The History Blog

The tombstone of Lucius Valerius Geminus, veteran of the Legio II Augusta, one of the elite legions that first invaded Britain in 43 A.D. under the Emperor Claudius, the legion which defeated Boudica and built Hadrian’s wall, is going on public display at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock for the first time since its discovery in 2003.

The tombstone was found in the foundations of the town wall near the west gate of Alchester, a Roman town two miles south of the modern Oxfordshire town of Bicester. The stone had been broken into 20 pieces and reused for rubble in the foundations of the stone wall which we know from coin evidence was built after 260 A.D. and before the abandonment of the town in the 5th century. The town was preceded by a Roman military base the construction of which, thanks to dendrochronological analysis of two wooden gateposts found at the front gate preserved by waterlogged ground, we can date incredibly precisely to between October of 44 A.D. and March of 45 A.D.

What makes this tombstone such a significant find is the biographical detail in the inscription describing a soldier who most likely participated in the initial conquest of Britain and then settled in the province after his retirement. It’s the only personal biography we have of anyone living in Oxfordshire before the Middle Ages, and the first for an individual veteran in the entire province of Britannia.

Here is the text of the inscription:

Dis. Manibus/ L(ucius) Val(erius) L(uci filius) Pol(lia tribu) Gemi/nus For(o) Germ(anorum)/ vet(eranus) Leg(ionis) [I]I Aug(ustae)/ an(norum) L. h(ic) s(itus) e(st)/ he(res) c(uravit)/ e(x) t(estamento)

“To the souls of the departed: Lucius Valerius Geminus, the son of Lucius, of the Pollia voting tribe, from Forum Germanorum, veteran of the Second Augustan Legion, aged 50(?), lies here. His heir had this set up in accordance with his will.”

Forum Germanorum was a one-horse town in north-west Italy at the base of the Alps in what is today the Piemonte region. It was once part of the province of Gallia Cisalpina (Gaul on this side of the Alps) but had been granted Latin Rights in 89 B.C. under a law promoted by (and maybe even written by) Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, father of the triumvir Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Lucius Valerius’s epitaph was inscribed 70 or so years later and his membership in the Pollia voting tribe still ranked a mention.

Since we know that he had to have died before the garrison left Alchester around 60 A.D., his approximate age at death (50), the general age of army recruits (17-25) and the standard term of service for a legionary (25-30 years), we can deduce he joined the legions during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.). The base of the Second Augustan Legion at that time was Strasbourg from which he may have participated in Caligula’s quasi campaign (he just executed a bunch of his own people and moved around, really) in Germany from 39-40 A.D. Less than two years later, the future emperor Vespasian became commander of Legio II Augusta and it was he who brought it from Strasbourg to Britain in 43 A.D.

It’s unlikely that Lucius Valerius died away from home and was buried on the spot. As noted in the inscription, the gravestone was inscribed and installed according to the explicit instructions in his will. Obviously he felt no need to be interred back home in Forum Germanorum — he’d probably been gone decades by then — because it wasn’t at all unheard of for soldiers on expedition to be returned home for burial even over great distances but he chose to rest eternally in British soil.

No accompanying burial was found during the 2003 excavation of the Alchester walls. This makes sense because he would have been buried outside of the city, probably along a road. What seems most likely to have happened is a couple of hundred years after his death and burial, Lucius’ gravestone was broken up and moved by cart to the construction site of the new town walls. It was probably a deliberate breakage and transport rather than someone collecting random broken stones because so much of it was found in the rubble foundation.

After its discovery, the tombstone was studied and painstakingly piece back together by experts at the Oxfordshire Museum. Starting July 20th, the gravestone of Lucius Valerius Geminus, first known legionary of Britannia, will be on display in the museum’s History in the Making Exhibition.

The eight Bronze Age log boats found preserved whole in the Cambridgeshire fens at Must Farm Quarry in Whittlesey, southeast England, have been moved to the museum in Flag Fen for conservation. Must Farm is the site of the largest find of Bronze Age artifacts ever made in Britain. Thousands of artifacts — jewelry, weapons textiles, long woven eel traps, fish weirs, a charred platform bridge, bowls of nettle stew — around 3,500 years old were unearthed in 2011, a rich slice of Bronze Age life along a river channel. The most dramatic of the finds were the eight log boats, canoes dug out of whole ash and oak trunks. It’s rare for even one whole Bronze Age boat to survive, but the cozy anoxic environment of the silt and peat fen preserved these eight. Most of them are almost completely intact, with decorative elements, lifting handles and transom grooves still extant.

