The History Blog

The Museum of London and The Times have collaborated to bring us a most delicious weekend-waster: an interactive map of London with skulls pinpointing the exact location of tens of thousands of buried skeletons found during construction and often reinterred.

Zoom in to see who was caught dead underneath a specific street, or just browse around the town, clicking on the skulls to read about the remains found on that spot. There are some great ones.

Another skeleton was found with a metal spike lodged in its spine. Its owner, a man who was buried in Smithfield, East London, in about 1350, was probably hit with an arrow or spear, but the attack did not kill him. He survived only to catch bubonic plague in his late thirties or early forties. “Somehow the injury didn’t cause an infection,” Mr White said. “The body has reacted by building bone around the projectile. He survived for months or possibly years. He was found in a large plot of land set aside for burying victims of the Black Death.” It is not known why the man was attacked, but it is thought that he may have been a soldier in the Hundred Years War.

Such a burn, surviving a spear in the spine in the Hundred Years War only to die of plague along with a good third of the rest of Europe.

The syphilitic, insane prostitute with rotten teeth and rickets from having been kept out of sunlight in childhood is a tragic figure of Hugoean proportion as well. I can’t help but wonder how much business she did, what with the deformed bones, decaying mouth and suppurating syphilis sores.

Hapaialii Heiau is a stone temple, possibly used as a calendar, made in the mid 1400’s on the Big Island of Hawaii. A team of masons and archaeologists has restored it one huge rock at a time.

During the project it was discovered a person could accurately mark the passing of the seasons when standing behind the center stone on the heiau’s top platform and aligning it with various points on the heiau.

Experts found that the sun sets directly over the southwestern corner of the platformlike structure during winter solstice, and they are expecting it to set over the northwestern corner during this month’s summer solstice.

“Our ancestors were well-accomplished developers,” Chun said. “A lot of knowledge was revealed through this work.”

The same team has already begun to restore an adjacent temple which is known as the place where Chief Kamalalawalu of Maui was sacrificed in the 16th century after losing a war to Chief Lonoikamakahiki.

You can see that temple in the background with Hapaialii Heiau in the foreground in this picture:

A gravedigger in the Shetland town of Cunningsburgh during the course of his duties discovered a Pictish stone engraved with symbols and dating back to 700 A.D.

Not only is it extremely cool-looking, but it turns out to be a witness to a crucial period in Shetland history.

The 18×11 inch sandstone slab, which is broken from a bigger stone, is inscribed with symbols on one side.

Most striking are two discs with crosses, which are connected together with a band and crossed over by a Z-shaped figure with ornate terminals.

The motifs on the latest stone are known by archaeologists as “double-disc and Z-rod”, one of the commonest motifs.

Double-discs often have circles within them, and sometimes spirals, but this is the only one with crosses.

If this is a Christian cross it indicates a mixed belief between the Picts’ indigenous religion, and their new Christian faith.

The Vikings invaded Shetland starting in the late 8th century, so this stone was carved less than a hundred years before Norse culture began to dominate, which it would do quite thoroughly until the Scots, using a clever pawnshop maneuver rather than a boring old war, snagged Shetland back from the Danes in 1469.

The Pictish symbols carved on the stone would have been illegible within a couple of hundred years, and so they remain.

It’s quite clever design, really. They drank out of the broad side once they grew up, so why not out of the small end as babies?

It’s like a natural funnel (that just happens to resemble those ear trumpets old Victorian gentlemen used).

Here the archeologists found wooden feeding devices made of cow horns. The Slavs used to attach leather sacks with milk to the broad ends of hollow horns and their babies would suck the milk through holes in the narrow part of horns.

How can a wooden feeding device be made of cow horns, you ask? Best not delve. Sometimes the press release translations can get a little wacky.

No preliminary dating of the find yet, but I’m going to front like I know what I’m saying and guess that it’s medieval. Veliky Novgorod was big in the middle ages.

The skeleton of a thousand-year-old Lombard warrior skeleton was found buried with his horse in Testona, Italy.

“This is a very rare find,” said Gabriella Pantò, the archaeologist leading the dig. “We have not seen many precedents in Italy. We have seen horses’ heads buried with warriors, but this find shows the area is vitally important,” she added. […]

The warrior was also buried with a treasure chest being x-rayed by archaeologists. In addition, a small bag held a pair of pincers, a bronze belt buckle and some armour.

He wore a ring on his left index finger and also had both a knife and a “scramasax”, a short sword designed for close combat.

I’m confused about the dating. The Lombards had been defeated by the Franks in the 8th century in the Turin area. A thousand years ago when the above fellow and his poor horse were buried, the Lombards were centuries away from their warrior heydey.

How do they know he wasn’t a Frank? The sequential conqueror/conquered cultures seem to have borrowed from each other liberally. The first Holy Roman Emperor Otto I used the famous Iron Crown of Lombardy when he was ever-so-fatefully crowned by the pope in 951 A.D., and that was 200 years after Pepin first spanked the Lombards in northern Italy.

Maybe his accessories mark him as a Lombard. The belt buckle, perhaps. Because lots of Germanic and Frankish peoples rocked the scramasax. He he… Scramasax.

Holes cut into skulls in the Cuzco area indicate that trepanation was a relatively common practice for Inca surgeons, most likely as treatment for combat injuries.

Interestingly, the skulls dating from 1000 A.D. show no evidence of bone regrowth which means the owners of said skulls died under the knife. They clearly didn’t give up, though, because by 1400 A.D. 90% of the skulls showed healing and no infection.

