Year: 2011

Remains of massive Roman shipyard found in Portus

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi

The international team of archaeologists led by the University of Southampton and the British School at Rome excavating the ancient Roman harbor town of Portus have discovered the remains of a massive building they think may have been an Imperial shipyard used to build some of Rome’s largest ships.

Few Roman shipyards have been found, and none for the city of Rome itself. Two small possibilities — one in the city on the Tiber near the Monte Testaccio (an artificial hill the Romans made from broken olive oil amphorae unloaded from merchant ships), the other at Ostia — have been advanced, but they would not have been large enough to service all of Imperial Rome’s ship building needs.

Five stories high and with direct access to both the Claudian and hexagonal Trajanic basins of Portus, this shipyard is on a whole other scale.

The huge building the team has discovered dates from the 2nd century AD and would have stood c. 145 metres [475 feet] long and 60 metres [196 feet] wide – an area larger than a football pitch [soccer field]. In places, its roof was up to 15 metres [50 feet] high, or more than three times the height of a double-decker bus. Large brick-faced concrete piers or pillars, some three metres wide and still visible in part, supported at least eight parallel bays with wooden roofs.

“This was a vast structure which could easily have housed wood, canvas and other supplies and certainly would have been large enough to build or shelter ships in. The scale, position and unique nature of the building lead us to believe it played a key role in shipbuilding activities,” comments Southampton’s Professor Keay, who also leads the archaeological activity of the BSR.

They’ve found a wide vaulted area that formed the western wall of the complex and the western-most bay. Estimates based on this one bay suggest they were 12 meters (40 feet) wide and 58 meters (190 feet) long. The piers on the northern end facing the Claudian basin were 6 x 5 feet, while the ones on the southern end on the Trajanic basin were larger at 10 x 5.5 feet, so archaeologists think that the primary entrance point was a massive arch on southern side, with a smaller but still notable entrance on the north.

Epigraphic evidence supports the existence of a major shipyard in Portus. Inscriptions found at the site mention that the guild of shipbuilders (the corpus fabrum navalium portensium) had a presence in the port. There’s artistic evidence that Roman’s had shipyards like this. A mosaic found in a villa just outside the ancient city of Rome shows the facade of a large building with a ship nestled in each arched bay.

One key piece of evidence still missing is the remains of any of the ramps that would have been necessary to launch newly built ships from dry dock into the harbor. Professor Keay thinks they may be hidden beneath the concrete embankment built in the early 20th century. Getting under there would be challenging, to say the least, and there’s no reason to believe any of them have survived.

The Antonine Wall gets its own gallery

Ancient, Museums, Roma, Caput Mundi

Roman emperor Antonius Pius, Hadrian’s successor, had a lot to prove when he ascended the throne in the summer of 138 A.D. He had risen through the political ranks, not the military, and in fact as far as we know, Antonius never even got near a Roman legion. It was in Britain that he decided to prove his commander-in-chief chops by sending governor Quintus Lollius Urbicus north of Hadrian’s Wall into southern Scotland.

Around 142 A.D. Antonius ordered that a wall be built marking the new northern border of Britannia. Urbicus deployed troops from the II Augusta, VI Victrix and XX Valeria Victrix legions to build the wall, starting with a foundation of stone topped with a turf rampart that was as high as 13 feet in places. The height of the wall was supplemented by a deep and wide ditch on the north side for added protection against the Caledonian hoards. It took 12 years to build and ended up stretching 39 miles across Scotland coast to coast from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde.

For reasons not entirely clear to this day, the Romans abandoned the Antonine Wall just eight years after its completion in 162 A.D. Since the turf wall didn’t last as well as Hadrian’s stone one, what we have left in place today are the defense ditches, remains of the stone foundations of the wall and of the 20 plus forts and fortlets that guarded its length. Excavations have also unearthed a wealth of artifacts, including some that put Hadrian’s fancy pants wall to shame.

The University of Glasgow’s The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow has just opened a new permanent gallery dedicated to the sculptures and artifacts found over three centuries of research, excavation and study of the Antonine Wall.

Through The Hunterian’s rich collections the gallery investigates four key themes: The building of the Wall – its architecture and impact on the landscape; the role of the Roman army on the frontier – the life and lifestyle of its soldiers; the cultural interaction between Roman and indigenous peoples, and evidence for local resistance; and the abandonment of the Wall and the story of its rediscovery over the last 350 years.

Among on the artifacts on display are 16 of the 19 surviving distance slabs, marble slabs elaborately carved by the legions to mark their work on the wall.

