The History Blog

Needless to say, it was found by an amateur metal detectorist. Danny Mills found the virtually intact bronze lamp at a metal detecting rally in Glemsford, near Sudbury, Suffolk, last fall. He reported it to local archaeologists and the landowner later donated it to the Ipswich Museum. Now the lamp has been restored and is on display at the museum.

It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

British conservation specialists from the Courtauld Institute in London have removed centuries of soot, grease, grime and graffiti from Hellenistic-style paintings on the wall of a cave in the canyon of Siq al-Barid in Beidha, about 3 miles away from the main city of Petra.

They’re at least 2,000 years old and may have been painted earlier. Very few examples of Hellenistic painting have survived, and what’s left is mainly fragments. We have very little Nabatean art at all, so finding such extensive pieces with intact color and detail under the layers of filth is remarkable.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra, in what is now Jordan, was the epicenter of an immense trade network linking East and West. As traders in everything from Indian spices to Levant aromatics, Nabatean culture was influenced by its trading partners, hence the Hellenstic style of these paintings which decorate the dining room, main chamber and a smaller recess of what appears to have been a rock-carved spa for the elite.

The Nabateans were experts in water control; a marked advantage, you can imagine, in the middle of a desert. Nabateans took advantage of the canyon flash flooding, channeling it with a system of dams and conduits, creating an artificial oasis that would last for hundreds of years until an earthquake in the 4th century A.D.

The 3,000-year-old neo-Assyrian gold earrings stolen from Iraq in the post-invasion chaos and almost sold by Christie’s 2 years ago have been returned to Iraq.

Christie’s claimed when they put up for sale that they were bought in 1969 and “similar” to the 8 identical pairs of elaborate gold earrings found in 1988 in the royal tombs at Nimrud, the ancient capital of Assyria. Iraqi officials spotted them in the catalogue and reported them to Interpol, stopping the sale.

Donny George, the former director of the Iraq Museum who was on the Nimrud excavation and who personally photographed the treasures, recognized the earrings as from Nimrud. He pointed out that the gold work at Nimrud was exceptional and unique, that there was no such thing as a “similar” piece.

The earrings were among the 613 items of jewellery and funeral ornaments that make up the Treasure, found in 1988 in two previously unexplored burial chambers, belonging to a ninth-century BC queen and princess, in the ancient city of Nimrud.

Sent to the central bank at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Treasure has hardly ever been on show. But it was once described by an American investigator seeking to recover lost Iraqi artefacts as making the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun “look like Walmart”.

The treasure remained in the vault of the central for 20 years, surviving the 1990 Gulf War, depredations of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay (he helped himself to almost a billion dollars in cash plus hundreds of gold bars from the bank), Shock and Awe, looters trying to break into it with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, and a major flood. A team of Iraqi, US and British archaeologists, plus an awesome reservist Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos who in civilian life is a New York prosecutor with a classics degree along with his legal one, were able to rescue the Nimrud treasure from the flood.

At the time they thought it was fully accounted for, but somewhere between the summer of 2003 and winter of 2008, those earrings migrated out of Iraq into Christie’s hot little ask-no-questions hands. Even now Christie’s refuses to say who the seller was or even comment on the story at all. New York Customs enforcement will only say that no legal action has been taken.

The Maine Charitable Mechanic Association in Portland, Maine, is selling its exquisite collection of early 19th century silk guild banners. Trade associations used to promote their wares by carrying painted silk banners describing their art with clever puns and beautiful images during town parades. Everyone from freemasons to blacksmiths to hatters made these kinds of banners.

The Maine Charitable Mechanic Association was created in 1815 to help train apprentices, and has kept 17 of these beautiful pieces of labour history from the 1830s. Sadly, they have an 1850s building in dire need of repair, plus a bunch of programs that need the funding. Since they don’t have the money to keep the banners in a secure, properly controlled environment for their conservation, they’ve decided to put them up for auction.

