The History Blog

The slave trade was illegal on the British islands of Turks and Caicos in 1841, so when 192 Africans survived the wreck of the Trouvadore, they settled on the islands.

Many of the current population are descended from the survivors, which makes the find of the wreck particularly important.

The team was able to determine that authorities on the islands apprenticed the Africans to trades for a year and then allowed them to settle on the islands, many on Grand Turk. The Spanish crew was arrested and turned over to authorities in Cuba, then a Spanish colony.

An 1878 letter refers to the Trouvadore Africans as making up the pith — meaning an essential part — of the laboring population on the islands.

As important as this ship was to the history of Turks and Caicos, its existence was forgotten over time, until in 1993 researchers stumbled on that letter in the Smithsonian.

From the 1878 letter:

Two African idols, found on board the last Spanish slaver, of wood with glass eyes [schr "Esperenza"] wrecked in the year 1841 at Breezy Point on the Caicos Islands. The slaves from this vessel were taken possession of by the Government and brought to the Grand Turk Island. – The captain of the slaver, escaped the penalty, (by being a Spaniard), of being hung according to the British laws. The slaves were apprenticed for the space of one year and they and their descendants form at the present time, viz the year 1878 the pith of our present labouring population.

Many years of research ensued after the discovery of the letter, and in 2004 marine archaeologists set off to find the wreckage off the coast of East Caicos. When they located a likely wreck, they couldn’t find the name of the ship on any of the remnants.

The age and dimensions — carefully measured and compared to every ship known to have gone down in the area — of the wreck are what finally persuaded scholars that it is in fact the Trouvadore.

Way back when the earth was new and I first began to blog, I wrote this entry about a “potentially revolutionary find” of 3rd c. Christian and Basque language inscriptions.

They would have been the earliest representation of Calvary and the earliest recorded instance of Euskera, the Basque language.

Well, not only are the inscriptions modern fakes, but they’re so fake it’s embarrassing.

Now experts who have studied the pieces in depth say the fakes, some of which used modern glue, should have rung warning bells immediately. References were found to non-existent gods, 19th-century names and even to the 17th-century philosopher Descartes.

Words in Euskara used impossible spellings. The hieroglyphs included references to Queen Nefertiti which would have been almost impossible to make prior to the 19th century.

The Calvary scene, meanwhile, included the inscription “RIP”. “It is a formula that can only be applied to people who are dead,” Almagro told El Correo newspaper. “To say that Jesus Christ is dead would be a heresy. I haven’t seen anything quite so funny in the whole history of Christianity.”

The forger either had fragments of third century pottery which he buried on site, or he had access to the lab where the fragments were examined and planted the forgeries there.

I feel sheepish as hell just for having relayed the story. I can’t imagine what the archaeologists on site were thinking. I mean, dig director Eliseo Gil called the find on a par with Pompeii and Rome itself.

Dude, srlsy. You have a degree. I mean, Decartes?

Also, he looked just like James Cromwell. Seriously. They could be twins.

Polish archaeologists found what they thought were Copernicus’ remains in 2005. A facial reconstruction of the skull matched contemporary portraits of the astronomer (and of James Cromwell), but they didn’t know for sure until they compared the DNA from the skeleton with DNA from two hairs found in a book Copernicus owned.

Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen analyzed DNA from a vertebrae, a tooth and femur bone and matched and compared it to that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned, which is kept at a library of Sweden’s Uppsala University where Allen works.

“We collected four hairs and two of them are from the same individual as the bones,” Allen said.

That was the easy part. It took archaeologists 2 years to locate Copernicus’ grave, and they already knew which church it was in.

Copernicus was known to have been buried in the 14th-century Frombork Cathedral where he served as a canon, but his grave was not marked. The bones found by Gassowski were located under floor tiles near one of the side altars.

Gassowski’s team started his search in 2004, on request from regional Catholic bishop, Jacek Jezierski.

“In the two years of work, under extremely difficult conditions — amid thousands of visitors, with earth shifting under the heavy pounding of the organ music — we managed to locate the grave, which was badly damaged,” Gassowski said.

So organ music literally moves the earth. The more you know.

Scientists at Penn State think all it would take to cook up a woolly mammoth in the lab is a little genome decoding and 10 million bucks. Cheap! Steve Austin was way smaller than a mammoth and it cost 60% that price to make him better, stronger, faster.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. “This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.

“Could” being the operative word. There are many ifs involved in resurrecting the mammoth. Ancient DNA is usually damaged and/or contaminated beyond recovery, although the DNA in hair, protected by keratin, tends to be in much better condition.

Also, the DNA of living cells takes ages to modify one site at a time, but there too our Penn State Frankensteins have an ace in a hole: Dr. George Church, a genome technologist who claims he has a new method that can modify 50,000 genomic sites at once.