The sculptures are, in general, more elaborate and richly decorated than their counterparts on Hadrian’s wall, featuring such scenes as Victory placing a laurel wreath on a Roman legionary standard, and the distinctive mascots of the soldiers’ legions: a running boar for the XX; a Pegasus and a Capricorn (after the Emperor Augustus’s star sign) for the VI.

The sculptures also clearly project the move north as a splendid military victory: several depict Caledonians being trampled by Roman cavalry, or simply crouching in submission, bound and naked.

The gallery emphasizes that life along the wall was not the stark existence you might expect from the northernmost border of the Roman Empire. The remains of bathhouses have been found along the wall, and the number of valuable consumer goods like red Samianware dishes and glass found suggest that some people in the area lived very well indeed.

Apocalyptic painting restored 83 years after flood

Modern(ish), Museums

In the wee hours of January 7, 1928, the Thames, swollen by heavy December snowfall and a sudden thaw, burst its banks near Lambeth Bridge right across from the Tate Gallery. Water flooded the street and all the buildings on it, including the nine galleries in the basement of the museum. Tate Gallery director Charles Aitken marshaled staff and volunteers to pump out the water which had reached depths of between five and eight feet, and then remove all the sodden paintings to the dry upper galleries.

Among the paintings removed from the flooded basement galleries was The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, an 8-foot apocalyptic vision of Vesuvius’ 79 A.D. eruption painted in 1821 by John Martin. It had been completely submerged in the flood waters and was severely damaged. It was caked in mud, the paint was flaking off and part of the canvas had torn leaving The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum almost bisected and crucially missing an erupting Vesuvius. Curators at the time considered it a total loss. They rolled it in tissue and put it in storage.

When the Tate decided last year to stage a major exhibition of John Martin’s work, they unrolled the The Destruction for the first time in 82 years. They found the painting in better condition than they expected. Sure, it was still coated in dirt and the paint was still flaking, but it hadn’t disintegrated so the loose paint flakes could be carefully reattached to the canvas and the losses retouched. The missing section was still missing, of course, but given the importance of the painting, the Tate staff decided to take the plunge and fill in even the huge blank.

It was computer technology that made the replacement of the missing part possible. Experts examined the area on a smaller version of the painting Martin made and on his preparatory sketch for the large one. Restorer Sarah Maisey then created four digital versions that were shown to a test audience. The audience was filmed looking at the four images and their eye movements tracked. The eye-tracking results proved that the eyes of the viewers were primarily focused on the undamaged part of the canvas.

If you look very closely at the painting you can see which is Martin’s brushwork and which is the work of restorer Sarah Maisey. “I’ve tried to tone down a lot of the detail,” she said. “I wanted the overall impact of Martin’s work to have been retained but ultimately wanted people to be able to appreciate what was left of John Martin’s work.”

Maisey admitted that restoring the work of Martin had been a responsibility. “As a conservator you don’t normally have to paint large sections, you do small filling in of losses, so this was something quite different. I think he’d be happy. His work was about impact.”

The restoration is reversible should future generations think it wrong, but for now it goes on display at the biggest Martin show ever.

John Martin: Apocalypse runs from September 21st to January 15, 2012, and is the not only the first major Martin exhibit in 30 years, but is also largest display of his work ever seen. Visitors will be able to see 120 of his works, from immense Biblical and historical apocalypse scenes, to sketches, watercolors, mezzotints and even his engineering plans.

John Martin’s paintings were dismissed by the snooty art academy established as lurid and “common.” Nineteenth century art critic and taste arbiter John Ruskin said “Martin’s works are merely a common manufacture, as much makeable to order as a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle.” Of course, John Ruskin famously refused to have sex with his wife when on their marriage night he was shocked to find out that women have pubic hair, so consider the source.

He had a vast fan base among the plebes, though, and artists in a variety of media have felt his influence. Stop-motion innovator Ray Harryhausen modeled his Olympus on the city on a hill in Martin’s Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. George Lucas was inspired by Satan presiding at the Infernal Council (1824-26), one of Martin’s engraved illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, when designing the Senate hall in The Phantom Menace.

Comic book writer Alan Moore is another of Martin’s contemporary fans in the creative world. He artfully described Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as: “This is the terror of the world’s edge, is the vertigo of an accelerated culture. Out beyond the lights of every city, every town and every century, this is the abyss that abides.”

Stone Age skulls mounted on stakes found in Sweden

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating a Stone Age lake bed in Motala, Sweden, have unearthed two skull impaled on spikes. The skulls were discovered with the stakes still firmly embedded inside them, reaching from the base of the skull to the top of the cranium.