You can browse the catalogue to see all 17 of them; the banners start at lot 2114. (Not that the rest of the lots aren’t worth browsing. This little auction house in Maine has some awesome pieces for sale, ranging from lovely local folk art to Aubusson tapestries.)

There has been some controversy over the sale. Nobody wants to see these treasures of Maine labour history dispersed into private collections. The auction house is being surprisingly accommodating, thankfully, so there’s a chance the banners might remain in state in a museum that can properly house them.

Buyers interested in the whole collection, rather than single lots, can make presale offers, Mr. Julia said; he will allow the winning bidder to pay off the bill over time rather than upfront. Estimates range from $2,000 for the tailors’ banner with a wreath around the phrase “Think and Act” to $30,000 for the shipbuilders’ painting of a three-mast vessel captioned “By Commerce We Live.”

Steve Bromage, the assistant director of the Maine Historical Society in Portland, wrote in an e-mail that “a consortium of Maine museums is working together to raise funds to participate in the auction.”

Given the “significant historic value of these banners,” he wrote, there is “a strong desire to keep them in Maine and accessible to the public.”

Here are a few of my favorites, but I really could have posted them all because I am completely in love with them. All my latent syndicalism has come gushing forth in a great geyser of adoration for these gorgeous banners.

In a brazen smash-and-grab captured on security cameras, 2 thieves stole a 17th century gold ingot from the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum on Key West, Florida. The 11-inch, 74.85-ounce gold bar was kept in a bulletproof polymer case that had a hole in it so visitors to the museum could put their hand in and hold the bar.

“Everybody who comes to the museum is encouraged to lift the gold bar and to have a firsthand experience with history,” said Melissa Kendrick, the museum’s executive director. “This is one of the most iconic and best-known objects in the museum.”

Somehow one of the thieves managed to break through the case, lift out the bar and walk casually out the door with the ingot in his pocket. The security footage (which you can see in this CNN video) doesn’t show how they broke through bulletproof plastic. I can’t detect a weapon or device of any kind. It looks like he just reaches in and pulls out the gold bar, but they had to bust up the case to do it.

The ingot was found in 1980 by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher. He and his team were looking for the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha galleon, a treasure ship that left Havana in 1622 along with a fleet of 27 other ships crammed to the rafters with New World booty only to be felled by a hurricane. Instead he found the wreck of one of the other 7 ships from that treasure fleet which went down in the storm: the Santa Margarita.

The gold ingot was one of the more dramatic pieces Fisher recovered from the Santa Margarita. Not only is it a large and handsome, but it has a variety of unique markers including Roman numerals marking it as 16-karat gold, a symbol identifying its owner, and dots indicating the taxes paid on it to the Spanish crown.

Its estimated value is $550,000, but the weight of the gold alone is worth $75,000. The museum is offering a $10,000 reward for its return. Here’s hoping the bastards don’t just melt it down and smoke 70 grand worth of meth.

Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Apollonia in what is today Albania have uncovered the remarkably intact Roman bust of an athlete. Archaeologists also found the decorated foot of a bronze statue, also an important piece but obviously not complete.

“It is an exceptional discovery, the most important in the last 50 years in Albania because the bust is still intact,” French professor Jean-Luc Lamboley, who led the dig at Apollonia with Albanian archaeologists, told AFP.

The quality of carving, especially of the face and curly hair, marks it as Roman. It may have been buried intentionally to keep it safe during periods of upheaval. The bust has been moved temporarily to the archaeological museum in Tirana since the local museum was plundered after the fall of communism in 1990 and is still closed.

Apollonia was founded in the 6th century B.C. by Greek immigrants in an area populated by Illyrian tribes. It became an important city in the ancient world because of its agricultural exports and a large harbour which was reputed to be able to accomodate 100 ships at a time. Strabo mentions it in his Geographia as a well-governed city (it was an oligarchy, with a Greek ruling class and a majority Illyrian serf population) which also has a rock that shoots out fire because rivers of water and asphalt run underneath it.

