The History Blog

In 1999, workers restoring a medieval communal fount called the Fountain of Abundance in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima discovered a curious mural hidden behind a whitewash layer. It depicts a tree heavily laden with heavily laden phalluses under which eight or nine women stand in various poses and large black birds fly. Expert thinks the fresco dates to 1265, the same year inscribed on the fountain itself.

According to George Ferzoco, the director of the Centre for Tuscan Studies at the University of Leicester whose summer program was in Massa that year, the townspeople’s initial reaction to the find was mixed.

“They considered it to be somehow dirty or erotic, one or the other. Those who saw it as erotic looked at it as being a symbol that mirrored the reality of the water and the place. Water gives life; Phalluses give life: Isn’t this a unique and interesting way to portray the life-giving properties of water? The porn camp, if we can call it that, saw it as being somehow deliberately obscene and thus believed that as little attention as possible needed to be drawn to it.”

Over a decade later, that ambivalence has long gone and locals are furiously protective of their Tree of Fertility. In 2008 a program of restoration was undertaken to fully clean the mural which had suffered not just from its whitewashing but also from water damage and concretions. The restoration finally ended in early August and the public were allowed back in to view the mural, only to find to their dismaythat there were parts missing. Male parts.

The experts who carried out the restoration have been accused of sanitising the mural by scrubbing out or altering some of the testicles, which hang from the tree’s branches along with around 25 phalluses.

“Many parts of the work seem to have been arbitrarily repainted,” said Gabriele Galeotti, a town councillor who has called for an investigation after seeing the finished work. “The authenticity of the fresco seems to have been compromised by a restoration effort that did not respect the original character of the work.”

The restorers deny categorically having painted over any phalluses. They claim any paint loss was the result of salt and calcium concretions lifting paint as they were removed during the cleaning. If any repainting gets done, restorers say, it’ll be done to put the lost phalluses back in, not to remove them.

Councilman Galeotti is not at all satisfied with that explanation.

“What the restorers say is absolute nonsense. As far as we are concerned they have compromised the authenticity of the fresco. The work was intended as a symbol of fertility with the penises being crucial to the intention of the art but now these have been removed and the message is therefore no longer there.

“We intend to make a formal complaint to the local prosecutor so that he can open an investigation into this disrespectful slaughter of an artistic work. There was obviously no intention to respect the original artist.”

Unfortunately, I can’t find any before and after images of the tree so we can assess the phallic loss with our own eyes, but judging from some of the old pictures I found (see this one from 2003), the fresco was in truly awful condition when uncovered. Recent pictures show it in far superior condition, figures, phalluses and tree.

It’s probably not actually a fertility symbol, btw. George Ferzoco’s studies suggest that the fresco is a political allegory, negative advertising, if you will, writ large in a highly trafficked location: the public fountain where people drew their water for daily use. Ferzoco notes:

“The fact of the matter is that there is, with regard to the phalluses on display in this painting, nothing whatsoever to do with fertility. It’s one thing to have a symbol of a phallus on its own. That can stand for good luck, fertility, what have you. It’s another to put it in a different context, one in which it’s seen to be quite literally growing on a tree. The Medieval culture, more than ours, was one that was extremely sensitive to what was perceived as the goodness of nature, the goodness of what is natural, and they would have put two and two together in a way which involved seeing this particular tree bearing fruit that is not natural fruit. Those two elements of the equation would have added up to be something which is not natural and hence not good.”

While the phalluses in the tree are, by the context, strange and shocking, there are other phalluses in the painting which add currency to Ferzoco’s hypothesis that this is anything but a mural celebrating fecundity. “We have an image of two women who appear to be locked in serious combat over one of these phalluses, so this supposed fertility symbol that ought to bring life and goodness is in fact bringing strife to the people fighting over it. More importantly, there is a woman on the left side of the mural, standing in what I call her ‘Lady Di’ pose, standing quite demurely, until you realise that she’s being sodomised by one of these phalluses. You can’t get pregnant by sodomy – it’s the ultimate in non-fertility. There’s something going on in the mural that subverts notions of fertility.”

