The History Blog

Archaeologists excavating what was once the central market in ancient Aigai, the capital of Macedonia in Philip II and Alexander the Great’s day, have uncovered an odd marvel.

When the digger first came across the large copper vat, he thought it was some old landmine. Upon further inspection, archaeologists found a gold jar inside containing a gold wreath and human bones.

You don’t come across gold wreaths every day. Only aristocrats and nobles were buried with them, but they were buried in, you know, cemeteries, not in jars.

That means someone disinterred those bones and the wreath, canned them, and reburied them in the market near the spot where Philip II was assassinated.

“Archeologists must explain why such a group … was found outside the extensive royal cemetery,” the university statement said. “(They must also) work out why the bones of the unknown - but by no means insignificant - person were hidden in the city’s most public and sacred area.”

During the fourth century BC, burials outside organized cemeteries were very uncommon.

Whoever did this did it fairly soon after burial and obviously left behind the big ticket items (the gold wreath and jar), so it definitely wasn’t a looter.

I love a good archaeological mystery.

In 1998 Christie’s auctioned off a pretty portrait of a young woman. Classified as a 19th-century German School work, it sold for a modest $21,850. The art dealer who purchased it sold it to a Swiss collector last year and the new owner did a little digging with the help of a collector friend.

The two collectors took the portrait to Lumiere Technology, a Paris-based company specializing in multispectral digital technology that had already digitized two works by Leonardo: the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and “Lady With an Ermine” at the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland.

“The first time that the owner gave me this drawing he didn’t say a thing; the author was secret,” said Pascal Cotte, Lumiere Technology’s chief technical officer.

Though Mr. Cotte carried out a series of tests on the work for nearly four weeks, he said, it did not take him long to come up with a name. “I went to the owner and said, ‘I have a feeling it’s a drawing by Leonardo,’ and he said, ‘We’re here for just that.’”

In June, Lumiere announced that its examination had led to the authentication of the work as a Leonardo.

Carbon 14-dating tests carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and released this month place the work’s date between 1440 and 1650.

So what crack was Christie’s smoking, you ask? They won’t comment until the painting “has been the subject of comprehensive and conclusive academic and scientific analysis.” Which naturally leads one to wonder what exactly their small army of appraisers did with their time before the portrait went on the block.

Not that the Leonardo authentication is a done deal, mind you. There are some weirdnesses. The painting is on vellum, for instance, and no currently known Leonardo uses that medium. Some experts think the style doesn’t match the master’s.

Even so, the Swiss collector has already gotten an insane number of offers for the piece, including one for $50 million from a Russian buyer, all of which he has turned down.

This time it’s not just pending litigation, but rather a major, major score of almost 3,898 Inca and pre-Inca artifacts returned from the National Institute of Latin American Anthropology and Thinking in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

According to the Peruvian embassy in Buenos Aires, these pieces include valuable ceramics, textiles, metal objects from different pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as a colonial picture, all of which were taken out of the country illegally.

These artifacts are part of an 18,000-piece collection of Peruvian cultural heritage that was illegally taken to Argentina, affirmed the Peruvian embassy.

I can’t find any other information about this collection, the circumstances of its removal from Peru or the legal reasoning behind the return of a fraction of it. I’ll keep digging.

Way back in December I posted about a huge fortune of 17 tons of silver and gold a private treasure hunting firm found on a shipwreck presumed to be the Spanish. Spain is taking the company to court over ownership rights to the salvage.

Now Peru wants in on that.

Peru filed a claim Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tampa to determine where the coins originated, entering the fray over the $500 million loot found on a sunken ship by Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration. Odyssey has been fighting the Spanish government for ownership of the ship and its contents.

Peruvian consumer rights advocates contend the coins were made with Peruvian metals and minted in Lima. When Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes y las Animas sank west of Portugal with more than 200 people on board in 1804, Peru was still a Spanish colony.

Bold move. There isn’t a Spanish gold ship which crossed the Atlantic without Peruvian specie. If they pull this off, Peru will have a claim to billions of dollars worth of discovered and undiscovered treasure.

The legal tangle is immense. I don’t see this being resolved any time soon, or possibly at all. Meanwhile, Odyssey has possession of $500 million worth of gold and silver coins. If they can pop it all into an interest-bearing account somewhere, they’ll be billionaires by the time the case/s is/are decided.

Would you look at this:

That is a pure gold 7th c. cross of Anglo-Saxon manufacture and it was found in a muddy field by yet another British dude with a metal detector.

I swear to God it’s like people just tossed huge loot around for people to find under a few of inches of dirt 1300 years later. And England was a backwoods for centuries! Yet still they score and score. I never hear of a metal detector turning up shit in Rome.

The stunning Anglo Saxon artefact was set with red gemstones and might have originally held a relic such as bone from a Disciple or fragment of the Cross.

Measuring just over an inch long, the 18 carat gold has been decorated with fine detail and is thought to have been worn as a pendant.

It is English made with gold that was probably melted down from Merovingian French coins.

The metal detector fellow actually sounds like he knows what he’s doing. There’s a great passage in the article where he describes his process and the discovery.

I’ve mentioned whole ancient chariots having being found in two entries, but neither times did any source provide a picture, and believe me I looked far and wide.