The artifacts provide a unique glimpse into a Bronze Age fishing village established on the River Nene when water levels began to rise. When the area first began to get soggy around 4,000 years ago, people left the flooding lowlands, but it seems they began to return 500 or so years later, figuring out how to live in the new wetlands. They built a causeway and the log boats to navigate the submerged land their ancestors had walked.

Thanks to the same technology used to conserve the Tudor warship Mary Rose and the 17th century Swedish warship Vasa, the log boats will remain whole. In the past, conservators have had to cut these kinds of canoes into sections to dry them evenly. To ensure these precious artifacts be kept whole, a cold storage facility has been built to house them. The vessels, still waterlogged from more than 5,000 years in the fen, will be treated for two years with polyethylene glycol (PEG). The PEG will gradually replace the water in the wood with a waxy substance, drying out the boats slowly while keeping them from cracking, warping and shrinking.

While this process is ongoing, visitors to Flag Fen museum will be able to observe the boats and conservators doing their thing.

Visitors to Flag Fen will be able to watch conservators at work, with the aim of eventually putting the boats on public display in glass cabinets.

Ian Panter, principal conservator at the York Archaeological Trust, designed the conservation strategy for the boats.

He said: “It’s the first time we’ve had this number of log boats on one site.

“To undertake the conservation with the public able to view it and watch the process develop over the next few years is a great opportunity to see it in action.

“We’re keeping the boats wet and cold to help keep everything as it is – so there’s no biological activity to digest through the timber – to reduce decay of the wood.”

Experts hope to answer more questions about the boats during conservation. They will be radiocarbon dated and analyzed in detail to determine when exactly they were made and why they were left in the river that became the fen. They’re in such good condition it’s possible they were deliberately sunk for ritual or ceremonial purposes. On the other hand, they may have just washed up at this point in the ancient River Nene or they have been abandoned under duress.

For zoomable pictures of the Must Farm artifacts, see the extensive picture gallery on the website dedicated to the finds.

The Cheapside Hoard is an unprecedented collection of jewelry from the late 16th and early 17th century discovered in 1912 by workers demolishing the Wakefield House in Cheapside, London, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. They drove a pickaxe into the cellar floor and hit a decayed wooden box that had been hidden there centuries earlier before the Great London Fire of 1666. Inside the box were trays of jewelry, nearly 500 pieces made of gold, enamel and gemstones from all over the world. The workmen helped themselves to the jewels, wrapping them in handkerchiefs and stuffing them into their pockets, boots and caps so they could sell the treasures to a man known in the neighborhood as Stoney Jack.

Stoney Jack was a familiar figure to construction workers in the area; he liked to hang out at demolition sites to snap up anything of interest that might be found. Fortunately for future generations, Stoney Jack wasn’t just some back alley fence. His real name was G.F. Lawrence. He owned an antiques store in Wandsworth and most importantly, he was head of acquisitions for the brand new London Museum which fortuitously opened the same year the Cheapside Hoard was discovered. Lord Harcourt, a founder of the London Museum, told Lawrence to seek out all the workers who had recovered hoard and buy whatever they were selling.

And that is how the upstart baby Museum of London acquired the most important collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewelry ever found, while the venerable British Museum had to make do with a gift of a few pieces and the prestigious Victoria & Albert was stuck with just a single gold and enamel chain. Now for the first time, the entire Cheapside Hoard will go on display at the Museum of London. The Cheapside Hoard: London’s Lost Jewels will run from October 11th, 2013, through April 27th, 2014, giving visitors a chance to see something that hasn’t been seen since 1912.

It’s an exceptional sight to behold. The collection is heavy on the gemstones courtesy of the global range of mercantilism. There are emeralds from Colombia and Brazil, Brazilian amazonite, spinel, iolites and chrysoberyl from Sri Lanka, Indian rubies and diamonds, Persian turquoise, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, Red Sea peridot, opals, garnets and amethysts from Bohemia and Hungary and pearls from Bahrain. There are spectacular individual pieces like a pocket watch set into a single Colombian emerald which before it was carved was the size of an apple, a 1,300-year-old Byzantine cameo carved out of amethyst, a gold, diamond and emerald hat pin in the shape of a salamander, a three-layer sardonyx cameo of Queen Elizabeth, an emerald parrot, incredibly delicate emerald and amethyst grape bunches hanging from gold and enamel branches.

