The History Blog

The Georgia Museum of Art has published the first part of a massive compendium of all the Italian paintings made between 1250 and 1500 on canvas and wood found in North American collections.

Part one is titled Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South. Author Perri Lee Williams of Miami University covers 400 paintings from public collections in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Puerto Rico. It’s a whopping 801 pages long and divided into 3 volumes.

From the press release (pdf file):

The “Corpus” compiles paintings by such illustrious artists as Giovanni Bellini, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna and Giotto as well as works by lesser-known names. Up-to-date scholarship, including provenance, iconography and bibliography, appears opposite each illustration in an easily accessible format. This resource is particularly valuable to scholars, educators and curators of early Italian art who are unable to travel between institutions.

Professor Bruce Cole of Indiana University and the late Professor Andrew Ladis of the University of Georgia initiated this project in 1993. At that time, only two publications might have rivaled a project as ambitious as this new fully illustrated “Corpus”: Richard Offner’s multi-volume “A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting” (College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930) and Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri’s single-volume “Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Collections” (Harvard University Press, 1972). However, both of these publications are now out of date and limited in scope. The new publication covers works by artists from all regions in Italy and is likely to become a seminal compendium of early Italian art.

It costs $200 which sounds like a lot, I know, but if I had it to spend I totally would because this is an enormous, even unprecedented, work of scholarship and worth every penny. Museums and libraries are eligible for a discount, so if you represent such an institution call (706) 542-0450.

Mark your calendars, folks. The first episode of BBC’s Radio Four and the British Museum A History of the World in 100 Objects debuts tomorrow. That’s already today for those of you across the Atlantic.

The theme of the first 5 episodes is “Making Us Human” and they covers objects that define us as human, made between 2,000,000 and 8,000 B.C. Tomorrow’s inagural object is the Mummy of Hornedjitef.

This is the mummy of Hornedjitef an Egyptian priest who was buried in a coffin, within a second, outer coffin. Examining his body using CAT scans and X-rays revealed that he suffered from arthritis and osteoporosis suggesting he was a mature man when he died. The embalmers have placed four packages inside his torso, probably his lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. He lived over a thousand years after Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great at a time when Egypt was ruled by Greek kings.

There’s tons of information on the brand spanking new website on each of the 99 objects that have already been selected for broadcast. For those of us out of Radio Four’s range, the programs will be posted as podcasts.

The website also has a neat feature where individuals upload objects of their own and explain their significance. Just get a good quality digital picture and click the yellow Add Your Own Object icon in the upper right of the page. A moderator will check to be sure it’s not pr0n then approve it.

You can view all the images in the series plus the ones uploaded by individuals and find out more about them using this Flash map. Click on Contributor in the menu on the left and choose Individuals to see only the pictures uploaded by people.

The radio program is just 15 minutes a day, but I’ve already spent hours browsing the site. It’s addictive.

Beginning in January 2010, BBC’s Radio Four in conjunction with the British Museum will air 100 15-minute episodes each detailing the history of one object from the British Museum collection. The aim is to cover a vast stretch of history from 1.4 million years ago to modern times, and all over the globe, not just European history.

[Radio 4 controller, Mark] Damazer said each episode would feature a description of the object but most of it would focus on “areas where radio excels as a medium – on how the object was made, its political, economic and cultural significance, how the object came to be in the collection, and so on. I have heard those that have been made so far and they are wonderful.”

[British Museum director Neil ] MacGregor said he would look at each object in roughly chronological order, “spinning the globe so we can see what’s going on in the world at various moments”.

Each week will be focused around a particular theme, such as “after the Ice Age” and “meeting the gods”, with contributors including Bob Geldof, Wole Soyinka, Grayson Perry, Madhur Jaffrey and Seamus Heaney.

Some of the artifacts covered are a 1.4 million year-old hand axe from the Olduvai Gorge, a Chinese Zhou ritual bowl from 1000 B.C., the Croesus Coin (550 B.C.0 from what is today Turkey, thought the be the first modern form of currency, a bust of Roman Emperor Augustus (27-25 B.C.) and the Nef Galleon, a beautiful mechanical toy ship from 1500AD.

