The History Blog

Scientists have confirmed that 51 decapitated bodies found last July in a mass grave near Weymouth, Dorset, were indeed Vikings.

Isotope analysis of their tooth enamel confirmed that they came to Dorset from Scandinavia. At least one of the beheaded men lived most of his years in the Arctic circle, in fact. They probably came to England in a raiding party and encountered Saxon resistance. Effective Saxon resistance.

Archaeologist believe the men were from a captured raiding party and were taken to the site by Anglo-Saxons defending their land for the specific purpose of putting them to death. Ms Boston added: “The location is a typical place for a Saxon execution site, on a main road and a parish boundary and close to prehistoric burrows.”

Teeth from ten individuals were examined by Dr Jane Evans and Carolyn Chenery at NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in Nottingham. Dr Evans said: “Isotopes from drinking water and food are fixed in the enamel and dentine of teeth as the teeth are formed in early life. The isotope data we obtained from the burial pit teeth strongly indicate that the men executed on the Ridgeway originated from a variety of places within the Scandinavian countries.

“These results are fantastic, this is the best example we have ever seen of a group of individuals that clearly have their origins outside Britain.”

Their deaths were not easy ones. Bone evidence indicates that their necks and jaws were hacked at repeatedly, not removed in one clean blow. One body’s hands were cut through, probably a defensive wound incurred while trying to grab the sword that was coming for his neck.

Others were wounded on the pelvis, stomach and chest. There are more bodies than heads, which suggests that 3 heads might have been put on spikes or displayed outside of the grave in some gruesome manner.

The research team also narrowed down the date a death a little more, to from between 910 and 1030 A.D., so towards the end of the Viking raid period. By 1016, Danish King Cnute had conquered most of England and the raids stopped, mainly because he was the boss of the raiders too.

Scientists are hoping to learn from further studies of the remains, like more details about their long-term health issues, diets, general lifestyle.

The Cave Canem project launched last November to microchip, treat and neuter the stray dogs that populate the ancient city of Pompeii. When last we saw our brave canine heroes, they were still in the process of being rounded up by the Italian animal welfare groups and the adoption website didn’t exist yet.

Now all the rounding up has been done and the website is up and running. On the site you will find a lovely photo gallery of the pups up for adoption (with the ones already adopted marked as such). They all have adorable Pompeiian names.

The best part of the site, though, is the backstory written by one Stella Pende for each dog. They tie each dog in to the city of Pompeii and its mythology. The anthropomorphic characterization is gloriously lurid at times.

Meet Polibia:

In the quarter of the ancient baths at Pompeii, where I roam freely, they call me Polibia. I am two years old and like each respectable member of my family, I am a freed-slave and when possible I choose this humid warmth area that gives body to my fur and soothe my poor tired paws. My doggy friends at Pompeii say that I am magic because, suddenly one morning, my tail awoke with a white wisp, but they don’t know the truth. One night at the bath I was immersed in the warmth of the pool, when, Apollo the Beautiful, revealed himself showing his muscles and vigour on the purple glitter coach, wrapped in a cloud of smoke. But he was also very annoyed to find a hairy freed-slave in his favourite waters. So, furious, he caught me by the tail and threw me out of the bath and this divine touch lightened my tail tip.

Mythological backstory animal abuse! Damn you, muscular and vigorous Apollo. Damn you and the purple glitter coach wrapped in a cloud of smoke you rode in on.

Sadly only the first page of the dog stories is translated into English. The rest of them are just as fabulous, so fire up Google Translate and go to town.

If you’re in Europe and/or able to get to Italy in person, you can apply to adopt one of these historic honies. The requirements and forms you need are on this page. If I could, I would snap them all up myself.

The outstanding website Heritage Key is running a series of London-themed challenges for bloggers. There are neat prizes to be won, but most of all, much love for London’s marvelous wealth of history to be expressed.

I missed the first challenge because I got all freaked out under pressure and went completely blank, so I’m hoping I can squeak in just under the deadline for The Most Important Ancient Site in London challenge.

