Month: July 2013

Schindler’s List for sale again

Modern(ish)

The only remaining copy of Schindler’s List in private hands is on the market again, three years after it was first sold by the heirs of Itzhak Stern, Oskar Schindler’s accountant and right hand man. This time it’s being on offered to pre-qualified buyers only on eBay, of all places, with a $3 million starting bid. Again it’s Gary Zimet and Eric Gazin of autograph dealers Moments in Time brokering the sale for the same anonymous seller who bought it three years ago when it priced at $2.2 million. He purchased it as an investment and I guess he’s ready to cash in now.

“Some real deep pockets shop on Ebay,” Gazin told ABC News. “We feel this type of valuable needs to be exposed to a different type of auction.”

Gazin said the auction is only open to pre-qualified bidders because he needs to vet that they actually have $3 million to spend. He has already received several inquiries, he said, but declined to provide the identities of those who were interested.

There are no bids showing on the page itself right now. Nonetheless, Zimet and Gazin hope the purchase price will rise to $5 million by the time the auction is over on July 28th.

This is one of seven original lists typed by Itzhak Stern and given to Nazi authorities. On the lists were Jewish employees (in a manner of speaking; this was slave labor) of an enamelware factory owned by Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten German, Czech national and member of the Nazi Party who bribed and charmed other Nazis into keeping his workers out of the death camps. Only five of the typed lists are known to have survived. Two are in the Yad Vashem Holocause Museum in Israel, one is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., one is a government archive in Koblenz, Germany, and the last is the privately held one which is now on eBay.

This list is 14 pages long and lists 801 male names (the number on the final list would be 1,200, 200 of them workers at a textile factory owned by Julius Madritsch, a Viennese businessman who also stuck his neck out to save Jewish lives). It’s dated April 18, 1945, and was typed on onion skin paper. The fact that so delicate an artifact has survived war and 68 years is a testament to Stern’s dedication and that of his descendants.

Stern’s dedication to Schindler was just as powerful. He and other Schindler Jews supported him for years after the war when all his businesses failed. At a 1962 reunion of Schindler survivors in Israel, Stern’s spoke about Oskar’s efforts on behalf of Krakow’s Jews and they went far beyond the list. He warned them when they were about to be driven into the ghetto, rescued people from trains destined for concentration camps, was the only German to visit the Budapest Rescue Committee (a Zionist group who worked to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation of Hungary) to tell them what was happening to Polish Jews, even built a Jewish cemetery following all religious strictures to inter just one Jewish woman who had died of natural causes but was going to cremated by the Nazis against Jewish tradition. That was the only Jewish cemetery established in occupied Europe.

It was used again in January 1945 when Schindler saved 107 skeletal and frostbitten Jews from cattle cars transporting them from Auschwitz and back again. There were 13 who did not survive that brutal journey without food and water in the dead of winter. The SS were going to burn them, but Schindler bribed and cajoled the authorities into allowing the dead to be buried according to Jewish tradition in that little cemetery.

Leicester Cathedral plans grand tomb for Richard III

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Even as a legal challenge contesting the University of Leicester’s license to determine where the remains of King Richard III are to be buried winds its way through the courts, Leicester Cathedral is moving forward with its plans for the monarch’s tomb. The church originally proposed a modest floor-level slab tomb, but when they opened it to public consultation the response was less than positive. The Richard III Society declared themselves “appalled” by the design. The cathedral went back to the drawing board and came up with a far more ambitious plan.

The Dean of Leicester, The Very Revd David Monteith, said the plans were influenced by feedback from a variety of sources, including members of the public who had been visiting the Cathedral and commenting in the media.

“We are committed to reinter King Richard with honour and we have listened carefully to the different views that were expressed. We want to create a really wonderful space in the Cathedral for him and the many thousands of people we know will want to come to visit and pay their respects.

With input from the Richard III Society, the University of Leicester and the City Council, the firm of van Heyningen and Haward Architects is working on several designs for an elaborate tomb that is both king-worthy and that will accommodate the large number of visitors expected to flock to Richard’s new home. The architects have been working on renovations of Leicester Cathedral since 2009. When the remains of Richard III were discovered, the cathedral asked them to integrate the tomb into the reordering.

Instead of being flush with the floor, Richard’s tomb will be raised in the center of dedicated space with new floors, lighting and a new stained glass window. The precise design has yet to be finalized, but here’s an artist’s rendering of the prospective tomb:

The inlaid marble white rose of York under the raised sarcophagus is a particularly nice touch, I think.

It won’t come cheap. The estimated cost to construct the tomb is £1 million ($1,525,000), moneys which the cathedral is going to have to raise before construction begins. Final approval is slated for November and then they’re going to have to get a move on, because when the Ministry of Justice granted the University the license to remove the remains, they stipulated that the remains would have to be reinterred by August 31st, 2014. Any delays from fundraising, the legal challenge or construction could run afoul of the deadline.

