The History Blog

Last summer, homeowners Stephen and Nicky West were having an addition built on to their house in Ratley, south Warwickshire, when their builders found a skeleton buried under the patio. The Wests are local history enthusiasts and immediately thought the body might be a casualty from a 1642 English Civil War battle that took place in nearby Edgehill.

They contacted the Warwickshire County Council who dispatched experts to determine whether the skeleton was historical or a the result of contemporary foul play. The archaeologist’s preliminary assessment was that any foul play that might have occurred took place hundreds of years ago. Under normal circumstances the find would not have been pursued much further because the local council doesn’t have the money to analyze every skeleton found under people’s patios. It was Stephen and Nicky West who personally commissioned Archaeology Warwickshire to excavate further under the patio and test the bones.

The archaeologists identified the remains of at least four bodies which included two adult females, a young male and a juvenile aged between 10 and 12.

Radiocarbon dates from two of the skeletons show that they died around 650-820 AD in what is known as the middle Saxon period. [...]

[Archaeology Warwickshire's manager Stuart] Palmer said: “The discovery of this previously unsuspected burial ground is an extremely rare and important addition to what has previously been an archaeologically invisible period of Warwickshire’s history.

“Detailed analysis of the skeletons has revealed an insight into the health of the middle Saxon population who clearly suffered periods of malnourishment and were subject to a wide range of infections indicative of lives of extreme hardship and often near-constant pain.”

Palmer believes the four skeletons found are part of a larger burial ground underneath the West’s home and adjacent properties. There won’t be further excavations, what with the people living there, but given the centuries of development on the spot, it’s remarkable that 1200-year-old plus skeletons were found at all.

The bones will be kept in storage by Archaeology Warwickshire until they decide what the final disposition will be. No little girls have been reported sucked into their TVs as of press time.

Vikings were known to have traveled extensively in the unfriendly waters of the North Atlantic, perhaps reaching as far as North America. How was it possible, in a time before the invention of the magnetic compass (in Europe, at any rate; they had magnetic compasses in Han Dynasty China (2nd c. B.C. – 1st c. A.D.), for sailors to navigate even under consistently overcast conditions when you can’t see the sun during the say nor the stars at night?

According to medieval Icelandic sagas, Vikings navigated using a sunstone, a mineral that polarizes light and thus allows the sun to be found even through heavy cloud cover. A passage in the 12th-13th century Rauðúlfs þáttr (pdf) saga describes its use:

The weather was overcast, and snow was falling, as Sigurður had predicted. The King then summoned Sigurður and Dagur into his presence. He sent a man out to observe the weather, and there was not a patch of clear sky to be seen. The King then asked Sigurður to determine how far the sun had travelled. He gave a precise answer. So the King had the sun-stone held aloft, and observed where it cast out a beam; the altitude it showed was exactly as Sigurður had said.

The sólarsteinn is mentioned in other sagas as well, described as a great treasure, and appears in several inventories of church property during the 14th and 15th centuries. None of the sources specify what mineral the sunstones were, however. There have been various likely candidates (cordierite, iolite, feldspar) since 1969 when Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou first proposed that sunstones were real minerals with polarizing properties rather than legendary talismans with supernatural powers.

A new study led by University of Rennes physicist Guy Ropars found that a transparent calcite crystal known as Iceland feldspar, aka Iceland spar, can indeed find the sun through the clouds and with a remarkable degree of accuracy. They used a piece of spar that was recently recovered from a British shipwreck from 1592.

In the laboratory, Ropars and his team struck the piece of Iceland spar with a beam of partly polarized laser light and measured how the crystal separates polarized from unpolarized light.

By rotating the crystal, the team found that there’s only one point on the stone where those two beams were equally strong—an angle that depends on the beam’s location.

That would enable a navigator to test a crystal on a sunny day and mark the sun’s location on the crystal for reference on cloudy days. On cloudy days, a navigator would only be able to use the relative brightness of the two beams.

The team then recruited 20 volunteers to take turns looking at the crystal outside on a cloudy day and measure how accurately they could estimate the position of the hidden sun.

Navigators subdivide the horizon by 360 degrees, and the team found that the volunteers could locate the sun’s position to within 1 degree.

Even after the magnetic compass was invented in Europe in the 1300s, the feldspar was still an important navigational tool, hence its presence on an Elizabethan ship a full four centuries after the end of the Viking era. The study found that even a single cannon from the shipwreck interfered with the compass by as much as 90 degrees. Therefore they couldn’t rely on the compass data alone. If the sun was obscured, a sunstone was crucial to avoid drastic navigation errors from a magnetic compass on a ship laden with cannon.