Yes, yes, but they can make a pig-sized woolly mammoth for the designer pet market? They’d make that 10 mill back in a week, guaranteed.

Israeli researchers have found a unique trove of artifacts from Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi riot of anti-semitic violence which resulted in massive destruction of Jewish-owned property and 30,000 men sent to concentration camps.

Despite the importance of the event, very few artifacts have ever surfaced. There are plenty of descriptions from witnesses, some pictures, a movie or two, but almost no material remains.

That’s because the Nazis piled the loot in trains and sent it to Klandorf. The locals knew about it, but no historians or researchers did until a fortuitous forest encounter.

Werner Russ, a retired forester, was gathering mushrooms when he ran into Yaron Svoray, an Israeli writer and former detective who was researching stolen artifacts once stashed in a nearby hunting lodge that belonged to Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander. Mr. Russ, 73, confirmed to Mr. Svoray what people of Klandorf had always known about the local dump. “We’re away from everything here,” he said. “I thought surely it would not interest anyone.”

Mr. Svoray, though, was decidedly interested. He returned in spring, bringing along three friends with shovels and picks. They dug up a green bottle with a Star of David stamped into the bottom, mezuzot and burnt armrests of chairs from synagogues. Mr. Svoray also found an ornamental metal swastika.

Now that it’s made the press, though, this pristine site needs to be kept from neo-Nazi shitheads diving for swastikas, not to mention from garden variety looters.

A Holocaust museum and research center in Israel, The Ghetto Fighters’ House, has a neat idea.

The Ghetto Fighters’ House hopes to set up a living history center that would bring young Germans and Israelis together to sift through the contents of the dump. Such a project could help the area, one of the many economically depressed parts of the former East Germany.

Texan Amanda Jones is 109. Her father was a slave until he was 12. At his encouragement, she has voted in every election since she first cast a ballot for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, despite all manner of harassment.

Amanda Jones’ father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Today, she filled in a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama. This is a great day.

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

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

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

She had it easy, though.

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

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

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

Cracked magazine has a great little article covering five historical instances of negative campaigning, all of them surprisingly similar to aspersions cast in the current political climate.

President Adams’ team sent out pamphlets saying if Jefferson was elected he would destroy Christianity, and that, “prostitutes…will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the Most High.”

When the threat of an all-hooker church wasn’t effective enough to destroy Jefferson’s career, Adams’ Federalists stepped up their game, explaining that Jefferson’s America would involve the “teaching of murder robbery, rape, adultery and incest”. Thomas Jefferson wants “murder robbery” taught in our elementary schools, people!

And that’s just the first one. It gets better. Or worse.

As always, history soothes my jangled nerves. Knowing that we aren’t particularly exceptional is a relief, frankly.

A lovely big shire horse by the name of Major is doing the heavy work of preserving an 2000-year-old Iron Age fort in Wessex, England.

Park Hill Camp is basically two ditches and an embankment, but just because there are no remaining structures doesn’t mean there isn’t a great deal to be learned from the site.

Martin Papworth, the National Trust’s archaeologist for Wessex, said: “The roots of relatively young trees are digging into the important archaeology – the hill itself. The story of the generations of people who once lived within Park Hill’s ramparts survives as layers of evidence buried in the soil. We need to remove young and immature trees from the hillfort to protect this archaeological information.” [...]

Using Major negates the risk of churning up the ground by using heavy vehicles to pull the logs and fallen trees.

The timber Major drags offsite is either sold or used for fences and gate posts on the estate.

Best of all: the footpaths are open so anyone can go watch Major do his thing. Archaeology groupies take note. It’s not every day you get to see preservation at work, and not ever with a horse at the helm.

The Brooks Brothers (!) coat Abraham Lincoln was wearing the night of his assassination is part of Ford’s Theater permanent collection.

Until last year when Ford’s closed for renovations, the coat had been on exhibit since the museum acquired it in 1968, but now that reopening approaches, some conservators are concerned that the coat can’t take being on public display much longer.

Light and gravity can doom historic clothing, they say. And the Brooks Brothers coat, like other Lincoln garments, had been on almost continuous display from the time they were acquired in 1968 until Ford’s was closed for renovation last year, officials said.

“It might be that it’s time to put these things away and not to exhibit them to the public if there’s any hope of saving them for future generations,” said Cathy Heffner, president of Textile Preservation Associates, who said she examined the clothes for the National Park Service last month.

The concern illustrates an ongoing debate over the display of national treasures: the desire to preserve items for posterity vs. the right of citizens to experience them.

It’s a tough question. Light damages textiles irreparably. There is no way to restore them once the UV rays have done their thing. UV blocking technology can help delay the inevitable, but it’s not a long-term solution.

Meanwhile, people want to see these kinds of deeply personal artifacts of iconic figures. How much closer can you get to the great man himself than to see his blood on his coat?