The History Blog

The Highland Council has created an incredibly nifty searchable, interactive online database of over 50,000 historical sites in Scotland. It’s called the Highland Historic Environment Record (HER) and is an invaluable tool for anyone planning to skip through the heather or even just for history nerds like me to spend hours clicking through.

The site, which went live yesterday, provides a database of more than 50,000 historic buildings, archaeological sites and finds dating from prehistory to the present day.

Developed by Highland Council’s planning department, the resource not only catalogues a diverse range of historical sites but also one or two more quirky attractions and items.

Take for example the 1950s petrol station at Brora, Sutherland. Users who stumble upon this “monument” are welcomed with a page of information including pictures, exact location and a blurb on the site which boasts two pumps. A group of World War II accommodation blocks can be found at Portmaculter and the miniature castle at Achmelvich is another curiosity.

WANT! I want a miniature castle!1

See, it’s already working on me. That’s how you promote local tourism right there. Forget the lame slogans and soft-focus commercials. Here’s the site: Highland Historic Environment Record.

City of Rome plans ancient theme park outside of town.

“The model is Euro-Disney in Paris,” said Deputy Mayor Mauro Cutrufo, announcing plans to build a vast ancient Rome theme park just outside the city which he says could be up and running within three to four years.

The park would provide family-friendly attractions to show visitors what life was like in the Rome of 2,000 years ago.

To be built on an as yet unspecified 1,000-1,200 acre site, it would put a Roman twist on rides like Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in which visitors float on boats through a fantasy pirate world.

“You would relive scenes from the Colosseum, from ancient Rome, gladiators or maybe Julius Caesar or other things,” a Rome city official said.

There aren’t enough puking emoticons in the world to describe what I’m feeling.

Hopefully the regional government of Lazio will end this tortured madness before it begins in earnest.

We live in a great era, folks. An era when things like this are created for our (NSFW on account some cussing) mirth.

On August 6th 2007, Mark Gagliardi drank a bottle of Scotch…
And then discussed a famous historical event.

That night history was made…Drunk History

That’s Michael Cera of Superbad and Juno fame playing Alexander Hamilton, btw.

For more awesome Drunk History with more special guest stars (Jack Black as Ben Franklin ftw), check out the YouTube channel. Fair warning: Drunk History 2.5 is particularly NSFW.

Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, the silent movie set in a dystopic future of proletarian exploitation, Art Deco glamour and evil robot babes, is considered a pioneering masterpiece nowadays, but it bombed so hard when it was first released in 1927 that the studio edited out half the film to try to improve its mass appeal.

For years film historians have tried to patch together a full version as Lang originally produced it, but could never find a complete copy of the long film. Other bits and bobs have turned up over the years, but a full quarter of the picture remained missing.

Until now.

Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there.

Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund – clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels.

A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken.

Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive – and discovered the missing scenes.

They contacted the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation — the holders of the rights to “Metropolis” — and director Helmut Possmann confirmed without reservation the authenticity of the recovered footage.

“We’re not being fooled,” he said. “The film can now be shown more or less as Lang originally intended it. In terms of understanding what it’s about, we’ll be seeing a new film.”

Although estimates of its original length vary depending on the speed at which it is shown, Possmann said “Metropolis” was conceived as a film lasting just over 2-1/2 hours.

Around 20 to 25 minutes of footage that fleshes out secondary characters and sheds light on the plot would be added to the film pending restoration, he added. But around 5 minutes of the original were probably still missing, he said.

We won’t know how much footage is actually recoverable until it’s restored, which could take years. By then I’ll have Blu-Ray so I won’t mind having to replace the sweet version I currently have on DVD.

Here’s a still from the press conference where you can see a scratchy but entirely viewable frame of the newly discovered footage. It’s a scene between the capitalist magnate Fredersen and the mad scientist Rotwang.

Students from UCLA will be blogging about their experiences this summer on digs in fourteen locations in seven different countries: Albania, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and the U.S.

Undergraduates will blog from — among other places — the world’s richest collection of rock art, a mass burial site for people mentioned in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and a tropical village possibly spotted by Christopher Columbus’ crew on his fourth voyage to the Americas. [...]

