The History Blog

Indiana Jones latest adventure involves a (doubtless perilous and booby-traped) search for a meso-American skull carved out of crystal.

For a hundred years, crystal skulls purported to be of Mayan or Aztec origins have popped up in museums and private collections around the world, spurring a wide variety of speculation and mythologies.

Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh examines the myth and reality in Archaeology magazine this month.

These exotic carvings are usually attributed to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, but not a single crystal skull in a museum collection comes from a documented excavation, and they have little stylistic or technical relationship with any genuine pre-Columbian depictions of skulls, which are an important motif in Mesoamerican iconography. [...]

These small objects represent the “first generation” of crystal skulls, and they are all drilled through from top to bottom. The drill holes may in fact be pre-Columbian in origin, and the skulls may have been simple Mesoamerican quartz crystal beads, later re-carved for the European market as little mementos mori, or objects meant to remind their owners of the eventuality of death.

The best one, though, is a “third generation” (ie, 20th c.) skull belonging to the family of Indy-like adventurer Frederick Arthur Mitchell-Hedges. Over time it has an acquired a spurious Mayan origin and a mystical reputation for shooting blue light out of the eye sockets and crashing computer hard drives.

If only all fakes could be so bad-ass.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. I remember being horrified, aghast, on the verge of tears whenever the realization of what we had lost sunk in.

What I didn’t know is how much worse it could get. How the entire country would be stripped of its (and our) precious history. How archaeological sites that testify to our earliest civilizations, where people first invented writing, cities, the wheel and so much more, would become pockmarked no man’s lands of chaotic rubble.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit on the looting of Iraq. Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past opens this evening in Chicago and will remain until December 31.

The exhibition will consist of photographs as well as objects from the museum’s collection. “It summarizes results of investigations into the looting of the Baghdad Museum and updates efforts to recover the artifacts that were stolen,” said Geoff Emberling, Director of the Oriental Institute Museum.

The exhibition also will document the looting of archaeological sites with a series of aerial photographs that show the increase in damage through the past few years and other ground-level pictures of the looters at work. “A central section illustrates the importance of archaeological context through several case studies that show what is lost when a piece is looted. The exhibit presents an overview of the international trade in antiquities and the ways in which it directly promotes the looting of the sites,” Emberling said.

If anyone has a chance to see this exhibit, please let me know. I would dearly love to hear all about it. Meanwhile, a companion publication is available for sale or freely downloadable as a pdf.

I’ve read it and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s 82 pages long so eminently readable, although painful in the horror it describes. Here’s one example to give you an idea of what you’ll find.

A bull-headed lyre excavated from the Royal Cemetery of Ur and dated ca 2800, B.C.:

That same lyre after looters pillaged the museum on April 10, 2003:

Tonight, SAFE is holding a candlelit vigil in memory of the tragic loss of our cultural heritage. Click here to see if there is a vigil in your area.

On a dig five years ago, University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader found 1000-year old ritual bowls in a cave in Mozambique. Instead of snagging them for his institution as usually happens when Western archaeologists excavate in Africa, Mercader decided to create a local museum, staffed with locals.

Locals are being trained in African archeology, making western and African academic research relevant to the local population.

“I’m grateful that I’m being given the chance to actually be trained,” said Mussa Raja, through a translator.

Raja is an honours student at a university in Mozambique and has been studying archeology at the U of C for the past 41/2 months.

“I’m getting the training in the actual practicality of how to excavate and do field work,” he said.

Raja, who said archeology is a new science for many African universities, has seen the attitudes of his people change when they see a fellow African doing archeological work.

“They’re so happy when it’s not just foreigners there,” said Raja.

The museum, which opens in August, will display the finds made by Mercader’s team, including Stone Age artifacts, and will also feature an interactive centre and an oral history archive.

I call that brilliant. One of the most common justifications I’ve read for western museums buying (often unprovenanced) antiquities on the (totally dirty) market is that the poor locals in their poor war-torn countries couldn’t possibly care for the artifacts as well as the big budget “universal” museums abroad do.

Mercader has now torn that argument to shreds, and he’s just one man doing the best he can. Imagine what museums and universities with endowments and hundreds of people on staff could accomplish if they made the effort to work with local people and institutions to study and display their antiquities.

The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda is raising funds to replace 52 ailing windows before hurricane season.

The museum, also the island’s first courthouse, is the oldest building in St. John’s dating back to the 1750s.

Archaeologist and curator of the Dockyard Museum Dr. Reginald Murphy said that the building’s age has caused the windows to suffer. “Over time all of our windows have suffered terribly. They are made of wood and right now they are being held together by the termites, who are sort of holding hands. There is nothing else holding these in so they have to be changed.”

Agnes Meeker of the Historical Society said the windows are double hung sash windows of large proportion in a neo-classical structure. They are 52 in total and the replacement cost has been estimated at around $3,000 each, not including installation.

The old windows will be made into decorative mirrors and sold to raise funds for building maintenance.

MSNBC has a low weird threshold, it seems to me, but it’s still a cool list of museums you might not have heard of.

I’ve been to the Amsterdam Sex Museum and it wasn’t all that. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose sounds like fun, though. So does the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets in New Delhi.

