January 2011 – Page 4 – The History Blog

Roman mosaics found in Syria

January 16, 2011

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the Faydht Marina archaeological site in central Syria have uncovered mosaics from the Byzantine era (between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the Muslim conquest in the 7th century). Byzantine coins recovered at the site date to the 5th century, but that doesn’t mean the mosaic dates to the same time. Pottery fragments from the Islamic era and the later Ottoman and Mamluk eras were also found.

Head of the archaeological mission Abdullah Basal said that the mosaic painting was greatly damaged as it is too close to the surface of a dusty road.

The uncovered parts revealed images for some kind of bird, almost a duck or a peahen, and a leopard separated with a grapevine decoration, he added. A head for a man riding upon an animal still covered while another head at the upper part of the painting was approximately revealed.

Basal said that the main theme of the painting was said to symbolize an ancient Roman legend inspired by the surrounding environment at that time[.]

The lime floor was found two meters under the road surface.

Archaeologist excavates Byzantine mosaic

Florida Public Archaeology lab seeks volunteers

January 15, 2011

Modern(ish)

If you’re in north Florida or environs and you’re an archaeology junkie with zero experience, you can volunteer to help sort archaeological artifacts in the laboratory of the Florida Public Archaeology Network in Pensacola.

The lab is open on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and you don’t have to volunteer for more than a day at a time, so you could make a long weekend out of it and pile into the car to party with the oldies. There is no age limit. Repeat: kids can do this!

Volunteers will help rough sort artifacts recovered from local archaeological sites. No experience is needed, but all volunteers are given a brief orientation.

The volunteer program is perfect for students needing volunteer hours for scholarships, individuals and groups interested in history and archaeology, as well as those wanting to get their hands dirty! All ages are encouraged to participate; however, anyone under 16 years of age must be accompanied by an adult. Individuals, families, and groups as large as 12 can be accommodated.

FPAN is involved in the excavation of many archaeological sites on land and underwater, including the 200-year-old Mardi Gras Shipwreck and the Emanuel Pt. Shipwreck, Florida’s earliest shipwreck site believed to date to the 1559 expedition of Tristán de Luna.

This program opened on Wednesday the 12th and will end April 29th. Perfect for the family looking to do something awesomely nerdy for Spring Break. The lab is open to volunteers the rest of the year too.

Contact Irina Sorset via email (isorset at uwf dot edu) or by phone (850) 595-0050 Ext 103, to make arrangements.

Construction halted on site of L.A.’s first cemetery

January 14, 2011

Modern(ish)

Construction of a section of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a new Mexican-American cultural center, has been halted after dozens of skeletal remains were discovered on the site of Los Angeles’ first cemetery. The find was unexpected because according to the Los Angeles Archdiocese the cemetery, just south of La Placita Our Lady Queen of Angels Church (founded 1822) in downtown LA, was closed in 1844 and all the bodies were disinterred and moved to a new burial ground at that time. Turns out they missed a spot or 24.

When the skeletons were first found starting in October, cultural center officials planned to continue construction. They said they were following all legal and archaeological protocols and that the Archdiocese had told them just to return the remains to them for proper reburial. Descendants of the Spanish, Native American and Mexican settlers weren’t pleased that construction was continuing without pause and without consulting them.

Controversy over the continuing construction grew increasingly hard to ignore. President and CEO of La Plaza Miguel Angel Corzo claimed that the coroner’s office told him the remains in the area would date only to the 1840s, around the time of the cemetery’s closing, not to early settlements, so there weren’t any Native American remains.

Native American groups, however, pointed to old mission records indicating that 2/3rds of the 670 people buried in the cemetery had been American Indians. One archaeologist had been going over the documentary evidence with Center officials for a week and a half while they continued to claim in public that as far as they knew, there were no Native American burials uncovered.

The Archdiocese was also less than pleased when they realized the extent of the remains found.

“That you have possibly discovered substantial remains, including full burials … raises for us a number of new ethical and legal questions concerning the current activity at your construction site,” wrote Brian McMahon, director of the church’s cemeteries office to La Plaza Chief Executive Miguel Angel Corzo, in a letter obtained by The Times. “We are not interested in helping to manage your public relations issue in order that the project may continue; we want to see the right steps taken and taken quickly to deal correctly and responsibly with this matter.”

Duly chastened, Corzo released a statement today announcing construction on the cemetery site would be suspended effective immediately. They won’t go forward without a more deliberate assessment and without input from settler descendants.

“We’re glad that they see there is sufficient reason to stop the project and make an assessment and let us appoint a most likely descendant to work with them in treating and disposing of the remains with dignity and respect,” said Dave Singleton of the Native American Heritage Commission.

The center was scheduled to open on April 9 of this year. We don’t know if that’s still on, but the rest of the site has not uncovered any human remains, only a small section of the center’s 30,000 square foot garden; so the actual buildings will keep getting built.

