May 2012 – Page 5 – The History Blog

Oldest Maya calendar found in Guatemala

May 11, 2012

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists mapping the Classic period (200 to 900 A.D.) Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala have discovered a room painted with murals including hundreds of numbers and astronomical tables that are the oldest Maya calendar calculations ever found. The calendar dates to 813 or 814 A.D., which we know so precisely because the inscribers generously dated their work. Before this discovery, the earliest calendrical calculations known to survive the bonfires of the post-Columbian missionaries were in the 11th-12th century Dresden Codex. There is enough overlap with the calendar texts in the Dresden Codex that it’s likely they both relied on earlier texts that have not survived, or at least not been found yet.

The hieroglyphs include columns of numbers reflecting the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. Tables track the phases of the moon, and some calculations appear to be attempts to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars. In a touching link to educators 1200 years later, there are numbers painted in red that correct the calculations painted in black next to them.

The real headline-grabber is that the calendar counts through 17 Bak’tuns. That’s a total of 7,000 years and takes us far past our current 13th Bak’tun cycle which is scheduled to end on December 23rd of this year in the fiery apocalypse that will destroy us all. How convenient that “scholars” and “experts” who have always claimed that the Maya 2012 apocalypse notion is a ludicrous misinterpretation of Maya calendar cycles find four more cycles JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME.

The calendar is not the only uniquely important aspect of this find. The murals are painted on the walls and ceiling of a small dwelling. It’s a room about six and a half feet wide, six feet long and 10 feet tall. This is the first time murals have been found somewhere that is not a temple or palace. Also, the room was filled in an unusual way, from the inside backing out through the doorway. Usually the Maya just flattened the roof of a building when they were done with it, and then built on top of that. The peculiar filling approach taken with this room ensured that the paintings on three of the four walls plus the ceiling were preserved.

The archaeologists working on the site never expected that. Boston University undergraduate Maxwell Chamberlain was looking into an old looting trench during his lunch break when he saw some faded paint on the wall. BU archaeologist and team leader William Saturno figured it was worth exploring the chamber in case there was any paint left, but he assumed there’d be only traces at best so they’d just map the room and perhaps be able to figure out its dimensions at the time the murals were painted.

Instead they pulled a Howard Carter and found an archaeological treasure trove (minus the gold). In addition to the calendar hieroglyphs on the east and north walls, they found several unusual murals. On the north wall:

An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king’s portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.

On the west wall:

Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. “We haven’t seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before,” Saturno said. “It’s clearly a costume of some kind.” One of the figures is particularly burly, “like a sumo wrestler,” and he is labeled “Older Brother Obsidian.” Another is labeled as a youth.

Saturno thinks the room was a writing room, a study for Maya scribes. The figure holding a pen indicates a connection to scribes and the repetition of hieroglyphs on the east wall complete with corrections in red suggests that the calculations could have been practice for later work in the formal halls of religious and political power.

The discovery has been published in the May issue of the journal Science (subscription only). There’s a fascinating interview with Saturno in the latest Science podcast.

Pictures are courtesy of National Geographic which sponsored the expedition. Their website has an awesome gigapixel zoomable image of the mural here.

WWII fighter plane found preserved in the Sahara

May 10, 2012

Modern(ish)

A Kittyhawk P-40 that crashed in the Sahara desert on June 28, 1942 has been found in remarkably good condition by Polish oil company employee Jakub Perka. Perka was exploring the desert west of the Nile 200 miles from the nearest city when he found the downed plane. It was damaged from the crash landing and bears scars from flak encounters, but other than that, the single-seater fighter plane appears to have been frozen in time by the desert heat.

The identification plates were undamaged, so military historians were able to identify it as a Royal Air Force plane piloted by Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping. Copping was part of the RAF’s 260 Squadron fighting German General Erwin Rommel’s forces’ advance towards Egypt. On June 28th, Copping was ordered to fly a damaged but functioning Kittyhawk to another airbase in Egypt for repairs. He went off course and was neither seen nor heard from again.

Military historians are confident the Kittyhawk found in the desert was the one flown by Ft Sgt Copping, based on identification numbers and letters on the plane.

It was documented at the time that there was a fault with its front landing gear which would not retract and the photographic evidence suggests the aircraft had its front wheel down when it crashed.

According to experts, a plane making a controlled crash landing in the desert wouldn’t have its landing gear down and would belly-flop on the sand.

There is also flak damage in the fuselage, which is also consistent with documented evidence of Ft Sgt Copping’s plane.

No human remains were discovered at the crash site. There is evidence that the pilot survived and tried to make a shelter from the baking sun out of his parachute. The radio and battery were also removed from the airplane, suggesting the pilot tried to get it in working order so he could send out an SOS. Had he died in the crash or while working nearby, his body would have been found, so he probably starting walking as a last resort. His remains could be anywhere within a 20 mile radius. The British Ministry of Defense plans to search the area, but the odds of finding Flight Sergeant Copping are very slim.