It was also an early notch in Rome’s bedpost, a loyal territory under Roman Republican control since 229 B.C. Famous for its philosophical school, Apollonia was hosting the future emperor Augustus when he heard the news of Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.

The city began to decline in the 3rd century A.D. after an earthquake silted up the famed harbour and turned the town into a malarial swamp. By the 6th century the city was deserted and fell into obscurity until grand tourists rediscovered it in the 18th century. It was never built over and so far only an estimated 10% of the classical site has been excavated, so there are many more treasures to be found.

Franco and Gonzalo Carrazana were digging up their patio to build a two room addition on their house in Tilcara, Argentina, when they found 8 ancient pots buried one next to the other.

“The first piece appeared when we had dug some 40 centimeters (16 inches). Then another pot appeared that was next to a third,” Roberto Carrazana, the brothers’ uncle, told the daily Clarin.

“When we started to dig up the whole space, the fourth pot appeared. And as we went ahead slowly we realized that more began to appear, unbroken. That’s when we got in touch with the archaeologists,” he said.

The pots are 4 1/4 feet tall and were probably used to store food 1300 years ago. That dates makes them older than the Pucará de Tilcara, a pre-Columbian, pre-Incan fortress which is thought to have been built by the Omaguaca tribe in the 12th century. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only publically accessible archaeological site on the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a 100-mile ravine in north Argentina that has been populated for 10,000 years.

The ceramics are very brittle, so the fact that the posts are still so complete is remarkable. Archaeologists from the Tilcara Interdisciplinary Institute intend to excavate further on the Carrazana property and in the area to see if there are any other such hidden treasures.

As of right now, we don’t know where the pots will end up. The Secretary of Tourism for the province is psyched, needless to say. He mused that some of the pots could remain in the ground where they are to mark the great find, which would give the Carrazanas an open-air museum in their backyard. They’d probably have to forgo building the addition in that case, though. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

In 1864, just a few weeks before Sherman overwhelmed Confederate defenses in Georgia, Confederate authorities built a small prison camp in Millen, Georgia, to house some of the prisoners from the vastly overpopulated Andersonville prison nearby. It only lasted 6 weeks, but in that time Camp Lawton grew to hold 10,000 Union prisoners of war.

When Sherman got there, all the inmates and guards had gone, hastily evacuated in the middle of the night. He burned the stockade and soon a lovely pine forest grew in the spot. Since the prison had been so short-lived and so small compared to ignominy hound Andersonville, nobody bothered to mark it for historical purposes. Archaeologists looked around for the stockade markers every once in a while, but beyond that there really wasn’t much interest in pinning down the camp site.

This year Georgia Southern anthropology professor Dr. Sue Moore and graduate student Kevin Chapman were finally able to pin down the exact location of the stockade using Civil War-era documents and ground-penetrating radar. Much to their and everyone else’s amazement, they also found a huge wealth of artifacts, some of them unique.

Chapman expected to find some post holes. But during his first day of sifting dirt, he found a Union button, then a musket ball, then a large U.S. cent, the size of a half-dollar. “The results have been stunning,” he said.

As a part of the Bo Ginn National Fish Hatchery, the site has been protected from amateur diggers, which increases its value, said Mark Musaus, deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It’s one of the most significant finds in recent decades because of its pristine nature.”

Chapman said the stockade and other occupied structures comprise less than 10 percent of the 42-acre camp. Of that stockade area, only 1 percent has been studied, he said.

Among the artifacts unearthed is an improvised tobacco pipe, with a bowl made from melted lead bullets and a 3-inch clay stem that bears the teeth-marks of the prisoner who used it.

The hasty dead-of-night departure ensured that prisoners left their treasured possessions behind: eating utensils, empty picture frames, even a scary looking tourniquet buckle. The lack of interest from locals and the property’s later status as a government hatchery ensured that those treasures remained untouched for the Georgia Southern team to find. They even kept the find secret until just now to give them time to secure the site from looters and Civil War aficionados.