This project has been in the works for 3 years. It took MacGregor and a team of curators 2 years just to pick 99 artifacts from the 8 million pieces in the British Museum collection. The last object has yet to be chosen. They’ll wait until later next year to select it since it might not even exist yet.

There will be a companion website which is set to go live in January (it’s just a placeholder now). More information about all of the artifacts will be on the site, as will listeners’ submissions.

For those of us across the pond, every episode will be available on the site in podcast format. In an unprecedented move for the BBC, the podcasts will remain online for 2 years, so no need to rush over to the site to make sure you don’t miss one.

You know, like a bookmobile only with archaeologists inside of librarians and artifacts instead of books!1 How completely awesome is that?

It actually used to be a bookmobile for the Athens Regional Library System that traveled to rural parts of Northeast Georgia, but budget cuts had long since left it parked and forlorn.

As a member of the Society for Georgia Archaeology, archaeologist Thomas Gresham had long wanted to put together a roving archeology show.

When he joined the library board and the subject of what to do with ye olde bookmobile came up, he proposed they sell it to the SGA for a mobile museum. Nine hundred bucks changed hands and the deal was done.

That was two years ago, and now the ArchaeoBus is primed and ready to travel to libraries and schools in Clarke County, Georgia, showing all comers artifacts excavated locally and giving mini-instructionals and labs on archaeological processes.

So far they’ve only done one planned stop, but Rita Elliot, the archaeologist who drove it to Athens from the mechanic in Savannah where the bus was first repaired and fitted with display cases, has big plans to integrate the bus into students’ curricula.

Elliot and other volunteers want to apply about a dozen activities and presentations to students’ in-class curriculum.

Archaeologists might ask younger kids to offer theories about where an artifact like a coin or a dish came from and then explain their guesses.

Older kids might have to show how they can use the Pythagorean theorem to map out a field excavation site using string on a peg board, Elliot said.

Using the theorem, archaeologists can lay out an accurate rectangular grid system to mark the layer of the soil where artifact is found.

“You want it so that you can see the clues in the soil, and unfortunately, the only way to do that is math, so the Pythagorean theorem comes in handy time after time,” Elliot said.

How many times do teachers hear the “But how am I going to use this in the real world?” refrain. The ArchaeoBus will answer that question as well as a million others about the history of the state and the study of material remains in general.

I am so into that I could not be more into it.

The ancient town of Amheida on the Dakhleh Oasis was and is hundreds of miles away from the political and cultural capitals of Egypt, but it’s been inhabited since the Stone Age and excavations indicate they kept up with the times.

The early settlers were farmers, maybe even before the Nile valley got famous as a center of agriculture. Irrigation is a lot easier when you have a steady supply of water rather than a yearly flooding, as the copious remains of figs and olives indicate.

They also seemed to have been tapped in to the dominant culture, despite their physical distance from it. The Roman and Greek era art found on the site features contemporary mythology and deities.

Then there’s the school. Conventional wisdom has it that teachers were poorly paid and widely reviled generalists hired by parents of would-be functionaries to ensure salable literacy. Amheida’s school, however, tells a different story.

Divided into three rooms lined with benches for more than 50 students, it more closely resembled today’s formal institutions. Students were segregated by subject and age, and the teacher’s lessons were scrawled on the walls, which were treated like blackboards at the time. What remains of that writing has caught Cribiorre’s attention.

“There you have a poem written on the wall in the column in red ink. The poem speaks of rhetoric. It says, ‘come on, get up, get to work,’” she explained. “It’s encouragement from a teacher of rhetoric to his students. But it’s all poetry. In Greek.”

Scholars had thought that rhetoric, not poetry, was taught in Roman Egyptian schools. The schools churned out politicians and bureaucrats, aristocratic young men destined for leadership. Prior to the find, Cribiore had suspected that they might also have learned poetry, and this confirmed it. The teacher had written his lessons in verse, showing that schools from the period were more formal than once believed.