For my most important ancient site in London I choose (drumroll please) Drapers Gardens. This soggy patch of land on Throgmorton Avenue had the great fortune of being deemed basically undevelopable until 1967, when the Drapers Company decided to build an office tower on their garden space.

When the eponymous skyscraper was demolished in 2007 in preparation for a new building to be erected on the spot, an archaeological survey stumbled on a massive treasure trove of daily life in Roman London from the 1st to the 4th century A.D.

Drapers Gardens’ sogginess had not only kept this mother lode from being obliterated by two millennia of development and redevelopment, but it also helped keep these objects in an exceptional state of preservation.

Among the treasures are 19 metal vessels from the mid to late 4th c., possibly hidden in a well by a wealthy family fleeing one of many Saxon raids on the city, or they may have been left behind intentionally as part of the ritual closing of the well. The vessels are made from copper and lead ore and include wine jugs, dishes, ladles, even a set of three nesting bowls. They’re in such spectacular condition that the articulating handles on some of them still swing.

A total of over 1100 artifacts were found at the site. Other remarkable finds include hundreds of brooches, a wood door with its original hinges, a roman road with wood footbridges over the ditches on both sides, a wooden ruler with the lines marking the Roman inches still visible, an infant burial site and the skull of a brown bear that probably died in the amphitheater nearby.

The dig uncovered not just rare and beautiful artifacts, but really the entire structure of the neighborhood for 300+ years of Roman life in London: streets, alleys, floors, clay and timber foundations of dwellings, waste disposal and plumbing systems. In Rome itself you don’t find this kind of staging because the city has been built and rebuilt so many times, and because timber or clay housing just doesn’t tend to last 2000 years.

The Drapers Garden find is a microcosm of Roman city life, not only a worthy candidate for the most important ancient site in London, but surely in the running for one of the most important discoveries of Roman social history, period.

Pictures courtesy Pre-Construct Archaeology

A man digging the foundation of his new home in northern Syria uncovered a cache of over 250 coins from the Hellenistic era (4th to 1st centuries B.C.).

He gave the coins in their bronze box to the authorities, and they’re now being analyzed and cataloged.

[Youssef Kanjo, the head of archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Aleppo,] added that the box contained two groups of coins, 137 “tetra” drachmas (four drachmas) and 115 single drachma coins.

One side of the tetra drachma coins depicts Alexander the Great, while the other side shows the Greek god Zeus sitting on a throne with an eagle perched on his extended arm.

Some of the coins bear the inscription King Alexander in Greek, while others say Alexander or carry the name of King Philip, most likely referring to his father.

Alexander conquered Syria in 333 B.C., after his defeat of Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Issus. It and the rest of Alexander’s Asian empire became the Seleucid Empire after Alexander’s death and the splintering of his generals.

Alexander coins would have kept being produced under the Seleucid Empire, which would was finally toppled by Tigranes of Armenia 20 years or so before Pompey yoinked Syria for good for Rome in 64 B.C.

Say that 20 times fast. But seriously, folks, researchers studying the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape of South Africa have found hundreds of engraved ostrich fragments.

These fragments are 60,000 years old, far older than the earliest writing. The symbols engraved are regular lines and hatches and so many in number that archaeologists think they may be communicative, or at least symbolic, rather than just decorative.

“What is extraordinary at Diepkloof is that we have close to 300 pieces of such engravings, which is why we are speaking of a system of symbolic representation,” Dr Texier said.

The team, which includes Dr Guillaume Porraz from the University of Tubingen, tried themselves to recreate the markings using pieces of flint.

“Ostrich egg shells are quite hard. Doing such engravings is not so easy. You have to pass through the outer layer to get through to the middle layer,” Dr Texier explained.

Some of the engraved cross hatchings and parallel lines are similar to later known symbols for water. The ostrich eggs seem to have had spouts, which could indicate they were used for transporting water, a technological breakthrough for early man.

