The History Blog

In May of 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a privately owned marine treasure-hunting company, discovered a Spanish shipwreck somewhere on the Atlantic seabed. Odyssey refused to divulge the exact location or the name of the ship. They ultimately recovered 17 tons of silver coins, plus almost 100,000 gold coins and a number of other artifacts from the wreck, which they code-named “Black Swan.” The site must have been near Spain because Odyssey secretly landed the $500 million treasure on Gibraltar, chartered a flight and flew the loot back to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

Spain was displeased, to put it mildly. Odyssey claimed the find was made in international waters in full compliance with the United Nations’ Law of the Seas, but since they refused to reveal the wreck site and pleaded ignorance about the name of the ship, Spanish authorities got suspicious. They filed suit against Odyssey Marine in a federal courthouse in Tampa, demanding that the company reveal everything it knows about the wreck so Spain could claim ownership, and they got a Spanish court order to seize Odyssey ships around Gibraltar and search them for historical artifacts.

The case has been winding its way through the legal system ever since then. In 2009, a Florida judge declared that the “Black Swan” was the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by the British off the coast of Cape St. Mary, Portugal in 1804, that Odyssey had specifically set out to find the Mercedes and had succeeded, and that Spain was the rightful owner of the recovered treasure. Odyssey’s claims of ignorance did not impress.

The judge argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes’ haul of mainly silver coins minted in Lima – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain’s European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on board the Mercedes.

“The debris field’s location, coins, cannons, and artefacts persuasively match the Mercedes’s historical record,” the judge said.

“That Odyssey, which set out to discover the Mercedes, found this mix strewn about in an area a few football fields square where the vessel met its explosive ending makes the conclusion even more compelling.”

Judge Pizzo also ruled that Peru, which had filed a suit of its own in 2008 claiming the treasure because the coins were made from Peruvian gold and silver, did not have a valid claim because there was no nation of Peru in 1804.

Odyssey appealed the ruling. Now a federal circuit court judge has upheld Judge Pizzo’s decision, giving Odyssey Marine 10 days to return the loot to Spain. Odyssey will doubtless appeal to a higher court next, so this story isn’t over yet, but they’ll run out of courts soon enough.

Don’t worry about Odyssey, though. They just made a sweet deal with the British government and the Maritime Heritage Foundation to recover the wreck of the HMS Victory which an Odyssey team discovered in 2008. This is the predecessor of Admiral Nelson’s famed vessel; it went down in a storm in 1744 carrying four tons of gold.

The terms of the agreement ensure that all of Odyssey’s costs will be reimbursed and they will in addition receive a percentage of the market value of any recovered artifacts. If the Maritime Heritage Foundation chooses, they will get paid in artifacts rather than cash, but Odyssey prefers cash.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 80% of the fair value of artifacts which were primarily used in trade or commerce or were private property and bear no direct connection to the construction, navigation, defense or crew of the ship, such as coins or other cargo.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 50% of the fair value of all other objects typically associated with the construction, crewing and sailing of ships including, but not limited to, the ship’s hull, fittings, fasteners, construction elements, clothing, organic remains, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, pottery, weapons, ammunition, ground tackle and navigational equipment.

For any private property including coins or other cargo administered through the Receiver of Wreck, the Foundation has agreed that Odyssey shall receive 80% of the value.

So yeah, they’re doing okay.

Two masked men broke into the Siskiyou County Courthouse in Yreka, California and stole the largest nuggets from a display case replete with gold nuggets, leaf, and dust from the area’s rich mining history. They got in through an unlocked window in the back of the courthouse, then broke a hand-sized hole through the thick bulletproof glass covering the display and helped themselves to the choicest pieces they could reach. Court employees discovered the theft when they arrived in the morning.

Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.

The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.

The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.

That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.

There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:

Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:

If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.

During a routine valuation in Dorset, a Duke’s Auctioneers specialist found a rare working model of a guillotine made out of animal bone scraps. According to family lore, the model has been in the family since the 19th century, but they had no idea what it was until Duke’s expert Amy Brenan (who also generously provided the sweet high resolution pictures herein) identified it.