Well, Bulgarian archaeologists have found a 1900-year-old chariot in a Thracian tomb and for once they’re not being stingy with the archaeoporn, bless their merciful hearts.

Daniela Agre said her team found the four-wheel chariot during excavations near the village of Borisovo, about 180 miles east of Sofia, the capital.

“This is the first time that we have found a completely preserved chariot in Bulgaria,” said Agre, a senior archaeologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

At the funerary mound, the team also discovered table pottery, glass vessels and other gifts for the funeral of a wealthy Thracian aristocrat. In a separate pit, they found skeletons of two riding horses apparently sacrificed during the funeral of the nobleman, along with well-preserved bronze and leather objects, some believed to be harnesses.

It’s actually not the first time a complete chariot has been found in Bulgaria; it’s just the first time one has been found by archaeologists and excavated properly instead of torn out of the earth by looters.

Anyway, it’s hotness, so without further ado, enjoy:

While excavating the site of a future theater, Museum of London archaeologists found what they think are the foundations of one of London’s first theaters.

According to the museum the precise location of the open air playhouse, called The Theatre, were previously unknown. A venture of the travelling player James Burbage, it was one of London’s first dedicated playhouses when it opened in 1576, and it was here that a young William Shakespeare trod the boards as part of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men company of players, and had his first plays performed.

A tenancy dispute led to The Theatre being dismantled and its timbers transported south of the river, where they were used to construct The Globe in 1599.

Needless to say, the Tower Theatre Company, the folks building the new community theater on the site, are just about peeing their pants with excitement over the find.

“The discovery that we shall be building a 21st century playhouse where Shakespeare and Burbage played and where some of Shakespeare’s plays must first have been performed is a huge inspiration.”

“We are delighted that informal discussions with Hackney’s planning officers have been extremely positive. In the run up to submitting a formal planning application we, our architect and structural engineer will all be working with English Heritage and the planning authority to ensure that the design of our building enables the archaeology to be retained in situ.”

Sounds ideal on all counts, then.

The Acadians were the first French people to establish a permanent settlement in North America at the beginning of the 17th c. They happily went about their business, staying neutral even as France and Britain duked it out all over them until 1754 when the British decided to up the ante and demand the Acadians take an oath of allegiance and fight for them.

Not wanting to kill their family members still living under French rule and having a religious problem swearing an oath to the British king anyway, the 10,000+ Acadians in British territory in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island refused and were expelled, their villages burned to the ground.

Now a Qebec archaeologist thinks he may have found La Petite-Rochelle, the last village British Commodore John Byron burned down after the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians.

“We’re pretty confident that we’ve located the village that the Acadians had fled to, to get away from the deportation,” said Michel Goudreau, vice-president of Quebec-based La Société Historique Machault, the organization that sponsored the survey.

“These are the people who did get away, and they’re why we still have an Acadian population in northern New Brunswick.”

Located in Quebec, just across the Restigouche River from Campbellton, N.B., La Petite-Rochelle was a community of about 200 houses, founded after the expulsion of the Acadians, an event that has since become known to history as the Great Upheaval.

The article is a bit unclear on the timeline. I guess Commodore Byron just kept burning even after the expelling was over?

Fun fact: John Byron was the grandpappy of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the famous Romantic poet.

During his daily swim in Palmahim beach, a lifeguard found a marble disc with a hole in the middle and the remains of two painted circles suggesting the pupil of an eye.

It dates from the 4th or 5th c. B.C. and was most likely affixed to one side of the ship along with a companion on the other side.

“We know from drawings on pottery vessels … that this model was very common on the bows of ships and was used to protect them from the evil eye and envy, and was meant as a navigation aid and to act as a pair of eyes which looked ahead and warned of danger,” Sharvit told The Associated Press.

“But we thought the eyes were only on fighting ships, not merchants ships. Only four eyes like these have been discovered in the world,” he added.

It’s like the Argo, Jason’s ship. Remember it had eyes painted on each side of the prow. Or at least I always thought they were painted directly on the wood. Maybe they were painted on marble discs instead.

I don’t know why but I seem to be on a pretty rocks kick lately. Today’s are brought to you by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit of “pietre dure”, literally hard rocks, a decorative inlay technique using semi-precious hardstones like lapis lazuli and alabaster.

The exhibit has been a sleeper hit for the Met, probably on account of the jaw-dropping beauty of the artifacts.

At the show’s heart is the constantly shifting use of stone, especially the flat pietre dure. Sometimes stone is exploited for its own fabulous color and texture, as in the bold geometric tabletops of papal Rome or a Venetian cabinet that is really more a rock-solid architectural model than it is furniture.

Sometimes delicacy prevailed, especially in pictorially inclined Florence. There, the stones’ textures, colors, shadings and inherent light were extensively micromanaged into descriptive schemes that often challenge painting. Examples include the fabulously accurate undergrowth of grape vines, butterflies and birds on a table with Eucharistic symbols, and a tiny austere landscape in which single pieces of lapis and agate form sky and hills. Inlaid details like a white church and green poplars sharpen the implicit spatial recession.

But the sentimental favorite has to be this amazingly realistic painting-like piece of the piazza in which I spent so many happy hours of my wayward youth:

Is that not a stunner? The craftsmanship, the eye for texture and color it takes to even see the possibility of something like this in a collection of rocks, just boggles my mind.