The History Blog

Italian police announced today that they’ve broken up a huge looting ring, recovering thousands of artifacts destined to be smuggled to countries including the United States.

During more than a year of investigations, authorities recovered nearly 1,700 statues, vases and other artifacts dating from pre-Roman times to the heyday of the empire. Police flagged 19 people for possible investigation by prosecutors.

The artifacts were mainly dug out from tombs near Naples and Venice and included a bronze bust of the emperor Augustus, customs police in Rome said.

Some pieces were already in the United States. Italian authorities worked with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Connecticut to repatriate 47 6th and 5th centuries B.C. statues that had been looted from a tomb in southern Italy.

This is the second time in two weeks that the ICE has returned artifacts from that period looted from southern Italy. Just last week they returned a Corinthian column krater from 580 to 570 B.C. that had been trafficked by Giacomo Medici (the now-convicted felon who directed the looting and sale of the Euprhonios krater) and wall panel fresco from Pompeii that had been stolen in 1997.

The Corinthian krater, incidentally, was recovered from Christie’s in June. It has first gone on the market at a Sotheby’s auction in 1985. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

Sir Anthony van Dyck’s last self-portrait sold for a record-breaking £8,329,250 ($13,521,704) at a Sotheby’s auction today. Nine bidders drove the price for this rare masterpiece far above the £2-3 million estimate, and far above the previous record of £3.06m for his A Rearing Stallion sold by Christie’s in July of last year.

The winning bid was made by Alfred Bader in partnership with Philip Mould.

Art dealer Philip Mould said buying the portrait was an “opportunity we could not miss”.

Mr Mould added: “This is the most important 17th-Century British portrait to come on the market in the last two decades. It was an opportunity we could not miss.”

Considering that the last time it was on the market was in 1712, I can see his point. It first belonged to artist Sir Peter Lely. In 1712, it was bought by Sir Francis Child, a London banker whose descendant married the 5th Earl of Jersey. The portrait has remained in the Earl of Jersey family ever since.

Van Dyck painted the portrait in London in 1640, just a few months before he died. It’s one of only 3 self-portraits he made in England and it’s a fabulous one. He’s wearing a styling black and white slashed silk doublet and looking over his slashed sleeves at the viewer.

Born in 1599, Van Dyck was something of a child prodigy. His artistic talent was evident at a very early age and he was already studying under a professional artist when he was a mere 10 years old. He started his own studio with fellow child prodigy Jan Brueghel the Younger when he was 15.

He was just 42 when he died.

A University of Washington freshman who was clearing a plot of rocks to plant grapevines found 3-inch tan and red stone spear tip. It was just a foot under ground, so Ellen Van Wyk didn’t think it was all that old, but comparisons with other pieces found in the region suggests the spear point is between 4,000 and 7,000 B.C. years old.

Peter Lape, an associate professor of anthropology and the curator of archaeology at the UW’s Burke Museum, said Van Wyk’s discovery holds significance.

“People find stuff all the time. But that one projectile point is actually pretty unusual. You don’t see a lot of those,” he said. “That style seems very limited to the Lake Union and Lake Washington area. It’s kind of cool; it’s very interesting.”

Seattle has seen a great deal of development in a short period, so it’s rare to find such an ancient artifact within the city limits. It’s been 90 years since an ancient artifacts was found on the UW campus. The last was a fishing net weight and a stone tool found in 1919 near the Fisheries Building, appropriately enough.

After Van Wyk’s find, archaeologists from UW’s Burke Museum dug three more test holes and found 2 more stone fragments. The area has been registered with the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, and Lape and his students have applied to the state for permission to excavate further in the spot.

Construction projects on the site and in other parts of the campus will be put on hold temporarily while archaeological surveys are performed.

The point will likely go on display in the Burke Museum, although a specific date has yet to be set.

Fun fact: this is the second archaeological find by a UW student this year. Megan Webb was scoring a few credits at the UW’s Tel Dor Field School in Israel this summer when she came across the sensational carnelian ring stone engraved with Alexander the Great’s portrait.

In 1998 raging fire devastated the interior of thousand-year-old Saxon church St. Brandon’s in Brancepeth, England. Temperatures reached 1200° Celsius at the height of the conflagration, melting the lead from the roof and virtually vaporizing the beautifully carved wooden interior.

The massive oak beams from the roof were the only remaining wood, and they too were so charred they may or not be datable via dendrochronology (tree ring dating).

Amidst the tragic loss, something wonderful was found: more than a thousand medieval gravestones stored in the walls of the church hundreds of years ago.

Cross slabs are the size of a coffin lid and are engraved with full-size crosses as well as designs indicating the profession or status of the deceased. A housewife is represented by shears, for instance, a priest by a chalice, a knight by a sword, a scholar by a book. Several of St. Brandon’s cross slabs include symbols not found anywhere else, like an intricate 5-point cross.