The guillotine was crafted by a prisoner of war, probably French, who was held in Britain between 1805 and 1815 during the Napoleonic wars. He collected sheep bones from the trash, carved them and put them together with impeccable attention to detail to make the 20-inch high model of an execution. An elaborate superstructure crowns the decapitation machine which rests on a platform with a victim lying horizontally waiting for the blade to fall. The victim is surrounded by armed guards on the platform, and the base of the structure is also manned by armed guards and cannons. Each figure has a hand-painted face, the blade of the guillotine drops and the soldiers holding weapons have moveable arms.

Amy Brenan describes its rarity:

“Napoleonic prisoner of war models made from bone and ivory are hard to come by. Many designs such as the model battle ships, spinning jennies and guillotines are so intricate that they disintegrate overtime and this makes any surviving examples extremely rare.

The sheer skill in creating a working model of the guillotine coupled with its social significance at the time, has made the guillotine models particularly desirable.”

Britain held approximately 100,000 prisoners of war over the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Revolutionary government decreed in 1793-4 that prisoners would no longer be ransomed, or even taken, and Napoleon would later also eschew traditional prisoner exchanges. Since Britain was at war with France for pretty much the whole time from 1793 until 1815, they soon had more prisoners than they could stuff into their prison hulks. Enemy officers were allowed parole and housed in various towns across England, but most of the prisoners enjoyed no such privileges.

The first permanent camp built intentionally to house prisoners of war was built in Norman Cross, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in 1797. From 1797 to 1816, about 10,000 prisoners were held at the Norman Cross POW camp.

Conditions were miserable — prisoners were crammed into barracks on rows of hammocks, disease was rampant, England was cold and wet — albeit comparatively humane. (French soldiers were known to voluntarily surrender to the British because they treated their prisoners better than anyone else.) Typhus cut a swath through the population in 1800 and 1801 killing 1021 prisoners. At least another 770 more died during the camp’s 17 years of existence.

Many of these soldiers and sailors had been conscripted into the Napoleonic military machine. They had crafting skills from their civilian lives, and desperate to make a little money to pad their meager subsistence, they made models of bone, ivory, wood scraps, even straw which they used to create marquetry baskets. Many of them are signed with the artists/prisoners’ names. The prisoners would then be allowed to sell their crafts to the local inhabitants. (They also fabricated counterfeit banknotes and porn, but the authorities weren’t so supportive of those creative endeavors.)

A British soldier describes being dispatched along with his regiment in 1799:

“….to Norman Cross for the purpose of guarding some thousands of unhappy Frenchmen, cooped up in that place and clothed in yellow (the prison dress), to expiate their revolutionary sins by many years captivity and exile in loathsome prison, cut off from family and friends.

Their necessities forced them to exert their ingenuity in making various curious toys which the disposed of at a very low rate to enable them to procure a few comforts to alleviate their extreme wretchedness…..for want of clothes many of them suffered every privation rather than be clad in a conspicuous and humiliating colour.”

The Peterborough Museum has a large collection of these models from the Norman Cross prisoners, and many of them are in deteriorating condition due to their inherent fragility. A working Napoleonic prisoner guillotine with all the parts moving and all the paint still attached, therefore, is a museum-quality find.

The guillotine will be sold at Duke’s on February 9 with an estimated price tag of £4000 – £8000 (about $6300 – $12,600).

Researchers at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park have discovered that 17 unlabeled wax cylinder phonograph records found stashed in a cabinet behind Edison’s cot back in 1957 contain extremely rare recordings made in Europe in 1889 and 1890, including the only known recording of Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire.

Two [of the wax cylinders] preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Since they weren’t labeled or cataloged, nobody had any idea what was on them until last year when Edison laboratory curator Jerry Fabris used an Archeophone device to trace the grooves on 12 of the cylinders and convert them to audible wav files. The recordings were very faint, too faint for Fabris to identify, so he enlisted the aid of sound historians Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin to try to determine who and what were on the cylinders.

They had a starting point: the words “Wangemann. Edison” carved into the lid of the wooden container in which the cylinders had been found. Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann had been hired by Edison in 1888 to market his newly invented wax cylinder phonograph. Wangemann quickly became adept at recording with the phonograph and was sent to Europe in June of 1889 to supervise the operation of the Edison phonographs on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair.

The assignment was only supposed to last two weeks, but after the World’s Fair was over Edison expanded his brief and allowed him to travel Europe collecting quality recordings to use for exhibitions. After Paris he went to his native country of Germany where he set up displays of the technology for scientists and luminaries. In Berlin, Wangemann set up his equipment in a room loaned to him by the Siemens Corporation. He carried the cylinders and accessories to the exhibition room in a lockable wooden box. It’s that box that was discovered back at Edison’s New Jersey lab in 1957.

