The History Blog

Then wake up at the crack of dawn and head to the Palazzo Vecchio, where 50 people will be allowed to view the archaeological dig in progress underneath the storied building. It’s like a club sandwich of Florentine history on display for you and 98 other eyes.

Visitors enter through a side door of the Palazzo, where a copy of the statue of David sits in front. They enter a cavernous room, where there’s a series of trenches, metres deep, and criss-crossed by wooden planks.

Archaeologists have spent the past few years unearthing the remains of an ancient Roman theatre — known as the Commune — discovering how the city evolved over 2,000 years.

“The Palazzo Vecchio has preserved all of the structures, whether Roman, medieval and even up to the renaissance, in its foundations,” says archeologist Lorenzo Spezzi, who has been working at the site since 2004.

“Here you see all of the ages of the city, from its establishment to the renaissance. That’s the wonderful thing about this area. You see, even from one room, the evolution of the city of Florence.”

The Commune was one of the first structures built after the Romans settled the town and was in continuous use for the 500-600 years. Then there’s a medieval street, complete with cesspit and all the facades of the buildings lining it still intact.

The dig is scheduled to be finished in a few months. After that, the city is planning to make available a permanent guided tour of the site.

Archaeologists are excavating three sites from Martin Luther’s life: the floor of the building where Luther was born, his parents’ house, and his residence in the monastery of Wittenberg where he lived with his family after the Reformation.

They’ve found all kinds of interesting little discarded geegaws in his kitchen trash.

The digs exposed toys and food remains, broken dishes and grain (dated to the year 1500, using the C-14 method). The archeologists also found his wife’s wedding ring and a hoard of 250 silver coins. [...]

The archeologists have already been hard at work in the old abbey in Wittenberg. They scored a direct hit in the rear courtyard, where they found a waste pit filled with a collection of the family’s refuse.

The find reveals that the doctor worked in a heated room with a view of the Elbe River. He spent his evenings writing in the light of lamps filled with animal fat. The dig contained the bindings of parchment books, several “quill knives” to sharpen goose quills, as well as four writing sets containing sand, ink and styluses.

He lived in style as a boy, too, despite his tall tales of being a poor miner’s son. His family trash testifies to his gourmet diet and expensive toys.

It was on this farm that young Martin and his siblings played, surrounded by flocks of geese and chickens. The fragments at the site reveal that they played with crossbows, clay marbles and bowling pins made of beef bones — toys not every family could afford at the time.

The remains of kitchen scraps discovered on the property reveal that the family frequently ate roast goose and the tender meat of young pigs. During Lent, the Luther family ate expensive ocean fish, like herring, codfish and plaice.

This remarkable collection of Lutherian artifacts will be going on display starting tomorrow at the German State Museum of Prehistory.

Fun fact: he claimed to chase the devil away with his farts. For. Reals.

You know the story immortalized by Shakespeare’s Henry V: a small force of scrappy but proud Englishmen (we few, we happy few) beat the arrayed force of French nobility on October 25, 1415, St. Crispin’s Day.

Well, some French historians beg to differ, and they’re holding a conference at Medieval History Museum in Agincourt on October 25th, the 593rd anniversary of the battle, to rewrite the history the victors claimed.

First, the few:

In fact, detailed bureaucratic records of French king Charles VI’s army reveal that they were made up of 9000 travelling soldiers, perhaps with another 3000 locals from the Picardy region where the battle took place.

This compares to the total force of 12000 who travelled to France with Henry, although some 3000 were lost during the preceding siege of Harfleur, and through dysentery.

Then, the happy:

Mr Gilliot said notably horrific acts perpetuated by the English included placing prisoners in a barn and setting in on fire, with the permission of Henry V.

When the Duke of Alençon, who commanded the second division of the French army, had failed to put an axe through Henry, he tried to surrender but was killed by the King’s 40-strong bodyguard.

Forty to one. I like them odds.

No British academics were invited to the conference, I can’t imagine why. This isn’t an exclusively French nationalist revision, though. The article cites a British professor Anne Curry who has written a book debunking the pro-England propaganda surrounding Agincourt.

Urban sprawl has an fascinating side-effect in Europe. Medieval and early modern execution sites which used to be on roadways outside of town are turning up in people’s back yards.

The finds are gruesomely informative. One site in Germany had a skeleton of a woman with a foot and a half long spike driven through her skull.

Apparently part of the executioner’s job was to decorate the area with dead people and body parts and whatnot to let visitors know the town was tough on crime. The lady’s head was nailed to a post as part of the “don’t fuck with us” decor.

She had it easy, though.

