The History Blog

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

It’s the year’s end and I’m going to keep it short and sweet. For your at-a-glance entertainment, here are two lists of the top 10 finds of the year:

There’s surprisingly little overlap, most likely due to their different readerships. The Stafforshire Hoard probably wins the year.

Thanks to you all for following this humble blog among many. May the new year and new decade bring you nothing but good things.

So I finally finished reviewing one out of three segments on last night’s History Detective. It took me longer than I expected and the entry is WAY longer than I expected.

Going forward, I might pick a favorite segment instead of doing a full review, otherwise I know I’ll get bogged down. Or I could save it for weekends. I often have a helluva time finding new stories on weekends, and I’d have plenty of time to while away on prolix prose.

What do y’all think? Should I bag the whole thing and stick with the finds?

Truth be told, I haven’t come up with a story for today (slow news over the long weekend), and I didn’t want to let a day go by without saying something, so I’m drumming up an entry out of a little idea I had.

Specifically, I’ve become completely obsessed with a PBS show called History Detectives. I’ve watched a half dozen episodes by now, and I inevitably sobbed at least once per hour. It features 3 different segments about an artifact its owner would like investigated.

Sometimes the stories are deeply personal, like the pencil portrait of an American pilot who sat for it while imprisoned in Stalag 17 whose granddaughter wanted to find the artist, a fellow American POW. That’s the kind of stuff that leaves me in a hopeless puddle.

Other times it’s a neat artifact with less emotional impact, but holding just as much fascination, like the house built on an old trolley car bought for a hundred bucks in the 30’s when the rail system was dissolved.

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to blog a review the day after each episode. They air on Monday at 10:00 pm in my market, so that means expect your weekly Watching the History Detectives missives on Tuesdays.

I’m hoping it’ll encourage people who haven’t seen it yet to seek it out (you can watch episodes online), and most importantly, it’ll give me a chance to chatter about each amazing story with a target audience of people who might actually give a rat’s ass.

All done now. My post auto-published and everything.

Edit: It seems we’re still on the old server. It might be a while.

Edit again: Now it’s really done.

We’re moving to a new server tonight, so there will downtime. Hopefully it will be brief and painless and we’ll be back tomorrow morning. I have tomorrow’s entry set to publish automatically so that even if I have problems accessing the server, it might just take care of itself.

If you have trouble loading the site tomorrow, don’t worry. It’s probably a DNS propagation issue and will resolve itself over the next 24-48 hours.

Keep your fingers crossed!

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.

Action Comics #1, the first comic featuring Superman, is the Holy Grail of comic book collectors. There are maybe 100 copies still around, and most of them have been restored or are in less than fine condition.

So it’s no surprise that even in these dire economic times, an original Action Comics #1 in excellent condition has sold for a whopping $317,200.

It’s one of the highest prices ever paid for a comic book, a likely testament to the volume’s rarity and its excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the auction site ComicConnect.com and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles.

The winning bid for the 1938 edition, which features Superman lifting a car on its cover, was submitted Friday evening by John Dolmayan, drummer for the rock band System of a Down, according to managers at ComicConnect.com.

Dolmayan is rare comic dealer and bought it for an anonymous client, not for himself.

The seller is also anonymous. He bought it at a second-hand comic store in the 50’s when he was 9 years old, then squirreled it away and forgot about it for 15 years or so.

When he found it again in 1966, he figured he’d hold on to it just in case it increased in value. Well, it did. From 35 cents to 31,720,000 cents.

I’m sure you all fondly remember our neo-pagan heroes Arthur Pendragon et al. standing up for their pre-Christian, post-living brethren. Well, thanks to the always juicy Daily Mail, we can now take a look at the men/drunken sots behind the self-delusion.

First of all, “Arthur Pendragon” is the short version. His actual name — legally changed in 1976 — is King Arthur Uther Pendragon. He’s a former Hell’s Angel and current barfly. Oh, and of course, the Battle Chieftain of the Council of British Druid Orders.

In his capacity as Battle Chieftain, King Arthur Uther Pendragon has accomplished many feats of strength.

‘I work out the political tactics for the druids. My order is the political arm. We’re the guys in white frocks, up the trees. We’re the ones trying to stop the Newbury by-pass.’

Hasn’t that been open for a few years?

‘Whatever — we’re at the sharp end. We’re the political arm of the whole spiritual movement.’

Unfortunately, not everyone is on board with Battle Chieftain King Arthur Uther Pendragon’s vision of the Druidic future. There are heretics, splitters, blasphemers who dare question his approach.

The ‘row’ concerns a small breakaway group of druids (known to some as COBDO West) who’ve requested the museum release the remains so they can rebury them where they came from. King Arthur and mainstream COBDO want the same thing — but are upset that COBDO West have taken matters into their own hands. ‘COBDO West are just a joke — three men and a dog, without even the dog,’ splutters King Arthur. ‘I’ve got thousands of members in my Arthurian War Band all round the world and loads more in the UK. I could field hundreds of activists at the drop of a hat. Bunch of idiots.’

Yes, how dare those men and their missing dog bother to actually fill out the paperwork to petition English Heritage for reburial of the Avebury skeletons. Don’t they know Battle Chieftain King Arthur Uther Pendragon could summon an army of RenFaire drunks with the merest whisper in the wind?

and the only prescription is more inauguration. I’ve been glued to CNN all day and now that it’s winding down, I feel a desperate need to drag it out longer.

I don’t have the time to research all the things I want to since, as I said, I have literally not torn my eyes off the cathode ray tube except for a few brief interludes of reading the back of the shampoo bottle while I peed, however, tomorrow’s entry is going to be all about the inauguration.

I hope you’re not sick of this shit yet, because you sure as hell will be when I’m done wallowing in it.