The History Blog

Archaeologists excavating the Skopje Fortress have found a chest containing the largest amount of Byzantine-era gold and silver coins ever found in Macedonia. The 44 gold coins from the Byzantine Empire and 76 silver Venetian coins date to the 13th century when the Nicean Byzantine Emperor John III Doukas Batatzes ruled Macedonia. Venice was a major trading partner at that time.

The Byzantine coins bear the images of various kings and Biblical motifs from the reign of John III Doukas; the Venetian coins bear the images of various doges from a wider range of years in the century.

This is the most significant archaeological find at the Skopje Fortress, along with the Medieval lead stamps that were discovered several years ago at the site, Pasko Kuzman, archaeologist and Director of Cultural Heritage Protection in the Macedonian Ministry of Culture, told the Vreme newspaper.

Golden Byzantine coins have been unearthed at other sites in Macedonia, but rarely and in smaller quantities, he added. According to archaeologists, large quantities of bronze coins are often found at ancient sites around Macedonia.

Excavations have been going on in Skopje Fortress for the past three years, but this is the most luxurious find yet. In the same layer where the coins were found, archaeologists also found high quality jewelry that would have been worn by a woman of great wealth.

The period these coins represent was an important transitional phase in the history of Skopje and Macedonia. Byzantine control waned in the middle of the 13th century as Bulgarian feudal lords conquered the territory. Skopje declined as warring factions duked it out, so the Byzantines were able to step into the vacuum for a few decades until the Serbian Empire invaded in 1282.

By the middle of the next century, Skopje was the capital of the Serbian Empire until the Ottomans swept in 1392. They stayed put for over 500 years until just before World War I.

Nary a single Imperial porcelain dish of the $80 million treasure sold at today’s auction. In fact, nary a single bid was received for any of the lots. Some 20 collectors expressed interest (thanks to Bingley for that link) in bidding for pieces the day before the auction, but since the auction opened and then instantly closed, that means none of the interested parties were willing to cough up the enormous $16 million deposit required from all would-be bidders.

So what now?

Fadel Muhammad, the Maritime and Fisheries Minister and chairman the National Committee of Excavation and Utilization of Precious Artifacts from Sunken Ships, said the committee, which oversees the auction, would need weeks or a month to decide what to do next.

“The next step is we will have a meeting among the committee, and then we will decide what we will be doing according to the regulation…of course we will consult with the president,” he said.

I imagine they’ll reschedule with a less absurd deposit requirement. However, this delay also gives the burgeoning protests time to burgeon even more. Archaeologists, as usual, vocally oppose the sale and dispersal of rare and precious cultural patrimony, but they’re not the only ones who have a problem with this auction. No less a personage than Sultan Sepuh XIV Pangeran Raja Adipati Arief Natadiningrat of the Cirebon Sultanate (the shipwreck was found in Cirebon waters) has expressed profound dismay.

“The big family of the Cirebon Kasepuhan Sultanate grieves deeply over the auction plan. The late Sultan XIII tried to prevent the auction by sending letters to the President and the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister, but he did not receive any response,” the [current] sultan said.

Pangeran Raja Adipati Arief said he was saddened by the thought that Indonesian students would have to go abroad to learn about their nation’s history because the auction was bound to attract foreign buyers.

The government obviously was as little swayed by appeals from royalty as they were by appeals from scholars, but now that the big money buyers have failed to materialize, there may be an opening here.

A 13th century skeleton buried on the grounds of a friary in Ipswich, England, is of Tunisian origin. Nobody knows how he got all the way to England, but he lived there for at least 10 years before he died of a spinal abscess. The body was discovered in the 1990s. It’s only now that analysis has revealed his unusual background.

“It’s not just the skin tone; it’s a question of bone structure,” said Xanthe Mallett, an expert at the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee. She said the size of the nasal bone or the shape of the orbits differed depending on whether skeletons were European or African.

“You can have an idea of where somebody is from by looking at their skeletal features,” she said.

Researchers were able to pin the man to Tunisia using isotope analysis, a technique which looks at the mix of elements that build up in a person’s teeth, bones or other tissues. Since people from different areas tend to accumulate such elements in different ways, analysis of their remains can sometimes pinpoint where they grew up, where they lived or even their diet.

“Each area has a different isotopic signature,” she said.

