Not the meteorite part. The figure was definitely carved from a piece of the Chinga meteorite which fell near the Mongolian-Siberian border 15,000 years ago. It’s the part about it being an 11th century Bön culture artifact that is suspect, and, even more sadly, the part about it having been found during Ernst Schäfer’s Tibet expedition. Buddhism expert Achim Bayer from Dongguk University in South Korea argues persuasively in this article (pdf) that the statue’s features mark it as a European counterfeit probably made between 1910 and 1970.

Bayer first notes that the team led by University of Stuttgart planetologist Dr. Elmar Buchner included no experts in Tibetan or Mongolian art, no ethnologists, no archaeologists. The team’s expertise rested entirely on the fields of mineralogy and planetary science, which is great for the analysis of the material but left them relying on what amounts to hearsay on the question of the sculpture’s origin. According to Bayer, Buchner’s team contacted museums and some individuals to determine which character from Tibetan culture the figure might represent, but no Tibetologists, a glaring oversight, especially considering that one of the paper’s authors is from the University of Vienna which has a well-known and highly respected South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies department.

Had they sought out the input of such experts in the field, Bayer believes they would have immediately been confronted with severe doubts about the statue’s authenticity. The pseudo-Tibetan characteristics of the iconography are glaringly obvious, in his opinion. He brings up 13 main examples, but there are even more minor issues. The posture, positioning and design of the hands, legs and feet are wrong, as is the full beard. The halos, the small one behind the head and the large one behind the body, are suspiciously round and plain. Halos are elaborately decorated in Tibetan art and either do not appear on metal statues or appear only as separate pieces.

The biggest red flags are with the garments. The sleeves, hat and cape do not match those worn by Vaiśravaṇa and other deities, or really anything at all in the Tibetan tradition — the knotted and draped cape looks more Roman than Asian — but it’s the shoes and pants that get top billing on Bayer’s list of errors:

1. The lama is neither barefoot nor does he wear traditional boots. The shoes cover the feet, like European shoes, up to the ankles and no further.
2. Obviously, the trousers worn by the lama do not resemble anything seen in Tibetan or Mongolian sculpture. Traditional statues feature robes, occasionally armour at the shins, but never trousers. The slits at the end of the trousers are probably meant
to make a vaguely oriental, mediaeval or pastoral impression.

That seems to be the common thread with all these would-be Tibetan elements: they’re what a Westerner with little knowledge of Tibetan and Buddhist iconography would imagine is Tibetan based on, say, a two dimensional image they’ve seen in a book. Tibet became a subject of fascination in Europe in the early 20th century, but since its traditional craftsmanship and iconography were not well-known, artists relied on images of sculptures and their own imaginations to create objects for the Tibetica market. The consumers didn’t know any better either. Genuine Tibetan scholarship took root in the European academy in 1970, and the art and antiquities markets followed suit. Bayer therefore places the creation of the Iron Man piece in the period between the dawn of European fascination with Tibetan art (ca. 1910) and the actual study of it (ca. 1970).

One possible source of inspiration for this statue is Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which was published in 1901 with illustrations by his father John Lockwood Kipling. J.L. Kipling was a sculptor, art teacher and museum curator in India for decades starting in 1865. The illustrations depicting Kim’s Lama mentor have several elements in common with Iron Man: the non-standard short hat, the siddha-like earrings, even the swastika on his begging bowl which is positioned in the middle of his torso like it is on the statue (see illustration on page 44). The orientation of the swastika is reversed, probably from the printing, but Rudyard Kipling’s swastika seal before the title page is facing left as in the Asian tradition.

Is there a chance that even if it is a counterfeit it was produced in Asia to sell to Nazi dupes on an expedition to find the spiritual source of the Aryan race? As much as I’d like it to be so because it would make the whole Schäfer story even better, it’s unlikely that local craftsmen would have made so many iconographic errors. It’s more likely that the raw meteorite chunk made it to Europe from Asia and was carved there, either for the general market in Tibet artifacts or for the market in Nazi memorabilia. In the latter case, it would likely have been commissioned with the specific intent of selling it as an artifact from the famous Schäfer expedition.

Bayer has corresponded with Buchner and asked him what evidence the team was given for the Schäfer provenance. The answer is none. They have no evidence whatsoever beyond the word of the anonymous collector who believed that’s where it came from. Bayer’s doubts on the provenance were confirmed by researcher Isrun Engelhardt, an expert on Schäfer expeditions, who is also looking into the Iron Man story and believes the connection to Schäfer is fiction.

🙁

General Horatio Gates was the commanding general at the Battle of Saratoga, which took place in eastern New York in two phases on September 19th and October 7th, 1777. The conclusive victory resulted in the surrender of British General John Burgoyne’s army and was the immediate cause of France’s agreement to negotiate an alliance with the ragtag colonists, which would force Britain to fight on multiple fronts and would provision the Revolutionaries with much-needed arms and money. The Battle of Saratoga is widely considered America’s greatest victory in the War of Independence.