It was common practice at the time to reuse old stone from elsewhere in the church to reinforce the walls, so many of these cross slabs were used as internal lintels for the clerestory windows.

They weigh up to half a ton each and they date from between 1100 and 1300 A.D. A local historian thinks they might have been intentionally secreted in the clerestory to keep them safe from Puritan reformers.

Jim Merrington, of the Brancepeth History and Archive Group, explained: “After the roof burned off we discovered a ring of cross slabs high up around the perimeter of the clerestory which was built in 1638 by Rector John Cosin, who later became Bishop of Durham. All were neatly placed facing skywards. It is possible that Cosin had them gathered up from the churchyard and secreted them away on the very top course of the building safe from vandals and reformists. It was obviously quite a task to get them up there for no real structural purpose.”

Archaeologist Peter Ryder said the collection of cross slabs was the biggest in the North, and possibly the second largest in the country after a collection at Bakewell, Derbyshire.

Twenty of the cross slabs are now on display on the church walls. Another 40 will be exhibited at nearby Brancepeth Castle.

A Maryland couple renovating their old house found thousands of artifacts when they gutted the kitchen. The house is from the 18th c. and is on the National Register of Historic Places, so they expected to find an old thing or two, but they figured most of the goodies would have long since been stripped in countless preceding renovations over the centuries.

How wrong they were. As soon as the contractors stripped the kitchen to the studs, they started finding an immense wealth of objects.

In the dirt under what used to be the floor were parts of old shoes, part of a pipe, bones from a wild boar and other animals, oyster shells, bells, bottles and many pieces of pottery.

For now, the artifacts, most still covered in a thin layer of dirt, are being held in bins.

Homeowners Brian Lees and Gay Carter Lees called the Archaeological Society of Maryland and archaeologist Mechelle Kerns-Nocerito came running. She mapped out the area and came back with volunteers aplenty to find and catalog all the artifacts they can.

She’s hoping they’ll find artifacts that date all the way back the earliest settlements on Kent Island in the mid-17th century. Little is known about that period, so these finds might fill in all kinds of blanks.

Now the Lees’ kitchen looks like an archaeological dig instead of a home renovation, and they’re pleased as punch about it. Kitchen renovations are stressful enough — what do you do to cook in the interim — and building delays are usually bad news, but the Lees are true history aficionados and as far as they’re concerned, this is both the joy and responsibility of owning a historical property.

Once the archaeological study is done, the space will be sealed and the kitchen renovation can begin anew.

Google Maps has added Pompeii to its street view function!1 That means you can wander its ancient streets as soon as you stop reading this without spending a dime.

Just go to Google Maps, type in Pompeii Italy, then drag the little yellow man icon from the zoom controls onto the street. The ones that are included in street view will turn blue.

I had to hunt around a little to find the ancient city as opposed to the (relatively) modern town. Just look for “Pompeii Scavi” (Pompeii digs) and drag the little man there.

Here’s a shortcut.

And here’s an embed:

View Siti archeologici di Torre Annunziata, Pompei e Boscoreale (NA in a larger map

Isn’t she beeyootiful? Happy visiting!

A large number of Neolithic bones found in a mass grave in what is now Herxheim, Germany, show signs of having been butchered and eaten over the course of several decades. It might have been part of a sacrificial ceremony or ritual reburial.

Artifacts found with the bones date to the Linear Pottery Culture, a western and central European culture from 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

Ongoing work at Herxheim has found signs of cannibalism on the bones of hundreds of other individuals, with only a few exceptions, he adds

The cannibalism is not confirmed, but it’s definitely the top hypothesis right now. It stands out. Before the Herxheim bones, only one previous find in France suggested Neolithic cannibalism, but it was on a far smaller scale. The remains of 6 people looked gnawed upon, not hundreds.

On the other hand, all the lower jaws and skull bases are missing, and that suggests reburial where specific bones were removed ritual purposes. The skin might have been removed and bodies dismembered as a part of the ritual without making a dinner of it.

University of Bordeaux anthropologist Bruno Boulestin thinks there was a major political crisis in European society 7,000 years ago, evidenced by mass murders at three central European sites around that time and abandoned settlements. Herxheim itself was abandoned, in fact.

Chemical analysis will show whether the victims were local or imports. You can tell from the elements in the bones what kind of food people grew up eating. If they were brought to the site, that would support both the cannibalism and the reburial hypotheses, so we not ever know for sure what exactly happened 7,000 years ago.

The Museum of London is putting some Shakespeare-themed shoes on display in its Docklands branch. Punningly named “Treading the Bards“, the exhibit features centuries of footwear donned by actors and written about by Shakespeare.

One pair of Elizabethan slip-on shoes were found on the site of the Rose Theater. Another was once worn by famous actor and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula Sir Henry Irving.