Carbon dating puts the skeleton to 1190-1300 A.D., at least 150 years older than the earliest post-Roman records of black people in England. There were people of African extraction in England under Rome — some slaves and soldiers, the 4th century “Ivory Bangle Lady” found buried in York — but then there’s a thousand year gap before 3 black people are mentioned in tax records.

Since he was buried in the friary, he must have been Christian, possibly a convert brought to England by Lord Tiptoth, the founder of the friary, upon his return from the 9th Crusade.

A mind-bogglingly huge treasure trove found on a 1000-year-old shipwreck by Indonesian fishermen is going on sale in Jakarta Wednesday. It’s the biggest treasure ever found in Asia, and comparable to the most valuable shipwreck ever found period, the Atocha, an early 17th century Spanish vessel found off the Florida coast.

On sale will be 271,000 individual pieces, including precious gems, Iranian glassware and Imperial Chinese porcelain all dating back to the first millennium A.D. The estimated value of the auction is a staggering 80 million dollars.

The pieces include the largest known vase from the Liao Dynasty (907-1125) and famous Yue Mise wares from the Five Dynasties (907-960), with the green colouring exclusive to the emperor.

Around 11,000 pearls, 4,000 rubies, 400 dark red sapphires and more than 2,200 garnets were also pulled from the depths by [Belgian treasure-hunter Luc] Heymans and his team of international divers.

It took 22,000 dives to bring it all to shore. There was a great deal of trade between Arabia, India, Java and Sumatra back then, but even so, whoever was on that ship must have been a big shot. Heymans speculates that all the Imperial porcelain suggests there was an ambassador on board. There was so much of it that when he first dove to the site, all he could see was a mountain of porcelain, no wood from the ship structure at all.

Recovering the treasure turned out to be the least of Heymans’ difficulties. He had arranged permits for the excavation and retrieval of the shipwreck, but the Indonesian police still arrested two of the divers. They stayed in jail for a month while Heymans worked out the problem. Meanwhile, other treasure-hunters tried to poach the find, the Indonesian navy got all up in his grill and the government spent a couple of years drafting new legislation to deal with the discovery.

Finally he cut a deal: the Indonesian government declared some of the treasure national heritage and therefore not salable, and it gets 50% of the sale proceeds from the rest of the treasure. So Heymans and his backers will have to settle for a mere $40 million at minimum.

Archaeologists excavating Glencurran Cave in Burren National Park in County Clare, Ireland, have uncovered an unexpected treasure: a 1,150-year-old Viking necklace. It’s surprising because the piece is highly valuable so must have been treasured by its owner, but Vikings never settled in the Burren area.

Some smaller, less significant Viking bead necklaces have been found in burials in Dublin. Nothing as glamorous as this, though.

[Excavation team leader Dr. Marion Dowd] said: “The necklace is the largest Viking necklace to have been found in Ireland. Normally, Viking necklaces that have been found have five to six glass beads, but this has 71 glass beads covered with gold foil.”

A leading expert on Irish cave archaeology, Dr Dowd said: “It is really bizarre how this necklace from a high-status Viking came to be in a cave in the Burren.

“There is no parallel for it in Ireland and it is puzzling on a number of fronts.

“The necklace would have been imported into Ireland from Scandinavia in the late 9th and early 10th century.

“Small numbers of these beads have been found with Viking burials at Kilmainham, Dublin, but nothing like the number found in Glencurran Cave. Such necklaces were worn by high-status Viking women and they might denote a woman’s cultural and religious affiliations. These were certainly prestigious items.”

Dr. Dowd speculates that the necklace might have come via Limerick. There was a Viking settlement there, so they may have traded with the Gaelic inhabitants of Burren.

Glencurran Cave has produced other finds in the 6 years since excavations began making it an archaeological gem even before actual jewelry was discovered. The current team has also found the skeletal remains of a two to four-year-old Bronze Age child, placed in the cave about 3,500 years ago, which is currently undergoing DNA testing. In addition, they’ve found the remains of seven adults, two other young children and one baby, plus the 10,000-year-old scapula of a bear.

This Sunday at 9 PM EST, the National Geographic Channel will broadcast an hour-long documentary about the Staffordshire Hoard called Lost Gold of the Dark Ages.

It’s going to have the usual unhealthy complement of goofy medieval battle recreations, but hopefully there will be plenty of hard facts and, most importantly, some great photography of the hoard itself.