Edison joined Wangemann in Germany to make a splash during the phonograph exhibits to scientists. While he was there, Edison asked to meet the three most important people in Germany, Bismarck, von Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II, but none of them were available. They all replied that they wanted to see the phonograph, though, so Edison sent Wangemann to show them the new toy and get their voices recorded for posterity. He did meet with them all, but although Wilhelm II greatly enjoyed Wangemann’s musical recordings, he never did get his own voice carved in wax. Three of his sons, the eldest just seven years old, did get recorded.

In Friedrichsruh on Oct. 7, 1889, Wangemann recorded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reciting verses from several ditties in four languages. The first is “In Good Old Colony Times,” a British folk song that was altered after the American Revolution to give it an anti-monarchist spin. The second is “Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam” (When good Emperor Redbeard), an 1814 German heroic ballad by Ludwig Uhland about Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa going on the Third Crusade. The third is the Latin song “Gaudeamus igitur,” a popular graduation song in Europe at the time with your classic “carpe diem” message. The fourth is the first verse of “La Marseillaise,” which is something of an enormous iceburn on the French given their ignominious defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

The last lines Bismarck speaks are a direct appeal to his son Herbert who would listen to it on a phonograph in Budapest a few weeks later and recognize his father’s voice. “Do everything in moderation and morality, namely work, but then also eating, and apart from that especially drinking. Advice of a father to his son.” Solid Junker advice, that.

Read about all of the newly converted Edison/Wangemann wax cylinders, listen to the recordings and read the original text and transcripts of the spoken parts on the National Park Service website.

A silk on linen needlework sampler stitched by 12-year-old Mary Antrim in 1807 sold at Sotheby’s Important Americana sale in New York on Sunday for $1,070,500 (including buyer’s premium). That’s ten times more than its pre-sale estimate of $80,000-$120,000.

Girls at that time (and from the 17th century through to the 20th) were taught needlework from a very young age, both in school and at home. They proved their skill, virtue and industry by creating samplers. Early samplers had a utilitarian aspect, teaching girls schoolwork as they stitched things like letters of the alphabet, maps and mathematical tables, but by the 18th century the focus had shifted to a more pictorial approach. Mary’s elaborate design of farm life, featuring symmetrical vignettes of trees, animals, houses, fruit bowls and an elegant lady riding side-saddle is an exquisite example of pictorial needlework. She was the daughter of weaver John Antrim, so she came by her extraordinary skills honestly.

The piece was one of 198 lots from the collection of needlework historian Betty Ring who wrote the definite reference books on the subject and pretty much single-handedly elevated the entire field of folk art needlework with her scholarship and her collecting. Sotheby’s has put her seminal books on the subject, Girlhood Embroidery Volume I, Volume II and American Needlework Treasures online. They are so rich with illustrations even just paging through them is a beautiful voyage of exploration.

The sale of the Ring collection totaled $4,389,503, over a million dollars above the total estimates, which is particularly remarkable considering that a quarter of the lots didn’t sell at all. Most of the unsold pieces were memorial samplers, depicting veiled mourners, weeping willows and gravestones stitched in memory of a deceased loved one. Interestingly, when Girlhood Embroidery was first published in 1993, it was positively reviewed by The Wall Street Journal (to this day it’s the only book about American decorative arts ever reviewed by the WSJ) and that reviewer was creeped out by mourning pieces. His description of them as “eerily premonitory of Edward Gorey” is supposed to be negative, I suppose, but I think it’s a ringing endorsement. The one pictured on the right, embroidered and painted on silk by Betsey Clarke, at Miss Patten’s School, Hartford, CT, ca. 1809, is one of the ones that didn’t sell. I find it gloriously Gorey-esque.

Sotheby’s press release declares the Mary Antrim sale established a new record sale price for a needlework sampler at auction. It’s not the greatest sale price ever garnered by a young woman’s embroidery, though, so either they made a mistake or they’re defining needlework sampler in a way I don’t understand. The most expensive sampler ever sold is View of Boston Common by Hannah Otis (1732-1801), stitched around 1750. It’s a huge piece, meant for display over a chimney mantelpiece, embroidered in wool and silk on linen canvas. It was purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Sotheby’s in 1996 for a record $1,157,500.