For some time after Saratoga, General Gates was held in the highest esteem. He and George Washington were treated as equally great heroes, appearing on the cover of almanacs and in contemporary histories as luminaries of the Continental Army. Then things went awry, which is why few people have heard of Gates today while we daily palpate George Washington’s visage on the dollar bill. The main problem was that General Gates had a gigantic ego which led him to take more credit than he may have deserved, and to attempt to secure more power than was wise.

Born in 1727 in Deptford, England, Horatio Gates was the son of a housekeeper with outstanding connections to the aristocracy and a civil servant. His mother’s service for the Duke of Bolton secured a military commission for her son, who ten years later would move to New York and serve under British General Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War. An injury early on in the campaign kept him from doing much field duty, but by all accounts he was an excellent military administrator.

By 1769, he was over the British army with its strict class-based promotion system that had kept him stuck at the rank of major for years. He sold his commission and bought a small plantation outside Leetown in what was then Virginia and is now West Virginia. When hostilities broke out with Britain in 1775, Gates immediately presented himself to Washington, whom he had known when they both served under Braddock in the French and Indian War, as an experienced candidate for high rank in the nascent US army. Valuing his inside knowledge of British military tactics and his administrative abilities, Washington appointed him Brigadier General and Adjutant General of the Continental Army.

Gates wanted a field command, though. In fact, he wanted the whole command, actively lobbying the Continental Congress in 1776 to appoint him Commander-in-Chief instead of Washington. He had many influential backers, especially among the New England delegates, but Washington’s victories at Trenton (after he famously crossed the icy Delaware River standing up in the front of a rowboat) on December 26th, 1776 and at Princeton on January 2nd, 1777 entrenched his position at the head of the army. General Gates was sent to New York State to help Major General Philip Schuyler, commander of the army’s Northern Department.

When Schuyler lost Fort Ticonderoga to the British, Gates saw his chance (even though he was plenty involved in the failed campaigns). Congress appointed him commander of the Northern Department in August of 1777, a month before the initial encounters with General Burgoyne’s troops at Saratoga.

There is much debate on the question of how much credit he deserves for the victory there. His field generals, most notably Benedict Arnold, did much of the on-the-ground fighting, and Arnold’s greatest success repelling a British attack on the left flank happened against Gates’ orders. Arnold was shot in the leg in that battle. The shot broke his leg and killed his horse, which then fell on top of him and broke his leg some more.

Gates liked his action defensive, always advocating for retreat and holding back. It’s not as glamorous as Arnold’s inspiring charge into the breach, but in this case Gates’ cautiousness served the troops well since it ensured they were well-established in a defensive position on Bemis’ Heights with solid supply lines all the way back to Albany. The British Army, on the other hand, had major supply issues and although they had won the first encounter in September, they did so at great human cost, particularly among their officers who had been successfully targeted by American shooters. The American army was able to cut off British resupply, and the German troops refused Burgoyne’s orders to attack again. On October 17th, Burgoyne surrendered to Gates.

Riding high on the Saratoga victory, Gates was appointed head of the Board of War, a civilian position which put him in the absurdly conflict-rife position of having political command over George Washington who was his commanding officer in the army. During this time, he and a cabal of officers, including General Thomas Conway, discussed having Washington fired and Gates appointed Commander-in-Chief in his place. It never went beyond an exchange of letters, and the Conway Cabal, as it became known, failed when Washington found out about it and confronted the grumblers. Gates apologized, resigned from the Board of War, and quietly took command of the Eastern Department.

In 1780, he was given command of the Southern Department after the British victory in the Siege of Charleston, South Carolina. This would turn out to be his military nadir. At the Battle of Camden on August 16th, Gates’ army was beaten like a red-headed stepchild by General Charles Cornwallis. The British took 1,000 of Gates’ men prisoner and all of his artillery. Gates reputedly distinguished himself in one way: by running 170 miles in three days on horseback to get back to safety up north.

Congress called for an inquiry into Gates’ conduct in the aftermath of the disaster, but it went nowhere and his supporters had it repealed in 1782. With the end of hostilities in 1783, you’d think his chances to mess up would also end, but Gates was involved in one more embarrassment, the Newburgh conspiracy, in which officers unhappy about the prospect of their promised pensions remaining unpaid due to Congressional brokeness tried to stir up trouble. They proposed Washington be replaced by Gates, but Washington yet again headed them off at the pass by delivering a speech which, though unpersuasive in substance, swayed his officers back to his side with a reference to his now having to wear glasses because of the hardships he’d suffered along with them during this war.

Gates went back to Traveler’s Rest, his estate in Virginia, for a few years. Then he sold the estate, manumitted his slaves, and moved to New York. He died in Manhattan in 1806 and was buried in the Trinity Church graveyard on Wall Street. Doubtless he had a gravestone at that point, but over time it was lost, as was the exact location of his burial.