Many of the gemstones are cabochons, but there are also some more elaborate faceted cuts like rose-cut and star-cut which were first seen in Europe adorning France’s Cardinal Mazarin in the 1640s. Either those gems were cut just before they were buried, or rose and star cuts were being made or at least sold in England before they made their debut in France. Recent research done by Museum of London curator Hazel Forsyth has helped narrow down the burial date. One of the objects in the hoard is a small, chipped red seal stone intaglio. Carved on its face is the coat of arms of William Howard, the first and only Viscount Stafford. He was created Viscount Stafford in November of 1640, therefore the hoard had to have been buried after November 1640 but before September 1666.

Scholars believe the hoard was the stock of a jeweler or a group of jewelers who hid it for later retrieval. In the 17th century, Cheapside was known for its jewelry shops.

“This collection has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, dismissed as jewellery for the merchant classes,” Forsyth said. “But at this date the merchants were among the wealthiest people in the land; they had far more disposable wealth than the aristocracy.”

In trying to find out who buried the treasure, when and why, she has solved some mysteries and may have uncovered a murder. Among the huge rubies, pearls the size of acorns, emeralds and sapphires, there were some faked stones made of quartz crystal carved and dyed to resemble precious gems. Forsyth believes these may have been the work of a jeweller called Thomas Simpson, known as a skilled but sharp operator. She also believes he may have been implicated in the murder of another jeweller, who was poisoned and thrown overboard on a voyage back from the orient, and that some of the gems the unfortunate victim was bringing back to London may have ended up in the hoard.

Nothing like a touch of murder to lubricate the international gem trade.

You can see more pictures of the Cheapside Hoard in this photo gallery, but none of them really do it justice. These beauties really need in-person viewing.

The hoard of 81 gold coins found by builders working on the foundations of an old pub in the South Tipperary town of Carrick-on-Suir have gone on display at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. They’re part of a new exhibition, Airgead, a Thousand Years of Irish Coins & Currency, which covers the history of money, coin and note, from 10th century hammered coins to the crisp pressed coins of the 17th century to credit cards and Internet banking.

There are 77 guineas and 4 half guineas in the Carrick-on-Suir hoard, the earliest dating to 1664, the reign of King Charles II, and the most recent dating to the reign of William III in 1701. This was a nearly unprecedented find in Ireland. The only other comparable discovery was made in Portarlington, Co. Laois, in 1947, when more than 100 gold coins and some silver coins were found by three wood workers — Joe Clarke, Joe Maher and Mike Daly — who spotted a rabbit carrying a coin in its mouth and dropping it outside of its burrow. The rabbit was apparently cleaning its warren of pesky human treasure. The men started digging and found dozens of coins in a pile next to fragments from a wood box which once contained it. These coins were buried in the 17th century in an area where under Cromwell’s iron rule, Catholics were not allowed to be. National Museum experts believe the hoard may have been buried by an Irish Army treasurer when Cromwell invaded.

Research is ongoing on the newly-discovered Carrick hoard, but according to Eamonn Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum, the 81 coins may have been collected by a Catholic merchant during the Penal Laws which were enacted starting in 1695 and continuing through the 18th century. These laws prohibited Catholics from, among many things, holding public office, marrying Protestants, serving in the military, voting, buying land, inheriting land from a Protestant and owning a horse worth more than £5. Under this kind of pressure, it might behoove a moneyed Catholic to start digging to keep his money safe from depredation governmental and otherwise.

The coins were not assembled haphazardly. Whoever collected them selected the best quality coins. Less pure coins from mainland Europe were in common circulation in Ireland during the 17th century. The guineas in the hoard are 91% gold, so dependably pure that they would have been accepted as currency anywhere in Europe and the Americas, an important asset if you’re part of a politically oppressed minority who might have to flee at a moment’s notice some day.

The guinea was not just minted starting with the restored Stuart monarchy; the Stuarts were directly involved in securing the gold. King Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York, and a group of London merchants set up the Royal African Company with the goal of monopolizing the trade in gold and slaves from West Africa, most notable the Guinea coast. Starting in 1663, the Royal Mint used West African gold from the Royal African Company in its coins. The Royal African Company even got to leave its mark on the coins made with its gold. Three of the Carrick-on-Suir coins — one Charles II guinea, one James II guinea and one William III half-guinea — bear the Elephant and Castle logo of the Royal African Company.