Its historical subject matter drove the price. It captures the Boston Common during the colonial era, complete with British flag flying over the Block House (destroyed in 1761) on the left, the actual beacon on Beacon Hill, and in the middle the Thomas Hancock house with a wealthy young man on his horse accompanied by a black groom in front of it. Thomas Hancock was the father of John Hancock, he of massive signature fame. The young man on the horse could well be John Hancock himself, and the couple on the left his mother and father.

Hannah Otis is closely linked to the American Revolution and American history in general. She was born in 1732, the daughter of Colonel James Otis and Mary Allyne Otis. Her mother was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Edward Doty. Her father was a judge and representative to the Massachusetts legislature. He was a fervent anti-royalist as was his son, James Otis, Jr., who introduced the phrase “Taxation without representation is tyranny” during the Stamp Act debates. Hannah’s older sister Mercy Otis Warren was a poet, playwright and historian who published numerous pro-Revolution writings and corresponded with the luminaries of the American Revolution like John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams.

The sampler remained in the Otis family until the 1996 sale. It had been on loan at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for over 40 years when the family decided reluctantly that they had to sell it.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was determined to buy the needlework, which was consigned to Sotheby’s by Martha Gray Otis (b. 1943) and her brother, Samuel Allyne Otis (b. 1940), who felt they could not afford to give it to the museum. “We are happy to have the museum have it; we hated to take it away from them,” said Martha Otis after the sale. “My greatest joy, besides being out of debt, is that the Boston museum has it.”

It was estate planning that drove the Otises to sell the needlework. “We are not wealthy enough to own it and pay inheritance taxes, and now by the time we pay the capital gains tax, we are not talking about a fortune divided between the eight of us,” Martha Otis continued. “I think Hannah Otis, who struggled to support herself, taking in borders and running a shop, would be pleased to know that the monies from the sale of her needlework will give my children and my brother Sam’s children a boost when they need it.”

Oxford University professor and Voltaire scholar Nicholas Cronk has uncovered 14 previously unknown letters by Voltaire written during his almost-three-year exile in England. Professor Cronk, director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation, found the letters while doing archival research in US libraries. Paul LeClerc, former president of the New York Public Library and a Voltaire scholar in his own right, asked Cronk to examine 11 letters by the French Enlightenment satirist they had recently purchased. Cronk found an additional two in the Morgan Library and Museum and one in the Columbia University library.

These letters shed new light on Voltaire’s time in England, confirming that he did indeed receive an impressive £200 pension from Robert Walpole’s government, a fact long debated by scholars, and underscoring Voltaire’s remarkable success at climbing the British social and literary ladder in a short period of time. He had arrived in England in 1726 a penniless poet and playwright with a knack for irritating the monarchy and aristocracy of France with his biting satire. He didn’t speak a word of English, and all he had to smooth his way was a letter of recommendation from the British ambassador to Paris. He learned fluent English in six months and was corresponding with royalty before a year had passed.

Professor Cronk said: “Voltaire spent two important but relatively undocumented years in England in his early thirties at a time when he was best known as a poet – he arrived with only a recommendation from the British Ambassador to Paris. While here, he was exposed to ideas of English writers and later took empiricism back to the Continent where it became the basis for the Enlightenment. These newly-discovered letters are therefore very interesting because they show how Voltaire’s close interaction with the English aristocracy exposed him to Enlightenment ideas and help us to piece together the nature of those interactions.”

One letter is from Voltaire to Lord Bathurst, a patron of the arts who often hosted great English thinkers at his manor, Richings, including Alexander Pope who wrote much of his translation of Homer there. In this letter Voltaire thanks Bathurst for “the freedom of your house and the many liberties I enjoyed in that fine library.” “This shows us one way in which Voltaire would have been exposed to so much of Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Swift, Pope and others – both by reading their books in the library at Richings and perhaps even by meeting contemporary English thinkers,” Professor Cronk explained.

Shortly after his arrival, in June of 1727, King George I died and his son assumed the throne as King George II. This was a fortunate changing of the guard for Voltaire, because the new king’s wife Queen Caroline was a strong supporter of the arts with a particular love of poetry. Grabbing the social climbing bull by the horns, Voltaire published an English translation of La Henriade, his 1723 epic poem about French King Henri IV, dedicating it to Queen Caroline. The poem sold well and solidified his patronage at the highest levels of British society.