Meanwhile, after 70 years of untouched rest, the wreck itself is now in danger. The Egyptian military has removed all the weapons and bullets for safety reasons, but the real danger is locals peeling parts off to sell as scrap. The wreck is close to a smuggling route between Sudan and Libya, and now that the word is out that the plane is there, some people have taken detours to strip pieces of it.

The Ministry of Defense is working with the RAF Museum to recover the plane. Because of the location of the wreck, the search and recovery teams will need to be escorted by the Egyptian army. Coordination is a challenge, to say the least, and the clock is ticking.

For more pictures, see the Telegraph’s photo gallery and Jakub Perka’s Picasa album.

The most brilliant printmaker you’ve never heard of

May 9, 2012

Museums, Renaissance

This is the last week of the British Museum’s exhibition of its impressive collection of etchings by Hercules Segers. Hercuwho, you might well ask, as did I when I first encountered him on the British Museum website. Short answer: Hercules Pieterszoon Segers (ca. 1589 – ca. 1638) was an incredibly innovative Dutch printmaker and painter during the Golden Age of Dutch art. He experimented with printing media in such radical ways that he was centuries ahead of his time. His imaginary landscapes of craggy mountains and desolate valleys printed on colored paper in colored ink look like something J.M.W. Turner might have painted two hundred years later, or rather, like texturized, color-washed, inverted negatives of something Turner might have painted two hundred years later.

Segers’ prints still look incredibly fresh, possibly because they’ve been so seldom seen since his popularity ebbed shortly after his death around 1638. He was better known by his contemporaries for his paintings which were collected by Dutch masters Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan van de Cappelle. Rembrandt was a particular fan. Only a dozen of Segers’ paintings are known today, and Rembrandt owned eight of them.

Rembrandt also collected Segers’ prints, which inspired his own far more famous etchings. One of Rembrandt’s etchings, in fact, was more than inspired by Segers’ work; it was built on it. Rembrandt acquired one of Segers’ original copper plates, Tobias and the Angel, and reworked the figures into a Flight into Egypt. He made small changes to the landscape (mainly the copse of trees behind the Holy Family), but kept much of it the same, because the greatest of the Dutch Golden Age painters knew that there was no improving on the original.

There are only 183 of Segers’ known prints extant, made from 54 original plates. Unlike Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya and every other printmaker you can name, Segers never made large print runs, and every single impression is different. Some of them are vastly different. He used colored ink printed on paper he dyed himself, sometimes running the paper and plate through the press with fabric to apply texture to the print. Sometimes he printed directly onto fabric. Once the print was pressed, he would hand-paint different details on each piece and often dipped the finished composition in a tint. Nobody else did this. He also experimented with different crops and cuttings, bringing a whole new focus to individual prints.

The results are so unprintlike that art historians have dubbed them “printed paintings,” and indeed his actual paintings are so small that they are about the same size as his large prints, so he blurred the demarcation line between print and paint in more ways than one.

He utilized existing printmaking techniques in new and startling ways, but he also broke entirely new ground. From the British Museum pdf about Segers:

His greatest invention was undoubtedly the process of lift-ground etching (also known as sugar-lift or sugar-bite etching, sugar aquatint or pen method). Although no accounts by Segers of his working methods have survived, it is assumed that he used a sugar solution to draw a composition on a copper-plate either with a pen or even with a brush, as some of the lines are quite broad. The plate was then probably covered with a thin, resinous ground and bathed in hot water which made the sugar granules swell causing the ground to blister off where the design had been applied. The plate would then have been treated as usual: the exposed copper-plate bitten in an acid bath, inked and subsequently printed. The resulting lines have a granulated surface, similar to aquatint which was a later invention. This technique, allowing the artist to apply defined lines with a brush, was not practiced again until the 18th century.

I checked my copy of H.W. Janson’s classic reference tome History of Art (mine is the Fifth Edition published in 1995) and Segers is not even mentioned in passing in the entire 1000 pages. Alexander Cozens, on the other hand, a fairly conventional British landscape watercolorist and printmaker who gets the credit for inventing aquatint over a century after Segers’ related invention, has six pages in the index.

Segers’ genius began to get recognition again in the 19th century, when major purchases by the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum (click links for pictures of the museums’ Segers collections) put his work before a broader audience. Even so, the current exhibition at the British Museum is the first time all of their Segers etchings have been put on display as a group, and most of them have never been on display at all. If you’re in London, get thee to the BM stat.

