Month: February 2009

Awesome obscure museum alert!

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

The Frank H. McClung Museum is associated with the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and is a fantastic repository of Tennessee history, from building materials (handmade bricks and Tennessee quartzite) to a world-class permanent collection of Native American artifacts excavated in the 30’s before the area was flooded to create reservoirs.

From 1934 to 1942, ten reservoirs were constructed on the Tennessee River and its tributaries, and archaeological work was conducted in nine of them. Hundreds of sites were recorded and excavations exposed over 1.5 million square feet of prehistoric and historic Native American occupations.

The results of these massive investigations, along with subsequent work in other reservoirs such as Nickajack, Tims Ford, Barkley, Melton Hill, and Tellico, are housed at the Frank H. McClung Museum. Millions of artifacts — along with the associated fieldnotes, forms, analysis sheets, drawings, photographs, and correspondence — comprise a research base for southeastern Indian studies of international significance.

A vast collection of millions of ancient Native American artifacts all of which are clearly documented with the documentation available for research is a rare thing in the museum world, needless to say. Maybe unique.

They’ve even digitized the photography collection, so you can see the New Deal at work preserving ancient history.

The permanent collection, Archaeology and the Native Peoples of Tennessee, sounds neatly designed too.

The exhibit occupies 3,200 square feet on the main floor of the Museum. Visitors enter from the lobby through an introductory walkway where a large topographic map of Tennessee reveals through fiberoptic lights the many excavated sites that form the database for the story about to be told. Two short videos explain the science of archaeology and summarize the history of archaeology in the State. […]

Within each of the five cultural areas are exhibit cases and displays that combine artifacts and images to present the changing lifeways of the Native Peoples and address the topics of society, technology, biology, subsistence, trade, ritual and art. Pull-out study drawers permit the visitor to learn more about specific kinds of artifacts, such as projectile points, pipes, pottery, trade beads, and other topics, including plant domestication, mound building, and cave art.

Pull-out study drawers. Ah am een lohve. :love:

I stumbled on this museum because they’re currently hosting what seems to be a gorgeous visiting exhibit called River of Gold: Precolumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte.

The artifacts are the products of the University of Pennsylvania’s excavations of Precolumbian burials at the Sitio Conte site in Panama in the 1940’s.

The exhibition includes 123 exquisite pieces of Precolumbian Panamanian goldwork ca. from A.D. 700-1100—embossed plaques, nose ornaments, gold-sheathed ear rods, pendants cast by the lost-wax method, bells, and beads—as well as polychrome ceramics and objects made of precious and semi-precious stones, whale-tooth ivory, and bone.

Shiny! Also — and here’s the best part — it’s all free. Admittance to the museum and all its exhibits is 100% free and gratis. Makes me want to send them a donation right now.

P.S. – They’ve also digitized their collection of early photography of Egypt. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, that’s where I’ll be.

The Syriac Bible: a media/PR/looting morality play

Ancient, Looting, Medieval, Modern(ish), Treasures

Warning: major teal deer. If you’re looking for my usual quick, fun read, :skull: this ain’t it. :skull:

It’s been all over the (history-related) news this past week: ancient Bible found in Cyprus could be from time of Jesus!!1 The news is big because the Syriac language is a dialect of Aramaic — Jesus’ lingua franca — and therefore a Bible written in it might be extra-specially connected the Man himself.

The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum and loosely strung together, photos provided to Reuters showed. One page carries a drawing of a tree, and another eight lines of Syriac script.

The problem is the only people who think the Bible is anything close to that old are the Turkish Cypriot police who found the Bible along with a bunch of other looted antiquities in Famagusta, Cyprus. I’m sure the Turkish Cypriot police are many great things, but archaeologists-at-a-glance isn’t one of them.

Actual experts think the Bible is likely to be medieval at the earliest, and probably far newer than that.

Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years.

“I’d suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old,” leading expert Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge told Reuters. […]

After further scrutiny of photographs of the book, manuscripts specialist at the University of Cambridge library and Fellow of Wolfson College JF Coakley suggested that the book could have been written a good deal later.

“The Syriac writing seems to be in the East Syriac script with vowel points, and you do not find such manuscripts before about the 15th century.

“On the basis of the one photo…if I’m not mistaken some words at least seem to be in modern Syriac, a language that was not written down until the mid-19th century,” he told Reuters.

Reuters calls that experts being divided over whether the Bible is “an original” or a “fake” but they don’t actually cite any experts who think the book is anything like 2000 years old. All the actual experts they quote are like “um, no”.

Good thinking on the part of the Turkish Cypriot police. You want global wire services to cover your relatively small looting bust? Invent a tenuous connection to Jesus and it’s on.

There’s no provenance on the looted Bible, so you can say it “might be” anything at all. (Another reason scholars of any sort should vocally support anti-looting measures instead of rationalizing their lust for ancient objects.)

Meanwhile, the part of the story I’m most interested in — the looting arrests — gets short shrift. There’s only one decent article on background from the Cyprus Sunday Mail, and I only found that after scouring Google News. The rest of the press and bloggers refer to the Reuters article, which cuts out the intricate Cypriot political aspect entirely.

For example, here’s a snip from the Sunday Mail article:

The bible may have come from the heartland of the Syrian Orthodox community in southeastern Turkey, where a small community remains, despite often being caught in the crossfire between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish military.

“It is very likely to come from the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, where there is still a Syriac speaking community,” Dr Chalotte [sic] Roueche, professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King College, London told Reuters yesterday.