You can see the neat double refraction effect of Iceland spar in this video:

I learned something new today. The word “dunce” comes from one Johannes Duns Scotus, a 13th century Franciscan friar, philosopher, theologian and professor at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris, who in his own time was considered a brilliant man. He was born probably in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland, around 1265. (Ireland and England also claim him as their own, but the strongest evidence suggests he was indeed a Scot, hence the “Scotus” cognomen.)

According to Luke Wadding, a 17th century Franciscan historian who cites earlier sources, young John was tending sheep for his father when two Franciscan friars came along begging for their keep, as was the wont of the mendicant orders. When they found that the boy didn’t know his proper prayers, they endeavored to teach him the Lord’s Prayer. He memorized it instantly after just hearing it once. Amazed at his intellectual gifts, the friars persuaded his father to let the boy go with them and be educated at their monastery in Dumfries.

Again according to Wadding’s sources, the novice friar was swept up in King Edward I’s invasion of Scotland in the early 1290s.

Hence it appears, that the Holy Virgin granted to Dunse innocence of life, modesty of manners, complete faith, continence, piety, and wisdom. That Paul might not be elated by great revelations, he suffered the blows of Satan; that the subtle doctor might not be inflated by the gifts of the mother of Christ, he was forced to suffer the tribulation of captivity, by a fierce enemy. Gold is tried by the furnace, and a just man by temptation. Edward I., king of England, called, from the length of his legs, Long Shanks, had cruelly invaded Scotland, leaving no monument of ancient majesty that he did not seize or destroy, leading to death, or to jail, the most noble and learned men of the country. Among them were twelve friars; and that he might experience the dreadful slaughter and bitter captivity of his country, John of Dunse suffered a miserable servitude; thus imitating the apostle in the graces of God, and the chains he endured.

Who knows if it’s true that he was kidnapped to England, but we do know that he took his Holy Orders and was ordained a priest in 1291 in Northampton, England. After that he went to Merton College, Oxford, were he distinguished himself in all branches of study, especially mathematics and theology. By 1301 he was a professor of theology at Oxford. The next year he was lecturing at the University of Paris, although only briefly because he was expelled for taking the side of Pope Boniface VIII against King Philip IV on the pressing matter of the taxation of Church property. He was back and teaching again at the University of Paris in 1304.

Known as Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his nuanced and complex dialectical approach to thorny theological questions, Duns Scotus made a name for himself defending the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (that Christ’s mother was conceived without Original Sin) against the objections of Saint Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican followers. He is said to have rebutted 200 arguments against the Immaculate Conception one after the other while he was teaching in Paris. His school of thought was dubbed “Scotism” as opposed to Acquinas’ “Thomism.”

His reputation spread far and wide, attracting huge numbers of students — one doubtlessly apocryphal story says he had 30,000 students — to the university. His followers were called “Dunsmen” or “Dunces.” Even after his early death of “apoplexy” on November 8, 1308, his arguments continued to hold sway in Paris, so much so that by the end of the 14th century, the University made upholding the Scotist position on the Immaculate Conception a requirement for everyone who taught there.

Duns Scotus’ intellectual gifts continued to be held in high reverence until the rise of the humanists in 16th century. His dense, detailed, indirect reasoning was derided as sophistry and his followers hopelessly behind the times, incapable of understanding the “new learning” of Renaissance humanism. The Dunces, already saddled with a reputation for painful hair-splitting, now became synonymous with unrelenting, unteachable idiocy.

They even got their own accessory, the “dunce cap” donned by many an elementary school dolt in the era before timeouts. John Duns Scotus was an advocate of the conical hat, you see, because wizards were known to wear them and wizards are smart. The point symbolized knowledge and the funnel shape drove all that knowledge downward directly into the head. Once the dunces became associated with dumbness, the pointy hat became their symbol.

So now dunces and their hats are part of our collective cultural consciousness while the original Duns Scotus is widely forgotten. Not entirely, though. The Catholic Church still hearts him. John XXIII recommended him highly to theology students, and Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1993.

A restorer working on a fresco by Giotto di Bondone in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi has discovered a the face of a devil hidden in the clouds. Medievalist and St. Francis expert Chiara Frugoni divined the demonic presence in fresco number 20 out of a series of 28 depicting the life of St. Francis as written by St. Bonaventure. Bonaventure was the seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor and was commissioned by the Order to write the official biography of St. Francis in 1260. Fresco 20 is the death and ascension of St. Francis, painted by Giotto between 1296 and 1304.

