Month: October 2011

Visit an Etruscan tomb in virtual 3D

Ancient, Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums

Two new museum exhibits dedicated to Etruscan culture, one at the University of Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum (APM), the other at the National Museum for Antiquities (RMO) in Leiden, will debut what looks like a brilliant digital 3D reconstruction of the Regolini-Galassi tomb in Cervetri.

The Regolini-Galassi tomb dates to the 7th century B.C. and was discovered in 1836 by General Vincenzo Galassi and the archpriest of Cervetri, Alessandro Regolini. Within they found at least two burials in four chambers — a lavishly adorned woman of royal status in the end cell, ashes in a bronze funerary urn in the right chamber — and evidence of one more — a bronze bed in the antechamber next to a chariot indicating a warrior burial. They also found an amazing wealth of precious artifacts, elaborate furnishings, silverware, gilded and bronze vessels decorated with lions and griffins, and immense golden pectoral pieces and a golden disc fibula which had once covered the body of the princess.

The 300 artifacts discovered in the Regolini-Galassi tomb are now on display at the Vatican Museum, but the tomb itself, poorly conserved after Messrs Galassi and Regolini emptied it out and left to the elements, is no longer open to the public. Enter Etruscanning 3D, a collaborative project supported by the APM, RMO, the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium, CNR-ITABC (a research institute that uses new technology in the preservation of cultural patrimony), Visual Dimension in Ename, Belgium, plus the Vatican Museum and the Villa Giulia in Rome, which seeks to digitize Etruscan tombs so museum visitors can experience them as they were when first discovered.

The team began by laser scanning the tomb in June of this year. They then compared the current data with maps, sketches and reports from the original 19th century excavation to pinpoint as closely as possible the precise location of objects in the tomb. Next they spent three days at the Vatican laser scanning the artifacts from the tomb. Computer graphics and GIS data were then employed to recreate a 3D rendering of the tomb.

The coolest part, though, is how the digital rendering was developed into a user-friendly interface for the museum exhibits. The visitor stands in front of a large screen. On the floor is a map of the Regolini-Galassi tomb. The user walks on the map moving a virtual camera which displays the reconstruction of that area of the tomb on the screen. There are seven “hotspots” on the map. When the user stands on a hotspot, a narration describes all the artifacts found on that spot.

Sadly, the narration appears to be in Dutch only at this point, but at least you can catch a glimpse of the reconstructed tomb experience in this YouTube video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7NuW6Uc3Q&w=430]

Etruscans: Women of Distinction, Men of Power, the double exhibit at the Allard Pierson Museum and National Museum for Antiquities has been conceived as a diptych, APM focusing on the role of men in Etruscan society while the National Museum focuses on Etruscan women. The exhibits opened on October 14 and will close in March of 2012. After that, they are scheduled to move to the partner Italian museums.

3 Staffordshire Hoard pieces form mystery object

Medieval, Museums, Treasures

Conservators have discovered that three gold, garnet and enamel pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard which bore no immediately obvious relation to each other fit together to form a beautifully perplexing mystery object. The millefiori stud (catalogue number K545), a gold mount with a collar of garnets and a glass enameled checkerboard surface, has a rectangular hole on the under side surrounded by four smaller round holes. A small gold cylinder (K1055) decorated with cloisonné garnets has a rectangular protuberance of silver on one end and four round holes. The cylinder’s tab A fits into the millefiori’s slot B perfectly, and the four holes on both pieces align.

On the bottom end, the cylinder has another set of four matching holes with a torn piece of silver plate in the center. That torn plate in turn matches precisely the torn silver in the center of an elaborate gold cloisonné garnet circular object (K130). The silver plate in the middle was riveted to the gold circle by four rivets, same as the holes on the other two pieces. Those four rivet holes show up on the other side of K130, too, so our mystery object has at least one more part.

(Aesopian interlude: as historian David Starkey noted at the time, this is why it’s so important to keep archaeological discoveries intact in their proper context. If the hoard had been broken up and sold to the highest bidder, those pieces could have been scattered to the four corners of the earth.)

As for what it might have been used for, researchers have proposed several possibilities.

(1) A fitting on a saddle.

(2) The decorative tip to a shield boss, presumably from a very elaborate shield. (In this case the object would have been rivetted to the top / front of a standard iron shield boss. A warrior held his shield by grasping a handgrip that ran across a circular hole cut in the centre of the shield. The domed boss covered the hole while leaving space for the warrior’s hand inside.)

(3) A decorative top to a stopper that fitted into a drinking horn. (Here the object would have been rivetted to a wooden stopper that fitted inside the mouth of the horn.)

(4) A decorative terminal to a parchment roll. (I think the suggestion is that there would be one at each end of the roll, fixed to whatever the roll was attached to.)

(5) A lid to something. But what? (Again this probably requires the object being rivetted to something like a wooden stopper.)