But why would one display such an extravagant, and no doubt expensive, symbol of non-fertility in such a central place? What message is it conveying? “The key to that subversion – according to Ferzoco – is shown with the symbol of one of the two competing political factions of the time, which is displayed prominently in the mural. This is the Eagle, a symbol of the Ghibelline party. The juxtaposition of this party symbol along with another symbol being used unnaturally, in a non-fertile way is meant to create in the viewer a kind of relationship between what is unnatural or not good on the one hand and the Ghibelline party on the other. It makes even more sense when you consider that during almost all of its history as an independent city republic, Massa Marittima was controlled by the anti-Ghibelline Guelph party.”

Stick with us, is the message, or prepare for a society in which perverted trees grow phallus fruit and women tear each other’s hair out trying to have non-reproductive sexual congress with them.

A five bedroom, centrally located town house in charming downtown Visby, capital of the Swedish island of Gotland, has just gone on the market with quite the unique selling point: there’s an exposed skeleton in the cellar, perpetually at slumber in his glass-covered grave.

The house was built in the 1750s over the foundations of a Russian Orthodox church which was abandoned in the Middle Ages. The skeleton, dubbed Valdemar by the locals, was a parishioner, probably a Russian, who was buried in the crypt of the church in the 13th century. There’s also another skull in a glassed-in niche in the cellar. Excavations in the 1970s uncovered the church walls and the human remains, and also found evidence of human habitation on the spot going back 4000 years. How’s that’s for a historical property?

“The man is resting in consecrated, sacred ground so his soul definitely rests at peace,” Leif Bertwig, the real estate agent in charge of the sale, told The Local. Therefore no ghosts are listed in the realtor’s description.

“If any prospective buyers would be worried that he will haunt the house they have nothing to fear,” Bertwig said.

Way to scare off the ghost-loving clientele, Leif. You should be draped in ectoplasm and flitting around at showings.

The cellar is not accessible directly from the town house. Four houses, including this one, share a private central courtyard. Valdemar and the remains of the church can be accessed via a spiral staircase in the courtyard. The patio off the living room, a stone cobbled outdoor space featuring the remains of a medieval well, is right above Valdemar’s resting place. You can sip a beverage in front of your medieval well and remember that thou art mortal.

However historically valuable the silent houseguest may be, Bertwig thinks that his underground presence will not affect the final price of the property, with bidding starting at 4.125 million kronor ($652,000).

“It’s definitely not a negative thing, more like a curious detail. Buyers will more likely be attracted to what the house looks like and how it’s built,” said Bertwig.

It looks great. It was renovated in 2000 and has some contemporary elements that jar a little with the beautiful exposed wooden beams and plaster walls reminiscent of Tudor construction, but it still exudes history from every corner.

As an archaeological and a historical home, the property is protected by law. You can’t alter the foundation in any way. You can, however, Leif assures us, take some folding chairs and a table downstairs and enjoy a picnic with Valdemar.

Here’s the listing with a detailed descriptions of all the features and contact information should you have $652,000 burning a hole in your pocket.

Metal detectorist Michael Greenhorn discovered a gold and sapphire ring in a field six miles south of York in April of 2009. He reported it to the Portable Antiquities Scheme and, as expected, it was declared treasure. The Yorkshire Museum has just raised the £35,000 assessed value to buy the ring so it can be kept where it was discovered, studied thoroughly and put on display.

Sapphire jewelry is rare in medieval England. Sapphires were reserved for royalty, upper nobility or high-ranking clergy and were said to hold magical protective powers, especially against poison. The York ring is the second earliest example of sapphire jewelry known in England. The oldest sapphire jewel is a Roman example from the fifth century Roman. The York ring was made after that, but scholars aren’t sure exactly when. There is literally nothing comparable to help them determine when it was made.

The ring weighs 10.2 grams, is 2.5 centimeters in diameter. A 6 millimeter deep blue sapphire is mounted in the middle, with pieces of red glass inset around it. The edges are adorned with fine gold beading, and all the gold in the piece is of a very high standard, an alloy of 90% gold, 8% silver and 2% copper.

The gold beading is characteristic of the Viking period (10th – 11th centuries), but a combination of red and blue glass set in gold is characteristic of early Anglian jewelry (7th – 9th centuries). The sapphire could have been used to replace the blue glass of the more modest traditional Anglian design to create a ring for fit for an important figure, maybe even a king. The only other known sapphire around this period was in Edward the Confessor’s coronation ring (he was crowned in 1042), and is now in the Imperial State Crown of Great Britain (it’s at the center of the Maltese Cross on the top of the crown). That sapphire is the oldest gemstone in the Crown Jewels.

