Month: July 2009

Harry Patch, the last Tommy, dies at 111

Modern(ish)

Harry Patch was a machine-gunner in the Duke of Cornwalls’s Light Infantry, conscripted into military service when he was 18 years old. He died yesterday in his sleep.

He was known as “the last Tommy” because he was last British veteran of the trenches of World War I.

“Tommy” was the nickname for the common British infantryman, immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Tommy”.

Harry Patch fought at Passchendaele, the third battle at Ypres, Belgium, in 1917. 70,000 British troops died in that battle. He never spoke of his wartime experiences until he was 100 years old, believe it or not, when he was interviewed for a documentary.

He grew up in Coombe Down, near Bath, left school at 15 and trained as a plumber. He was 16 when war broke out and reached 18 just as conscription was being introduced. He joined the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.

“I knew what it was going to be like: dirty, filthy, insanitary,” he said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

He was removed from the front line on September 22 1917, after being injured in an artillery bombardment which killed his friends.

Mr Patch recalled: “I can remember the shell bursting. I saw the flash, I must have passed out. The next thing I could remember was the dressing station. A wound in my groin. The nurse painted something around it to stop the lice getting at it. I was given a good hot bath. The lice came off – you could pick them up with a shovel – bloody things.”

Mr. Patch didn’t truck much with the glorious war narrative, needless to say. RIP, brother.

This leaves only one remaining British veteran of WWI. Claude Choules is a Royal Navy vet now living in Australia. During World War I, he served on the battleship HMS Revenge and was witness both to the surrender of the German Imperial Navy in 1918 and to its scuttling by its German commander, Admiral Ludwig von Reutera, a few months later.

Is Berlusconi flouting antiquities laws?

Ancient, Modern(ish), Social policy

In case you haven’t been following the latest from the Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi has become embroiled in yet another sex scandal, this one involving transcripts and recordings of his alleged conversations with an escort, one Patrizia D’Addario.

Among the usual disquisitions on how his astonishingly manly stamina is a family trait, the importance of the escort masturbating frequently and the many fine features of his Sardinian estate, Villa Certosa, there’s this tidbit (translation mine):

SB: Here’s another lake.
PD: With swans?
SB: Yes
PD: … with swans.
SB: Yes, but we take them out later because we want to have clean water to swim in.
SB: This is a fossilized whale.
SB: Under here were found 30 Phoenician tombs from 300 before Christ.
SB: Here, see, these here are the meteorites. These are the gifts … see these here I went to India… this is the labyrinth… What did I tell you?

Hold up, what was that bit about the Phoenician necropolis again? Because by Italian law anybody who finds ancient remains on private property has to report it and allow the state to excavate. There is no record of Berlusconi having done that.

Naturally his lawyer denies everything, and it certainly would be a highly unusual find. Phoenician tombs are rare. Finding 30 in one place, especially in an area where no evidence of a settlement has ever been found, is unheard of.

Oddly, there is a small local newspaper story from 2005 that describes that same lawyer showing functionaries from the archaeological superintendence and some art squad carabinieri antiquities found on the property, namely some pottery and traces of a small necropolis from the third century AD.

Neither the lawyer nor the Sardinian authorities claim any knowledge of this today.

So far Berlusconi has blown off the various would-be sex scandals that have proliferated since his wife filed for divorce, but this antiquities angle may turn out to be something he can’t actually duck so easily. MPs on both sides of the aisle are calling for an explanation and/or an investigation.

Not reporting archaeological finds carries a possible 12 month prison sentence. They aren’t joking around.

On a side note, a fossilized whale? Parties packed with hookers, barely legal wannabe models and naked politicians may well turn out to be the most normal things about Villa Certosa.

Five Roman shipwrecks!

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

Maritime archaeologists of the Aurora Trust have discovered no fewer than 5 ancient Roman shipwrecks lying in the deep Tyrrhenian waters off the west coast of Italy, near the island of Ventotene.

The ships were probably heading for the island to find a safe harbor in the storm, but obviously the storm got them first and sank them within this relatively small area.

The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years, the researchers said on Thursday. […]

The vessels were transporting wine from Italy, prized fish sauce from Spain and north Africa, and a mysterious cargo of metal ingots from Italy, possibly to be used in the construction of statues or weaponry.

Gambin said the wrecks revealed a pattern of trade in the empire: at first Rome exported its produce to its expanding provinces, but gradually it began to import from them more and more of the things it once produced.

Aurora has some great pictures and footage of the wrecks on their website.

Here’s a neat comparison. The following are captures from Site 5, which is a well-preserved ship carrying North African amphorae of garum from the 5th century AD. On the left is the sonar image, the right the camera closeup.

Modern human suspect in Neanderthal murder

Ancient, Multimedia

Shanidar 3 was a 40-50 year old Neanderthal male, most likely felled by a deep blow to his left ninth rib somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago.

A variety of things might have caused this ultimately lethal wound, but researchers think the best candidate is a projectile weapon such as the ones crafted by the Homo sapiens of the time.

Churchill and his colleagues examined Shanidar 3, one of nine Neanderthals discovered between 1953 and 1960 in a cave in northeastern Iraq’s Zagros Mountains. The team also ran experiments with a specially calibrated crossbow, which they used to deliver stone-pointed spears with different forces to simulate a thrusting spear and a long-range projectile weapon like a dart. […]

Then, the researchers compared the wounds created by the different scenarios, finding the thrusting spears did lots of damage, breaking multiple ribs.

“With the projectile weapon, even though it’s traveling faster, it’s a lot lighter and it tends to make distinct cut marks in the bones without injuring surrounding bones. That’s like what we saw in Shanidar 3,” Churchill said.

Neanderthals had spears but only the thrusting varietal, not the throwing ones, so it seems likely that the spear which inflicted the fatal wound was thrown by a modern human.

Modern humans used spear throwers, detachable handles that connected with darts and spears to effectively lengthen a hurler’s arm and give the missiles a power boost.

Shanidar 3 didn’t die immediately. The wound shows evidence of some healing, so he probably died several weeks after from infection.

1500-year-old Silla armor unconvered in Korea

Ancient, Treasures

The Silla dynasty was one of three to rule Korea during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC to 668 AD). Murals have been found showing cavalrymen with intricate armor on both horse and rider, but until now, that was all the evidence we had of Silla warriors.

Archaeologists excavating the Silla tombs of the Jjoksaem District of Gyeongju (the onetime capital of the Silla Kingdom), have unconvered an astonishingly complete set of armor, scale for the human and barding for the horse, dating between the 4th and 6th centuries AD.

Scale armor is made of hundreds of small, intricately connected metal pieces. Compared to ordinary metal armor, scale armor makes it a lot easier for warriors to move, significantly enhancing the mobility of the entire army.

Murals from the era show that scale armor was used during the Three Kingdoms period, but without any hard evidence, Korean archaeologists have only been able to guess at what the armor might have looked like.

“Scale armor is known to have been used in other countries like China, but in Korea it only existed in rock paintings that we haven’t seen in person,” Lee of the Cultural Heritage Administration said.

Silla burial customs seem to have played a major part in the dispersal of their remains. After burial, a person’s belongings were left outside the tomb for people to take, so finding a buried set of armor is unprecedented.

This burial had a coffin where the body was interred (no remains of the body were found) and a box containing the decedent’s belongings. The armor was found in the coffin, laid out flat underneath the body.

The barding was on the bottom, neck and chest armor first, then the flank and hindquarters armor. On top of that was the scale armor.

You can see how it looks flattened out in the picture on the left. The mural on the right shows it in action.