The History Blog

It’s a rostrum. The Romans used to affix them to the prow of their ship to batter the sides of enemy vessels.

This particular rostrum was found off the coast of Sicily and seems to have been used in the last naval battle of the First Punic War against Carthage. (The first one was the one without Hannibal and his elephants.)

The ram was attached to the bow of a ship that was used in a 241 B.C. skirmish called the Battle of the Egadi Islands, off a body of water that has been a shipping pathway dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. The Romans traveled the waterway on their way to and from North Africa, Royal said.

The Battle of Egadi Islands pitted 200 Roman ships against 100 Carthaginian ships. The battle was one of the last of the first Punic War and led to the Carthaginian’s surrender, Royal said.

I don’t know how the archaeologists made this determination, but it’s a majorly big deal to find a rostrum in the first place (only 4 others are known) and completely unique that it can be traced to a specific battle.

I pictured them shaped like rams heads, thanks to excessive consumption of Hollywood sword-and-sandal cinemascope epics, but instead they’re rather pointy and scary and eminently well-adapted to their function.

So Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree and boldly refuse to cover it up, and it seems like the tales of his abject poverty were equally fictional.

In fact, he lived with his family in a spacious (for the time) 8 room, 1 1/2 story house. The house was demolished in the early 19th c., but archaeologists have found parts of the foundation, chimneys and stone-lined cellars, enough to determine the home’s original size and floorplan.

From sections of foundation stones, the bases of two chimneys and remains of four cellars, the archaeologists determined the dimensions of the main house, a rectangle 53 by 37 feet, not counting the separate kitchen. Other evidence from debris indicated that the house had a clapboard facade and wooden roof shingles.

Mark Wenger, an architectural historian for Ferry Farm, said the house appeared to have had a central hallway with front rooms and back rooms on each side and possibly three rooms upstairs under the slope of the roof. The front rooms faced on the river, which in those days was navigable to large sailing ships.

“It was a very nice gentry house,” Mr. Wenger said, at a time when most people made do with houses of only one or two rooms.

They found some groovy geegaws, too, like a pipe engraved with a Masonic symbol (Washington was a mason, so it might have been his) and wig curlers. He he… Washington put his wigs in curlers.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Emory family settled in Maryland in the 1660’s and pretty much kept every scrap of paper from then until World War II. This huge cache of documents mouldered in the attic of their estate, Poplar Grove, until this spring, when Washington College students began going through them all.

There are all kinds of papers in that attic, everything from sales receipts to letters to posters, including one trashing Martin Van Buren for voting to give every free black man the vote.

“Historians are used to dealing with political records and military documents,” said Adam Goodheart, a history professor at nearby Washington College. “But what they aren’t used to is political letters and military documents kept right alongside bills for laundry or directions for building a washing machine.”

Goodheart is working with state archivists and a crew of four student interns to collect the documents, which were found stuffed into boxes, barrels and peach baskets.

“Look at this: ‘Negro woman, Sarah, about 27 years old, $25,’” Goodheart says, reading from a 19th century inventory. “It was as though this family never threw away a scrap of paper.”

The documents include maps, letters, financial records, political posters, even a lock of hair from a letter dated Valentine’s Day, 1801. There’s a love poem from the 1830s (in which a young man graphically tells his sweetheart what he’d do if he sneaked into her room on a winter’s night), along with war accounts and bills of sale from slaves and crops.

The Civil War era documents illustrate the sad veracity of the brother-against-brother cliché. One son fought for the Union, the other for the Confederacy.

You can follow the researchers as they delve into this hoard of social history on their blog. They’ve just unveiled a War of 1812 roster in perfect condition from a week after the British torched the White House.

Two years ago, a diver came across a huge field of 500 amphorae on the seabed, still arranged in the shape of a hull off the southern coast of Cyprus.

The authorities kept the find quiet to protect it from looters and the ship itself along with an estimated 300 other amphorae buried in the sand has yet to be excavated, but an international collaboration of scientists and archaeologists have now examined some of the vessels and found evidence of all kinds of goodies, like herb-infused olive oil and retsina wine.

There is little doubt the first amphora contained the herb-infused olive oil, which was likely used to dress and flavor meals. The scientists suspect the potent antioxidant properties of oregano helped to preserve the mixture over the millennia.

As for the second amphora, its DNA signature matched a plant from the Pistacia genus. That points to either pistachio nuts or mastic (scientific name Pistacia lentiscus).

Foley said the ancient Greeks were known to have shipped huge containers of nuts. One third-century B.C. wreck, in fact, contained jar after jar of them. But since the design of this particular amphora was most associated with wine shipments, mastic-flavored wine is the more likely choice.

This is a major discovery, the first time DNA has been extracted from a shipwreck.

“This (study) opens new possibilities for archaeologists — now perhaps we can figure out what was carried in almost every ‘empty’ jar we find in land excavations or shipwrecks,” researcher Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told Discovery News.

“Maybe we can even go back to the amphorae, jars and cooking pots previously excavated and now sitting in museum storerooms around the world and ask new questions of each artifact,” he added.

So cool. I hope this starts a run of DNA testing on ancient vessels.

The 22-gun British warship HMS Ontario sank during a storm on Lake Ontario in 1780, and divers have been looking for her ever since. Now they’ve found her, and she’s apparently in great shape.

“Usually when ships go down in big storms, they get beat up quite a bit,” Mr. Scoville said. “They don’t sink nice and square. This went down in a huge storm, and it still managed to stay intact. There are even two windows that aren’t broken. Just going down, the pressure difference, can break the windows. It’s a beautiful ship.”

Mr. Smith, who was shown underwater video of the discovery, said, “If it wasn’t for the zebra mussels, she looks like she only sunk last week.”

The dark, cold water acts as a perfect preservative, Mr. Smith said. At that depth, there is no light and no oxygen to hasten decomposition, and little marine life to feed on the wood.

They’re not releasing the location to keep her safe from looters, and she won’t be raised. She was carrying 130 British troops when she went down, so the site is a de facto war cemetary.

The British colony on the Avalon peninsula in Newfoundland was founded by Lord Baltimore in 1621. Six years later, someone dropped a 22-karat gold Scottish coin. Almost four hundred years later, archaeologists found it in the stone footing of a house.

The “Sword and Sceptre” coin dated 1601 was issued during the reign of King James VI of Scotland, two years before he ascended the throne of England as King James I.

It features the crowned arms of Scotland (rampant lion) on the obverse, surrounded by the Latin inscription, “James VI, by the Grace of God, King of Scots.” The reverse features a crossed sword and sceptre, flanked by two thistles — all below a crown. The reverse Latin legend reads, “The safety of the people is the supreme law.” “It’s probably the most unusual and valuable thing from this early period (ever found). I don’t know of any other (complete) gold coins from any other land archeological sites in eastern North America or Canada,” said Tuck, who has been excavating the site of the colony since the early 1990s. “Those underwater guys are always finding them by the bushel from ships and stuff.”

That’s funneh.

Interdisciplinary envy aside, I didn’t realize gold coins were such a rare find in North America. It makes sense, though, considering that Britain colonized the land at least in part to establish a solid launching point for piracy again Spanish treasure ships from Central and South America, and all that gold went to the motherland.

The authorities found it because looters starting digging it up hoping to score fancy funerary artifacts, but it’s not that kind of necropolis.

In fact, the very reason looters would find this burial ground useless is what makes it so special a find: it’s full of labourers who bear the marks of a lifetime of hard work on their bones, not the rich people one usually finds in Roman necropolises.

Not that the deceased weren’t buried with stuff for the afterlife because they were. The children’s tombs held necklaces of figurines and amber chunks (want!), bronze rings, gold earrings. They’re just not the big ticket items the antiquities trade craves.

Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male, and many of them showed signs of years of heavy work: joint and tendon inflammation, compressed vertebrae, hernias and spinal problems, archaeologists said. Sandy sediment helped preserve the remains well.

Judging by the condition of the skeletons, archaeologists concluded that the men likely carried loads on their backs at a nearby port during the early years of Imperial Rome, said Gabriella Gatto, a spokeswoman for the archaeology office.

Many ailments “seem to hark back to work as laborers, in transport and carrying of heavy loads, in an especially humid environment, circumstances that makes one think of the burial of individuals who worked in port areas of the city,” the office said in a statement.

One of the skeletons was of a 30-year-old man whose upper and lower jaw bones were fused together. Apparently his family cared for him for 30 years feeding him a liquid diet via a hole in his teeth.

That’s a major find. Romans were not keen on birth defects. It would have been perfectly acceptable, even expected, for the infant to have been thrown off the Tarpeian rock.

Arthur Sackler donated a huge collection of 3000 or so Asian antiquities to Columbia University in 1970. Out of that group, 22 particularly notable Chinese stone sculptures ended up uninventoried and unloved in the basement until collector and Columbia donor Leopold Swergold was allowed access.

The display includes steles, Buddha heads, standing bodhisattvas, tomb doors, a large section of a mortuary bed and smaller icons. Their startling diversity makes the show feel much bigger than it is, and it reflects the unstable, culturally up-for-grabs phase of China’s history from the fall of the Han Dynasty in the early third century to the rise of the Tang in the early seventh century, sometimes likened to the Middle Ages in Europe.

Over those four centuries China was especially porous. Nomadic peoples from Inner Mongolia took turns invading and setting up kingdoms, sometimes being absorbed by local populations and sometimes being repulsed. Buddhism and its artistic styles, traveling along the Silk Road with monks from India and Central Asia, were part of that flux. The thirst for stone images of Buddha and bodhisattvas gave stone sculpture a boost, as did Indian traditions of carving figures and entire temples out of walls and caves of living rock.

You can get a sense of the range of sculptural styles and techniques from the pieces on exhibit. They testify to the cultural changes of the period.

A 6th c. Northern Wei dynasty funerary stele is a glorious mixture of Buddhism, ancestor worship, dragons and images of partying in the afterlife. An Eastern Wei votive stele made just a few decades after that is all about the Buddha, indicating a major religious shift in a short period of time.

The sculptures are now on display at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery at Columbia University through June 21.

A gravedigger in the Shetland town of Cunningsburgh during the course of his duties discovered a Pictish stone engraved with symbols and dating back to 700 A.D.

Not only is it extremely cool-looking, but it turns out to be a witness to a crucial period in Shetland history.

The 18×11 inch sandstone slab, which is broken from a bigger stone, is inscribed with symbols on one side.

Most striking are two discs with crosses, which are connected together with a band and crossed over by a Z-shaped figure with ornate terminals.

The motifs on the latest stone are known by archaeologists as “double-disc and Z-rod”, one of the commonest motifs.

Double-discs often have circles within them, and sometimes spirals, but this is the only one with crosses.

If this is a Christian cross it indicates a mixed belief between the Picts’ indigenous religion, and their new Christian faith.

The Vikings invaded Shetland starting in the late 8th century, so this stone was carved less than a hundred years before Norse culture began to dominate, which it would do quite thoroughly until the Scots, using a clever pawnshop maneuver rather than a boring old war, snagged Shetland back from the Danes in 1469.

The Pictish symbols carved on the stone would have been illegible within a couple of hundred years, and so they remain.

It’s quite clever design, really. They drank out of the broad side once they grew up, so why not out of the small end as babies?

It’s like a natural funnel (that just happens to resemble those ear trumpets old Victorian gentlemen used).

Here the archeologists found wooden feeding devices made of cow horns. The Slavs used to attach leather sacks with milk to the broad ends of hollow horns and their babies would suck the milk through holes in the narrow part of horns.

How can a wooden feeding device be made of cow horns, you ask? Best not delve. Sometimes the press release translations can get a little wacky.

No preliminary dating of the find yet, but I’m going to front like I know what I’m saying and guess that it’s medieval. Veliky Novgorod was big in the middle ages.