The museum will launch a multi-disciplinary investigation to find out more about the ring. They will try to narrow down the date, comparing it stylistically to other medieval jewelry. They’re also going to focus on the high quality of the gold alloy, hoping the composition might shed some light on what historians think may have been a high level jewelry-making industry in medieval York.

The museum, in York, also plans to track down the ultimate origin of the sapphire itself. It’s possible that it came originally from India or Sri Lanka and a special scanning electron microscopy examination of the gem will almost certainly be carried out to identify trace elements and ascertain its geological background.

This may also help to reconstruct its pre-Anglo-Saxon history. Is it likely to have been imported into England or Europe from thousands of miles away in Anglo-Saxon times, or is it more likely that it was imported in Roman times and re-used in various different high status roles for hundreds of years before it was lost south of York a millennium or more ago.

Microscopic examination of ware marks on the ring may also shed light on its history – as might a detailed historical examination of the area around where it was found

The ring is scheduled to go on display at the Yorkshire Museum in the next few weeks.

The dramatic coastal clifftop setting of the 13th century Tintagel Castle in Cornwall was the setting for one of the most legendary acts of debauchery: Uther Pendragon’s sneak seduction of Ygerna (aka Igraine) while magically disguised as her husband Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall. That heated night of rape-by-fraud at Tintagel resulted nine months later in the birth of the Once and Future King, Arthur. What would you do if you got to spend an evening at Tintagel with five of your closest friends?

Think about it carefully and then post your answer on English Heritage’s Tintagel Castle Facebook wall. If your idea has a mass appeal, you get to make it happen. The entrant who gets the most ‘likes’ by August 1st (subject to English Heritage’s discretion, so, like, peeing your name on the ramparts probably won’t cut it even though you’d get plenty of likes) will win private access to the ruins on an evening of your choice between August 6th and August 20th.

Matt Ward, site supervisor at the castle explains: “Tintagel is such a beautiful and atmospheric place, as well as being steeped in history and folklore it has some of the most spectacular views along the English coastline. Never before have we been able to hand over the castle for someone to enjoy exclusively so we’re really excited to see what ideas people will come up with to make the most of it.”

I’m afraid if I were honest in my entry, I’d be sure not to win since I’d just spend the evening nerding out over the ruins and the view and that’s not really a crowd-pleasing concept. Just as well I can’t make it to Cornwall next month. Still, if one of y’all submits an entry please link to it in the comments and you’ll at least get yourself a like or two from other readers.

Although the Tintagel peninsula was in use from Roman Times through the early Middle Ages as an easily defensible location for the peripatetic courts of local kings and chieftains, Tintagel Castle as we know it today began as a Norman stronghold built by Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, in 1145. That was six years after Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his account of Arthur’s conception in his Historia Regum Britanniae but there’s no evidence of an earlier structure on the spot that Geoffrey could have known as Tintagel Castle. Most of the ruins we see today date from 1233 when Richard, Earl of Cornwall and Henry III’s younger brother, built the main part of the castle. He could well have picked the spot to associate himself with Arthurian legend.

The Castle fell into disuse after the death of Edward, the Black Prince, son of King Edward III and Duke of Cornwall, in 1376. The county sheriffs took it over, using the building as a prison and letting the land to shepherds for pasture. With the revival of interest in Arthurian legend during the mid-19th century, the romantic windswept outcroppings of Tintagel became a tourist attraction.

As Monmouth describes it:

A whole week was now past, when, retaining in mind his love to Igerna, [King Uther] said to one of his confidants, named Ulfin de Ricaradoch: “My passion for Igerna is such, that I can neither have ease of mind, nor health of body, till I obtain her: and if you cannot assist me with your advice how to accomplish my desire, the inward torments I endure will kill me.”– “Who can advise you in this matter,” said Ulfin, “when no force will enable us to have access to her in the town of Tintagel? For it is situated upon the sea, and on every side surrounded by it; and there is but one entrance into it, and that through a straight rock, which three men shall be able to defend against the whole power of the kingdom.