Queen Caroline was a political ally of Sir Robert Walpole and may have played a part in securing Voltaire that £200 grant. One of the most notable of the newly discovered letters was written by Voltaire to the Treasury confirming receipt of the money. He signs it “Francis Voltaire,” a unique autograph that combines an anglicized version of his first name François with his famous pseudonym.

His time in England introduced him to ideas that he would advocate for the rest of his life, including freedom of speech, religious tolerance and constitutional monarchy. After his return to France in 1729, he would praise those ideals in his Letters Concerning the English Nation, a collection of essays published first in English in 1733 and then in French a year later. The French publication caused a scandal, getting the publisher sent to the Bastille and forcing Voltaire to flee yet again.

The 14 letters have been scanned, digitized and uploaded to Oxford’s Bodleian Library’s Electronic Enlightenment website, a treasure trove of correspondence from over 6,000 writers, philosophers, and political leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries. In collaboration with Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation, Electronic Enlightenment is working on digitizing the definitive complete collection of Voltaire’s writings.

It’s subscription only, I’m sad to say, but if you have access to an institutional login, you can view the Voltaire letters here.

On January 3rd, two vicious brutes broke into a retired vicar’s house in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, beat him up and tied him to a chair, then stole the most valuable pieces from his collection of paintings and antique furniture as selected by a knowledgeable accomplice via iPhone. Before leaving they destroyed the rest of the art and antiques with a hatchet.

Authorities are keeping mum on the details while the investigation is ongoing — the vicar’s name is not being released because he is terrified of drawing attention to himself — but we know that among the stolen pieces are paintings by 18th-century Venetian master Canaletto. The total value of the stolen works is well into the millions of dollars. No word on what the rest of the vicar’s collection was worth before they took a hatchet to it, but he’s been an avid collector and a fixture at auctions for decades.

A source said: “This robbery was well-planned and ruthlessly executed. They had possibly been watching the house for months, watching the major art sales where the victim was well known.[...]

The Irish Daily Mirror understands the two men worked with a third party to assist them with the robbery. A source said: “They were on the phone to someone outside the house and from what I understand they used a hi-tech phone to show the third party which pieces were in the house.

They wanted to know which were most valuable because those are the ones that were stolen. There was a lot taken, an awful lot.

“This was a horrendous experience for the victim and it was carefully planned and executed.”

The thieves also stole the victim’s contact books which had personal information about a number of other high end art collectors, including scions of the Guinness family and Edward Haughey, Baron Ballyedmond, the richest man in Northern Ireland. All the people in the book have been alerted to the theft and advised to increase their security.

Two similar thefts took place in the same county two years ago. The Police Service of Northern Ireland and Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Siochana, are investigating any connection between the crimes.

Archaeologists excavating a Croatian cave overlooking the Adriatic Sea have discovered what they believe is the oldest astrologer’s board ever found. They were digging at the entrance to the cave in 1999 when one of the researchers’ girlfriends burrowed her way through debris into the cavern. She discovered a 33-foot-long passageway leading to a chamber that had been sealed off in antiquity, probably in the first century B.C. during a war against invading Romans. Inside were thousands of pieces of pottery, ivory, and bones around a stalagmite shaped like a phallus.

It took several seasons to excavate the cave. The floor of the cave and all the artifacts were caked in thick, sticky cave clay making them a challenge to dig out and to clean. Once excavated, researchers spent years piecing together the fragments of what turned out to be high quality Hellenistic drinking vessels from the 3rd and 2nd century B.C. The tiny fragments of ivory turned out to be pieces of a Greco-Roman astrology board, beautifully carved with the signs of the zodiac.

Radiocarbon dating of the ivory indicates the ivory is 2,200 years old, which is just around the time that astrology, originally a Babylonian discipline, became popular under the reign of the Ptolemys in Egypt. It’s the Greco-Egyptian version of astrology that established itself in Europe and that is still in popular use today.

An ancient astrologer, trying to determine a person’s horoscope, could have used the board to show the position of the planets, sun and moon at the time the person was born.

“What he would show the client would be where each planet is, where the sun is, where the moon is and what are the points on the zodiac that were rising and setting on the horizon at the moment of birth,” said Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

“This is probably older than any other known example,” Jones said. “It’s also older than any of the written-down horoscopes that we have from the Greco-Roman world,” he said, adding, “we have a lot of horoscopes that are written down as a kind of document on papyrus or on a wall but none of them as old as this.”