St. Francis is shown lying on his death bier, surrounded by mourning friars while his soul is taken to heaven by a host of angels. Bonaventure described the scene in Chapter XIV of the hagiography: “In the hour of transit of the blessed Francis a friar saw his soul ascend to the heavens in the form of an enormously bright star.” The profile of the demon is on the right side of a cloud underneath the bright star, staring at the crotch of an angel.

“It’s a powerful portrait, with a hooked nose, sunken eyes and two dark horns,” Ms Frugoni said in an article in a forthcoming issue of the St Francis art history periodical.

“The significance of the image still needs to be delved into. In the Middle Ages it was believed that demons lived in the sky and that they could impede the ascension of human souls to Heaven.

“Until now it was thought that the first painter to use clouds in this way was Andrea Mantegna, with a painting of St Sebastian from 1460, in which high up in the sky there’s a cloud from which a knight on horseback emerges. Now we know that Giotto was the first (to use this technique).”

The figure hasn’t been seen until now because it’s almost impossible to spot looking up from the floor of the basilica. It took carefully examination of close-up photographs to find the little devil.

Sergio Fusetti, the chief restorer of the basilica, notes that theology may not have been Giotto’s entire motivation. He could have included the demon as a private joke, perhaps to spite someone who had done him wrong, or perhaps just for the fun of having a hidden image in the clouds.

There are some more pictures — unfortunately all of them small — on the Franciscan website.

Marine archaeologists from the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa have discovered the wreck of a ship from one of Kublai Khan’s invasion fleets off the coast of Nagasaki. Kublai Khan attempted two invasions of Japan, one in 1274 with an estimated 900 ships and 22,000 troops, the other in 1281 with an estimated 4,400 ships and 140,000 troops. Both invasion attempts would quickly end in disaster thanks to two perfectly timed — some would say divinely timed — typhoons, burying the Great Khan’s navies in the Japanese seabed.

A part of the hull was first identified last year, but an in depth archaeological exploration of the site only began last month.

The warship was located with ultrasonic equipment about 3 feet beneath the seabed at a depth of 75 feet. The archeological team, from Okinawa’s University of the Ryukus, had been carrying out a search of the waters around Takashima Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, because the area had yielded other items from Mongol ships.

Historical records suggest that some 4,400 ships carrying 140,000 Mongol soldiers landed in Japan in 1281 and skirmished with samurai in northern Kyushu. But after returning to their boats, the fleet was struck by a devastating typhoon that put an end to the invasion plans – a storm known to all Japanese as “kamizake,” meaning divine wind, and again invoked in the dying days of the Second World War.

The researchers believe the boats tried to find shelter in the coves of northern Kyushu, an assumption borne out by the discovery by Professor Yoshifumi Ikeda’s team.

Anchor stones and cannon balls from the Yuan Dynasty fleets have been found in the area before, but no remains of vessels. This wreck is the first of Kublai Khan’s ships to be discovered, and considering it’s almost 800 years old and sank in a divine wind, it’s in quite good condition. The mast and top structures are gone, but a large section of the ship’s hull, including a keel almost 50 feet long and more than 1.5 feet wide, ribs, bulkheads, and rows of wood planking still nailed to the keel. Preserved by layers of silt, the planks still have some of their original grey paint.

The team also found weapons, ink stones, Yuan Dynasty pottery and hundreds of bricks used as ballast in the immediate vicinity of the shipwreck. It’s the artifacts together with the structure of the vessel that mark the wreck as a 13th century Yuan warship and thus one of Kublai Khan’s invading fleet. The location indicates it was part of the second failed invasion.

Scientists plan to expand the exploration of the area to see if more of the ship can found, with an eye to the possibility of maybe one day lifting the entire vessel and preserving it. As of right now, however, there are no plans to attempt salvage. The wreck will be covered with a protective netting to keep it from further damage. Meanwhile, Ikeda’s team hopes to create a replica of the complete Yuan warship based on the archaeological remains.

This will answer some important questions about Mongol shipbuilding, and about Kublai Khan’s fleets in particular. Historians and chroniclers have long said that Kublai Khan put together his navies from scratch in less than a year, even the 4,400 ships from the larger second invasion. According to the Goryeosa, a 15th century history of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (918–1392), Kublai Khan was in a rush and thus filled his navy with flat-bottomed riverboats instead of taking the time to build proper ocean-going ships. Those traditional boats did not have curved keel so they capsized easily and were extremely hard to manage in high seas. Discovering the first hull and keel of a Yuan warship from the fleet ever found, therefore, is a historical divine wind.