You can see how the first two pieces — the millefiori stud and the cylinder — came together thanks to perspicacious curator Deborah Magnoler in the following video from this summer. The gentleman with her is Dr. David Symons, curator of the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the museum that shares ownership of the hoard with The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-On-Trent.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh_tNPXYPBE&w=430]

Finally, and I’m really surprised at how little this has been advertised, some of the Staffordshire Hoard is coming to America! One hundred of the most important pieces, including gold and garnet sword pommels, the folded gold cross and the strip of gold with the Latin Biblical inscription, will be on display at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., starting next Saturday, October 29! The exhibit runs until March 4, 2012 so you have five months to claw your way there before all the pretty shiny heads back home.

Etruscan image of woman giving birth found

Ancient, Treasures

An archaeological excavation at Poggio Colla, an Etruscan site northeast of Florence, has uncovered a fragment of pottery engraved with two images of women giving birth. The fragment is over 2,600 years old which apparently puts it in the running for the oldest depiction of a woman giving birth in western art. According to Open University archaeology professor Phil Perkins, images of childbirth are rare in ancient art. There are later Greek and Roman representations but this depiction is several hundred years older than anything else extant.

(When I first read that I thought it couldn’t be right because not two weeks ago my mom showed me a picture she took at the Temple of Kom Ombo in Egypt of a bas relief depicting a woman mid-childbirth. I looked up the temple dates, though, and Kom Ombo turns out to be Ptolemaic, built in the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. The Temple of Edfu, which has another childbirth relief, was built between the 3rd and 1st centuries B.C. Dendera’s Temple of Hathor, Egyptian goddess of childbirth, is Ptolemaic too.

What about the hieroglyph msỉ? It’s the word for childbirth and is a logographic depiction of a woman giving birth. Does pictorial writing not count as an image or is the glyph a later addition to the Egyptian vocabulary? Those aren’t rhetorical questions. I searched but thus far have not found an answer. If y’all know, please to tell.)

It was Professor Perkins who identified the fragment as a piece of Etruscan bucchero, a characteristic Etruscan black clay pottery that begins appearing on the archaeological record in the seventh century B.C.

The ceramic fragment is less than 1-3/4 x 1-1/4 inches (4 x 3 cm), from a vessel made of bucchero. Bucchero is a fine, black ceramic material, embellished with stamped and incised decorations, used to make eating and drinking vessels for Etruscan elites. Typically, stamped designs range from abstract geometric motifs to exotic and mythical animals. There are no known Greek or Roman representations of the moment of birth shown as clearly as the Poggio Colla example until more than 500 years later. The fragment dates to about 600 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era).

Because the site at Poggio Colla has produced numerous votive deposits, scholars are certain that for some part of its history it was a sacred spot to a divinity or divinities. The abundance of weaving tools and a stunning deposit of gold jewelry discovered earlier have already suggested to some scholars that the patron divinity may have been female; the discovery of the childbirth scene, because of its uniqueness, adds another piece of evidence to the theory.

The fragment was discovered by William Nutt, agraduate student at the University of Texas at Arlington, who is one of the lucky few selected for the Poggio Colla Field School, a hands-on archaeological plunge into the excavation of one of Etruria’s most fascinating sites, inhabited by Etruscans for almost the entire length of time they are known to have existed, between 700 B.C. and 187 B.C. Nutt is legally blind, very, very lucky and right about now, very, very happy.

“I was very grateful to be accepted to the summer program at Poggio Colla – it was my first archaeological dig,” said Nutt, who is attending UTA under a National Science Foundation fellowship. “I found the artifact at the beginning of my second week there. It was quite dirty, and we weren’t sure what it was until it was cleaned at the onsite lab and identified by Dr. Perkins. It was thrilling to find out that it was so significant. To make a discovery like that, which provides important new information about a culture we know so little about, is exactly what makes archaeology and anthropology so appealing.”

Intact Viking boat burial found in Scotland

Medieval, Museums, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the peninsula of Ardnamurchan in Scotland have discovered the first fully intact Viking boat burial site ever found in the mainland UK. The grave is five feet wide and almost 17 feet long, the size of boat itself which has long since decayed. The only remnants of it are 200 metal rivets that once held the timbers together and some slivers of wood still attached to rivets. The shape of the boat, however, with its pointed prow and stern, was pressed in the ground over the centuries and is still clearly visible. Experts have given the site a preliminary date of 1000 A.D., but we won’t know the exact date until the remains are radiocarbon dated.

The Viking, of whom only a few bone fragments and teeth remain, was buried in a traditional pagan Norse warrior ritual: laid to rest on his boat with his shield on top of him, then covered in stones. Buried in the grave with him archaeologists found a sword, a battle-axe, a spear, the shield and a number of other artifacts including a bronze drinking horn, a bronze Irish ring-pin and a Norwegian whetstone. The range, variety and quality of grave goods indicate that the warrior was widely traveled and extremely well-off.