The fragments are also intentionally colored. They aren’t the natural color of the ostrich eggs nor is an external pigment applied. The team was able to reproduce some of the colors by baking fragments of shell in a fire.

Before these ostrich fragments, 30,000-year-old cave painting like those at the Lascaux Caves were thought to be the oldest evidence of written human communication. If we can confirm a communicative symbolism in these etchings, we’ll push that major milestone 30,000 years further back.

Archaeologists excavating the site of Amenhotep III’s funerary temple in Luxor have found a colossal head of the pharaoh from what was once an enormous full-body statue. Other pieces of the statue have been found in the area, but this is the largest and depicts the pharaoh’s serene visage at its youthful ideal.

Measuring 2.5 metres, made from solid red granite and depicting Amenhotep III wearing the Upper Egyptian white crown, it has been described in a press statement by Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass as a “masterpiece of highly artistic quality”.

The head, added Hawass, is a “portrait of the king with very fine youthful sculptured features”. It was sheared from the body statue at the chin and neck. The body statue – fragments of which are currently in restoration – is believed to show Amenhotep III in a standing position, with his hands crossed over his chest and holding the royal insignia.

So far the team has uncovered 84 statues at Amenhotep’s funerary temple, including the giant head plus other depictions of Amenhotep III and his wife, Queen Tiye.

They’ll keep looking for more pieces of the colossal statue, but the site is so gigantic — 350,000 square meters (that’s over 3,767,000 square feet) — that who knows if they’ll be able to find them.

A unrelated but nonetheless neat little tidbit from the article:

Amenhotep was the wealthiest and most powerful of all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. In a list compiled by American business and financial bible Forbes in 2008, he was ranked as the 12th richest person in human history.

I couldn’t find the Forbes article the factoid was allegedly derived from and other lists I’ve encountered don’t include pharaohs or Alexander the Great type people who “owned” basically everything.

The official announcement is set for tomorrow, but it seems the campaign to raise money to buy the Victorian garden site on top of the only Roman circus in the UK has been successful. They had to raise £200,000 by the end of February in order to buy the property from developers, and as challenging a goal as it was in these tight times, they pulled it off.

Most of the money came in small donations from local people. They organised events including a chariot and two horses hurtling around the car park before Colchester United’s match against Oldham on February 20.

So creative. Good for them for rallying the local population to stand behind their unique heritage.

Now comes another major hurdle: raising £550,000 to purchase the Victorian barracks adjacent to the garden so they can build a visitor’s center next to the circus gates.

The campaigners are hoping some local organizations will step into the breach and scrape up this large sum, since the small donations are most likely tapped out.

An 1,800-year-old marble bust of Jupiter was found in English Heritage’s main northern archaeological storage unit in Helmsley, North Yorkshire.

Conservators examined it and quickly realized it wasn’t a reproduction, but rather a genuine 2nd c. Roman sculpture that had been given to the Earl of Arundel, one of the first dedicated collectors of antiquities, by Dudley Carter in the early 17th century.

It was first documented in 1616, but the collection itself became dispersed later in the 17th Century.

However, about 100 years later, the bust fell into the hands of John Aislabie, an MP and wealthy owner of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, near Ripon.

It is believed it may then have taken pride of place in the Temple of Jupiter on the Studley Royal estate, adding a touch of authenticity to the 18th Century folly.

The Studley Royal neo-classical folly is actually called the Temple of Piety and was dedicated to Hercules, but it became known as the Temple of Jupiter because of the bust.

Aislabie found the bust in the cellar, where it had been relegated after the Earl of Arundel’s collection was broken up later in the 17th century. A lot of the Earl’s pieces were discarded rather unkindly, so it may have been at this point that the bust was damaged as we see it today.

Aislabie loved it anyway, so he moved the sculpture to Studley Royal and built the temple with Jupiter as its centerpiece. Aislabie’s son remodeled the temple and removed the sculpture, eventually putting it in storage.