Archaeologists excavating the thousand-year-old temple complex of Chotuna Chornancap in Lambayeque, northern Peru, have discovered the tomb of an important lord thought to have been an executioner. The tomb was found two weeks ago and contained human remains, ceremonial knives, ceramic pots, a dress made from native cotton and a series of rolled copper discs. It’s the grave goods that mark the burial as belonging to someone with a key ceremonial role in Lambayeque human sacrifice rituals.

Carlos Wester, director of the Bruning Museum in Lambayeque and one of the tomb’s discoverers. Wester told AFP the person buried there was most likely in charge of human sacrifice.

“We found the perfectly preserved tomb of a sacrificer of the Lambayeque culture, with copper machetes and human offerings laid around them,” Wester told the news agency. [...]

The 20 to 30 year old resident of the tomb “played an important role in the ceremonies of human sacrifice” for the ancient culture, which flourished from 700 to 1375 AD. Sicán or Lambayeque culture emerged around the eighth century, lasted until 1375 and peaked between 900 and 1100.

The adobe pyramids, temples and tombs were built by the Lambayeque culture around 900 A.D., but they remained in use by later cultures until the arrival of the Spanish. The temple complex was discovered in January of 2010, but even before that the Chotuna Chornancap archaeological site produced copious evidence of extensive Lambayeque and Inca human sacrifice.

In September of 2008, archaeologists discovered two Lambayeque tombs that contained the remains of seven sacrificed women between the ages of 15 and 25, as well as several sacrificed llamas. All of the skeletons showed signs of having been cut at the throat, and one of the women was pregnant. Sacrificing pregnant women was not a common occurence. It’s an extremely rare find, in fact, and indicates that an important religious ritual took place, perhaps the death of an important personage or the sanctification of a newly built temple.

Just a few months later archaeologists found a large Inca sacrificial pit containing 33 bodies, this time dating to approximately 600 years ago, just before the Spanish conquest.

The British Library needs to raise £9 million ($14.5 million) over the next eight months to buy the 7th century St. Cuthbert Gospel, aka the Stonyhurst Gospel, the earliest book made in Europe to have survived intact. The pocket-sized copy of the Gospel of John was written and bound in finely tooled red goatskin at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey some time between 680 and 687, the year St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, died. The gospel was placed in his casket when he was buried on Lindisfarne island.

Three years later, the seven-year-old Bede would become the pupil of the Ceolfrid, the abbot of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow who had been in charge when the St. Cuthbert Gospel was made. Thirty years after that, in 721, inspired by the recent discovery that Cuthbert’s body was uncorrupt, the Venerable Bede would write a hagiography of the saint: The Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert.

In 793, the Vikings raided Lindesfarne for the first time, destroying the church at Lindisfarne. After the second Viking raid in 875, the monks of Lindisfarne fled and took the remains of their patron saint with them, first to various places in Northumbria and then to Durham. In 1104, Cuthbert’s coffin was opened once again so his remains could be moved to a new shrine behind the altar of Durham cathedral. Again his body was found to be uncorrupt, still flexible and smelling like a rose. The gospel was next to his head.

That’s where it remained until 1537 when Henry VIII sent emissaries to loot and destroy the saint’s tomb. They too found his body uncorrupt, but that didn’t deter them from making off with the jewels and ornaments buried with him, including the gospel. The book, now over 850 years old, passed into private hands. It was kept wrapped in leather, thankfully, which protected its delicate binding. In 1769, it was donated to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits kept in a wooden box in the library of Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit boys’ school

Encased in its leather wrappings, Cuthbert’s gospel was protected from misadventure. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century it passed into the hands of collectors. In 1769 it was given to the English Jesuit College at Liège. The Jesuits packed the book in a small oak box and placed it in the library, bringing it with them to England when the Liège college was moved and renamed Stonyhurst College. In 1979, the Society of Jesus loaned the gospel to the British Library, where it has been on display ever since.

The Jesuits have been privately offered large sums for the gospel which they’ve thus far turned down, but now they have decided to sell and use the profits to repair church buildings. Because they don’t suck, they offered the British Library the chance to buy it for £9 million before putting it up for auction. That’s a good price, too, because of the incredible condition the St. Cuthbert Gospel is in and what a Zelig-like fulcrum of British history it is.

The BL responded with alacrity, first securing a £4.5 million ($7.2 million) award from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The British Library trusts chipped in £1.25 million ($2 million), the Art Fund and Garfield Weston Foundation £250,000 ($400,000) each. That leaves just £2.75 million to be secured. The British Library is optimistic that it will be raised in time, especially since they’ve signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Durham World Heritage Site that they will share the book, and Durham is thrilled at the prospect of its homecoming.