The value of the hoard has yet to be fully assessed. Some big numbers like 500,000 euro ($650,000) have been thrown around, but that’s unlikely. One coin, the 1691 William and Mary Guinea, is in “extremely fine” condition and is worth 9,300 euro ($12,000). If all 81 coins were worth that the hoard would be worth close to a million dollars, but we know that’s not the case. Once the value is determined, the finders — David Kiersey, Shane Comerford, Tom Kennedy, Shane Murray and Patrick McGrath — will receive an undisclosed percentage of it as a reward.

Both the Carrick hoard and the Portarlington hoard are on display in the Airgead exhibition. The Carrick hoard coins will be loaned to the South Tipperary Riding Museum in Clonmel, the local museum nearest where there hoard was found, for a display in the fall.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble bust of Francesco I d’Este, Duke of Modena, needs your help. This Baroque masterpiece is part of the permanent collection of the Galleria Estense in Modena which houses the internationally important art collection of the Dukes of Este who ruled Modena for more than 500 years (1288–1796). Modena was devastated by the earthquakes that hit the north central Italian region of Emilia Romagna last May and the damage to the Galleria Estense was extensive. The museum has been closed ever since, the bust of Francesco I kept for its protection in a large wooden box where not even the workers can see it.

It’s a miracle that Bernini’s sculpture survived this time. Before the museum can reopen, its masterpieces need to be secured as much as possible against future seismic events. The kind of specialized equipment required to retrofit museums for earthquake safety is very expensive and Italy is flat broke. That means initiatives of government agencies like the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities need private funding.

In the case of the bust of Francesco I d’Este, the non-profit heritage protection organization Fondo Ambiente Italiano (in English known as the Italian National Trust) is helping the ministry raise money to develop a bespoke anti-seismic pedestal which will keep the sculpture from crashing to the floor when the next earthquake hits.

In cooperation with a team of qualified experts of the IUAV University of Venice, we are working on an innovative seismic isolating device system based on the theory of the double pendulum. Essentially, the anti-seismic pedestal diminishes the strength coming from the ground to the piece of art, therefore securing it from destruction.

In the US, they’ve started an Indiegogo campaign to raise $60,000 of the $80,000 they need to build and install the pedestal. There are 30 days left in the campaign and so far they’ve only raised $1,372 from 20 contributors. I think we can do better than that.

Historical preservation and heritage protection suffers enormously from slashed budgets and so often there’s no way for people who care but who happen to live far away from the problem to pitch in. I’ve often wanted to help donate when I’ve come across these kinds of stories and been frustrated by how localized these fundraising campaigns are. Requiring people to send a personal check across oceans by mail in this day and age just locks out the world. Crowdfunding, on the other hand, draws the world in, but it only works if people hear about it, so please spread the word. If you’re on Facebook, here’s the related FB page you can link to to promote the campaign.

There are some exceptional perks for contributors to this one: two free tickets to the museum for a $10 contribution, two free tickets and a book about the Este art collection for $20. For $50 they carve your name — or the name of the person in whose name you donate — on the new pedestal. It keeps getting better from there. A hundred dollars gets you all of the above plus of a bottle of Del Duca PDO Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, a top of the line balsamic aged 12 years. You could easily spend that much on a vinegar of this quality imported from the magical land where all true balsamic vinegar is made. Or if opera is more to your taste, 100 bucks will get and a friend an evening at the Luciano Pavarotti Opera House. Like cars? Modena has got you covered with two tickets to the new Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari . For the big donations, you get Modena handed to you on a plate, with all the goodies at the lower rates plus a personalized tour of the city for $1000 and a weekend with hotel included plus all the above for $5000.

See the video below for more details about the campaign, the Galleria Estense and a very sad shot of the box Francesco d’Este is in right now, and please spread the word. Even if Baroque sculpture of luminaries from Italian ducal families is not your bag, the next campaign that is inspired by the success of this one might save your favorite thing ever.

The Roman gold pendant in the shape of a phallus that was discovered in 2011 in Hillington, Norfolk, has become such a popular exhibit at the Lynn Museum that replicas will be sold at the gift shop. The small but proud gold member was unearthed by metal detectorist Kevin Hillier on January 30th, 2011, in a field belonging to farmer Neil Riseborough. Hillier reported it to the Portable Antiquities Scheme and at an inquest in April of 2011, Norfolk coroner William Armstrong declared it official treasure trove.

