The History Blog

Needless to say, it was found by an amateur metal detectorist. Danny Mills found the virtually intact bronze lamp at a metal detecting rally in Glemsford, near Sudbury, Suffolk, last fall. He reported it to local archaeologists and the landowner later donated it to the Ipswich Museum. Now the lamp has been restored and is on display at the museum.

It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

The Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles has created a new web-based tracking system for archaeological sites in Jordan. Financed in part by the World Monuments Fund and with extensive support from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the million dollar project has been in the works for 3 years and will be available for authorized users starting in September.

Awesomely named MEGA — Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities — the database uses Google Earth satellite images and archaeologist field reports to catalogue over 10,000 ancient sites in Jordan. Some of the information was available in a local Jordanian database, but it wasn’t web-based and was clunky to browse and update. Now anybody in the know can easily record any news about a site’s condition, from encroaching development, looters, environmental threats, whatever is relevant.

Obviously real-time updates are not going to stop someone from looting a site, but it will help authorities track problems almost as soon as they happen, and get a better idea of how to apportion protection and conservation resources.

It was the devastation of Iraq’s archaeological sites in the wake of the US invasion that actually inspired this project. The looting of the National Museum in Baghdad got much of the attention at the time, but the Getty thought they could devise a database to help authorities cope with the archaeological sites being destroyed by looters. Unfortunately, the chaos in the country over the next few years kept the Getty from being able to work with local Iraqi experts, so the project never got off the ground.

“The idea of shipping a couple of big computers to Iraq and hoping that they would get there and that it would all work just seemed too crazy,” said Alison Dalgity, a senior project manager at the Getty who helped develop MEGA.

And so the institute accepted an invitation from Jordan to develop the system there first, a plan that coincided with a sea change in Web-based mapping tools and the rise of open-source software, meaning that the system could exist on the Web and be built and updated cheaply.

It’s not even live yet, but already Jordanian authorities are so delighted with the database that they’re considering opening it to everyone, not just authorized experts but tourist schmoes like the rest of us. Jordan isn’t exactly comfortable with open information sharing when it comes to official government data, so it says a lot that they’re seriously considering upending their customary attitude towards transparency to share the wealth of their archaeological sites.

Jordan’s experience with MEGA might be something of a template for Iraq and other antiquities-rich countries. Change the Google settings and the names, and then it’s just a matter of data entry.

British conservation specialists from the Courtauld Institute in London have removed centuries of soot, grease, grime and graffiti from Hellenistic-style paintings on the wall of a cave in the canyon of Siq al-Barid in Beidha, about 3 miles away from the main city of Petra.

They’re at least 2,000 years old and may have been painted earlier. Very few examples of Hellenistic painting have survived, and what’s left is mainly fragments. We have very little Nabatean art at all, so finding such extensive pieces with intact color and detail under the layers of filth is remarkable.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra, in what is now Jordan, was the epicenter of an immense trade network linking East and West. As traders in everything from Indian spices to Levant aromatics, Nabatean culture was influenced by its trading partners, hence the Hellenstic style of these paintings which decorate the dining room, main chamber and a smaller recess of what appears to have been a rock-carved spa for the elite.

The Nabateans were experts in water control; a marked advantage, you can imagine, in the middle of a desert. Nabateans took advantage of the canyon flash flooding, channeling it with a system of dams and conduits, creating an artificial oasis that would last for hundreds of years until an earthquake in the 4th century A.D.

The 3,000-year-old neo-Assyrian gold earrings stolen from Iraq in the post-invasion chaos and almost sold by Christie’s 2 years ago have been returned to Iraq.

Christie’s claimed when they put up for sale that they were bought in 1969 and “similar” to the 8 identical pairs of elaborate gold earrings found in 1988 in the royal tombs at Nimrud, the ancient capital of Assyria. Iraqi officials spotted them in the catalogue and reported them to Interpol, stopping the sale.

Donny George, the former director of the Iraq Museum who was on the Nimrud excavation and who personally photographed the treasures, recognized the earrings as from Nimrud. He pointed out that the gold work at Nimrud was exceptional and unique, that there was no such thing as a “similar” piece.

The earrings were among the 613 items of jewellery and funeral ornaments that make up the Treasure, found in 1988 in two previously unexplored burial chambers, belonging to a ninth-century BC queen and princess, in the ancient city of Nimrud.

Sent to the central bank at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Treasure has hardly ever been on show. But it was once described by an American investigator seeking to recover lost Iraqi artefacts as making the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun “look like Walmart”.

The treasure remained in the vault of the central for 20 years, surviving the 1990 Gulf War, depredations of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay (he helped himself to almost a billion dollars in cash plus hundreds of gold bars from the bank), Shock and Awe, looters trying to break into it with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, and a major flood. A team of Iraqi, US and British archaeologists, plus an awesome reservist Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos who in civilian life is a New York prosecutor with a classics degree along with his legal one, were able to rescue the Nimrud treasure from the flood.