In 1994, the British historian William Dalrymple wrote that the community “could die out within one generation”. However, conditions are reported to have improved in recent years with the Turkish government making efforts to protect religious minorities in the country.

The first and third paragraphs contain rather glaringly pertinent facts. The Reuters quote of Dr. Roueche seems vacuous to me now without that context. They just didn’t want to get into it, preferring the groundless-but-sexy Jesus angle.

Now, look at the rest of what Dr. Roueche said which did not make it into the Reuters article:

“The problem about this description is that a Syriac gospel-book could be from the 4th century, but it could date from several centuries after that, well into the middle ages. Indeed, I think that gospel books may still have been being written in Syriac then. Obviously the smugglers will have wanted to date it as ancient as possible,” Dr Roueche added.

Oh snap! Obviously Reuters is glad to help them in that endeavor.

Other details on the bust courtesy of a tiny local Cypriot newspaper which the giant wire service didn’t care to include in their story: the police arrested 9 people at the Famagusta bus station on a tip that the stolen Bible was about to sold. Two men fled the scene and are still being sought. The nine have been charged with smuggling antiquities, carrying out illegal excavations and possession of explosives.

Well, here. I’ll let Cyprus Mail tell the story, since Simon Bahceli took the time to do some actual reporting.

Police in the north believe that those arrested may have been involved in a wider antiquities smuggling operation after a Christian prayer statue and a carving of Christ were found in the Karpas village home of one of the suspects. Five sticks of dynamite were also found, which police believe were to be used for later excavations by the suspects. […]

The smuggling of antiquities from churches and ancient sites in the north has been an ongoing problem since the division of the island in 1974, but questions are being asked why such a valuable item would have been smuggled into the north from Turkey. Some reports said the bible may have been destined for a buyer in the south of the island.

Three more people have been arrested since then for being in possession of a 145-year-old church bell.

It’s unclear from the article whether they are thought to be in cahoots with the 11 wrong-doers from the Bible raid or whether Cyprus is just bristling with stolen antiquities.

Written in Bone

Museums, Treasures

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is putting on an exhibit of artifacts and bones from the early settlers in the Chesapeake area. Through these remains, you can discover a great deal about how the early colonials and their slaves lived.

The bones on exhibit tell a tale of lives lived and lost.

“Lifelong, backbreaking labor marked the bones of men, women and children who tended fields. Most are nameless now, their stories lost — until we find their remains,” proclaims the greeting for visitors in a section on working life.

For example, consider tailor’s notches and shoemakers femur.

Studying these ancient bones tells the scientists that one lady was a tailor, her front teeth marked by tiny notches from holding pins. Another thigh bone shows its owner was a shoemaker, the bone changed by the pounding of leather and nails into boots braced on the man’s leg.

And those were the good jobs. Damn we have it easy.

A more fancy find was the grave and remains of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold. They determined his identity based on his age, no apparent cause of death and the captain’s accouterments buried with him. Gosnold is the man who named Cape Cod (after the fish) and Martha’s Vineyard (after his daughter) during an expedition to New England in 1602.

They also have a section on 17th c. medicine, including a scary set of doctor’s tools. I love scary medical history. That’s the best kind.

There’s also an overall focus on forensics, on what the remains can tell us, which is very exciting. Most of the time museum exhibits focus on results, not the process. The popularity of investigative procedurals like CSI or my personal favorite, Bones, has brought the background work into the foreground.

Here’s a great albeit brief intro video of Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley examining some of the bones on display.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/So6L3s1tc2E&w=430]

Oliver Cromwell, warts and all

Treasures

An original (or a very early 17 c. copy) of Oliver Cromwell’s plaster death mask is up for auction at Wallis and Wallis auction house East Sussex.

There is no chain of ownership record for the piece (ahem, shadyyyy!), so nobody’s sure if it’s one of the original 6 masks made from Cromwell’s post-mortem mug, or if it’s a copy made very early on from one of the original 6.

Cromwell is credited for coining the phrase “warts and all” when talking to the artist Lely about his portrait of him.

His actual words were: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint your picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughness, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me. Otherwise, I will never pay a farthing for it.”

Ah, Puritan reverse vanity, bless its warty heart.

Of course, we don’t really know that Cromwell said that. The quote comes from Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England published in 1764, over a century after Cromwell’s death in 1658, and it’s a third-hand story of a conversation between the Duke of Buckingham and the Captain William Winde, the architect who designed Buckingham House, now known as Buckingham Palace.

The quote is as related by Winde to the Duke then reported by Walpole, so it could be a complete fiction. It’s certainly plausible, though. Cromwell was one lumpy sumbitch.

Metal detectors strike again

Ancient, Treasures

This time Sussex is the game, and a 1500-year-old Saxon burial is the game. Two metal detectorists with names that sound like late night motel aliases (Bob White and Cliff Smith) have found the graves of 2 women and a man, complete with remarkable artifacts.

The most impressive grave contained the remains of a female, an unusual bronze bowl, gilded brooches and silver belt decorations.

The male was buried with a spear and shield.

The skeletons are off to be dated and studied. Their ultimate destination is a local museum, which makes me wonder if they’re pre-Christian and if so, is Arthur Pendragon on the case yet.

Here’s the only picture of the artifacts I could find. They’re the gilded brooches found in one of the women’s grave.

Apparently Cliff and Bob did an excellent job of respecting the site, and they say they’re not looking for a treasure reward. Assuming that’s true, finger snaps for Cliff and Bob.