Experts at the British Museum assessed fair market value of the phallus at £800 ($1200). That sum, which technically is a finder’s fee rather than a sale price, is split between the finder and the landowner. Local museums have first dibs and although Lynn Museum has a budget even tinier than a two-centimeter phallus, they were able to raise the money with donations from the Friends of the King’s Lynn Museum (they contributed £80), and grants from the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund (£400) and the Headley Trust (£320). In January 2012, the phallus went on display.

The figure is formed out of a sheet of gold soldered together along the length with an aperture at the ends and two globes of gold soldered to each side of the base. Between the testicular globes is a transverse loop that was soldered separately. The loop suggests the phallus was worn as a pendant, possibly by a Roman soldier since the use of phalluses as amulets to ward off evil spells was not a local religious practice. It’s a rare object as most of the other ancient phalluses discovered in Britain are made out of base metals. The gold is bright and the piece is in excellent condition.

The little artifact has captured the imagination of museum visitors like nothing else in its collection, so when last year the museum began looking into the possibility of creating souvenirs inspired by local objects, replica Hillington phalluses leaped to mind. The museum has commissioned artist Sue Heaser to create the souvenirs.

Mrs Heaser, who is also an archaeological illustrator, said: “This is the most extraordinary thing I have ever done. I love working with ancient jewellery and the craftsmanship involved here is amazing.”

Normally Mrs Heaser would be able to make a mould directly from the piece but this has not been possible as the pendant is so delicate. Instead Mrs Heaser has had to painstakingly measure, draw and photograph the piece in order to make a mould. A silicon model of the piece has allowed Mrs Heaser to make a mould. She will later use metal clay to make a replica.

The replicas will not be made out of shiny real gold, though, and it will be a solid piece rather than a hollow sheet seamed up at the side. Silver and bronze replica phalluses will be available in the gift shop within the next few months.

Retail manager Maria Wong said the museum was also looking at some of its other exhibits to replicate as souvenirs.

Miss Wong said: “This is a very exciting project. This is the first time we have reproduced from our own collection. The Hillington Phallus is a very popular exhibit at Lynn Museum.”

I think it’s a great idea and I love how cool they are about this. It’s very Roman, really, since they were entirely sanguine about nudity in general and phalluses in particular. Phalluses were everywhere in ancient Rome, so widespread a symbol that when stuffy 19th century curators at institutions like National Archaeological Museum in Naples and the British Museum had to deal with the mountains of penises in art, graffiti and consumer goods found at Roman sites, they locked them all up in secret rooms that only “men of good character” were allowed to enter.

Two hundred years later, I doubt a local museum in the US would be able to even contemplate such an addition to the gift shop without somebody starting a boycott or a letter-writing campaign to stop it from corrupting their children with its penisness. I doubt they’d be persuaded by the historical fact that Romans gave their children phallus amulets to keep them safe. Roman kids were bristling with phalluses.

John Constable’s masterpiece, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, has been secured for the British public for £23.1 million (almost $35 million) plus tax breaks. If you include the value of the tax concessions, the total sale price is equivalent to a market price of £40 million ($60 million).

The collector who owned the monumental six-foot canvas, Barclays Bank director Lord Ashton of Hyde, had loaned it to the National Gallery since 1983, but he died in 2008 and his heirs recently reclaimed it in order to sell it. A major US museum with its major US endowment was extremely interested, asking the sellers for right of first refusal. This was a serious threat. Consider the fate of J. M. W. Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, aka My Turner. After it sold at auction to the deep-pocketed Getty, the authorities put a temporary export ban on the painting to give UK museums a few months to raise the purchase price and keep the masterpiece in the country. The ban expired before museums could raise $45 million so the Getty Center in LA now has one of the greatest Turners of all time hanging on its wall.

Rather than risk seeing the painting disappear into a private collection in the UK or go abroad, a group of museums raised money in grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund (£15.8 million) and the Art Fund (£1 million), from private foundations and museum members.

“It’s one of the quintessential images of 19th century British art and it’s worth every penny,” Tate Britain’s Director Nicholas Serota told the BBC. [...]