Nobody’s quite sure how it got from Studley Royal to the English Heritage storeroom, but Professor Michael Vickers of Oxford’s Ashmolean confirmed that it was indeed the Jupiter bust from Arundel’s collection. Experts have looked for it in collections before but obviously never found it.

The bust is in fairly good condition despite its missing half. It needs cleaning and further research to try to pin down its movements over the centuries. Conservators will analyze the marble to determine exactly which part of the Roman world it may have come from originally.

Other than that, it’s good to go. In fact it will become the centerpiece of a series of free tours of the Helmsley facility which is normally closed to the public. It looks really cool in there. Huge floor to ceiling racks of dusty marbles just waiting to be explored.

Archaeologists excavating in the site of ancient Gabii south of Rome have uncovered the beginnings of lavish palace which probably belonged to the family of Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last Etruscan king of Rome.

So far just three rooms have been found, but they’ve already found terracotta roof tiles decorated with a minotaur, the emblem of the Tarquins, so they’re hoping they’ll find a lot more intact spaces as well as remains of the caved in parts.

“It’s an extraordinary find,” Rome Archaeological Superintendent Angelo Bottini said at the site….

“The way the site was demolished by furious locals in ancient times and later escaped local urban sprawl has allowed the palace to come to us virtually intact”. [...]

Aside from its historical value, the site is of “exceptional” archeological importance because similar buildings in Rome and other large cities were demolished to make way for later ones, Bottini observed. The 6th-century BC ruins, brought to light between September and December, in fact contain the highest intact walls of such a date ever found in Italy, at about two metres.

Under the well-preserved floor, archaeologists found 8 cells containing human remains, including 5 still-born infants. They weren’t human sacrifices, but rather buried during propitiatory rites before the building was built.

Tarquinius Superbus was considered a great tyrant by the Romans, who had become accustomed to being treated with respect according to pre-established social contracts by previous kings. The Tarquins were even related to the top families in Rome, including the Junii.

It was Lucius Junius Brutus who killed Tarquin after Tarquin’s son raped Lucretia, daughter of the prefect of Rome who was known for her virtue and who committed suicide after the rape by stabbing herself in the heart in front of her father.

He became the first co-consul of the Roman Republic. It was his descendant Marcus Junius Brutus who many centuries later on a certain Ides of March would plunge a dagger into another tyrant type fellow, one Gaius Julius Caesar.

The United States is returning a beautifully painted 21st Dynasty wooden sarcophagus to Egypt. Customs officials confiscated the coffin from a Spanish national at Miami International Airport in 2008 when they found it had no documentation of ownership.

They contacted the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities in October 2008 to let them know that they had the piece in custody. Since it had been shipped from Spain with the likely intent of selling it in the US without documentation, they figured (correctly) that it had been smuggled out of Egypt illegally at some point.

Egypt immediately provided documentation of their ownership of the coffin, but the Spanish dealer shamelessly refused to relinquish it until Zahi Hawass filed a suit against him in a US court.

The coffin of Imesy, a beautifully ornate piece with colorful religious scenes painted on it, had been a piece the council had been demanding be returned.

Zahi Hawass, the SCA Secretary-General said last year that the coffin likely belongs to pharaoh Ames from the 21st Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 1070-945 BC.

A US investigation found that it was likely smuggled out of Egypt after 1970 (the dividing line established by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property), kept underground for a few decades, only to surface in an exhibit in Madrid in 2007. The dealer who shipped it to Miami apparently has family ties with the owner of the Egyptian museum in Barcelona.

According to Hawass’ statement, the sarcophagus was first smuggled out of Egypt in 1884. It’s always challenging to pinpoint the movement of looted artifacts. That’s one of the many reasons looting sucks. David Gill at Looting Matters looks at the smuggling trajectory of the coffin, especially the Spanish connection.

The sarcophagus is scheduled to be returned officially in a gala ceremony on March 10th in Washington, D.C. Zahi Hawass, of course, will be there with bells on.