Month: April 2010

Ancient Greek building: some assembly required

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating in Torre Satriano in the southern Italian region of Basilicata (the arch of the boot) have found a 6th century B.C. Greek building that comes complete with detailed assembly instructions. The building is a highly decorated, luxury structure with a sloping roof that is inscribed with descriptions of how the pieces of it slot together.

Rendering of the roof tiles with rainwater filtersThe roof was designed to filter rainwater down decorative panels, known as cymatiums, with projections designed to protect the wall below from dripping water.

“All the cymatiums and several sections of frieze also have inscriptions relating to the roof assembly system,” explained the Director of Basilicata University’s Archaeology Schoool Massimo Osanna.

“So far, around a hundred inscribed fragments have been recovered, with masculine ordinal numbers on the cymatiums and feminine ones on the friezes”.

The end result is a kind of instruction booklet, with every component identified by its own symbol and, as in modern systems, categorized as masculine or feminine depending on how it fits together with other parts.

So insert tab A into slot B and get yourself a Greek temple kind of thing.

The decorative elements are very similar to those found on a structure in a nearby town. They may have in fact been cast from the same molds. The team thinks that these structures were the result of a local builder taking advantage of the fashion for all things Greek at the time to create expensive build-it-yourself kits.

Greeks had invaded the region a century before then, but they were mainly in the south of Basilicata along the coast. Potenza, which is at a high elevation in the northern part of the region, was still very much on the outskirts of Greater Greece. Local knock-offs would have been both more available and more affordable.

“Eggshell skull” moves from courthouse to museum

Modern(ish), Museums, Social policy

Curator Jan Collins holds the proverbial eggshell skullThe eggshell skull rule is an old standard of English common law that holds that someone who broke the law is liable for all the consequences of that act, even if they’re unpredictable. So if you hit someone on the head who you don’t know has a skull as fragile as an eggshell and he dies, you’re responsible for his death even if you didn’t know of his condition and had no intent to kill him or even harm him.

This rule has been consistently upheld in many a court case and is taught in law school, but I came across a skull today that figured in a case that went the other way entirely.

On Christmas night 1901, gold miner James Roberts had a few drinks at the Dawson Club in what was then a notoriously rowdy part of Colorado Springs. He got into an argument with William Brooks, the bar owner, and when Roberts turned away Brooks took a Colt .45 revolver to the back of his skull. Roberts fell, hitting his head on the stove and then again on the floor.

The evening’s revelers continued to revel around Roberts’ prone body for an hour or so until someone finally thought to call the doctor. It was too late. Roberts had died.

Defense attorney J. Maurice FinnYou would have thought it was an open and shut case, but Brooks bought him some quality justice in the person of J. Maurice Finn, defense attorney to wealthy scalawags the county over, known as the “Oratorical Whirlwind of the West.”

Finn put on a novel defense: that Roberts had a particularly thin skull, therefore Brooks couldn’t have known that 2+ pounds of steel wielded with pistol-whipping force would be the death of him. Finn persuaded the coroner to saw off the top part of Roberts’ skull to use it as evidence of his theory in court.

His flair for drama worked and Brooks was acquitted. Roberts’ body was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Mount Pisgah cemetery, but the top of his skull stayed in the Teller County Courthouse unnoticed for decades.

In 1974 or 1975, former county attorney P.J. Anderson found the skull next to a bag of gold dust. It made the press, mainly because of the gold, but when the gold turned out be worth less than 20 bucks, interest in the skull faded too. A bar named after Finn wanted the skull to toast to, and a judge wanted to use it as an ashtray, but it stayed in storage in the courthouse for a few decades more.

Then came 2009 and Craigslist.

“I had this flat screen TV my wife said I needed to sell,” Anderson said.

He put it on Craigslist and a Teller County Courthouse employee bought it. During the TV transaction, Anderson told the story of James Roberts and his fractured skull.

“I’ve been telling the story for 35 years,” Anderson said.

The employee went in to work and repeated the story of the TV and the skull. Lisa Wheatcraft, a court reporter, knew of the skull and went to look for it and discovered it was gone.

Wheatcraft tracked down the skull to a former courthouse worker who’d taken it home — and who willingly returned it.

Roberts' skull on display at Cripple Creek District MuseumWheatcraft locked the skull in a drawer and after a few months of digging, offered the skull to the [Cripple Creek District Museum]. [Director Jan] Collins took it and went to work confirming Anderson’s history.

Now the skull is on respectful display. Museum workers greet it every morning when they get there and say goodnight when they leave.

No word on whether it’s actually unusually thin, but it looks normal to me.

11 Rembrandt Bugattis for sale

Modern(ish), Treasures

Eleven sculptures by my latest obsession Rembrandt Bugatti are going on sale in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art sales on May 5th and 6th in New York City. The Bugattis are from the S. Joel Schur Collection, which is wide considered one of the finest, if not the finest, group of Rembrandt Buggati pieces in private hands.

The sculptures include some of Bugatti’s most famous pieces like the Babouin Sacré Hamadryas, the planar, Cubist-style baboon which prefigured the Art Deco and Cubist movement. It is estimated to sell for $2-$3 million.