“This is the one of Constable’s most important paintings,” Sir Nicholas told the BBC’s Will Gompertz. “He regarded it as one of his masterpieces and always wanted it to be in the national collection.”

This collaboration between museums is an innovative approach well suited to an era of slim budgets and empty pockets. The museums in question are national — the Tate Britain, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, the National Galleries of Scotland — and regional — Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Colchester and Ipswich Museums — who came together to form a partnership called Aspire. The deal is, the painting will travel between all the partner galleries. The rondelet began Thursday at the Tate Britain. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows will be on display in the Constable room until the end of the year before hitting the road. It won’t return to London until 2018.

It’s fitting that a such an iconic painting of national significance should be shared between major museums in the UK and local museums that share a thematic connection to the piece. Salisbury Cathedral is one of a series of monumental scale landscapes Constable painted to display in competition at the Royal Academy. Twelve of these large pieces are in the UK, and out of those only two of them were in private hands. Now it’s only one.

He reserved his greatest compositions for these monumental pieces because he felt they would make the strongest impact even in the crowded exhibition space of the Royal Academy. Salisbury Cathedral was first shown at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1831. It depicts Salisbury Cathedral against a dark sky with a cart crossing the river Nadder, a tributary of the Wiltshire Avon, in the foreground. A rainbow penetrates the black clouds and almost embraces the church and its characteristic spire. Constable thought it was his best work. He called it “The Great Salisbury” and wrote “I am told I got it to look better than anything I have yet done.”

Some see the cathedral in a storm as a statement on the political changes that were threatening the traditional temporal power of the Church of England (the Reform Act which increased the electorate, allocated more representatives to new industrial cities and removed the vestigial seats from “rotten boroughs” passed in 1832). Constable was a deeply committed member of the Church of England and a close friend of Salisbury’s Bishop John Fisher and even closer friend of his nephew Archdeacon John Fisher. They are known to have discussed religion and politics during this time.

Constable was also going through a personal crisis. His beloved wife Maria Constable had died of tuberculosis in November, 1828, and he was in deep mourning from then until the end of his life in 1837. He wrote to his brother Golding “hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel—God only knows how my children will be brought up…the face of the World is totally changed to me.” His best friend Archdeacon Fisher invited Constable to stay with him at his home near the cathedral twice in 1829. He encouraged him to do a painting of the Salisbury Cathedral to exhibit at the Royal Academy; a preliminary pencil sketch of the composition dates to one of those 1829 visits.

The rainbow’s end in this painting is the location of Leadenhall, Archdeacon Fisher’s home. Perhaps it signifies a more personal ray of hope during a turbulent time — the support of his friend and spiritual brother — rather than a political statement on the present and future of the Anglican Church.

The carved outline of foot found on the removable deck planking of the late 9th century Viking Gokstad Ship bears mute witness to how at least one crew member passed the time during a long sea voyage. There are two foot outlines: a right foot carved across two planks and a weaker outline of a left foot on a single plank. The deck was made out of moveable pine planks that could easily be lifted if the crew needed to access the small hold for cargo storage or to bail out water. When the ship was first excavated in 1880, the planks were found scattered so we don’t know if the feet were originally next to each other or if they were carved independently.

Even though the ship was excavated 133 years ago and has been in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum since 1932, researchers only noticed the footprints in 2009 when moving the loose floorboards. Museum storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad thinks the carving was the work of a bored youth, much like kids these days might carve their initials into their desks.

“My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It’s a kind of an ‘I was here’ message,” says Aannestad. [...]

Aannestad has measured one of her own feet against a tracing of the carved outline – because no one can actually step on the fragile floorboard, of course. The foot was smaller than hers, and even though people were generally shorter in the Viking days, this was probably a little person.

“It could have been a young man. People were treated as adults much earlier in those days. They took off sooner than we would allow young boys to do today,” says Aannestad.

They should add the shoe outline to the exhibit so visitors, especially kids, can compare their feet to that of a real Viking who lived and traveled in that ship 1100 years ago.

The foot carving is not the first time a young man established a lasting connection to this ship. It was first discovered on Gokstad farm near the town of Sandefjord on the west side of the Oslo Fjord in 1880 by the two teenage sons of the farm’s owner. The hill was called Kongshaugen (meaning “The King’s Mound”), and one day the boys decided to see if the legends that a king was buried there with all his treasure might be true. Just after New Year’s when the ground was still frozen, the highly motivated youths climbed the hill and started digging. Although the name suggests the hill was a burial mound for royalty, there are many mounds named Kongshaugen that turn out to be just hills. This one turned out to have an elaborate Viking ship burial within.