At the time they thought it was fully accounted for, but somewhere between the summer of 2003 and winter of 2008, those earrings migrated out of Iraq into Christie’s hot little ask-no-questions hands. Even now Christie’s refuses to say who the seller was or even comment on the story at all. New York Customs enforcement will only say that no legal action has been taken.

Chang Chieh-kuan, a Taiwan printer, is dedicating to keeping the ancient art of Chinese character movable lead type alive in the digital era. He owns one of the only remaining foundries that still casts lead type from copper molds for thousands of Chinese characters.

Because there is no alphabet in Chinese, putting together all the characters to print even a few words is hugely time-consuming, never mind the 4000 or so characters that make up the average novel. Chang’s Ri Xing Type Foundry has 2 million individual pieces of lead type.

Handwritten Chinese, using brush and paper, is considered an art form and an indicator of its practitioner’s scholarship and aesthetic sensibility.

In communist China, many characters have been replaced by simplified forms to promote literacy, but purists say they lack the heft and balance of the originals.

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the Chinese coast, still uses the traditional versions, regarding them as the heart and soul of Chinese culture. The older characters are also in use in Hong Kong, though no movable-type foundries exist there.

And everywhere, word processing is threatening to make the old skills extinct.

Chang is dedicated to preserving this cultural and historical asset, no matter how obsolete it may seem. Movable type was invented in China, after all, in 1040 A.D., a full 400 years before Gutenberg developed the printing press in the West. Its inventor, Bi Sheng, used wood type, but that was soon abandoned in favor of clay which had no grain nor warping problems after being soaked in ink. Metal type took another 200 years to appear, first in Korea then throughout the Mongol Chinese empire.

When Chang’s uncle started Ri Xing Type Foundry in 1969, there were 5000 print shops in Taipei. Now there are only 30 of them left, and Chang’s is the only remaining foundry.

To keep this thousand-year-old tradition alive, Chang has had to sell his family home, and since the print shop hasn’t actually turned a profit in 10 years, he created a museum of movable type where people can buy lead characters as novelties. They look totally cool. He needs to get a website up because I bet people from all over the world would buy them for the coolness alone. It would be wonderful to see a dying traditional craft benefit from the Chinese character trend so overused in tattoo art.

Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Apollonia in what is today Albania have uncovered the remarkably intact Roman bust of an athlete. Archaeologists also found the decorated foot of a bronze statue, also an important piece but obviously not complete.

“It is an exceptional discovery, the most important in the last 50 years in Albania because the bust is still intact,” French professor Jean-Luc Lamboley, who led the dig at Apollonia with Albanian archaeologists, told AFP.

The quality of carving, especially of the face and curly hair, marks it as Roman. It may have been buried intentionally to keep it safe during periods of upheaval. The bust has been moved temporarily to the archaeological museum in Tirana since the local museum was plundered after the fall of communism in 1990 and is still closed.

Apollonia was founded in the 6th century B.C. by Greek immigrants in an area populated by Illyrian tribes. It became an important city in the ancient world because of its agricultural exports and a large harbour which was reputed to be able to accomodate 100 ships at a time. Strabo mentions it in his Geographia as a well-governed city (it was an oligarchy, with a Greek ruling class and a majority Illyrian serf population) which also has a rock that shoots out fire because rivers of water and asphalt run underneath it.

It was also an early notch in Rome’s bedpost, a loyal territory under Roman Republican control since 229 B.C. Famous for its philosophical school, Apollonia was hosting the future emperor Augustus when he heard the news of Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.

The city began to decline in the 3rd century A.D. after an earthquake silted up the famed harbour and turned the town into a malarial swamp. By the 6th century the city was deserted and fell into obscurity until grand tourists rediscovered it in the 18th century. It was never built over and so far only an estimated 10% of the classical site has been excavated, so there are many more treasures to be found.

Franco and Gonzalo Carrazana were digging up their patio to build a two room addition on their house in Tilcara, Argentina, when they found 8 ancient pots buried one next to the other.

“The first piece appeared when we had dug some 40 centimeters (16 inches). Then another pot appeared that was next to a third,” Roberto Carrazana, the brothers’ uncle, told the daily Clarin.

“When we started to dig up the whole space, the fourth pot appeared. And as we went ahead slowly we realized that more began to appear, unbroken. That’s when we got in touch with the archaeologists,” he said.

The pots are 4 1/4 feet tall and were probably used to store food 1300 years ago. That dates makes them older than the Pucará de Tilcara, a pre-Columbian, pre-Incan fortress which is thought to have been built by the Omaguaca tribe in the 12th century. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only publically accessible archaeological site on the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a 100-mile ravine in north Argentina that has been populated for 10,000 years.

The ceramics are very brittle, so the fact that the posts are still so complete is remarkable. Archaeologists from the Tilcara Interdisciplinary Institute intend to excavate further on the Carrazana property and in the area to see if there are any other such hidden treasures.