The government plans to reopen the hatchery, but it won’t interfere with the Civil War portion of the property. That will be fenced off and kept safe for archaeological study. The artifacts have been temporarily put on display at Magnolia Springs State Park. Later they will become part of the permanent collection of the Georgia Southern museum in Statesboro.

Archaeologists excavating a tract of land outside what is now Le Mans, France, but was once Vindunum, Gaul, in preparation for future construction have discovered a large, rich temple complex dating from the 1st to the 3rd century A.D. Most of the stone structure is long gone, doubtless recycled into a couple thousand years worth of local buildings, but what remains indicates a large site which would have been able to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of worshipers.

The shape of the buildings were first spotted from aerial views. Archaeologists followed the shapes with some exploratory digs on the ground. Once they realized there weren’t many in the way of walls to harm, they sent in mechanical diggers to peel off the wheat fields from the sanctuary foundations.

At the entrance to the site, there once stood a large E-shaped building, probably for welcoming the pilgrims, selling religious objects and housing the temple guardians. One wide path littered with iron slag (Vindunum was a major metalworking centre), leads a few hundred metres south to the foundations of a circular fanum (temple) about 12 metres in diameter. That round shape was rare in Gallo-Roman times and there are only a few such examples in France.

In fact, three temples were erected successively during the second and third centuries. Possibly they had to be rebuilt because of the instability of the ground. A pergola and a flight of steps would have led to the temple, which had stone walls around seven metres high covered by a tiled roof. Inside, the cella (central room) housed the statue of the god.

Another fanum stood at the west, the oldest in the sanctuary, dating to the first century. It was square, 15 metres wide and apparently in the Celtic temple tradition. This one was originally built in wood and stone added later, together with a cella surrounded by a gallery for circumambulation and a wall separating the sacred space from the profane. Fragments of coloured plaster show that the walls were once panted. The temple was surrounded by octagonal or square-shaped secondary “chapels”.

This Celtic fanum is where archaeologists found the most artifacts. Most likely offerings made to the deities, the finds include Gallic, Celtic and Roman silver coins, broaches, rings, keys, pottery, weapons and heavy work tools like sledgehammers and hammers. Metal workers and soldiers would have had good reason to offer valuable implements of their trade to the gods, given how dangerous their jobs were.

Archaeologists didn’t find any offerings in the circular temple, but they did find something completely unexpected: graves. Romans didn’t bury the dead on temple grounds. They didn’t even bury them inside the city walls. Dead bodies were not considered pure, and temples had to be.

Vindunum was a major Gallo-Roman city in the first few centuries A.D. It had a large bath complex — demolished in the third century and the stone used to build the walls encircling the city — and an amphitheater built about the same time as the walls. (Fun fact: it’s also where Henry II of England was born. The well-preserved medieval old town is known as Cité Plantagenêt.)

Here’s some more information on the discovery of King Hekatomnus’ tomb in Milas, Turkey. Police searched a home the looters were using and found 2 tunnels leading to the tomb. Inside the tomb they found not only a large and elaborately carved sarcophagus, but also frescoes and possibly more easily portable treasures that they promptly sold on the black market.

A court has arrested and charged five of 10 people detained in the raid, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

Anatolia, which was allowed to enter the tomb, said the suspects had dug two tunnels — 6 and 8 yards long — from the house and an adjacent barn, leading to the tomb that is buried about 10 yards deep.

They used sophisticated equipment to drill through the thick marble walls of the tomb and were working to remove the coffin from the underground chamber.

So I gather then that the tomb is a marble structure, not just a grave. Maybe it was an inspiration for his son Mausolos’ famous excess.

Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay noted that these looters weren’t some fly-by-night amateurs with shovels. They had funding and access to specialized equipment. Turkey intends to follow the money, investigating any potential international links. Gunay has also ordered further digs on the site and in nearby areas.