The Kamikaze and Japan’s two-time defeat of the mighty Mongol war machine were nation-defining events. Before the Yuan invasions, the samurai class had never fought together against a foreign invader. They had only fought amongst themselves. Although at first their one-on-one dueling approach to warfare (even large forces arrayed against each other still picked an opponent and duked it out hand to hand) was easily defeated by the Mongol showers of arrows, artillery and coordinated army combat, the Japanese learned the lesson and spent the next seven years fortifying the coastline with stone walls, forts and other defensive structures. Those defenses worked. The outnumbered Japanese were able to repulse Mongol attacks from the fortifications and thus kept the second invasion fleet at sea and smack in the path of the two-day typhoon that would sink 80% of it.

Until War War II, Kublai Khan’s thwarted attempts were the closest Japan would come to invasion in 1500 years.

Conservators have discovered that three gold, garnet and enamel pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard which bore no immediately obvious relation to each other fit together to form a beautifully perplexing mystery object. The millefiori stud (catalogue number K545), a gold mount with a collar of garnets and a glass enameled checkerboard surface, has a rectangular hole on the under side surrounded by four smaller round holes. A small gold cylinder (K1055) decorated with cloisonné garnets has a rectangular protuberance of silver on one end and four round holes. The cylinder’s tab A fits into the millefiori’s slot B perfectly, and the four holes on both pieces align.

On the bottom end, the cylinder has another set of four matching holes with a torn piece of silver plate in the center. That torn plate in turn matches precisely the torn silver in the center of an elaborate gold cloisonné garnet circular object (K130). The silver plate in the middle was riveted to the gold circle by four rivets, same as the holes on the other two pieces. Those four rivet holes show up on the other side of K130, too, so our mystery object has at least one more part.

(Aesopian interlude: as historian David Starkey noted at the time, this is why it’s so important to keep archaeological discoveries intact in their proper context. If the hoard had been broken up and sold to the highest bidder, those pieces could have been scattered to the four corners of the earth.)

As for what it might have been used for, researchers have proposed several possibilities.

(1) A fitting on a saddle.

(2) The decorative tip to a shield boss, presumably from a very elaborate shield. (In this case the object would have been rivetted to the top / front of a standard iron shield boss. A warrior held his shield by grasping a handgrip that ran across a circular hole cut in the centre of the shield. The domed boss covered the hole while leaving space for the warrior’s hand inside.)

(3) A decorative top to a stopper that fitted into a drinking horn. (Here the object would have been rivetted to a wooden stopper that fitted inside the mouth of the horn.)

(4) A decorative terminal to a parchment roll. (I think the suggestion is that there would be one at each end of the roll, fixed to whatever the roll was attached to.)

(5) A lid to something. But what? (Again this probably requires the object being rivetted to something like a wooden stopper.)

You can see how the first two pieces — the millefiori stud and the cylinder — came together thanks to perspicacious curator Deborah Magnoler in the following video from this summer. The gentleman with her is Dr. David Symons, curator of the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the museum that shares ownership of the hoard with The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-On-Trent.

Finally, and I’m really surprised at how little this has been advertised, some of the Staffordshire Hoard is coming to America! One hundred of the most important pieces, including gold and garnet sword pommels, the folded gold cross and the strip of gold with the Latin Biblical inscription, will be on display at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., starting next Saturday, October 29! The exhibit runs until March 4, 2012 so you have five months to claw your way there before all the pretty shiny heads back home.

Archaeologists excavating the peninsula of Ardnamurchan in Scotland have discovered the first fully intact Viking boat burial site ever found in the mainland UK. The grave is five feet wide and almost 17 feet long, the size of boat itself which has long since decayed. The only remnants of it are 200 metal rivets that once held the timbers together and some slivers of wood still attached to rivets. The shape of the boat, however, with its pointed prow and stern, was pressed in the ground over the centuries and is still clearly visible. Experts have given the site a preliminary date of 1000 A.D., but we won’t know the exact date until the remains are radiocarbon dated.