Of 411 skulls that were sufficiently well preserved to study, 66 had holes cut through the bone.

In one location, 21 of 59 skulls—over a third—had received trepanation.

While methods of trepanation varied over time, Inca surgeons eventually settled on a scraping technique to penetrate the skull without causing wider injury.

“The skull was slowly scraped away, resulting in a circular hole surrounded by a wider area of scraped bone,” Verushko said.

Some of the skulls had been perforated more than once, including one individual who had undergone the operation seven times.

Damn. Stop-loss much?

Spanish police have arrested two people for smuggling an enormous cache of looted pre-Colombian artifacts.

Seven hundred antiques including masks, sculptures, jewelry and ceramics, dozens made of gold, all of them extremely valuable museum-quality artifacts looted from archaeological sites in Peru and Ecuador were weeks away from the auction block.

It is alleged that the historic treasures were plundered from archaeological sites - mostly in Peru and Ecuador - and then sold on to the couple through middlemen in Colombia.

The couple had just returned from a trip to the Colombian capital, Bogota.

The Spanish police seized documents and a computer which allegedly detailed a trade in cultural contraband stretching back years.

One interesting thing about these low-down dirty no good sons of bitches “antiquities dealers” is that they tend to keep excellent records. If police can manage a surprise raid, they can get loads of information about the criminal organization.

I hope they throw every book they have at them.

In front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey lies an intricate Cosmati mosaic made of exotic colored marble, glass and gemstones so delicate that it has been covered up for much of the 20th century.

Even Queen Elizabeth II had to stand on carpeting during her coronation because it was deemed too perilous to perch the throne, flunkies and other imperial accoutrements on the mosaic proper as had been done for 6 centuries before.

Now that a two-year restoration program has begun, the layers of carpeting have finally been removed so visitors may actually get a glimpse of the beauty.

The wraps have come off one of Westminster Abbey’s least known treasures, a medieval marble pavement foretelling the end of the world, while conservation experts consider how to preserve the ancient stones for the next 740 years.

Few modern visitors have ever seen it, although since 1268 kings and princes, queens and cardinals have walked across a symbol laden mosaic as intricate as a piece of jewellery.

It is made up of rare marbles and gemstones, including some recycled from monuments 1,000 years older, and pieces of coloured glass, set in complex allegorical patterns into a framework of Purbeck marble cut as intricately as a jigsaw puzzle.

The allegory of the shapes apparently contains references to the end of the world, as does an inscription that is now almost entirely gone but was transcribed in the 15th century:

If the reader wittingly reflects upon all that is laid down,
he will discover here the end of the primum mobile:
the hedge lives for three years,
add in turn dogs, and horses and men
stags and ravens, eagles, huge sea monsters, the world;
each that follows triples the years of the one before.

Cool, huh? I do love a quality obscure-metaphor-packed apocalyptic code. Here’s a neat interpretation of the inscription.

This inscription refers to the medieval belief that the earth was fixed at the centre of nine moving spheres, which carried the sun, moon, five known planets, and the fixed stars. The ninth and outermost sphere, beyond the fixed stars, was called the “primum mobile” (first moved) because it was thought to be the sphere set in motion by God, which provided the motive power of all the other spheres.

“The end of the primum mobile” means the age of the universe when it will come to an end - at the Day of Judgement. The verse claims that this can be calculated by tripling the life-spans of God’s other creations. So the hedge, standing for three years, is tripled to give the life-span of a dog (nine years), which in turn is tripled to give the life-span of a horse (27 years). The final age, the life-span of the primum mobile, is 19,683 years - three raised to the power of nine. This was appropriate for the age of the ninth sphere.

That’s a pretty generous End of Days assessment. How are you supposed to get a bevy of adoring supine girls and the entire contents of their daddy’s bank accounts when the apocalypse is 20 thousand years away?

Taking a short break from their busy schedule of exploitation and war-fomenting, diamond cartel De Beers has found a late 15th/early 16th c. shipwreck laden with bronze cannon, gold coins and elephant tusks off the coast of Namibia.

The site yielded a wealth of objects, including several tons of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and the gold coins, which were minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s, according to the statement.

The Namibian government will claim ownership of the treasure found, Halifa Mbako, group corporate affairs manager at Namdeb, said in a telephone interview from Windhoek today.

According to company sources, the human remains and royal artifacts suggest that the ship might have belonged to Portuguese aristocrat Bartolomeu Dias whose caravel sank off the Cape of Good Hope in 1500.

Dias was not only the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, but he charted the trade routes to Asia later used by Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral. He also accompanied de Gama on his voyage to India and Cabral on the voyage that inadvertently resulted in their discovering Brasil.

Alexander Granhof and his grandfather Jens were puttering around the site of the Battle of Lund after a recent ploughing when Alexander stumbled on some silver coins

They called the National Heritage Board, and the next day archaeologists confirmed that the coins were part of a huge buried treasure trove of over 7,000 14th c. silver coins from Denmark, England, Germany and the Netherlands.

“I suspect we may have doubled the number of English coins from the Middle Ages ever found in Sweden,” said Anglert, who estimated that 1,200 of the coins had come from across the North Sea.

English sterling coins were used as something of a global currency at the time, said the archaeologist.

“The ones we found were in their own separate container,” said Anglert.

They don’t know why the treasure was buried, but it probably wasn’t a religious sacrifice because even the most pious medieval Swedes weren’t quite that generous with their offerings.

Here’s Alexander with his find looking the cat who swallowed the canary: