The History Blog

That’s a Deadwood reference there in the title. I have nothing against the fine folks of San Jose.

Quite the opposite, in fact, since they’re bucking the trend and turning a parking lot into an archaeological excavation of a turn of the century Chinatown.

Starting on Tuesday, historians, archaeologists and two community members will spend 10 days digging on the block bounded by Jackson, Sixth, Taylor and Seventh streets. Their hope? To find a trove of post-1887 artifacts from the lost community that provided a rare sanctuary amid the anti-Chinese hostility gripping California.

Buried on the site may be evidence of how San Jose’s Chinese population indeed thrived - all thanks to an enigmatic German landowner who risked his livelihood to lend them a home. [...]

In May 1887, when arsonists burned down the Chinatown where the Fairmont San Jose hotel now stands, 71-year-old John Heinlen stepped forward. He ignored angry mobs and fought an attempted injunction by city leaders to offer low-cost leases to build on pastureland he owned. Chinese were barred from owning land.

Chinatown stood on Heinlen’s land until the depression bankrupted him and the banks took over the property. Eventually the buildings were all razed and the city paved the block over with concrete. Until now.

Back 50,000-100,000 years or so ago, when the ice caps had slurped up enough of the oceans to make dry land out of what is now the North Sea, Neanderthals frolicked in a state nature, eating berries and drinking dew drops.

Or else they eked out a living using dozens of flint axes to butcher mammoth.

Academic interest in what are being described as drowned Stone Age hunting grounds is likely to increase dramatically after the discovery of 28 Neanderthal flint axes on the sea bed off the East Anglian coast.

Dating from at least 50,000-60,000 years ago, they were found with other flint artefacts, a large number of mammoth bones, teeth and tusk fragments, and pieces of deer antler. The sea bed location was probably a Neanderthal hunters’ kill site or temporary camp site.

The axes – one of the largest groups ever found – were spotted by a keen-eyed amateur archaeologist when a consignment of North Sea gravel arrived at the Dutch port of Flushing.

Go keen-eyed amateur, go! Hanson, the dredging company, has stopped its activities on the location to give the pros a chance to assess the site.

The possibilities are very exciting indeed. The cold water is an excellent preserver of materials that on land decay or naturally erode or are destroyed by subsequent inhabitants.

Technically, it’s Octavian’s home because he lived in it with Livia in 30 BC, right after his victory over Marc Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, but before he donned the title of Augustus in 27 BC.

It was a modest home in terms of size, but the 4 rooms that have been restored and open to the public are decorated with the most gorgeous frescoes I’ve ever seen.

Some of his interior decoration was found intact when the Italian archaeologist Professor Gianfilippo Carettoni finally broke through to the rooms in the early 1970s.

Other frescoes had to be pieced together from fragments found by a team led by Irene Jacopi, the archaeologist in charge of the Palatine Hill.

The art is so delicate that no more than five visitors at a time will be able to enter the rooms. Nevertheless, they are expected to attract large crowds.

Also notable is the graffiti the builders left behind. They sketched a design for what might have been a floor mosaic and signed their names to it. It’s not often you to find out the names of contractors who worked on a house 2000 years ago.

Some pictures of the frescoes:

Authorities have kept the exact location of Fort Lane undisclosed to keep treasure hunters at bay, but even so archaeologists have found missing artifacts and holes on the site.

“There was a fairly extensive amount of looting,” said Mark Tveskov, an associate professor at SOU and director of the laboratory.

“The value of the fort is in its integrity,” he added. “Our excavations were very limited in scale. We left everything intact.”

Tveskov, who led test digs at the site in a joint effort by the county, SOU and the Southern Oregon Historical Society in 2004-06, noted that artifacts taken out of context render them useless to those looking for clues about the region’s past.

The Oregon Parks and Recreation Commission has agreed to take over the fort and environs, but until the ownership transfer goes through, the sheriff’s department is going to keep an eye on things.

Built in 1853 by the U.S. Army’s First Dragoons based in Benicia, Calif., the short-lived fort represented the Rogue Valley’s only civil authority. It was established shortly after a clash between American Indians and European settlers. It was named in honor of Joseph Lane, Oregon’s first territorial governor, who also led military campaigns against the Indians in 1851 and 1853.

It sounds like it’ll be a great park when all is said done, with something for the history enthusiast, hiker and day-tripper alike.

Rome has only 2 subway lines, and they’re old and crappy and don’t hit many of the most famous locations in the center of town because it’s basically impossible to dig in the historic center without encountering structures of immense archaeological value.

The laws on the subject are strict: the city’s archaeological superintendency decides the fate of any archaeological find.

Most of them remain in place, with the new construction either changing route or going up around the ancient. Some are moved.

Some are even be destroyed, don’t ask me why. They let this Roman villa get split in two by a parking ramp. Go figure.

Anyway, since 2006 so far the subway digs have come across:

• mosaics
• aqueducts
• an ancient arch
• Roman Villas
• the foundations of an imperial Roman public building
• dating back to imperial times,
• parts of a monumental complex built by Augustus’ partner Marcus Agrippa
• Roman taverns near the ancient Forum
• remains of 16th-century palaces
• Roman tombs
• A sixth-century copper factory
• medieval kitchens still stocked with pots and pans

It remains to be seen what becomes of these treasures. The authorities are looking into the planned route to see if it can be made to snake around finds, but it seems to me no matter where they go, they’re going to find other stuff that needs snaking around.

I think they should include them in the build of the subway. Like box them in plexi or something. That would be coolest subway ever. People could get an education just taking the train.

It was found while crews were working to repair a collapsed sewer, to be fair. I don’t know that it was actually in the sewer when discovered.

Anyway, it was made out of copper alloy in the 12th century it’s and is surprisingly well-preserved. Apparently waterlogged land is a good preservative of treasure.

“We found this encrusted buckle which had been folded over, but was obviously something nice,” she said.

“So we brought it back here and carefully unfolded the copper and discovered this most beautifully designed medieval buckle, which we think probably dates back to the 12th Century.

“It’s such a piece of work that it probably belonged to somebody with a bit of money.

“We suggested maybe a merchant in the medieval burgh because of course Perth was quite an important trading post.”

There’s only one extant portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, and that portrait is suspiciously similar to other portraits Haussmann made, so we don’t know how accurate it is.

Thanks to a Scottish anthropologist and her trusty computer program, though, we can now get a whole new picture of what Bach might have looked like.

Working with a cast of the composer’s skull on loan from the Bach Museum in Eisenach, Scottish anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson has created a 3-D representation of the face of a man who died in 1750 at the age of 65.

Wilkinson, a specialist in her field, had developed a computer program that is capable of extrapolating the measurements taken from the subject’s facial bones. She has also used it to identify casualties in the Balkan wars and to reconstruct the face of Pharaoh Ramses II.

“We carried out a laser scan of the skull which allowed us to recreate the musculature and skin of the face on our computer system,” she told reporters. “This is really the most complete face that can be built from the available reliable information.”

So without further ado, say hello to Mr. Bach:

Here’s Haussmann’s portrait for comparison:

They look pretty close to me. Slap a peruke on the computer model and they could be twins, or at least brothers.

There’s an exhibit of them at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art right now, and it looks amazing.

Around the year 500 A.D., an unknown artisan pressed red, white and gray ceramic tiles into drying mortar to form the image of a menorah in a mosaic.

Commissioned by a woman named Juliana at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the design was for a Jewish synagogue in coastal Tunisia.

Over the centuries dry earth covered the ruined synagogue until, more than 1,300 years later, French Army Captain Ernest De Prudhomme dug up his yard in 1883 to make a garden.

Setting aside for the moment the painful cultural pillage which took them from 19th c. Tunisia to 21st c. Brooklyn Museum, 21 of these mosaics on loan now in Boston along with statues, coins, even textiles from various periods in the Roman empire.

I don’t know where else you’d be able to see the mosaic floor of an ancient Roman synagogue, nevermind one from a century after the fall of the Western Empire.

The fall of Rome is a tricky thing, of course. The traditional date for the fall is 476, when Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor, but that’s more of a convenient marker than a dividing line between Empire and non. In North Africa, the decline of Roman economic systems was slow and steady from 400 AD to 700 AD.

As far as Juliana was concered, Rome was still going strong.

Shell middens and rings are the greatest structures that remain from the state’s earliest inhabitants and date back between two to four millennia.

They contain mostly oyster and clam shells but also pottery fragments and animal bones. No one is quite sure whether they began life as temples or mere trash heaps or something in between.

Spanish Mount, a shell midden in South Carolina thousands of years old, is eroding at a precipitous rate. It has lost 8 feet in height in as many years, and has moved back 14 feet in the center and 7 feet on each end over the past 5 years.

They’ve built a wall and walkway to slow the erosion and give people a chance to see the mound up close, and although it has done its job admirably, it’s only postponing the inevitable.

The mound will disappear and soon.

So the question state park archaeologists have to face is do they excavate the midden while it’s still a large depository of valuable information about the pre-history of the area, knowing that by the time they’re through with the dig there will be nothing left, or do they try to preserve it as long as possible, knowing that eventually it will erode into nothingness and much precious knowledge will disappear with it?

For now the question is on hold because they don’t have the budget for an excavation, but sooner rather than later the decision will have to made.

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