As of right now, we don’t know where the pots will end up. The Secretary of Tourism for the province is psyched, needless to say. He mused that some of the pots could remain in the ground where they are to mark the great find, which would give the Carrazanas an open-air museum in their backyard. They’d probably have to forgo building the addition in that case, though. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

Archaeologists excavating a tract of land outside what is now Le Mans, France, but was once Vindunum, Gaul, in preparation for future construction have discovered a large, rich temple complex dating from the 1st to the 3rd century A.D. Most of the stone structure is long gone, doubtless recycled into a couple thousand years worth of local buildings, but what remains indicates a large site which would have been able to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of worshipers.

The shape of the buildings were first spotted from aerial views. Archaeologists followed the shapes with some exploratory digs on the ground. Once they realized there weren’t many in the way of walls to harm, they sent in mechanical diggers to peel off the wheat fields from the sanctuary foundations.

At the entrance to the site, there once stood a large E-shaped building, probably for welcoming the pilgrims, selling religious objects and housing the temple guardians. One wide path littered with iron slag (Vindunum was a major metalworking centre), leads a few hundred metres south to the foundations of a circular fanum (temple) about 12 metres in diameter. That round shape was rare in Gallo-Roman times and there are only a few such examples in France.

In fact, three temples were erected successively during the second and third centuries. Possibly they had to be rebuilt because of the instability of the ground. A pergola and a flight of steps would have led to the temple, which had stone walls around seven metres high covered by a tiled roof. Inside, the cella (central room) housed the statue of the god.

Another fanum stood at the west, the oldest in the sanctuary, dating to the first century. It was square, 15 metres wide and apparently in the Celtic temple tradition. This one was originally built in wood and stone added later, together with a cella surrounded by a gallery for circumambulation and a wall separating the sacred space from the profane. Fragments of coloured plaster show that the walls were once panted. The temple was surrounded by octagonal or square-shaped secondary “chapels”.

This Celtic fanum is where archaeologists found the most artifacts. Most likely offerings made to the deities, the finds include Gallic, Celtic and Roman silver coins, broaches, rings, keys, pottery, weapons and heavy work tools like sledgehammers and hammers. Metal workers and soldiers would have had good reason to offer valuable implements of their trade to the gods, given how dangerous their jobs were.

Archaeologists didn’t find any offerings in the circular temple, but they did find something completely unexpected: graves. Romans didn’t bury the dead on temple grounds. They didn’t even bury them inside the city walls. Dead bodies were not considered pure, and temples had to be.

Vindunum was a major Gallo-Roman city in the first few centuries A.D. It had a large bath complex — demolished in the third century and the stone used to build the walls encircling the city — and an amphitheater built about the same time as the walls. (Fun fact: it’s also where Henry II of England was born. The well-preserved medieval old town is known as Cité Plantagenêt.)

Here’s some more information on the discovery of King Hekatomnus’ tomb in Milas, Turkey. Police searched a home the looters were using and found 2 tunnels leading to the tomb. Inside the tomb they found not only a large and elaborately carved sarcophagus, but also frescoes and possibly more easily portable treasures that they promptly sold on the black market.

A court has arrested and charged five of 10 people detained in the raid, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

Anatolia, which was allowed to enter the tomb, said the suspects had dug two tunnels — 6 and 8 yards long — from the house and an adjacent barn, leading to the tomb that is buried about 10 yards deep.

They used sophisticated equipment to drill through the thick marble walls of the tomb and were working to remove the coffin from the underground chamber.

So I gather then that the tomb is a marble structure, not just a grave. Maybe it was an inspiration for his son Mausolos’ famous excess.

Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay noted that these looters weren’t some fly-by-night amateurs with shovels. They had funding and access to specialized equipment. Turkey intends to follow the money, investigating any potential international links. Gunay has also ordered further digs on the site and in nearby areas.

Researchers studying fossilized animal bones from the Dikika region of Ethiopia have found evidence that Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, used tools to butcher meat. The bones had marks from cuts, scrapes and scratches made when the bones were fresh. Forensic analysis found stone fragments in one of the cuts.

Before this study, paleontologists thought hominids of the Homo species first used tools 2.5 million years ago, but the A. afarensis bones date to 3.2 million and 3.4 million years ago. Lucy and her kin were also previously thought to have eaten a vegetarian diet, but if they were butchering animals to the bone, they were eating the proceeds.

Study co-author Zeresenay Alemseged, the palaeoanthropologist from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco who leads a large research effort in the region, said that the find overturns much of what was thought about A. afarensis.

“For 30 years, no-one has been able to put stone tools in their hands, and we’ve done that for the first time,” he told BBC News.

“We are showing for the first time that stone tool use is not unique to Homo or Homo-related species – we have A. afarensis now behaving like Homo in a way both by using tools and eating meat. It’s another attribute that could enable us to link A. afarensis to the genus Homo.”

There are still some holes that need filling in, though. The sample of bones was small and no tools were found on the site. We don’t know if A. afarensis picked up convenient stones to use as tools, or if they were advanced to the point of actually crafting cutting tools out of larger stones.

We don’t even really have direct evidence that it was Lucy’s species doing the butchering. The bones were dated by dating the volcanic rock in the area where they were found, and it’s the date that points to A. afarensis because as far as we know there were no other hominid species in the Dikika region 3.2 – 3.4 million years ago.