“This wonderful book links us directly to Saxon Christianity of the north of England, and to the north’s best-loved saint, Cuthbert himself,” explained Reverend Michael Sadgrove, the Dean of Durham.

“Durham Cathedral owes its very existence to him, and we prize not only his memory, but also the treasures associated with him here at the Cathedral such as his pectoral cross and portable altar.

“It is a vital part of our cultural and spiritual heritage. The Gospel speaks powerfully about Northumbria’s golden age, whose spiritual vision, intellectual energy and artistic achievement continue to inspire us today.

“We are in the British Library’s debt for having taken this initiative and must make sure it succeeds.”

A local metal detectorist in Furness, northwest England, uncovered a hoard of Viking silver this May. The hoard includes 92 silver coins, including two Arabic dirhams, several ingots and an almost complete silver bracelet. The dirhams, a silver coin circulating in 10th century, are only the fourth and fifth ever reported to have been found.

Experts believe the hoard was interred in the mid-10th century during a period when Viking invaders had established settlements in the area. Despite a panoply of local place names — including Furness itself — of Old Norse derivation, here hasn’t been a great deal of evidence for a strong Norse presence found in the region, just occasional individual artifacts. This is the largest collection of Viking material ever discovered in Furness, and from a critical transitional period between invasion and settlement.

British Museum Viking expert Dr Gareth Williams said: “On the basis of the information and photographs that I have seen so far, this is a fascinating hoard.

“By the mid-950s, most of England had become integrated into a single kingdom, with a regulated coinage, but this part of the north-west was not integrated into the English kingdom until much later, and the hoard reflects that. It is a good reminder of how much finds like this can tell us about the history of different parts of the country.”

The British Museum is studying the hoard right now. Once it’s declared treasure by a coroner’s inquest, it will be officially valued and local museums given the chance to purchase it. The Dock Museum in Barrow, the museum closest to the discovery, is hoping they will be able to buy the hoard and keep it in the area in which was found. Before it moved to the BM for the treasure investigation, the hoard was kept at the Dock Museum.

But aren’t they always in Rome, you ask? Geographically yes, but politically the Vatican Secret Archives, the Pope’s private document library and subject of much Dan Brown-based intrigue, have never left the confines of Vatican City before. A hundred handpicked documents covering a thousand years of history on all continents will go on display at Rome’s Capitoline Museums from February to September, 2012, to mark the 400th anniversary of the archive’s founding.

The Archivum Secretum Vaticanum was created by Pope Paul V in 1612. Unlike the Vatican Library, they were the personal archives of the Pope, not a Church department administered by the Curia. In fact its description as “Secretum,” which now has such a delicious air of conspiracy, in its ancient usage connotes privacy, not secrecy. The Secret Archive remained the private domain of the Papacy until 1881, when Pope Leo XIII opened the doors to scholars.

Today the 52 miles of shelves holding primary documents and historical texts going back 1500 years remain available to researchers, but they have to go to the Vatican to peruse them. Come February, some of those documents marking history’s most momentous events, will be shown to the public and they will be shown on the Capitoline Hill, the secular civic center of Rome for thousands of years. That’s two big firsts: the first time the Papacy’s personal archive is opened to public view, and the first time the Vatican is making a loan to a museum in the city of Rome.

The oldest document on display will be the “Dictatus Papae” issued by Pope Gregory VII in 1075 (there’s some debate on the date). It’s a list of 27 axioms that form the basis of papal supremacy. The 1245 bull of deposition of Frederick II in which Pope Innocent IV excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor for defying that supremacy is also part of the exhibit.

My favorite piece is a letter sent to Pope Clement VII in 1530 by over 80 England lords, bishops and cardinals, asking the Pope to get cracking on annulling the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Henry VIII had first asked the Pope to annul the marriage in 1527, the same year that Emperor Charles V, Catherine’s nephew, sacked Rome and imprisoned the Pope. Even after Clement returned to Rome in 1528, he was still very much under pressure from Charles. The letter was an attempt to goose Clement out of his frozen posture. It was written on parchment and has long trailing ribbons containing all the red wax seals of England’s peerage. Clement was not impressed with its undeniable coolness. He thought it presumptuous of the nobles to complain about the delay and he didn’t much appreciate the implication that England would respond to a refusal with extreme measures.

