The History Blog

In 1950, South Korean military rounded up thousands of prisoners and sometimes under the watchful eye of American military observers, shot them and buried them in ditches.

Those mass graves, long spoken of as “fiction” or leftist propaganda or else blamed on the North Korean army by US and South Korean officials, are still being uncovered today as the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempts to fulfill its brief.

The victims were supposed to be Communists working with the North Koreans, but according to a former prison guard/executioner who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they were really garden variety criminals, peasants rounded up in random sweeps, even women and children.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were “the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. [...]

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean “internal matter,” even though he controlled South Korea’s military.

Pictures of the massacres taken by a US Army major are among the documents recently declassified by the US government. I can’t find them on the National Archives website, but there are several included in the AP photo gallery.

My parents have a couple of God-knows-how-old stone walls on their property in Connecticut, and I’ve never paid them much attention except when investigating the crannies for lizards and snakes.

It turns out, though, that these historic remnants of the state’s farming past are in danger from developers and thieves of various sorts.

They sometimes come in broad daylight, with bulldozers and other heavy equipment, loading rocks from Connecticut’s old stone walls into dump trucks and carting them away to beautify another home, decorate a driveway or make a rustic entrance to a mall.

More surreptitious scavengers of stone work in the dark or slip deep into the woods, where old stone walls often exist in isolation, glimpsed only by hikers. After they pluck the most desirable ones, weathered stones covered in lichen to establish their antique pedigree, they typically leave behind a jumbled, rock-strewn mess.

In most places, salvaging or removing such stones with a landowner’s permission is lawful, but from the historical point of view, archaeologists and preservationists say, it is a crime, a theft of history. Stone walls are an important part of the landscape, delineating where settlements and farms existed, and how they operated. They tell a story about who we were — and are.

Much of the time the scavengers have the permission of the property owners who have no particular need or affection for their stacked stone treasures. Some towns have zoning ordinances that regulate the mining of stone walls, but the ones mentioned in the article are mainly about walls on or abutting public land.

Then there’s the question of the few poor laws out there being enforced. Here’s the spoiler: they aren’t.

The January raids on four California museums resulted in the arrest of art historian Roxanna Brown on Friday.

Yesterday, she died in a federal prison of an apparent heart attack.

As is routine with all inmates upon booking, Brown was given a medical screening at the prison. A spokeswoman for the detention center did not disclose the status of that screening.

By Monday, Brown was too ill to appear in court, but did appear briefly Tuesday. She had been charged with one count of wire fraud, allegedly for allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums. The collectors then claimed fraudulent tax deductions, investigators said.

Brown was a vocal anti-looting advocate. Her position was that buyers of antiquities should only consider purchasing finds from well-documented official digs. Anything short of that was likely to result in buying stolen goods.

How to reconcile this highly ethical stance with the tax fraud charges, I have no idea. Now she will never have the chance to clear her name, although I’m certain the investigation will continue.

I couldn’t let the first annual National Train Day pass without comment.

May 10 was chosen as the National Train Day in commemoration of the day the last rail and the last spike — an engraved golden spike now residing in the museum — joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.

I love me some trains, and in this day and age when air travel costs far more than the ticket price in discomfort, humiliation and delays, and car travel gets increasingly more prohibitive as the price of a full tank skyrockets, it’s good to see Amtrak actually wake the hell up and get some PR steam.

For some fantastic period pictures and scans of news articles published on the day, check out the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum.

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.

Iran and Italy have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which will allow closer cooperation between Italian and Iranian archaeologists in the excavations of Burnt City.

The head of the Italian team working on Iran’s Burnt City project, Lorenzo Costantini, noted that different phases of excavations in the Burnt City have revealed the competence of people of the city in different sciences and crafts.

Located 57 km from the city of Zabol in Sistan-Baluchistan province, southeast Iran, Burnt City is one of the most important prehistoric sites in Iran which thrived during the third millennium BC.

All kinds of amazing things have been found in Burnt City, from delicately painted, 5000 year-old artificial eyeballs to the earliest known backgammon set (turquoise and agate pieces on an ebony board).

Another update on the controversy over the building of a motorway over Tara, one of Archaeology magazine’s top 10 archaeological stories of 2007.