We can’t trace where the ivory came from, but Egypt is certainly a viable candidate. Ivory was a precious material, so once harvested from its elephantine owner it could have been hoarded for years, maybe as long as a century, before it was carved. The board was made by carving ivory plaques in a 28-degree arc with a sign of the zodiac on the face. The plaques were then attached to a flat surface, probably a wood board.

The Cancer plaque is the most complete one, with Gemini and Pisces also clearly identifiable. A partially reconstructed plaque shows the back of an animal that could be Sagittarius’ horse’s ass. The rest of the plaques are too fragmentary to identify.

Researchers aren’t sure how and why these valuable Hellenistic artifacts found themselves smashed around a stalagmite in an Illyrian cave. The location, overlooking the Adriatic, was a well-traveled commercial route. Illyrians, who the Greeks thought of as somewhat barbarous, could have traded for the goods or pirated them and then brought them to the cave for religious purposes.

According to Stašo Forenbaher, a researcher with the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb whose former girlfriend (now wife) tunneled her way into the sealed-off chamber in 1999, the broken artifacts around the stalagmite suggest the chamber was a sacred space which the locals used to sacrifice to a deity.

“There is definitely a possibility that this astrologer’s board showed up as an offering together with other special things that were either bought or plundered from a passing ship,” Forenbaher said. He pointed out that the drinking vessels found in the cave were carefully chosen. They were foreign-made, and only a few examples of cruder amphora storage vessels were found with them.

“It almost seems that somebody was bringing out wine there, pouring it and then tossing the amphora away because they [the amphora] were not good enough for the gods, they were not good enough to be deposited in the sanctuary,” Forenbaher said.

The Illyrians might not even have known what the astrologer’s board was for, but recognizing it as a valuable and beautiful object they sacrificed it anyway.

In 2000, a group of archaeologists and volunteers discovered some Iron Age pottery outside the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire, central England. A metal detectorist followed up in the area and found gold and silver coins. Further excavation revealed they had found one of the most important Iron Age sites in Britain, complete with 333 Roman coins, 5,296 British-made silver and gold coins, jewelry, ingots, thousands of pig bones, complete skeletons of three dogs and the pièce de résistance: an elaborately decorated Roman cavalry parade helmet that was buried around 43 A.D., the year of Claudius’ invasion of Britain.

The discoveries indicate that the site was a major Iron Age hilltop ritual enclosure, an important religious center for the local inhabitants, primarily the Corieltavi tribe. The pig bones were buried at various times during the 30s A.D., some of them remains of huge feasts while others were buried with the joints intact as a sacrifice to the gods. Because of the careful placement of the dogs’ remains, archaeologists believe the dogs were intentionally killed and buried to guard the shrine.

The valuables buried underscore the importance of the site. The hoard of Iron Age British coins is the largest ever found in Britain, comprising almost 10 percent of all extant British Iron Age coins. Among the 333 Roman coins found was the oldest Roman coin ever found in Britain: a silver denarius dating to around 211 B.C. It was buried by the Corieltavi in the 40s or 50s A.D. The images of Roma on the obverse and the Dioscuri (the twins Castor and Pollux) on the reverse are extremely worn, meaning that that denarius traveled far and wide for about 250 years before being put to rest in Leicestershire’s loam.

Then there’s the helmet. It was found in thousands of pieces, the metal so corroded archaeologists joked that they’d found a “rusty bucket” this time. The pieces were embedded in the mud; archaeologists had to remove the whole block of soil encased in plaster of Paris to get it to the conservation lab. There they discovered the rusty bucket was a silver-gilt iron cavalry parade helmet, the cheekpiece decorated with the figure of an emperor trampling a barbarian under the hooves of his horse while a winged victory holds a laurel wreath over his head.

It’s one of a very few Roman cavalry helmets ever found in Britain and one of the earliest. It’s also the only Roman helmet found in Britain with most of the silver plating surviving, even though it’s too corroded to shine anymore. This would have been owned by a cavalry officer of high status. There’s speculation that it could even have belonged to a Briton in the Roman army who buried it as a sacrifice, although of course there’s no way to know who owned it, who buried it and why.