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.

Two million items from Europe’s museums, archives, libraries, collections of all sorts are now available for the searching on a single website. Just type in a keyword and see what images, video, recordings and texts show up.

I searched for “Galileo” and it returned an entire digitized book from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, along with another 230 other texts, 448 images and 4 videos, including this awesome 1950’s Italian documentary on the importance of an educated populace to the economic and technological fortunes of the country.

Europeana’s list of contributors currently includes piles of national libraries, the International Federation of Television Archives, the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre in Paris.

Started by the European Commission in 2007, this is just the first prototype of a complete European digital library. Version 1.0 will have 6 million digitized items, and is scheduled to launch in 2010.

I’ve been waiting to post this entry since last November when Europeana first debuted, but it was so packed with win that it was instantly overwhelmed with traffic and had to be taken down for over 2 months.

Now it’s finally up and ready for copious, obsessive searching.

Archaeologists and computer scientists from the universities of Glasgow, Leicester and Exeter are collaborating to study how the ancients transferred information by analyzing the development of widely-used consumables like pottery and coins.

The project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will combine archaeology, archaeological science and computer science to investigate Greek, Punic and other civilisations, from the late Bronze age through to classical times.

Prof Peter Van Dommelen, from the University of Glasgow, said: “By tracing the development of techniques and technologies used to create specific objects we will see how the developments crossed temporal, geographical and cultural boundaries.

The researchers hope this analysis will help computer scientists develop more effective and reliable means of transmitting and upgrading information.

It’s sort of like a reverse NASA: instead of inventing new things for space exploration which end up used in a myriad mundane consumer applications, use the ancient mundane to create more advanced computers.

If you have (or are) a kid between the ages of 9 and 12, run, don’t walk, to the Black Hills of South Dakota to sign up for a week-long archaeology summer camp.

During the week-long camp, kids will get the chance to participate in a real archaeological dig in Deadwood led by real, live, honest-to-goodness archaeologists. Many of Deadwood’s archaeological digs in recent years have been in the old Chinatown district, where the Fee Lee Wong family (pictured above) lived and worked. There hasn’t been any official word yet, but the children in the summer camp may get to learn in this area.

The curriculum includes a crash-course in the archaeological process, as well as hikes from the excavation site to related locations, a visit the State Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City and daily lessons from professionals ranging from general historic preservation to mapping techniques and – perhaps most thrilling of all to a third-grader – how to use a compass!

“But, liv,” I can hear you ask, “how could I afford to send my kids to such an incredible summer camp?” My reply? A quick excavation between the cushions of your couch should do the trick because the total cost for the whole week is $25.

Even if you don’t live in the area, you should seriously consider taking the week of June 23rd for vacation, and hightail it to Deadwood like it’s the Gold Rush all over again. An opportunity like this is just too good to miss, and there are only 20 spots in the camp so the clock is ticking.

The long-running British show about a crack team of archaeologists (and Baldrick) excavating a site in just a few days is coming to the States.

TIME TEAM, USA (w.t.) will take viewers into scientific digs, as experts uncover America’s rich history. The fast-paced series will intertwine high-tech geophysics, artists’ renditions of the past and computer reconstructions with more traditional archeological techniques. But the team of experts will have a mere 72 hours onsite to disinter artifacts and other significant materials; when time’s up, they’ll report what they’ve learned. Camera crews, tracking each step, will give the audience an archaeology-as-it-happens experience.

Some of the sites under consideration include the Indian Mounds of Mississippi and Skull Creek Dune in Oregon.

The US doesn’t provide quite the glamour of the UK when it comes to archaeological sites, though. No Roman forts or medieval cities. I wonder if they’re going to basically stick to pre-Columbian locations or if they might adapt to the newness of the culture and study more recent stuff.

There’s always the Spaniards. Spanish history in the United States goes way back and it’s often been overlooked in favor of the splashier British arrivistes.

Oh, I know! The Lost Colony of Roanoke! That would be a great thing to uncover in 72 hours after historians have spent hundreds of years trying to figure out what happened.