BBC Ulster radio has an in depth documentary on the subject very much worth the 28 minutes of listening time. It puts the NPR story I linked to in my previous update to shame.

Here’s a money quote from the UK chief executive of the World Monuments Fund, Dr. Jonathan Foyle (at 12m 38s in the broadcast):

The World Monuments Fund watch list contains all sorts of endangered sites - this one actually reminds me of the Bamiyan Buddhas which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 against international uproar.

It was a government which decided that these monuments would be erased and cultural erasure is part of the game of war and buildings very often suffer from that.

This entire site is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations, Canterbury for its Christian associations - all rolled into one.

And that is to be made way for, well, maybe not a radical Islamist view of God, but it is a radical view of Western consumerism as a be all and end all which must be serviced by the state.

I really that to destroy culture to shave 20 minutes off a journey time and to turn County Meath into a vast carpark is really quite a radical thing to do.

You tell ‘em, brother.

For the short version of the documentary, see this article.

For the full version, click here: Download

They’re not going to patrol the sites, but they are going to help facilitate a multi-step protection program.

Major Holloway explained: “The British Army’s role in the cultural project will be to facilitate specialists coming out from the UK to south-east Iraq, to liaise with Iraqi civil contacts, and to assist where possible with contracts for work required, underwritten with a degree of funding.”

The most urgent need is to conduct condition assessments on the major archaeological sites and to determine the extent of damage caused by looters. These places include the ancient Sumerian cities of Warka and Eridu. Satellite images show evidence of considerable illicit digging after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the remains are now badly pockmarked. The project will not involve British troops patrolling archaeological sites.

Now when they say sites are badly pockmarked by digging, they don’t mean some holes have been dug. They mean this:

That’s not the result of shelling or bombing you see there, despite the Flanders ca 1917 look of it. Looters did it all.

Hopefully the British program will turn out to be a solid foundation for long-term protection of Iraqi antiquities. Soldiers patrolling wouldn’t be more than a very short term solution, so it’s probably a good thing they’re looking to use the military to set up a civilian operation instead of making a few soldiers play watchman for the time being.

Margaret Hodge, UK Culture Minister, has put an export block on the Dering Roll, a beautifully illuminated roll of arms from the 13th century. Sotheby’s is looking to sell it out of country, apparently, although I can’t find out the details of the sale other than it was part of a lot listed for sale on December 4.

The Minister’s ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, administered by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The Committee recommended that the export decision be deferred on the grounds that the roll is of outstanding significance for the study of early English heraldry and is so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune. The Committee awarded a starred rating to the roll meaning that every possible effort should be made to raise enough money to keep it in the country.

The Dering Roll was produced in England in the last quarter of the 13th century. It is eight and a half feet long and contains the coats of arms of approximately one-quarter of the English baronage of the reign of King Edward I. As the earliest surviving English roll of arms it is a key document of medieval English knighthood. As a statement of the knights who owed feudal service to the constable of Dover Castle, it carries outstanding local as well as national significance.

The cost is $400,000 or so and all offers need to be submitted by April 19 (although there might be an extension until July). For an illuminated roll of such historical importance and such lush design, that seems eminently doable. I’m surprised it hasn’t been snapped up already, possibly by one of the families whose coat of arms are represented.

~ Thanks to John Harrison of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, for the picture. ~

The Burmese Ministry of Culture prohibits mining and excavation near archaeological sites. Unfortunately, that prohibition doesn’t extend to government-owned mining concerns. Cement Factory Accused of Destroying Antiquities.

The Kawgun cave—a natural lime stone cavern, 200ft high and 300ft long—is located near a village of the same name, two miles from Hpa-an. It contains many images and artifacts that historians say date from the Pyu era, spanning the period from the first century to the ninth century AD. [...]

Residents say the blasting dislodges the Kawgun cave’s Buddha statuettes and other historical objects. “Buddha statues are broken day after day, and we feel very frustrated,” a monk told The Irrawaddy. “We want to repair the damage, but it should be the responsibility of the department of archeology.”

Beautiful cave. Here’s hoping the publicity shames them into stopping the destruction.