With none of the artefacts bigger than your hand and most considerably smaller, my director of photography Mike Craven Todd has brought with him a set of Dedolights which at 150 watts are powerful enough to light the entire area but can be ‘spotted down’ to a tiny pin prick of light. We’re shooting the show on XD Cam, a blue-ray based camera system, so with the lens fitted with a close up dioptre a large HD video monitor is fired up and we get our first glimpse of the treasure in all its close-up glory.

Everyone present, from the conservators, archaeologists and camera crew the only word that seems to be on everyone’s lips is Wow!

Most of the people that have looked at and handled the artefacts, have only seen them with their naked eye. In macro close-up, they’re seeing new amazing details for the first time. They can see that some of the artefacts are rubbed smooth and worn indicating that they must have already been old when they were placed in the ground almost 1500 years ago. They can see damage that might have occurred when they were being used – perhaps in battle. They can see how well cut, polished and shaped the garnets are – if we need a high tech, high definition camera to see such detail, how on earth did the craftsmen who made them manage to see what they were doing?

The companion website has a cool interactive component which allows you to select from a dozen individual items from the hoard to view close up and from every angle.

This is not specifically related to the Hoard but apparently there will be performers reciting Old English poetry as part of the goofy re-enactments. Here’s a short behind the scenes clip that features a lovely reading of an Old English poem. It’s mellifluous and beautiful and sounds nothing at all like my high school teacher’s hacking attempts at Beowulf.

Thanks to the Art Fund’s amazing work raising funds from individual donations, trusts and grants, and a huge £1,285,000 (almost $2 million) final donation from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Staffordshire Hoard is staying put in the region where it was found.

Unusually for the fund, when the trustees met today there was no argument about the extraordinary quality of the hoard, or the merits of making the grant. Dame Jenny Abramsky, chair of the NHMF, said: “The Staffordshire hoard is an extraordinary heritage treasure. It is exactly the sort of thing the National Heritage Memorial Fund was set up to save, stepping in as the ‘fund of last resort’ when our national heritage is at risk, as a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives in the service of our nation. We’re delighted, in our 30th anniversary year, to be able to make sure it stays just where it belongs, providing rare insights into one of the more mysterious periods of our history.”

“Frankly they’d have been demented not to give the money,” David Starkey, the historian who led the £3.3m appeal, said, welcoming the announcement.[...]

“This is by far the most important archaeological discovery in Britain since the second world war, and beyond that this is a find – of the most extraordinary beauty, brilliance and technical sophistication – which has really caught the imagination of the public.”

The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, said: “Thanks to this grant, these superb items will be able to stay – and be enjoyed – where they belong: in the Midlands where they were discovered.”

The NHMF donation brings the total funds raised to the £3.3 million target a full 3 weeks before the deadline. Now two local museums — the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery — will receive the donated sum and they’ll both purchase the hoard from its discoverer Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson, the owner of the property where it was found.

The museums will share the hoard for display, conservation and research purposes, which is a great solution both for the public, so they have the opportunity to see the treasure in a couple of different places, but also for regional museums in general. A collaborative model allows local museums to support their own heritage instead of the British Museum getting it all.

Next hurdle: raising £1.7 million to properly conserve and study the hoard going forward. The Art Fund is keeping the donation lines open to help raise the conservation cash.

A circular Saxon object found in a tomb at The Meads, Sittingbourne, in 2008, has so far stumped book research, microscopes and CAT scans. Nobody knows quite what it is.

It’s a disk made out of wood, silver and bronze and there are some holes on it suggesting that it was mounted on something, but beyond this at-a-glance level of evidence, scientists have so far not penetrated.

Despite using microscopes, X-rays and reading articles about burial grounds, the Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) has been unable to identify it.

CAT believe that the object could be a decorative form of mount as it was discovered next to a sword.

Finds manager of CAT Andrew Richardson said: “We don’t currently recognise it, but it may be a decorative mount on something, but we don’t know what it’s mounted on.

Tests will continue, of course. A chemical analysis of the wood might hint at whether it was attached to something else, and since the disc was found with over 2,500 other artifacts in this Saxon burial ground of 229 graves, there might be some other items found with it that could suggest they were once mounted together. If there was a common pattern to the corrosion areas, for instance.

Two shields and two spears were found in the same grave as the disc. So far they haven’t found anything on the weapons to suggest the circle was mounted on one of them, but they’re still looking. The wealth of the grave goods indicates the deceased was someone of high status in his community.

Perhaps most interestingly/oddly of all, this analysis is being performed in a lab in what appears to be a shopping mall, the Forum Shopping Centre, to be precise. They have a display up not only of the disc, but of several weapons and other pieces found at The Meads.