Viking boat burials in general were reserved for the most important personages destined for Valhalla. Few of them survive intact because as befits a naval theme, chosen burial sites were often coastal and thus highly susceptible to flooding and erosion. Some of them have been found on Scottish islands — the Norse were settled and living in Orkney and Shetland by the mid-800s — but all the Viking burials found on mainland Britain have been found in traditional Christian cemeteries.

The Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, a collaborative team of archaeologists from Manchester and Leicester universities, plus private archaeology firm CFA Archaeology and volunteer non-profit Archaeology Scotland, has been excavating the Ardnamurchan every summer for six years focusing their research on periods of social transition, for instance the shift from Bronze Age to Iron Age.

Hannah Cobb, an archaeologist from the University of Manchester who is co-director of the excavation, said: “We had spotted this low mound the previous year, but said firmly that it was probably just a pile of field clearance rocks from comparatively recent farming.

“When we uncovered the whole mound, the team digging came back the first night and said it looked quite like a boat.

“The second night they said: ‘It really does look like a boat.’ The third night they said: ‘We think we really do have a boat’. It was so exciting, we could hardly believe it.”

They recovered fragments of an arm bone and several teeth, which should allow analysis of radioactive isotopes and reveal where the man came from.

The fragments of wood clinging to the rivets should reveal what trees were felled for his ship, and possibly where it was built.

The beautiful and rugged coastal Highlands of Ardnamurchan have long since appealed to local populations as burial grounds. There are cairns dating back to the Stone Age 6,000 years ago in the area. Perhaps it was specifically selected as a final resting point for a highly respected Viking figure, or perhaps he died in transit. Its completeness, artifact remains, pagan ritual and location on the British mainland provide a rich field of material that archaeologists expect will illuminate post-raid Viking life in Scotland.

The artifacts are now being studied by team members at the universities of Manchester and Leicester. They will be cleaned and eventually put on display at a museum to be determined. Of course the British Museum is interested, but the locals think this spectacular find should be exhibited in Scotland where it was found.

Ancient citadel in Herat, Afghanistan, restored

Ancient, Museums

After decades of war and neglect, the medieval citadel of Qala Ikhtyaruddin in Herat, western Afghanistan, has been restored. Funded by a donation from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and support from the U.S. and German governments, Afghan craftsmen have been working since 2008 to make extensive repairs to the masonry and structure of the walls and ramparts which were in such bad shape they were visibly crumbling. Buildings within the citadel’s lower enclosure were also repaired or replaced with period-appropriate replicas.

The citadel has been destroyed or come close to it many times in its checkered history. In 1950 plans to demolish the citadel were thankfully derailed, and UNESCO oversaw extensive conservation of the site between 1976 and 1979. Unregulated development in Herat’s city center, battles and the presence of a military garrison put unbearable pressure on the citadel and its ancient materials, many of which was reused for new construction. The enormous size and complexity of the site makes conservation a major logistical challenge. It is more than 250 meters (800 feet) long and 70 meters (230 feet) wide in places. Its two main enclosures contained deteriorating buildings, courtyards and 18 brick masonry towers.

Herat was an important crossroads on the Silk Road, the trade route that moved luxury goods between the Levant and India and China. Excavations have discovered evidence of habitation on the site dating back to the sixth century B.C. Alexander the Great himself occupied the area in 330 B.C. and is thought to have built the first fortress on the site. Not the last, though, as Herat’s prime location made it attractive to every occupation force in the area. The citadel was destroyed by the Mongolian army 1221, rebuilt by the Persian Kartid dynasty, then destroyed again by Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) army in 1380. It was Timur’s son, Shah Rukh, and his wife Queen Gowhar Shād who implement extensive construction programs in the 15th century, creating the walled citadel of brick, stone and glazed tiles that we see today.

It’s not just the crumbling masonry that’s been repaired. The project focused also on adapting ancient buildings to modern uses while preserving their historical architecture. Several buildings have been converted into a public cultural center that has been used to much acclaim for concerts and art shows. There is also a provincial archeological museum.

Housed at the citadel is the National Museum of Herat, one of four provincial museums in Afghanistan to reopen to the public. The Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin worked with the German Archaeological Institute to document and restore artifacts and prepare them for display. There are about 1,100 items from the Herat region in the museum; about 250 are on display.

Most of them are from the 10th to 13th centuries when Herat was a center of politics and culture. There is pottery, metal work, a tombstone of major Persian painter Behzad, 260 manuscripts and books and a cenotaph adorned with tiles that date from 1378.

Tourism seems like a distant prospect, what with the war and all, but preserving Afghanistan’s immense cultural heritage is the first step in making it possible at all.