Other remains were also found at the site, among them skull fragments from 11 people of varying ages and animal bones. Radiocarbon dating confirms that all of the bones are the same age: 8,000 years old. That makes these heads on spikes the oldest ones found in the world, and by a lot.

The lake bed, a shallow lake during the Neolithic, was used as a ceremonial burial ground during the Mesolithic era.

Archaeologists are exploring two theories to explain why the human skulls were mounted on wooden stakes before being placed in the lake bed

“One thought is that it was part of some sort of secondary burial ritual where the skulls were removed from dead bodies that had initially been placed elsewhere,” said Hallberg.

“After the soft tissue had rotted away, the skulls were removed and placed on the stakes before being placed in the shallow lake.”

Another theory is that the mounted skulls are trophies brought back from battles with other settlers in the area.

“It may have been a way to prove one’s success on the battlefield,” Hallberg explained.

DNA and isotope analysis might help fill in some of the blanks, like if everyone in buried on the site was related or if they were raised in the area or came from elsewhere. If they’re all part of the same family, it seems unlikely that the impaled skulls were battle trophies.

This excavation site has been a regular source of unique discoveries over the past two years. It gained immediate notoriety last summer when a Stone Age antler bone dildo was discovered by the same team that found the spiked skulls. Then last October the team discovered a treasure trove of artifacts — parts of a bow, a paddle, an axe handle and blade — all made out 9000-year-old wood. The bow was the first of its kind ever found in Sweden. That’s the miracle of sodden earth and peat in action again, keeping perishable materials from perishing.

Minneapolis museum to return looted vase to Italy

Ancient, Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) has agreed to return a 5th century B.C. red-figure volute krater (a vessel used to mix water and wine) that was part of Giacomo Medici’s hoard of looted antiquities to Italy. The museum purchased it from antiquities dealer/high society fence Robin Symes in 1983.

According to the museum website, the krater is probably the work of the Methyse Painter and depicts a Dionysian parade which stars a child satyr riding on the shoulders of a maenad. This is the only known vase painting of a child satyr getting a piggy back ride from a maenad. There are satyrs carrying child satyrs, women holding human babies, but no other women carrying child satyrs.

That unique depiction is key to the repatriation saga. When in 1995 the Italian art police raided a Geneva Freeport warehouse that antiquities dealer/fence Giacomo Medici (later sentenced to 10 years for antiquities theft) had stuffed full of looted artifacts, they also found a cache of 10,000 Polaroid pictures of newly excavated, unrestored ancient artifacts Medici had already sold.

That massive score of photographs has been the underpinning of many of the recent legal and diplomatic avenues Italy has pursued to reclaim looted antiquities from U.S. museums. Among the 10,000 was a picture of a volute krater depicting a Dionysian parade with a child satyr riding on the shoulders of a maenad. The vessel in the picture still bore the mud and salt encrustations from its fresh excavation.

In 2005, Italian authorities published a list of artifacts in eight major US museums that they had reason to believe had been illegally excavated, exported and sold. Among them was the child satyr krater at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Italian police believe the vase was probably looted from Rutigliano, a town in the Puglia region (the heel of the boot) that was once colonized by Greece and is a mother lode of Greek vases because they were so prized they were often buried with their owners.

The museum of course claimed that it had bought the artifact “in good faith” (they always say that) and that according to their information (ie, the fictional ownership history Symes invented so the buyer could later claim to have purchased the stolen object “in good faith”), the vase had been in private collections in Switzerland (Canadian girlfriend alert!) for 15 years prior to the 1983 sale, pushing its fake provenance back two years before the 1970 cutoff established by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

According to Kaywin Feldman, director and president of the MIA, in the wake of Italy’s allegations the museum launched an investigation on the provenance of the volute krater. The investigation somehow fell through the cracks after some staff changes, until Feldman entirely on her own “out of curiosity” contacted the Italian culture ministry last year to pursue the case.

That conversation led to an exchange of information which eventually determined the MIA’s krater had likely been illegally excavated. The MIA’s board of directors voted in March to deaccession the object and return it to the Italian government. The Italian government for its part has stated that it is thankful for the return of the krater.

The Italian government is unfailingly flattering to the museums they bust once they’ve secured a return, even when they don’t really deserve it. The six-year delay between the Italian claim and the repatriation decision was ludicrous. That Medici Polaroid is as close to undeniable evidence that vase was looted as it gets. Polaroid didn’t even make the camera model that took the picture until 1972, so there was no way that Swiss collection cover story could be remotely possible.

There is no firm date for the return of the krater. Talks are ongoing. Meanwhile, it will remain at the Minneapolis Institute of Art for at least another month, probably more, and they’ve added a blurb about the investigation to the display.