Sixty years ago, archaeologists discovered intricately carved friezes on the walls of caves in Roc-aux-Sorciers, France. Carved 15,000 years ago, they are the sculptural equivalent of the famous Lascaux cave paintings but are barely known because they have never been on display.

The messy business of tourism — breath and heat and sweat and sticky little fingers poking and scratching and touching — would damage the carvings beyond repair, so instead a replica has been created, exact to microscopic detail using computers and laser-copying technology.

A museum to open near Poitiers, in western France, will span one-a-half millenniums of human image-making, from stone chisels to computers. The star of the show, at Angles-sur-L’Anglin, in the départementof Vienne, will be a 60ft-long frieze of bison, horses, cats, goats and erotic female figures, carved into the limestone of western France 15,000 years ago.

The caverns containing the frieze were discovered by French and British archaeologists in 1950 but have never been opened to the public. The Roc-aux-Sorciers (witches’ rock) caves are the only site of their kind in Europe: a two-dimensional, carved equivalent of the celebrated cave paintings at Lascaux in Dordogne, 120 miles farther south, which were created 1,000 years earlier.

From today, the public will be able to visit a €2.7m (£2.1m) visitor centre where the original sculptures, and the contours of the cavern sides, have been precisely recreated to full size by computerised, laser-copying techniques. At intervals a half-hour son-et-lumière display will be projected on to the frieze, suggesting how the carvings may have been created and how they were discovered 58 years ago.

The old one was small, run down, and oh yeah, built in the middle of the actual battlefield in the 20’s. They’re razing it and restoring the whole battlefield to its Civil War topography.

The new one is 3/4 miles away from the battlefield, has 24,000 square feet of exhibition space, a fully renovated “Battle of Gettysburg” cyclorama, complete with its dioramas for the first time in half a century, and an all-new “Refreshment Saloon” where visitors can experience Civil War-era foods and original recipes.

(Virginia ham and apple pie, apparently. I call that kowtowing. Weevily hardtack and salt pork would have been so much cooler.)

The new digs open on April 14, with a grand opening in September 26 to launch the cyclorama. Read all about it on the Gettysburg National Military Park’s website.

Technically, it’s Octavian’s home because he lived in it with Livia in 30 BC, right after his victory over Marc Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, but before he donned the title of Augustus in 27 BC.

It was a modest home in terms of size, but the 4 rooms that have been restored and open to the public are decorated with the most gorgeous frescoes I’ve ever seen.

Some of his interior decoration was found intact when the Italian archaeologist Professor Gianfilippo Carettoni finally broke through to the rooms in the early 1970s.

Other frescoes had to be pieced together from fragments found by a team led by Irene Jacopi, the archaeologist in charge of the Palatine Hill.

The art is so delicate that no more than five visitors at a time will be able to enter the rooms. Nevertheless, they are expected to attract large crowds.

Also notable is the graffiti the builders left behind. They sketched a design for what might have been a floor mosaic and signed their names to it. It’s not often you to find out the names of contractors who worked on a house 2000 years ago.

Some pictures of the frescoes:

There’s an exhibit of them at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art right now, and it looks amazing.

Around the year 500 A.D., an unknown artisan pressed red, white and gray ceramic tiles into drying mortar to form the image of a menorah in a mosaic.

Commissioned by a woman named Juliana at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the design was for a Jewish synagogue in coastal Tunisia.

Over the centuries dry earth covered the ruined synagogue until, more than 1,300 years later, French Army Captain Ernest De Prudhomme dug up his yard in 1883 to make a garden.

Setting aside for the moment the painful cultural pillage which took them from 19th c. Tunisia to 21st c. Brooklyn Museum, 21 of these mosaics on loan now in Boston along with statues, coins, even textiles from various periods in the Roman empire.

I don’t know where else you’d be able to see the mosaic floor of an ancient Roman synagogue, nevermind one from a century after the fall of the Western Empire.

The fall of Rome is a tricky thing, of course. The traditional date for the fall is 476, when Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor, but that’s more of a convenient marker than a dividing line between Empire and non. In North Africa, the decline of Roman economic systems was slow and steady from 400 AD to 700 AD.

As far as Juliana was concered, Rome was still going strong.

The Onassis Cultural Center will be hosting an exhibit of ancient Minoan artifacts starting March 13.

The exhibition brings to light aspects of Minoan daily life during the second and third millennia B.C., including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion, and technology.

In eleven thematic sections, the exhibition maps chronologically the establishment and great achievements of Minoan culture. Here the viewer can explore the historical and cultural context of this celebrated society and gain insight into its mysteries, such as the legends surrounding the reign of King Minos of Knossos, who commissioned the fabled Labyrinth of Greek mythology.

Most of these pieces have never been seen outside of Crete, so if you’re planning on being in the Northeast US between March 13 and September 13, you might want to make a point of visiting.

Remember: Minoans are reknown not just for the legendary labyrinth designed by Daedalus, the bull dancers, queen Pasiphae having sex with a bull and giving birth to the Minotaur, but also for topless babes. That place was lousy with breastseses.

Just sayin’, in case it sweetens the deal for anyone.