The news reached the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments and its then-president Nicolay Nicolayse managed to stop the amateur dig. He returned in the Spring and began a proper excavation from the side instead of the top down. You can read his 1892 account of the dig here. What he found was an oak clinker-built ship 76 feet long and 17 feet wide with 16 oar holes on each side of the hull. There was room for more than the 34 rowers, however. The ship’s maximum capacity was around 70. A scrap of white wool with red stripes sewn on was found in the front of the ship, possibly a fragment of the square sail.

There was a birch bark-covered wooden burial chamber built at the stern of the ship behind the mast. Inside the burial chamber was a raised bed with the incomplete skeleton of an adult male, a man in his 40s around 5’9″ whose leg bones showed the marks of the cutting blows that probably killed him in battle. Blows to the leg were a common fighting technique in Viking times. Fragments of silk and gold thread stuck in the joists of the roof indicate the chamber was once draped with expensive textiles.

There were grave goods, although none of the gold, silver, jewelry, precious accessories and armaments that usually accompanied a Viking ship burial. Those had been looted, probably not long after the burial, but plenty of archaeological wonders remained: wooden furniture, a game board with horn pieces, fish hooks, a sledge, a tent, a harness tackle made of iron, lead and gilded bronze, fish hooks, kitchen equipment, six beds and 64 shields. There were also three smaller boats in pieces and the remains of many animals (eight dogs, two goshawks, two peacocks and 12 horses).

The ship and artifacts were removed to the University of Oslo where they were studied, conserved and stored until the Viking Ship Museum room was built to house them. Since this was before the days of PEG and giant freeze dryers, the wood dried during excavation and conservation. Restorers steamed the planks to shape them back into their original curved positions and put the ship back together. The wood that was too damaged to subject to the process was replaced with modern planks.

It wasn’t until 1993 that dendrochronological (tree ring) analysis narrowed down the date. The timber that built the ship was felled in 890. The ship was used for sea voyages for at least a decade — we know this because the oar ports in the upper hull are worn and now because smart-alecky teenagers carved their feet into the deck — before being retired for the burial of what had to be a very important person. A possible candidate for the deceased is Olaf Geirstad-Alf, a king of Vestfold of the Swedish Yngling dynasty, who according to the Norse saga Heimskringla died at the end of the 9th century.

Although the ship and grave contents have been much seen and analyzed since their discovery, the site itself has been somewhat neglected. As of 2009, researchers from the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo have returned to Gokstad to explore the mound in the light of our current understanding of Viking history and culture and using the latest technologies.

Up to now, the find has had an apparently isolated position, both as archaeological monument in the landscape, and as cultural historical phenomenon. Although sporadic archaeological investigations and chance finds since the 1880′s have demonstrated that the surroundings around Kongshaugen are rich in other contemporary structures, there has never been an attempt to investigate and analyze the landscape surrounding the mound as a whole. And likewise it has never been tried to look at the entire Gokstad find – the mound, the animals, the objects and the deceased – as a single, monumental manifestation by those who once created it, and to decipher what it was that they intended to accomplish. At the core of the Gokstad revitalised project thus stands the goal to create a context around the burial, and to give an archaeological answer to the question Who was the Gokstad man?

An antebellum slave cabin from the Point of Pines Plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina, will become a centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), a new museum set to open in 2015. The cabin, one of two still standing on the plantation, was donated to the museum last month by the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society who received it from the plantation’s owners, the Burnet Maybank family.

Quite a few slave cabins have survived despite their rickety construction, and there are several in museums, but the NMAAHC was particularly interested in acquiring one of the Point of Pines cabins because it was one of the first places where slaves emancipated themselves after Union occupation. Point of Pines was a large plantation where more than 170 slaves picked Sea Island cotton before the Civil War. The islands on the coast of South Carolina were taken by Union troops shortly after the war began. In 1861, almost two years before the Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves in Confederate territories free, Point of Pines slaves and slaves from neighboring plantations who had fled to Point of Pines, declared themselves free. The Point of Pines cabin therefore tells not just the story of the degradation of chattel slavery, but also of the triumph of self-determination.