The blogs are designed to showcase UCLA’s new field studies program, which this summer is taking 140 undergraduates to 13 different sites in 11 countries. Typically, archaeological digs are run with the help of professionals and graduate students. But participants in UCLA’s new field program are much less experienced. In fact, they aren’t necessarily archaeology or even anthropology majors — just students intrigued by archaeological fieldwork.

Lucky, lucky, lucky bastards. So lucky I can hardly stand it. Good thing they’ll be blogging about the digs so I can live vicariously through them.

The Albanian dig is my favorite. I mean, you can’t beat this with 20 sticks:

No less exciting will be John Papadopoulos’ dig in southwestern Albania, near the Adriatic coast. In 2004, the UCLA classics professor and his wife, Sarah Morris, also a UCLA classics professor, discovered the graves of 150 people they now believe to be Illyrians, neighbors of the ancient Greeks who were mentioned not only by Aristotle but also by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. By day, the students will learn to use GPS mapping technology and methods for classifying and conserving all kinds of artifacts, including delicate bronze crowns discovered in the graves of adolescent girls. At night, they will sleep among the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Apollonia, where the Roman Emperor Augustus attended a school of philosophy and his great uncle Julius Caesar was once stranded on the way to a key battle.

You can read a succulent description of a past student’s experience in this article in UCLA magazine. It sounds like an amazing program for anyone. Even graduate students don’t get this lucky often.

“In most field schools, students aren’t being treated well,” Boytner said. “They’re being treated as inexpensive labor, and there isn’t really any training.” Students leave those digs discouraged, feeling used, without learning proper techniques or even much about the site. That means fewer students became archaeologists — and even fewer become donors, he said.

Boytner, co-director of the Chile dig, used the Tarapaca Valley project as a pilot program. A packed schedule of field work and classes gives students a crash-course in the historical significance of the dig site, how and why to use different archaeological techniques, and instruction on lab work and complex field equipment. Working side by side with local archaeologists also exposes students to regional customs, like the pago. [A Chilean custom of asking the earth's permission before digging by making an offering of wine.]

The blogs begin on July 7th. The site is password protected until then (lame), but I’ll remind you next week. Summer Digs.

The Museum of London and The Times have collaborated to bring us a most delicious weekend-waster: an interactive map of London with skulls pinpointing the exact location of tens of thousands of buried skeletons found during construction and often reinterred.

Zoom in to see who was caught dead underneath a specific street, or just browse around the town, clicking on the skulls to read about the remains found on that spot. There are some great ones.

Another skeleton was found with a metal spike lodged in its spine. Its owner, a man who was buried in Smithfield, East London, in about 1350, was probably hit with an arrow or spear, but the attack did not kill him. He survived only to catch bubonic plague in his late thirties or early forties. “Somehow the injury didn’t cause an infection,” Mr White said. “The body has reacted by building bone around the projectile. He survived for months or possibly years. He was found in a large plot of land set aside for burying victims of the Black Death.” It is not known why the man was attacked, but it is thought that he may have been a soldier in the Hundred Years War.

Such a burn, surviving a spear in the spine in the Hundred Years War only to die of plague along with a good third of the rest of Europe.

The syphilitic, insane prostitute with rotten teeth and rickets from having been kept out of sunlight in childhood is a tragic figure of Hugoean proportion as well. I can’t help but wonder how much business she did, what with the deformed bones, decaying mouth and suppurating syphilis sores.

The Catholic Church has refused to grant the Da Vinci Code sequel permission to shoot scenes in two Roman churches.

A spokesperson for the Catholic Church said they had immediately declined the requests to film in Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria churches because the movies challenge Catholic beliefs.

Church official Monsignor Marco Fibbi said: “It’s a film that treats religious issues in a way that contrasts with common religious sentiment. We would be helping them create a work that might well be beautiful but that does not conform to our views.”

Hey, the Church is throwing them a bone already by suggesting that the stupid sequel to a stupid movie of a stupid book might turn out to be a thing of beauty.

I can think of only one draw Santa Maria della Vittoria holds for this production: Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. It’s a famously sensual representation of St. Teresa’s vision of being pierced by an angel’s lance. Then there are the guys in the opera boxes on both sides of the chapel watching her.

Doubtless the folks who brought you the theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and the Church supressed it to keep women down would find Teresa’s ecstasy all sorts of relevant.