Of course, convicts might also have suffered by way of the notorious “wheel.” This punishment was reserved for the worst of all crimes, murder or treason. Using the wheel involved pegging the convict down on the ground with his or her extremities spread wide. Then the executioner would repeatedly drop an iron-mounted wheel onto the victim.

A skeleton from Friedlandburg near Göttingen demonstrates what kind of mess this brutal procedure produced. The ribs are shattered, lower legs and forearms broken, the skull’s left temple shattered.

Then the body was left to rot. The longest period of time recorded for a corpse to have been exposed on a wheel is 3 years.

Workers in Istanbul are currently excavating a rail tunnel underneath the Bosphorus. Like the Chunnel linking France and England, only this one will link the continents of Asia and Europe.

The 2.6 billion dollar project began in 2004 and almost immediately encountered a major archaeological roadblock in the form of the 4th c. port of Eleutherios harbour where a railway hub was supposed to go.

Since then, they’ve found enormous piles of stuff, including over 30 shipwrecks transporting material from far and wide. These discoveries are writing a whole new chapter in the history of Byzantine trade.

Keep in mind that these shipwrecks are the first ever found in Istanbul, despite its fortuitous location straddling two seas.

For more on the Bosphorus finds, see this AFP story:

Britain’s pubs are in decline. Many of them are owned by large corporations offering franchise fare and mass-market details. The smallholders are collapsing at a precipitous rate. Fifty-seven pubs close every month.

Their hand painted signs disintegrate with them.

Only the 30 independent pub chains and breweries in Britain are still ordering individually painted signs. The St Austell Brewery in Cornwall has a full-time sign painter and the Donnington Brewery at Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire is hanging painted signs at its 16 tied pubs. Whitbread ran a sign-painting studio in Cheltenham until 1991, but has given up brewing and now runs pub restaurant chains such as Brewers Fayre.

God knows what stamped polymer crap is swinging outside places where once hand-painted lambs and archbishops cavorted on wood and iron. Googling “antique pub signs” turns up a horror show of groomsman gifts and “what to get the frat house that has everything” tat.

The pub or inn sign tradition goes back to Roman times, when a vine around a pole signaled there were victuals to be had inside. Richard II made pub signs compulsory so the official Ale Taster could easily spot his charges, so there must have been an explosion of awesome after 1393.

Archaeologists excavating some Viking castles west of Copenhagen have uncovered a rare wooden Viking shield dating from over a thousand years ago.

Archaeologist Kirsten Christensen said the wooden shield has a diameter of 32 inches. [...]

Christensen said Thursday it is the first time such a shield has been found in Denmark. She said the moist soil in the area is “ideal to preserve wood.”

The fir shield is believed to date from the late 10th century.

In the pictures it’s not fully excavated yet, but you can definitely see the classic shield shape. It looks like it came right off the pages of an Asterix and the Normans.

The medieval glaziers who made the cathedral in Chartres and the Duomo of Milan so breathtaking inadvertently made the taking of said breath healthier.

It’s the gold paint they used that acts as an air purifier when light shines through the glass.

[Associate professor at Queensland University of Technology] Zhu [Huai Yong] said that tiny gold particles found in medieval gold paint react with sunlight to destroy air-borne pollutants like volatile organic chemicals/compounds (VOCs), which are emitted from paints, lacquers, and glues, among other things.

“These VOCs create that ‘new’ smell as they are slowly released from walls and furniture, but they, along with methanol and carbon monoxide, are not good for your health, even in small amounts,” Zhu said.

When interacting with gold particles, sunlight creates an electromagnetic field that reacts with the oscillating electrons in the gold. This field resonates and breaks apart pollutants in the air, according to Zhu.

No wonder churches smell so great. I sense a new/old trend in Green building coming on. No more overpriced Sharper Image ionizer things; just glorious stained glass in every window.

The Cranky Professor

Would you look at this:

That is a pure gold 7th c. cross of Anglo-Saxon manufacture and it was found in a muddy field by yet another British dude with a metal detector.

I swear to God it’s like people just tossed huge loot around for people to find under a few of inches of dirt 1300 years later. And England was a backwoods for centuries! Yet still they score and score. I never hear of a metal detector turning up shit in Rome.

The stunning Anglo Saxon artefact was set with red gemstones and might have originally held a relic such as bone from a Disciple or fragment of the Cross.

Measuring just over an inch long, the 18 carat gold has been decorated with fine detail and is thought to have been worn as a pendant.

It is English made with gold that was probably melted down from Merovingian French coins.

The metal detector fellow actually sounds like he knows what he’s doing. There’s a great passage in the article where he describes his process and the discovery.

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.