Ancient plaque buildup a boon to archaeology

May 8, 2012

Ancient, Modern(ish)

In the centuries before flossing, fluoride and Waterpiks became standard in human populations, tartar would build up on teeth in layers, sometimes creating dental superstructures of majestically disgusting size; see the technicolor example on the right. Now researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno have discovered that small samples of plaque removed from the teeth of ancient human remains can reveal information about the food they once chewed.

Analysis of stable isotopes like oxygen, strontium, lead, carbon and nitrogen performed on teeth and bone can provide a wealth of detail about ancient diet and migration, but the analysis requires the destruction of the sample. Museum curators are obviously not keen to allow destructive procedures on the remains in their charge, but since dental calculus is technically an accretion on the body, scraping off bits of it and destroying them doesn’t count.

[Researcher G. Richard] Scott obtained samples of dental calculus from 58 skeletons buried in the Cathedral of Santa Maria in northern Spain dating from the 11th to 19th centuries to conduct research on the diet of this ancient population. After his first methodology met with mixed results, he decided to send five samples of dental calculus to Poulson at the University’s Stable Isotope Lab, in the off chance they might contain enough carbon and nitrogen to allow them to estimate stable isotope ratios.

“It’s chemistry and is pretty complex,” Scott explained. “But basically, since only protein has nitrogen, the more nitrogen that is present, the more animal products were consumed as part of the diet. Carbon provides information on the types of plants consumed.”

Scott said that once at the lab, the material was crushed, and then an instrument called a mass spectrometer was used to obtain stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios.

“It was a long shot,” he said. “No one really thought there would be enough carbon and nitrogen in these tiny, 5- to 10- milligram samples to be measurable, but Dr. Poulson’s work revealed there was. The lab results yielded stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios very similar to studies that used bone collagen, which is the typical material used for this type of analysis.”

Extracting collagen requires dissolving the bone samples in multiple acid baths. It’s time-consuming, dangerous, expensive and highly destructive. Scraping off a small amount of plaque from thousand-year-old dental stalactites is quick and easy. Then all you have to do is grind it up and put it in the mass spectrometer to find the stable isotope ratios. If this procedure turns out to be repeatable and accurate, our long, scabrous history of poor dental hygiene will finally have meaning.

Glass plates of India under the Raj found in shoebox

May 7, 2012

Modern(ish), Treasures

A heretofore unknown collection of 178 glass plate negatives taken in India during the heyday of the British Raj were found in a shoebox in the archives of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) in Edinburgh. The negatives were still in their original five-by-eight-inch plate boxes which were wrapped in pages from 1914 issues of the English-language Indian newspaper The Statesman and then placed gingerly in a box that once held a pair of grey, size 9 Peter Lord loafers.

The pictures document daily life in India, mainly Calcutta (today known as Kolkata) in 1912. There are pilgrims at a religious festival, street fairs, riverside villages, portraits of nameless pith-helmeted British types, and spectacular night views of the city lights, among many other subjects. (Doesn’t the sporting gent at right look just like Tintin?) All of the images are in pristine condition. RCAHMS thinks the glass plates remained untouched since they were wrapped in 1914 newspaper (possibly in 1914), thus keeping the delicate negatives from degrading.

In December of 1911, King George V and Queen Mary traveled to India for the Delhi Durbar, an opulent ceremony proclaiming them Emperor and Empress of India. This was the only time a British monarch was actually present at Durbar, and the only time a British monarch visited India as her emperor. After the ceremony, they toured other cities of the subcontinent, including Calcutta right before and after the New Year. There are some amazing pictures in the collection showing the city decked out in welcome, documentation as historically significant as it is beautiful given that George V had unexpectedly announced at the Durbar that the capital of India would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi.

RCAHMS has no idea where the pictures came from or who the photographer was. They theorize that the pictures could have been taken by a British civil servant stationed in Calcutta, or by a Scotsman involved in the jute trade. In the early part of the 20th century, there was a thriving trade in raw Indian jute fibers between Calcutta and Dundee, Scotland. Factories owned by formidable local industrialists known as the Jute Barons spun the raw jute fibers into a plethora of consumer products like twine and burlap bags. There was enough of a Scottish community in Raj-era Calcutta that they had their own cemetery which has recently been restored and documented.

RCAHMS architectural historian Clare Sorensen said, “We don’t know for sure how the negatives came to be in our collection. We receive archive material from countless different sources, from architectural practices to generous donations from the public, and sometimes take large amounts of material in at once, and often documentation for historical deposits does not exist.

“Over time all this new material will be inspected and catalogued as part of our collection and then made available to the public. It’s fantastic that a small shoe-box contained such a treasure-trove of photographic imagery, but in some ways it’s not unsual [sic]. Our experience as an archive has shown us that some of the most interesting discoveries can be made in the most unlikely of places.”

The entire collection has been digitized and is very much worth a browse. They’ve also put a selection of 40 highlights in this gallery.