year Sotheby’s sold an Edward Weston photograph for $1.6 million. The estimates for his lots this time around are far more modest, ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 dollars.

The highest estimate — $200,000 - $300,000 — goes to a László Moholy-Nagy portrait of Lucia Moholy, an extremely well-known photograph considered part of the artist’s seminal oeuvre.

You can browse the entire Sotheby’s sale — and it’s worth it — here.

Iraq is suffering the worst drought in decades, and as the waters of the Euphrates recede, ancient ruins are surfacing for the first time since Saddam Hussein dammed the area in the mid-1980’s.

Ratib says that at least 75 archeological sites had been partially excavated before the area was flooded. They ran the gamut of civilizations — from 3,000 B.C. to the Sumerian and Roman periods. Ancient Jewish settlements were also submerged in the area. But because of the receding waters, Ratib has been able to access some sites for the first time — including, for instance, a cliff with a series of pre-Christian tombs carved into its face. Though they have been heavily damaged by the water, Ratib says they still have value. [...]

But it’s not only previously discovered archaeological sites that the drought has made accessible.

Ratib and a colleague are suddenly excited by something they’ve seen on this particular day. They kneel next to what looks like an old stone wall, shards of pottery everywhere. Ratib says he believes it is a Roman-era irrigation ditch.

“I’ve never seen this site before,” he says. “When we excavated this area decades ago, this was all buried underneath the soil, but the receding waters uncovered it.”

Unfortunately, these discoveries come at the expense of local farmers and fisherman, who deprived of their normal income, have a strong incentive to loot the newly reveled sites.

It’s unlikely that Baghdad will be able to finance reasonable protection of the sites, never mind further excavations. There are 10, count them, 10 guards assigned to protect the entire Anbar province. This does not bode well.

A 17th c. wooden bust of St. Innocent stolen from Santa Maria degli Angeli alle Croci in Naples in November of 1990 has been found in a private home in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Officials from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have seized the statue and will return it to Italy this month.

Two years ago, authorities in Rome contacted U.S. Customs and Enforcement officials with information that an Italian citizen had sold a similar wooden statue to an antiques dealer from Greensboro.

ICE tracked down the buyer as the owner of Caroline Faison Antiques, which specializes in 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century antiques. She purchased it at an antiques fair in France, Johnson said. [...]

ICE contacted Johnson last year to see if she recognized pictures of the stolen items. She said the paint was almost gone, but she recognized the form of the bust.

When she realized it was stolen, she said she immediately bought the statue back from her customer and gave it to federal agents. Johnson said she did not get her money back from Faison, nor did she ask.

Good on her, although I can’t help but point out that if she’d actually cared to demand any kind of provenance, she could have been part of the solution right up front instead of feeding the problem.

It’s an unusual case because most of these stolen artifacts end up sold in major cities like New York. It’s also unusual in that it was found at all after so much time.

The bad news is that the bust has not been well-treated over the past 20 years. The head was lost somewhere in the voyage between Italy and France, where it was first purchased by Caroline Faison Antiques. A cross St. Innocent used to carry is also gone, as is much of the gold paint.

Santa Maria degli Angeli alle Croci will surely be delighted to have him back on the altar, even the worse for wear.

It was discovered in pieces in a tomb next to King Tut’s in the Valley of the Kings three years ago. Archaeologists have painstakingly put the puzzle together so now we can see the entire bed as it was when it was used 3,000 years ago.

The bed, featuring carved heads of a lion and a lioness at its foot, slopes downwards five centimetres (two inches) from head to toe to help drain bodies being prepared for mummification. [...]

Luxor antiquities director Mansour Bouriq told AFP that unlike most beds found in tombs, this one was not ceremonial but actually used for embalming.

“We believe this was a room used for embalming because we found some embalming materials, including herbs, oils and pottery vessels,” he said.

No mummy was found inside the tomb, so they can’t date the bed exactly, but they think it dates to the 8th dynasty (1570-1304 BC).

Over 9,000 actually, ranging from medieval treatises to first editions of 20th century novels. Library officials think they’re just lost in the stacks, not stolen or removed from the premises.

One item, an essay entitled Of the Lawful and Unlawful Usurie Amongest Christians, by 16th-century German theologian Wolfgang Musculus, is valued by the library at £20,000, and has not been seen for almost two years. Others are precious only to a specialist market, such as a set of tables of 1930s London cab fares, or the 1925 souvenir history of Portsmouth Football Club.

Although the library has not listed any value for thousands of the books, a quick Guardian tot-up of the market price of nine collectible volumes came to well over £3,000 – including £1,300 for a first edition of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, missing from the library’s shelves since 1961. [...]

Most of the losses are 19th and 20th century texts, including first editions of novels by Charles Dickens and John Updike, although many older books have also vanished, including a 1555 edition of 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses ben Maimon’s Letter on Astrology, missing since 1977, and a 17th-century guide to Rome.

Many of the books turned up missing in and around 1998, the year the library moved from the British Museum to St Pancras, so it’s very possible they were put on the wrong shelves in the confusion of the move.

Still, some of these have been missing for decades. You can declare a missing person dead after 7 years. How long before they admit that the first edition of Dorian Gray is gone for good?

Peruvian archaeologist Quirino Olivera has found thousands of 6,000-year-old cave paintings in the Amazon jungle in the Andes.

They’ve been researching the area for the past two years and had found over 6,000 Stone Age cave painting already. Now they’ve found 10,000 more.

According to Olivera, most of the Tambolic paintings depict hunting scenes and are similar to those found in Toquepala. The artists used mainly red, brown, yellow and black pigments.

The Toquepala caves are located in the western Andes, at an altitude of 2,700 meters above sea level. They are noted for cave paintings depicting scenes of hunters corralling and killing a group of guanacos, a camelid animal native to South America. Known as “chaco” in the Peruvian Andes, this hunting technique consists of forming human circles, to corral the animals and either capture or kill them.