The Viking, of whom only a few bone fragments and teeth remain, was buried in a traditional pagan Norse warrior ritual: laid to rest on his boat with his shield on top of him, then covered in stones. Buried in the grave with him archaeologists found a sword, a battle-axe, a spear, the shield and a number of other artifacts including a bronze drinking horn, a bronze Irish ring-pin and a Norwegian whetstone. The range, variety and quality of grave goods indicate that the warrior was widely traveled and extremely well-off.

Viking boat burials in general were reserved for the most important personages destined for Valhalla. Few of them survive intact because as befits a naval theme, chosen burial sites were often coastal and thus highly susceptible to flooding and erosion. Some of them have been found on Scottish islands — the Norse were settled and living in Orkney and Shetland by the mid-800s — but all the Viking burials found on mainland Britain have been found in traditional Christian cemeteries.

The Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, a collaborative team of archaeologists from Manchester and Leicester universities, plus private archaeology firm CFA Archaeology and volunteer non-profit Archaeology Scotland, has been excavating the Ardnamurchan every summer for six years focusing their research on periods of social transition, for instance the shift from Bronze Age to Iron Age.

Hannah Cobb, an archaeologist from the University of Manchester who is co-director of the excavation, said: “We had spotted this low mound the previous year, but said firmly that it was probably just a pile of field clearance rocks from comparatively recent farming.

“When we uncovered the whole mound, the team digging came back the first night and said it looked quite like a boat.

“The second night they said: ‘It really does look like a boat.’ The third night they said: ‘We think we really do have a boat’. It was so exciting, we could hardly believe it.”

They recovered fragments of an arm bone and several teeth, which should allow analysis of radioactive isotopes and reveal where the man came from.

The fragments of wood clinging to the rivets should reveal what trees were felled for his ship, and possibly where it was built.

The beautiful and rugged coastal Highlands of Ardnamurchan have long since appealed to local populations as burial grounds. There are cairns dating back to the Stone Age 6,000 years ago in the area. Perhaps it was specifically selected as a final resting point for a highly respected Viking figure, or perhaps he died in transit. Its completeness, artifact remains, pagan ritual and location on the British mainland provide a rich field of material that archaeologists expect will illuminate post-raid Viking life in Scotland.

The artifacts are now being studied by team members at the universities of Manchester and Leicester. They will be cleaned and eventually put on display at a museum to be determined. Of course the British Museum is interested, but the locals think this spectacular find should be exhibited in Scotland where it was found.

Archaeologists excavating Mexico City’s Templo Mayo have discovered a circular platform studded with snake heads that they hope might be a clue to finding an Aztec emperor’s tomb. It is 15 yards in diameter and dates to around 1469.

The team has been digging for five years looking for what would be the first tomb of an Aztec ruler ever found. The Spanish priests who accompanied Cortés and his troops to the Aztec capital then known as Tenochtitlan recorded that Aztec kings being cremated at the foot of the Templo Mayor on a structure called the “cuauhxicalco.” This platform could well be the cuauhxicalco, and if it is, then perhaps an imperial tomb is nearby.

There are no other extant sources that describe how the Aztecs buried their royalty, however, so the archaeological team doesn’t have a lot to go on. On the other hand, the Spanish conquistadors did provide themselves with a rare opportunity to see the death of three Aztec kings — Montezuma II, his brother Cuitláhuac, and Cuitláhuac’s nephew, Cuauhtémoc — within six years of their arrival, so an argument could be made they are expert witnesses.

[National Institute of History and Anthropology archaeologist Raul Barrera] said the platform, which is still being unearthed, was gradually uncovered over the preceding months. It is covered with at least 19 serpent heads, each about a half-yard (meter) long.

Barrera said accounts from the 1500s suggested the platform was also used in a colorful ceremony in which an Aztec priest would descend from the nearby pyramid with a snake made of paper and burn it on the platform.

Records indicate there were a total of five such platforms in the temple complex. One was found several years ago, but that platform was farther from the ritually important spot at the foot of the pyramid, where the most recent finding was made.

In 1997 archaeologists found underground chambers using ground penetrating radar very near the spot of the snakehead platform. They thought perhaps those chambers would prove to be the tomb of Emperor Ahuizotl who ruled at the end of the 15th century, but when they excavated all they found was a staircase and some offerings.

A team of archaeologists on their fourth year of excavations at the 12th century Nevern Castle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, have unearthed 12 slates inscribed with a variety of designs. Found at the south entrance to the castle, the scratched symbols were probably made by laborers to keep evil spirits from crossing its threshold.