Now, thanks to the efforts of James S. Kaplan, a tax attorney/historian/tour guide who for the past 16 years has given a walking tour of Revolutionary War sites in Manhattan every July 4th from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, General Horatio Gates has an official memorial marker at the Trinity Church cemetery. The marble marker was installed on the south side of the church and a wreath lain in a ceremony on Sunday, October 21st.

Read James Kaplan’s assessment of General Gates’ role in the Battle of Saratoga in this article. You can listen to James Kaplan’s Trinity Church tour here. Search for “Kaplan” on this page to access recordings of his many other tours of New York City, including his ten-stop Great Crash of 1929 tour of Wall Street in collaboration with real estate executive Richard M. Warshauer.

The low salinity and cold temperatures of the Baltic Sea provide ideal conditions for the preservation of shipwrecks and their contents. There are an estimated 100,000 shipwrecks resting on the floor of the Baltic Sea, with perhaps 6,000 of them deemed of particular archaeological and historical significance. Although Swedish Baltic archaeological finds have made much of the news lately, there are approximately 1,500 protected marine monuments (mostly shipwrecks, but also some downed aircraft and submerged archaeological remains that were once on dry land) in German Baltic waters.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these were mainly left alone. Much of the coastal Baltic was restricted territory. Except for a few select people, divers weren’t allowed to explore the vast historical wealth under water. Since reunification, areas that were once off limits are now open, and advances in diving technology have greatly increased the numbers of sports divers hoping to see the Baltic sights. They can also go further offshore to reach shipwrecks that 20 years ago wouldn’t have been accessible. Add to that a wider range of available tools for the sports diver, and now stealing objects of historical value from Baltic wrecks becomes a lucrative proposition.

Only 350 of the marine monuments have been officially explored and mapped, which makes it hard to know exactly how bad the undersea looting situation has gotten. The evidence on the sites that have been documented, however, is extremely disturbing. For example, one World War II U-boat, a small two-man vessel discovered 60 feet under Baltic waters off the coast of Boltenhagen in 2000, was found with its turret hatch closed and undamaged. It was therefore designated a war grave, since its crew remained sealed within. In 2002, divers broke into the hatch. Regional government officials sealed the hole with a steel plate which is still in place today, but shows clear signs of having been tampered with in an attempt to break into the U-boat.

“It’s one of our big worries, over the years people keep trying to get into it and that is of course utterly disrespectful,” says Detlef Jantzen, an archaeologist at the regional agency for monument protection in the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

It’s possible that these divers don’t realize the U-boat is a war grave, or at least aren’t consciously thinking about the fact that they’re desecrating a grave by messing with the hatch. Some of the other wreck sites that are regularly visited by hobby divers may be damaged because the tourists with good intentions don’t understand how their interactions with the artifacts can cause harm. In an attempt to appeal to better natures, and maybe to enlist conditioned reactions to museum signs, Germany’s Society of Maritime Archaeology has started a project to add underwater signs to historic shipwrecks.

Last week the first sign was added to a 100-year-old tugboat thought to have been sunk during or just after World War II. At only 30 feet deep, it’s a popular site for sport divers to visit. The wreck was discovered three years ago and is already showing the ill-effects of diver interference. The sign informs divers that the wreck is a protected historical monument and provides additional information about the site’s layout and history.

The group will start by signposting nine monuments. One particularly valuable wreck is that of the “Darsser Kogge,” a 14th century ship that is a rare example of medieval shipbuilding. “It’s lying on its side and the remains provide valuable information on construction and manufacturing techniques of the time,” said [Society of Maritime Archaeology chairman Martin] Siegel. “These preserved vessels are often the only source of research into traditional shipbuilding.”

The Darsser Kogge has enough to worry about as it is without divers making things worse. The Baltic Sea is increasingly subject to the depredations of the dreaded Teredo navalis, naval shipworm, which used to stick to saltier waters leaving Baltic wooden wrecks free of its destructive devouring. As the waters of the Baltic have gotten warmer and their salinity has increased, particularly over the past decade, the wood boring creatures have spread from the coast of Denmark east into German Baltic territory and north into Swedish waters.

The EU has funded a study of the presence of shipworm in the Baltic, the Wreck Protect Project, to determine how far Teredo navalis has spread, whether, as researchers suspect, climate change is the underlying cause of the Baltic’s environmental changes, and how best to preserve archaeological and historical sites in situ, since logistics and funding make it impossible to contemplate raising every wreck for conservation on dry land.

The EU’s MoSS (Monitoring Safeguarding and Visualizing North European Shipwreck Sites) Project worked to document and protect four wreck sites in the Baltic and elsewhere in Northern Europe, including the Darsser Kogge. There are some good pictures and information about the history of the ship and its conservation challenges on its website.