You can go watch them poke at things and use titrating pipettes and whatnot. Some of the sciencey-analysis types are actually volunteers trained by the professionals to use microscopes and X-ray scanners to help analyze and process the thousands of artifacts.

It’s a bit weird that you could watch laboratory archaeology being done by professionals and volunteers between The Gap and Williams Sonoma, but it’s also kind of brilliant.

Researchers examining Giotto’s wall paintings in the Peruzzi Chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce church with ultra-violet rays have uncovered an incredible wealth of detail invisible to the naked eye.

Giotto’s Santa Croce paintings were made on dry plaster, as opposed to frescoes which are painted on wet plaster. That made the color more brilliant when he first applied it in 1320, but dry paintings don’t last as well as frescoes so these beautiful works didn’t have the best start from a preservation perspective.

Then it got worse. The Peruzzi family, who had commissioned Giotto’s paintings for the chapel, decided to redecorate in the early 18th century and whitewashed the walls. Crazy sumbitches.

Restorers in 1840 removed the white paint, but used harsh solvents and wire brushes and all the rest of the horrid arsenal of 19th century “conservation” and so ended up stripping the delicate Giotto paintings. Then to add insult to injury they repainted over some of the damage they did to highlight areas so they could be seen from the ground.

The 19th c. paint was removed by a restoration in 1958, so all that’s left now are the battered remains of Giotto’s own work.

That’s where our team of intrepid researchers steps in. Financed by a grant from the Getty Foundation, the four-month project aimed to utilize non-invasive diagnostic tools to assess the condition of the paintings.

“It was something really astonishing,” said Cecilia Frosinini, co-coordinator of the project that studied the scenes in the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.

“We knew we could get some very interesting results from our scientific diagnostics but when we looked under ultra-violet light, all of a sudden all these very faint paintings that were ruined by old restorations took on a new life,” she said, pointing to one scene while donning protective eye wear. [...]

“The scenes are again three dimensional … we were able to see all the chiaroscuro effects,” she said. “There were bodies under the garments … they became three dimensional, you could see the folds of the garments, the expressions of the faces.”

Look at the halos. It’s amazing how much of the original gold paint is still there. On the non-UV one you can only see that small sliver of gold on the right of the saint’s nose. Under UV light all of the sudden the entire round stands out.

Unfortunately, the ultra-violent rays which are so illuminating in short bursts would damage the paint if they were focused on it permanently, so this can only be a short-term application. The team plan to use the information from the UV examination as a map for future restorations.

They’re also hoping to snaggle enough grant money to take detailed UV pictures of the entire chapel so they can create an online virtual chapel for the general public to get as close to Giotto’s originals as we can 700 years later.

A series of alabaster statues carved between 1443 and 1456 have never moved more than 200 feet away from the tomb they decorate in the city of Dijon, and even that tiny hop only happened once over 6 centuries.

In an unprecedented opportunity created by the renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon where the tomb is housed, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City gets to be the first place to exhibit them away from their home. The beautifully detailed and realistic alabaster mourners usually process around the base of the tomb of John the Fearless, so being able to see them not just across the Atlantic but also in detail and from all angles is a unique treat.

Carved over a 25-year-period by sculptors Jean de la Huerta and Antoine le Moiturier, each statue represents a mourner — mostly ecclesiastical figures such as a bishop, a choirboy and rows of monks from the Carthusian order.

In their normal setting in Dijon they are only partially seen as they blend in between miniature Gothic arches lacing the base of the wealthy and powerful couple’s black marble tomb.

The open display at New York’s Met has allowed them to loosen up, emerging as individuals with sometimes surprising results.

Far from being pompous advertisements for the deceased couple’s religious devoutness and social standing, the monks and priests of the procession exude individuality, humanity and a cheeky strain of rebellion.

Each statuette is about sixteen inches high (the choirboys are the smallest), and they’re all totally different. There’s a solemn bishop, a nattily accessorized gent with his hands in belt, a choirboy holding the remains of a cross, and a whole lot more. A total of 39 statues are exhibited on a catwalk so they still have their funeral procession flair.

John the Fearless, the second duke of Burgundy, died in 1419 and these figures are meant to depict his actual funerary cortege, even though the artists only began to carve them 24 years later.

Learn about the mourners from the Court of Burdundy on their website where an intensive photography project has borne beautiful fruit with 360 degree views of each statuette.