Inscribed slates from this early on are a rare discovery. There’s a later Welsh tradition of scratching curses or blessings on slate tiles and throwing them down wells, but what you usually see are the initials of a cursee or blessee inscribed, not symbols.

“Scratched images from the medieval world are rare, and we can confidently date these to the period 1170-1190 when the stone phase of Nevern Castle was built,” added [Lead archaeologist Dr. Chris] Caple.

“These drawings connect us with the lives and beliefs of masons or labourers who built the castle. We hardly ever recover evidence about the peasants of the medieval world, and never information about their beliefs and ideas, but these scratched designs are from the imagination of a serf, a farm labourer or a man at arms.”

Welsh slate had been quarried and used as a building material, particularly roof tiles, since the Roman period. The south entrance was made of slate bedded with clay, a local building technique that creates a strong structure as long as you ensure the bedded slate walls are capped with large stones or wide eaves to ensure rain doesn’t wash the clay away.

On top of the clay bedded slate, the doorway was built out of blocks of local sandstone. Finely chiseled, evenly faced square blocks of sandstone were not a local building technique at this point. That style was imported by the Anglo-Norman invaders, and in fact it was Anglo-Norman lord Robert FitzMartin who built Nevern castle as we know it today in the first decade of the 12th century. That makes the doorway an extremely early fusion of native and invader construction.

Control of the castle shifted over the century between FitzMartin and Welsh prince Rhys ap Gruffudd. During the period in which those slates were inscribed, 1170-1190, the castle was in FitzMartin’s hands. Most of the masonry was built onto the timber and earthenworks castle by The Lord Rhys between 1135 and 1170, but FitzMartin is thought to have added some new stone structures after he regained control. By 1195 it was back in Welsh hands, but Rhys died in 1197 and his son Hywel Sais demolished much of it and left it to decay.

Its short lifespan and connection to Rhys ap Gruffudd makes the castle an important site for Welsh history. Not only was Rhys a powerful figure in his time, but if archaeologists can pinpoint buildings that he added on to the castle, that will make Nevern the earliest excavated remains of a stone castle built by the Welsh themselves.

An archaeological team excavating the Tuscan port town of Piombino hoping to find the remains of its patron saint has instead uncovered the skeletal remains of two 13th century women of questionable repute. Approximately 25-30 years old at time of death, they were both buried in the bare earth, without a coffin or even a shroud, very much against custom.

One of women had seven curved, one-and-a-half-inch-long nails placed in her mouth after death and 13 more nails jammed into the ground all around her body. Archaeologists speculate that the ones around her body were used to nail the body to the ground in some kind of exorcism ritual to prevent her using witchcraft to rise from the dead.

The other woman was buried with a leather pouch holding 17 bone dice. Games of chance were against civil and ecclesiastic law during the Middle Ages, and although the laws were constantly flouted, a women associated with dice was a woman associated with immorality. Also, 17 was and remains an extremely unlucky number in Italy. (The story I’ve heard about why it’s unlucky is that the Roman number for 17, XVII, is an anagram of “vixi” which is Latin for “I have lived” which is just like saying you’re dead and is therefore an ill omen. No idea if that’s true.)

L’Aquila University archaeologist Alfonso Forgione, the dig leader, notes that these burials are unique in his experience. Not only are they strangely bare and contain those odd accouterments, but they are also in consecrated ground. There’s a chapel on the grounds purportedly marking the burial spot of Saint Cerbonius, the sixth century A.D. bishop and patron saint of Piombino. The team was looking for the saint’s burial and for the remains of a medieval cathedral that was once dedicated to him when they found the ladies. If the women were social outcasts, one of them demonic, the other degenerate, neither of them worthy of a decent burial, how come they got to go to their eternal rest in a cathedral cemetery next to a saint?

Forgione speculates that they may have had the advantage of powerful friends and families surviving them who arranged for them to have at least a chance at heaven by ensuring their bodies were placed in consecrated ground.

The excavation will continue through the end of the month. They have already found 350 burials in four eight-by-ten meter (26 by 33 feet) sites on each side of the chapel, and there are strong indications that the cemetery goes on for another 65 feet inland and another 33 feet or so towards the sea. Such a large, well-populated cemetery indicates that little Piombino, the only known Etruscan port city, remained a thriving town through the Middle Ages.

Archaeologists are working against the clock, though. The cliff side is eroding faster than they can dig. There are bones visibly jutting out, to the delight of many a tourist taking a romantic walk on the beach, but they can’t be removed for fear that the entire promontory will crumble like a Jenga game.