A Heritage Lottery grant allowed British Museum conservators to piece it back together like a 3D puzzle. It took them ten years.

Metals conservation expert Marilyn Hockey began unearthing the fragments “out of a big lump of soil” at the British Museum three years ago.

She said: “Working our way down this enormous lump of clay, we discovered at the bottom some amazing finds … the Emperor cheek piece told us it was something really special. To get something straight out of the soil like this is like gold. You can find out so much from it.”

Jeremy Hill, head of research at the British Museum, said his “mouth dropped” when he saw the object pieced back together.

He said that the helmet had helped “change our understanding of what Britain was like just before the Roman conquest”.

He said: “Every book on the Roman conquest of Britain is going to have a picture of that helmet in it now.”

Next up for the Hallaton Helmet is permanent display at the Harborough Museum, just nine miles from where it was discovered, along with many other pieces of the Hallaton Treasure. For more details about the finds and tons more pictures, please see the Leicestershire County Council website. There’s video of the restored helmet here. For more about the conservation, see the British Museum blog.

A group of amateur archaeologists working under the guidance of professional archaeologists discovered eight 6th century gold coins in a potato field near Biesenbrow in Uckermark, northeast Germany, last November. The treasure is composed of seven Byzantine solidi and an extremely rare coin bearing an image of the Merovingian King Theudebert I (reigned 533-548 A.D.). The coins are thin and bent, weighing around 4.4 grams each. The standard weight of solidi was 4.5 grams, so despite their bent and curled appearance, they’ve managed to stay remarkably intact.

The area has had a reputation for buried treasure ever since 200 coins from Rome and Constantinople were discovered there in the 19th century, the first appearing in 1851. Four of them are now in the Numismatic Collection of the State Museums of Berlin. Some of the lesser coins were given away, and the rest of the gold coins were all melted down by the farmer who owned the property. The find wasn’t well documented at the time. Biesenbrow village teacher W. Dalichow (we don’t even know his first name) wrote an account of the find in 1885 for the Brandenburg Provincial Museum in Berlin, but historians have questioned Dalichow’s accuracy.

Color him vindicated, because it was from Dalichow’s correspondence that archaeologists were able to figure out which potato field to search. In a letter, Dalichow mentioned the name of the farmer who found the coins and from there historians were able to figure out where that farm once was. Archaeologist Felix Biermann pinned down an area of 400 by 800 meters (1312 feet by 2625 feet) as the likeliest spot. He took a group of volunteers with metal detectors who had been trained in excavation work, and it was one of them who saw the first glint of gold just four inches underground. A retired actor and teacher found the King Theudebert coin.

The discovery is of major historical significance. The coins themselves, first of all, are rare and valuable. By the 6th century, only the Byzantine Roman emperor had the right to strike gold coins with his face on them. It was against the law to use them outside of the Byzantine empire. All taxes had to be paid in solidi and once collected, the emperor melted them down every year and minted new ones. This ensured that the soft pure gold pieces didn’t get whittled down to chips through heavy circulation. If the coins were taken out of the empire, then they weren’t going to be paid as taxes and the whole imperial system of gold recycling and preservation would falter. Of course the solidi ended up traveling anyway.

How they traveled to the Brandenburg area in around 550 A.D., we do not know. At that time, the area was a wasteland. The Germanic tribes had left the area during the early Migration period (starting in 400 A.D.) while the Slavs had yet to move in. The Frankish Kingdom of Austrasia was on the other side of today’s Germany, covering parts of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. King Theudebert I, grandson of King Clovis, was initially an ally of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I when he attempted to reconquer the Western Empire from the Ostrogoths in 535. Justinian paid Theudebert for his assistance, and then wound up fighting him when the Franks saw the Gothic War as a perfect opportunity to get some prime northern Italian real estate of their own.

Theudebert’s minting of coins with his own image rather than the emperor’s was in keeping with his increasing prominence in Western politics. He was the first Merovingian to issue his own characteristic coinage rather than pay homage to the emperor, and it was a direct insult to Justinian. Theudebert even wore the pearl-bedecked crown of the Byzantine emperor on his coins. Constantinople was concerned that Theudebert would seek to expand his kingdom even beyond Italy at Byzantine expense.

Historians speculate that the entire coin cache — these eight coins are believed to be part of the same treasure that was first uncovered in the 19th century — was buried by Thuringian warriors on the run after losing battles against the Franks.