The earliest shoe was preserved in the damp mud of Southwark and is still decorated with pinked zig-zagged patterning – an embellishment common enough that in The Taming of the Shrew it is remarked upon when a servant’s “pumps were all unpink’d i’ the heel.” The pressures on actors at the time are highlighted by the hole at the toe end – deliberately cut to accommodate a painful bunion.

The later shoes were worn by a triumvirate of actors; each considered the greatest thespian of their day. Edmund Kean’s tasselled boots accompanied fiery performances as Richard III in England and America in the early 19th century. Samuel Phelps’ bright red silk boots costumed Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, his final stage performance, in 1878. And Sir Henry Irving’s exquisitely decorative Elizabethan-styled shoes were worn as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in 1882.

Oh hey Shakespeare called shoes “pumps”. I did not know that. Although it would appear he wasn’t talking about the standard closed-toe slip-on heel that I refer to with the word.

Anyway, the museum’s Fashion and Decorative Arts Curator Hilary Davidson (cool damn job, sister) points out that these long-gone actors imbued the shoes with their physical presence. Between the bunion cut-outs and the tread patterns, you can envision how they moved, their walks, limps, drags, not to mention their overall dimensions.

Besides, shoes! Pretty! Okay maybe not so much the mudlark one, but the rest are still beautiful in design and fabric.

The skull of an aurochs, the huge wild cattle which once roamed the forests of Europe, has been found in Northumberland, England. The aurochs went extinct on the island about 4,000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating puts this skull between 5670-5520 B.C., so 3,500 years before the last aurochs kicked England’s dirt of its hooves. Two red deer antlers from the same period were found along with the skull.

The bones were preserved in a peat pocket, against all odds in the middle of a working wet quarry. Fragments would have been far more likely a find instead of this pristine complete skull and horns.

The startling discovery was made at Thompsons of Prudhoe’s Haughton Strother quarry near Humshaugh.

‘If the excavator bucket had been 10 centimetres either side it would have smashed the skull,’ said Robin Taylor-Wilson, director of Durham-based Pre-Construct Archaeology, who advise Thompson’s of Prudhoe.

‘It is very rare to find a complete auroch skull, but it came out hanging off the bucket from a wet area as if it was meant to be.

‘The find is of an animal which lived thousands of years before that, and one which would have been a prize capture for dinner for the hunter gatherers of the time.’

Given that aurochs were 6 feet tall at the shoulders and grumpy as hell, I can well believe it. They also had wicked horns that pointed forward instead of upwards, the better to gore you with, my dear.

Aurochs have played a quasi-mythic role in human iconography. They were painted by our Paleolithic ancestors on the Lascaux Cave walls, they decorated Babylon’s Ishtar Gate along with dragons and lions, Julius Caesar wrote about their fierceness and prized horns made into drinking vessels in Chapter 6, para 28 of his Gallic War. Even Nabokov gave them top billing ahead of angels in the last sentence of Lolita.

The last European aurochs died in Poland in 1627. Her skull was taken as war booty by the Swedes 30 years later and is now on display in the Royal Armoury in Stockholm.

Megalithic temples on the islands of Malta and Gonzo are providing researchers will a wealth of new information about the role acoustics might have played in ancient sacred mysteries.

For example, Malta’s Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, a multi-level ritual complex of caves and man-made structures, has a small niche called the Oracle Chamber. When a man with a deep voice speaks into it, his voice echoes throughout the entire complex. One researcher describes it as feeling like you’re standing inside a bell.

Imagine the effect that must have had on worshipers inside the complex: like you’re feeling the word of God inside your very bones.

A consortium called The PEAR Proposition: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research are pioneers in the field of archaeo-acoustics, merging archaeology and sound science. Directed by Physicist Dr. Robert Jahn, the PEAR group set out in 1994 to test acoustic behavior in megalithic sites such as Newgrange and Wayland‘s Smithy in the UK. They found that the ancient chambers all sustained a strong resonance at a sound frequency between 95 and 120 hertz: well within the range of a low male voice.

In subsequent OTSF testing, stone rooms in ancient temples in Malta were found to match the same pattern of resonance, registering at the frequency of 110 or 111 hz. This turns out to be a significant level for the human brain. Whether it was deliberate or not, the people who spent time in such an environment were exposing themselves to vibrations that impacted their minds.

Sound scientist, Prof. Daniel Talma of the University of Malta explains: “At certain frequencies you have standing waves that emphasize each and other waves that de-emphasize each other. The idea that it was used thousands of years ago to create a certain trance — that’s what fascinates me.”

Studies of brain activity exposed to different resonance frequencies have found that at 110 hz the prefrontal cortex suddenly shifts, deactivating the language center and turning on the part of the brain that controls mood, empathy and social behavior.

Not that Maltans 6000 years ago knew the acoustics could cause these kinds of effects, but it makes sense that populations that once worshiped in caves would seek to recreate and enhance that vibe once they started building huge stone structures instead of just using the ones they found.