The complete minutes from Galileo Galilei’s 1633 trial, signed by Galileo himself and including his scientific manuscripts, will be on display, as well as two letters that are remarkable perhaps less for their content and more for their material. One is a letter written by Empress Helena of China to Innocent X on silk. The other is inscribed on birch bark and was sent to Pope Leo XIII in 1887 by the Ojibwe Indians of Ontario, Canada who address the pope as “Great Master of Prayer, he who holds the place of Jesus.”

The exhibit doesn’t shy entirely away from more contemporary controversies. Documents describing the World War I-era genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey are included, as are some pieces about Pius XII during World War. The latter is quite the shocker given that documents in the Archive are only currently authorized for perusal up until February 1939, the end of Pius XI’s papacy. Pius XII’s reputation has been tarnished by his public silence on the Holocaust and working relationship with Nazi dictatorship, but the Vatican hasn’t allowed historians to study his records because they are in a “closed period,” the time when access is shut down so Vatican archivists can spend years cataloging and collating.

At the press conference about the exhibit, Bishop Sergio Pagano, Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, said that the Armenian genocide documents “cause an irrepressible sense of pain and horror” that “make [him] ashamed to be a man,” and that the documents will soon be published in a single volume. He also noted that he thinks the Pius XII archives will be opened over the next two or three years.

On July 3rd, the thousand-year-old Baphuon temple in Cambodia’s Angkor Thom complex will be officially reopened to the public after it was dismantled into its 300,000 component stones in 1960. It has taken a French and Cambodian restoration team 15 years to pick up where the 1960-1970 restoration was forced to leave off by the advancing Khmer Rouge forces and solve the greatest 3D puzzle in the world.

The three-tier pyramidical temple was built by King Udayadityavarman II in around 1060. Dedicated to Siva, it was the largest temple in the country until Angkor Wat was built in the next century, and it was famed for its dramatic central tower. With the tower, it was 164 feet (50 meters) high, and 426 by 340 feet (130 x 104 meters) wide. It was built around a sand core, however, and its massive size, hasty construction and thin walls led to structural problems almost from the beginning.

By the 15th century, large portions of it had collapsed, so when it was converted from a Hindu temple to a Buddhist one, builders had no qualms about removing large chunks of rock from the tower to create an abstract outline of a massive reclining Buddha (30 feet high and 230 feet long) on the second tier, endangering the structure even further.

Come the 20th century, the temple was in ruins. The Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient (EFEO), the French organization that was in charge of Angkor conservation since 1908, started an ambitious program of restoration in 1960. Based on successful use of anastylosis by Dutch restorers in Java, the restoration of the Baphuon temple called for the ruins to be completely dismantled, the structure shored up, then the temple rebuilt. Each of the 300,000 sandstone blocks were numbered and spread out over 10 hectares of the surrounding area. Careful records were kept so that they could all be put back together again. This was a dry stone construction — no mortar was used to glue stones together — so every stone was individually shaped to fit together.

Soon after the temple was dismantled, the Cambodian civil war broke out. They were working on the second tier when the EFEO restorers were expelled from the country and many of the Cambodian restorers and builders were killed. When the KR took Phnom Penh in 1975, the EFEO offices were ransacked and all the records lost.

In 1995, after the civil war of the 1980s and the political turmoil of the early 1990s settled down, the EFEO restorers were allowed back into the country under the leadership of Pascal Royere. Without the original plans, however, the undertaking was daunting to the point of impossibility.

“It has been said, probably rightly so, that it is the largest-ever 3D puzzle,” Royere told AFP.

The team carefully measured and weighed each block and then relied on archive photos stored in Paris, drawings and the recollections of Cambodian workers to figure out where each part fits.

“We were facing a three-dimensional puzzle, a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture. And that was the main difficulty of this project,” Royere said.

Thankfully the EFEO offices in Paris had photographs of the site stretching back to 1910, so the team was able to track certain blocks and figure out where they went based on where they had been. Sometimes they would find the block they were looking for in 10 minutes, sometimes in three weeks. Royere was also fortunate to have the spry mind of Jacques Dumarcay, the architect who had supervised the dismantling in the 1960s, on his side, and about 30 Cambodian workers who had worked on Angkor projects in the 60s and 70s and had survived the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. One of them, Mith Priem, is now a team supervisor at Baphuon. He was able to recognize patterns on the stones based on his decades-old experience and train new workers to do the same.