The lowest estimate is a mere $80,000–$120,000 for Marabout au repos, aka a stork at rest. So whichever one of you is getting me that J.M.W. Turner can throw in the Bugatti stork as a stocking stuffer.

'Grand Giraffe Tête Basse' by Rembrandt Bugatti, ca 1910The one I really want, though, is the Grand Girafe tête basse. It’s 25 1/2″ tall and is just so delicate and lovely.

The graceful giraffe, with its willowy neck arched towards the earth, exemplifies Bugatti’s brilliance at capturing the curvilinear elegance of an animal’s anatomy. The artist was so charmed by the poise of this African mammal that he sculpted it in two variations. The present work, which is the most visually complex of the series, holds the pose that can be seen in the photograph of the artist and his subject at the Antwerp zoo. The present bronze, which is numbered along the back edge of the base, is the sixth of an edition of six works ever to be cast of this sculpture.

The estimate for this one is $900,000-$1,200,000. There’s a bronze Degas ballerina doing an arabesque in this sale that is estimated to sell for less than half of that. There are several Rodins that don’t even come close to Bugatti’s price range.

Obviously I’m not the only person completely enraptured by his artistry and tragic story.

On a side note, some furniture by Rembrandt’s father Carlo Bugatti is going to be in an Art Deco sale at Sotheby’s London a couple of weeks after the Modern Art sale. Here’s a rare 1902 desk and chair set that has a bit of Rembrandt’s connection to the natural world in the bird and plant decoration. It’s also somewhat rococo and about as far from Rembrandt’s elegant simplicity as you can get with its copious tassels and geegaws.

Desk and chair set by Carlo Bugatti, 1902

WWI chemical weapons found in D.C. backyard

Modern(ish)

Munitions dig in Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C.It was farmland outside of Washington, D.C. when the Army first buried untold amounts of artillery and chemical weapons there, but what was once an out-of-the-way American University chemical warfare station is now the backyard of a house between the university president’s home and the residence of the South Korean ambassador.

The Army used the university to develop and test munitions during World War I. When the war ended, the Army buried the leftovers in pits and pretty much forgot about it until new homes started being built in the area in 1993.

Since then, the Army Corps of Engineers has done 4 major excavations. Until recently they thought they had found all that needed finding, so they removed an airtight protective structure only to find a whole new pile weapons they didn’t know was there.

The Corps discovered an open flask containing traces of the chemical agent mustard, another blistering agent called lewisite and munition shells with more digging near a one-time Army chemical warfare station at American University.

More recently, protective structures were rebuilt and digging continued. Workers found a larger jar with mustard, glassware that was smoking and fuming, scrap munitions and a shell containing a tear gas agent.

The Army Corps has removed more than 500 pounds of glassware and scrap metal and nearly 750 barrels of soil, some of it contaminated with chemical agents, said spokeswoman Joyce Conant.

“It’s a much larger disposal area than we predicted,” project manager Dan Noble told The Associated Press on Thursday. “The nature of debris is so different, perhaps it’s a different disposal area.”

It’s still federally owned property, which is good because the Army Corps of Engineers has a lot of work to do to secure and clean up the site. Meanwhile, neighbors are justifiably concerned that their drinking water may be contaminated, not to mention that their high property values might not be so high anymore.

Staffordshire Hoard on National Geographic Channel

Medieval, Multimedia, Treasures

This Sunday at 9 PM EST, the National Geographic Channel will broadcast an hour-long documentary about the Staffordshire Hoard called Lost Gold of the Dark Ages.

It’s going to have the usual unhealthy complement of goofy medieval battle recreations, but hopefully there will be plenty of hard facts and, most importantly, some great photography of the hoard itself.

With none of the artefacts bigger than your hand and most considerably smaller, my director of photography Mike Craven Todd has brought with him a set of Dedolights which at 150 watts are powerful enough to light the entire area but can be ‘spotted down’ to a tiny pin prick of light. We’re shooting the show on XD Cam, a blue-ray based camera system, so with the lens fitted with a close up dioptre a large HD video monitor is fired up and we get our first glimpse of the treasure in all its close-up glory.

Everyone present, from the conservators, archaeologists and camera crew the only word that seems to be on everyone’s lips is Wow!

Most of the people that have looked at and handled the artefacts, have only seen them with their naked eye. In macro close-up, they’re seeing new amazing details for the first time. They can see that some of the artefacts are rubbed smooth and worn indicating that they must have already been old when they were placed in the ground almost 1500 years ago. They can see damage that might have occurred when they were being used – perhaps in battle. They can see how well cut, polished and shaped the garnets are – if we need a high tech, high definition camera to see such detail, how on earth did the craftsmen who made them manage to see what they were doing?

The companion website has a cool interactive component which allows you to select from a dozen individual items from the hoard to view close up and from every angle.

This is not specifically related to the Hoard but apparently there will be performers reciting Old English poetry as part of the goofy re-enactments. Here’s a short behind the scenes clip that features a lovely reading of an Old English poem. It’s mellifluous and beautiful and sounds nothing at all like my high school teacher’s hacking attempts at Beowulf.