Santa Maria del Popolo is one of my favorite churches. I used to hang out in it often waiting for my friends who were always, always late meeting up at Piazza del Popolo. It has 2 Caravaggi (The conversion on the way to Damascus and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter), Pinturicchio frescoes, and a really cool tomb with a shrouded skeleton welcoming you when you first walk in.

It was bound to happen.

Viewers here cringed when the world’s most famous fictional archaeologist arrives in Peru and announces that he learned to speak Quechua, the language of indigenous people across the Andes, when he was captured by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Villa and his revolutionaries raided the US town of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 — and in an episode of the 1990s TV show, “The Young Indiana Jones,” the young Jones is kidnapped.

But Villa’s men spoke Spanish, not Quechua, which is spoken by some 10 million people in places like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Wake up, people! Lucas did that on purpose to embrace the Campbellian mythos of pompously imperialist and ethnically confused 30’s adventure stories to which all his Indiana Jones movies are a loving, humble, even pious, homage.

Oh, and another thing, Peru (if that’s your real name):

The movie also shows quicksand, man-eating ants and enormous Hawaiian waterfalls, all of which do not exist in the Peruvian Amazonia.

I’m not falling for the “no man-eating ants or bottomless pits of sandspooge here” line again. There’s just no oversight on these chamber of commerce slogans.

It’s a documentary on the history of portrayals of Asian characters in American films.

Featuring clips from more than 90 films — the earliest from the 1890s — “Hollywood Chinese” shines a light on the accomplishments of the Chinese, from the first American film produced in the U.S. by a Chinese American in 1917 to director Ang Lee winning the Academy Award two years ago for “Brokeback Mountain.”

Among the Chinese and Chinese Americans profiled in the film are Lee, Wayne Wang, Joan Chen, David Henry Hwang, B.D. Wong, James Hong and Nancy Kwan. Dong also talks with the ninetysomething Rainer about playing an Asian and to Christopher Lee, who played Fu Manchu in several British films.

The documentary is 10 years in the making, and the director actually found original reels of “The Curse of Quon Gwon,” the first Chinese-American movie and one of the first directed by a woman, Marion Wong.

For more details on the production and some clips from the movie, see the “Hollywood Chinese” website. I don’t see anything about David Carradine getting Caine instead of Bruce Lee. They better be on that.

If the documentary isn’t playing in your neck of the woods, tune in to Turner Classic Movies every Tuesday and Thursday in June at 8:00 P.M. EST for their “Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film” festival.

Each night’s collection of films will be centered on a particular theme, such as a look at the career of Anna May Wong, the legendary actress whose roles during the 1930s and 1940s ranged from victims to temptresses; a collection of detective films, including the long-running Charlie Chan series; an exploration of how movies have depicted interracial and intercultural relationships; an examination of Asian depictions in films made during and after World War II; and a look at contemporary Asians stars, such as Ming Wen and Jackie Chan. The festival will also feature discussions about the Hollywood practice of casting non-Asian actors and actresses in Asian roles.

I’m on that like white on rice, if you’ll pardon the cheap racist stereotype pun. Seriously, this is not the kind of coverage one often gets on American basic cable. Most definitely worth seeking out.

Do you know how I come up with entry-worthy stories for this here wee bloggeh? Every day I check 4 or 5 news sites that I’ve found to have a good range of archaeology/history themed news, but my the bulk of my finds come from a vast panoply of Google News Alerts that I have set up.

Every day, several times a day, Google News sends me a list of articles that have appeared using a certain keyword. I have about 10 or so keywords so I get piles of alerts often packed with irrelevancy but there are always some nuggets worth the panning.

Well, thanks to one Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., some of my richest ore, the “archaeology” “archaeologist” family of keywords, has turned pyrite. Every single story is about that damn movie! It’s Indiana Jones is a horrible archaeologist here and Indiana Jones makes archaeology look sexy there, like, 10 times a day.

It’s not just the journalists, either. Archaeological society and university department/club press releases read like the pink, heart-shaped diaries of a bobby soxer.

I can’t takes it no more!11 I might have to boycott the movie to protest the hell the Lucas/Spielberg publicity machine has put me through. Or at least delay watching it until the furore dies down.

Oh okay, I’ll probably see it this weekend, let’s be honest, but I’ll be totally frikkin grumpy about it!