They attempted computer modelling but it wasn’t as helpful as the experience and knowledge of the people who had been involved in the original project. Ultimately this immense 3D puzzle would be solved by dedicated people with good memories working hard for a decade and a half.

The rebuilding has taken a good seven years longer than the earliest overly optimistic projections, but partial access was allowed to visitors starting in May 2006. There’s a lovely photo gallery of the restored Baphuon temple here, and video accompanying the AFP story here.

Researchers from the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee have discovered that 17 bodies thrown head first into a Norwich well in the 12th or 13th century were Jews, at least five of them from the same family.

The remains were first discovered in 2004 during the construction of a shopping center. The archaeological survey of the area had been completed months earlier when archaeologist Giles Emery of Norvic Archaeology got a call from one of the backhoe operators saying he’d seen a skull in a foundation hole over 16 feet below ground level, far deeper than normal burials even from the ancient layers. Emery returned to the site and when the machine pushed aside a clump of dirt, they saw a tight mass of human skeletons which had been dumped into the well. They were shoved in so close together that at first Emery thought there were three or four bodies. It was only after further excavation that he realized there were so many more.

Eleven of the 17 bodies were children between the ages of two and 15, five of them below the age of five. The positions in which they were found indicated many of them had been dropped into the well from their ankles, the adults first. There was no obvious cause of death detected in the initial osteological examination, although some of the bones did show signs of malnutrition and non-fatal trauma like healed minor fractures and arthritis. Radiocarbon testing and some pottery sherds found in the well dated the bodies to the 12th or 13th centuries.

It was a mysterious, unique find. No other pile of bodies shoved into a well has ever been found in the UK. There was a consecrated cemetery within view of the well and the Jewish neighborhood a few steps away, so why had these people been thrown away like trash instead of buried according to religious custom? Even common graves and plague pits are at least holes in the ground.

Recently the BBC program History Cold Case became involved, bringing the University of Dundee team on board to perform cutting edge forensic examinations of the bones. They were able to eliminate disease as a cause of death. Bubonic plague was still a hundred years away at the time of death, and there was no evidence of any other fatal illness like leprosy or tuberculosis in the bones.

It was DNA expert Dr. Ian Barnes who found the smoking gun: five of the individuals had retrievable, testable DNA and it indicated that they were Jewish. The mitochondrial DNA — DNA that remains the same transmitted down the female line — of all five people matched, so they were family members. Stable isotope analysis, which uses the trace elements found in the bones to determine diet and migration patterns during their lifetime, indicated that the skeletons were from the Norwich area.

Norwich had a well-established Jewish community from 1135 until King Edward I expelled all the Jews from England in 1290. That’s not to say they were embraced as fellow men and brothers. When 150 Jews were killed in York in 1190, Norwich followed suit with a massacre of its own. Only the Jews who had fled to the castle survived. In the 1230s, there were a number of Jews executed because of a rumored child abduction, your classic blood libel.

Here’s a striking view of how Jews were seen not just by the population of Norwich but by the government, which had no problem at all borrowing money from Jews while also taxing them at sky-high rates and stealing/confiscating their property. It’s a drawing found on an Exchequer Roll, a document that lists tax payments made by the Jews of Norwich in 1233, during the reign of King Henry III.

That three-headed monster with the crown towering over the center of the drawing is Isaac fil Jurnet, a wealthy Jewish moneylender from Norwich who was banker to King Henry, the Abbot and monks of Westminster, the Bishop of Norwich and many, many other movers and shakers. The man and woman facing each other beneath him with Satan between them are Mosse Mokke and his wife Abigail both of whom were employed as debt collectors by Isaac. On the left there’s a poor Christian monk, his scales full of coin that Isaac is trying to wrest from him using one of the many devils at his command. Isaac had sued the Westminster monks to get the interest from money they had borrowed after they refused to pay it.

That’s the level of anti-Semitism found in the tax rolls of 13th century England. You can imagine how much worse it got outside official government documents. Bad enough, certainly, to explain 17 people, 11 of them children, murdered and stuffed in a well.