Jaw-dropping 19th c. Roman micromosaic for sale

January 13, 2011

Modern(ish), Treasures

Still wounded that nobody bought me that $45 million Turner painting, I could learn to love again if you get me this amazing micromosaic from ca. 1879 of almost the exact same scene: a panoramic view of the Roman Forum with the Colosseum in the distance. It will go under the hammer on January 30th at Myers Auction Gallery in St. Petersburg, Florida.

What makes this piece so astonishing is that it’s made entirely of hundreds of thousands of itsy bitsy teeny weeny pieces of opaque colored glass. The mosaic is 59 inches wide, 32 inches long and weighs over 100 pounds. It’s so huge and heavy the frame had to be supported with iron straps.

Although there is no artist’s signature, the piece is attributed with surety to Cesare Roccheggiani, a master mosaicist who worked at the Vatican workshops from 1856 to 1864 and moonlighted making popular micromosaics for the Grand Tour crowd and for art dealers at his private atelier. There were as many as 96 mosaicists working in Rome by 1874, but most of them produced smaller items like cameos and jewelry and small plaques for the tourist trade. A piece of this size would not have been the usual tourist purchase. This kind of magnificence was reserved for aristocrats and the very wealthy, and was probably commissioned rather than purchased off the rack.

Since the 1920s, the artwork had rested above a mantel in the residence of a prominent Tampa businessman. When the home was sold in the 1980s, the buyer was given the option of purchasing some of the existing furnishings. The micromosaic was among the pieces selected. Now, through descent, the estate artwork is headed to auction.

“While unsigned, we believe it is almost certainly the work of Roccheggiani,” said Michael Myers, founder and co-owner of Myers Auction Gallery. “A micromosaic nearly identical in size and subject matter, and artist-signed by Rocchegiani, was auctioned last month at Christie’s London gallery for more than half a million dollars.”

The exquisite artistry in the circa-1879 work to be auctioned by Myers renders a photorealistic quality. “It’s so luminous, it even fooled a visitor who walked into our gallery and thought they were looking at a picture on a flat-screen TV,” said Mary Dowd, Michael’s wife and business partner. “An artwork as stunning as this one would have been very expensive in its day and available only to a very wealthy buyer.”

Some things never change. The estimate is a conservative $100,000-$200,000, but given the Christie’s result from December, I think we can safely say that figure will be eclipsed.

NB: if you compare the Turner painting to this mosaic, you can see how much more excavation was done in the area between 1839 and 1879. Granted, Turner’s beautiful glowing mist isn’t exactly photorealistic, but look particularly at the Arch of Septimus Severus in the lower left. In Turner’s time it looks almost sunken at the base of a hill. By the time Roccheggiani made his mosaic, that area is cleared, paved and staired.

Those are the results of the final defeat of the Pope, inclusion of Rome into a unified Italy in 1870 and the subsequent push to revive the city’s ancient past.

'Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino', J.M.W. Turner, 1839

micromosaic of the Roman Forum, by Cesare Roccheggiani, ca. 1879

Oldest New World dog found in human poop

January 12, 2011

Ancient

Samuel Belknap III, a University of Maine graduate student doing research for his thesis on ancient diets in southwest Texas, has found bone fragments of the oldest known domesticated dog in the Americas. The fragments were in an intact ancient human stool sample, indicating that 9,400 years ago people were using dogs not just as companions, workers and guardians, but also as food.

The paleofecal sample was discovered in the 1970s in Hinds Cave, an archeological motherlode in a small canyon of the lower Pecos River, near the Mexican border. Hunter-gatherers lived in the area for 9,000 years, starting before 8,000 B.C. and persisting until as recently as a thousand years ago.

Belknap and fellow UMaine graduate student Robert Ingraham first visually identified the bone as a fragment of the right occipital condyle, the place where the skull articulates with the atlas vertebra of the spine. Ingraham also visually identified the bone at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which indicated that the fragment closely matched that of a short-nosed Indian Dog from New Mexico.

The bone was then sent to University of Oklahoma researcher Cecil Lewis, who runs the Molecular Anthropology Ancient DNA Laboratory, for DNA analysis. The DNA analysis from the lab, along with a 2002 genetic study of archaeological dog specimens, supported the conclusion that BE-20 is from a domestic dog rather than a wolf, coyote or fox, and is closely related to a species of Peruvian dog.

The age of the bone and the paleofecal material were both radiocarbon dated, confirming that they were contemporaneous and really, really old. This is an important element because previously researchers thought they had found bones of even older dogs (about 11,000 years old) in the Jaguar Cave in Idaho, but that date was based on the archaeological context. When the bones were carbon dated, they turned out to be far more recent, just 1,000 to 3,000 years old.

Judging from the size of the bone (just 1.5 centimeters or a half inch long), Belknap thinks the dog was fairly small, about 25-30 pounds. He’s thinking it might have been chopped up into a stew, which would also explain the second bone he found that is too small to analyze but may be from the dog’s foot.

According to ethnographic studies, dogs were consumed either in times of desperation or times of celebration. Dogs were butchered in a specific way and may have been cooked in a stew, which could explain how bones from a skull and wrist or ankle ended up in the same paleofecal sample.

“It could be that the smaller bones broke off in the butchering process and found their way into a stew or soup,” Belknap said.