The fragile structure is being dismantled on site by Museum Resources, a Virginia company which specializes in historic woodwork. Smithsonian officials arrived on Monday to supervise the deconstruction and to do some on-site archaeological and historical research on the cabin and its inhabitants. The dismantlement process is a painstaking one. The first step is to marking and remove any non-period materials added to the historical structure. Then the siding and roofing comes off, then the roof framing and flooring, then the cabin frame. Every board and nail will be numbered and mapped before being carefully packed for transportation. The work is expected to take a week, after which the packaged cabin will be driven to the Williamsburg headquarters of Museum Resources where the wood will be dated, cataloged, its condition assessed and stabilized.

Once the pieces are given the all clear, the two-room, 16 by 20-foot cabin will be rebuilt inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture where it will be centrally located and visible from three floors. Because of its delicate condition, visitors will not be allowed to step into the cabin.

“This is one of the crown jewels of the collection, along with the Harriet Tubman shawl, Nat Turner’s Bible and an airplane used by the Tuskegee Airmen,” said Nancy Bercaw, a curator with the museum who is in South Carolina to monitor the cabin’s dismantlement. “It is there to remind us of the lives of people who were enslaved and definitions of freedom coming out of the African American community that led to transformational moments that changed America.”

Only a few days into the deconstruction, new information has been unearthed about the site. The cabin appears to have been built along a “slave street,” a row of up to 25 cabins similar to the surviving one.

Preliminary documentary research has uncovered rich primary sources about Point of Pines slaves. One is the private register of the Rev. Edward Thomas, Rector of Edisto Island’s Trinity Church, which covers 1827 through 1829 and includes information about the plantation owners, the Bailey family, and their slaves. Another is the 1758 estate inventory of Joshua Grimball (Paul Grimball, the first European settler of Edisto Island in 1674, built the plantation; it stayed in his family until it was sold to the Baileys in 1789). Along with the furniture, tools, cattle, spinning wheels and glassware, it lists the names of more than 90 Point of Pines slaves, among them Wando Pompey, the Wench Murriah, Big Sampson, Angolo Ned, Sambo and Gamboa Sampson. The African place names indicate first generation slaves.

With this valuable documentation and the help of Lowcountry Africana, a non-profit African American genealogy organization, Bercaw’s team is also interviewing local descendants of the Point of Pines slaves to add an oral history component to the future display about the cabin and the community that lived there slave and free.

The American Civil War Wax Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is for sale. The 12,450 square-foot building, all of its contents, plus the adjacent Veteran’s Park with its native plants and shade trees can be yours for the bargain price of $1,695,000.

Founded in 1962 by Polish immigrant C.M. Uberman, the museum today boasts more than 300 life-size wax figures arranged in 35 scenes depicting important events in the Civil War. It’s the only museum in Gettysburg that focuses on the entirety of the war, although of course it also gives due prominence to the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. There’s a Battle Room in which the figures combine with digital enhancements and sound to recreate the feeling of being at the Battle of Gettysburg, followed by an animated figure of Abraham Lincoln delivering the address.

Living history displays with Civil War reenactors take place outside from April through November. The museum hosts book signings, live performances of Civil War music, lectures from experts in everything from Civil War artillery to Victorian hair jewelry to newspaper printing and all kinds of other neat events.

More than eight million visitors have enjoyed the museum since its opening, and this year being the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (which took place July 1–3, 1863), there’s sure to be a boost in visitor numbers. So why are they selling, you ask? It’s a family run business and the owners are ready to retire but the children aren’t interested in taking over. Public sale is the result, and there won’t be any conditions so the new owners can either keep the museum open or just buy it for the property. The good news is there are several interested buyers and all of them have told the owners they would keep the museum running.

Meanwhile, there are all kinds of 150th anniversary events scheduled through the end of the year. General Manager Tammy Myers says they expect the 2013 schedule to remain unchanged, sale or no sale.

I haven’t been to this museum personally, but from the pictures I’d say the wax figures and dioramas are on the rudimentary side. There’s a lot of room, I think, for new owners to bring in a fresh perspective and spruce up the displays. Wax figures can be amazingly lifelike nowadays and when it comes to backdrops and settings, digital elements could really boost the sense of realism. Given the relatively low cost of the property and the reliable stream of income from visitors and gift shop purchases, a Civil War buff with deep pockets could get a great return on investment by renovating the exhibits.