Meanwhile, the University of Leicester is back at the Greyfriars site. This time they’ve been able to open a far larger trench to accompany their far wider brief. The goals are to unearth more details about Richard’s final resting place, discover more about the layout of the church, unearth other burials in the church, most notably the stone coffin thought to contain the body of a local dignitary (perhaps the founder of the friary Peter Swynsfeld, perhaps a knight named Sir William Moton) and the remains of three friars who were hanged and beheaded by Henry IV for treason in 1402 after they were found to be spreading rumors that Richard II was still alive thereby undermining Henry’s legitimacy.

The archaeological team has already found the outlines of the church walls and many medieval floor tiles, some reused in Robert Herrick’s 17th century garden, some still in situ in the choir floor. They’ve also re-excavated the stone coffin and Richard’s grave. The latter they scanned using laser and digital photogrammetric technologies to get the most detailed 3D map possible. Once the grave is covered up again so people can park their cars on it, archaeologists will have an interactive reconstruction to study and to use for comparison in any future excavations. It will also be part of the display at the new Richard III Visitor Centre being build adjacent to the former Greyfriars church.

They’ve erected a public viewing platform at the north end of the parking lot which will be open every day between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM until the end of July.

Navy finds stone boat effigy on San Clemente Island

Medieval

Navy archaeologist have discovered a rare Native American boat effigy on San Clemente Island (SCI). SCI, one of Southern California’s Channel Islands 90 miles west of San Diego, is owned by the US Navy which uses it as ship-to-shore live firing range. The island also has thousands of archaeological sites dotting its 57 square miles. As part of its legally mandated stewardship of the land, the Navy employs archaeologists to survey and excavate these sites. They’ve already identified 4,000 archaeological sites on the 55% of the island that has already been surveyed; experts estimate there are at least that many again yet to be found. Artifacts like hooks carved from shellfish, stone knives, carved animal, drills and bone needles have been discovered that are up to 10,000 years old.

This exceptional archaeological wealth is due to its lack of permanent residents for many centuries and an ecological quirk: the island is completely devoid of burrowing rodents or worms. Archaeologists don’t even have to dig to find artifacts from the pre-Columbian inhabitants. They sit on the surface, where they’ve sat undisturbed for thousands of years. That’s where archaeologists found the boat effigy, in fact, on the surface of a site they were surveying.

The stone boat is nine inches long, weighs about three and a half pounds and was carved from submarine volcanic rock. This is a difficult material to sculpt because submarine lava has smaller vesicles than lava on land. All those little pores make the rock as brittle as it is hard. The artist who carved the boat was a highly skilled craftsman paying homage to the canoes that were an essential part of their culture as ocean-dependent people. These canoes were crafted from redwood logs carried by floods down the coast. They were cut into planks which were then sewn together with plant ropes. The gaps were caulked with natural tar.

As important as the canoes were for transportation to the mainland, trading and fishing, boat effigies are not at all common finds amidst the plethora of artifacts on the island.

“In 30 years, it’s the first time I’ve found one. Even for a reasonably jaded archeologist, this was a reasonably rare find,” Andy Yatsko, the Navy’s archaeologist for San Clemente Island, said during an outing on the island this week. […]

Yatsko said it likely dates back 500 to 1,000 years — a relatively recent artifact for the island, which was inhabited for at least nine millennia.

Dr. Yatsko has seen references to boat carvings in old records, but has never seen one in person. Archaeologists from the San Diego Museum of Man excavated the island before the Navy purchased it in 1934 and they never found anything like a boat effigy either. Plenty of carved volcanic rock animals, but no boats.

Researchers aren’t sure which Native American tribes populated the island. The prime candidates are the Tongva people who are known to have inhabited nearby Santa Catalina Island. The Chumash were in the northern Channel Islands and may have interacted with the people on San Clemente, positively or negatively. Skeletons have been found piled on top of each other on SCI which suggests hostile encounters, even wars, took place on the island.

6,000-year-old decorative wood carving found in Wales

Ancient

Archaeologists monitoring the construction of a substation at Maerdy Wind Farm in the Rhondda Valley of south Wales last September discovered 12 oak timbers preserved in peat deposits. One of them appeared to have abstract designs of parallel zig-zags and an oval shape carved into it. Ancient timbers, like all organic materials, survive exceptional well in peat thanks to the waterlogged anaerobic environment, but decorative carvings are a far rarer find.

Before they got too excited, the archaeologists sent a sample of the 5’5″ length of timber to be radiocarbon dated. The test returned a date range of 6,000-6,270 years old, the Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic period in the UK. Most of the artifacts surviving from that period are stone tools, so the discovery of art carved on timber shines a new light on the culture of Late Mesolithic Britain, an important time when people were transitioning from hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyles to sedentary tribal communities.

They still needed to be sure the designs were deliberate human carvings rather than the freak effect of erosion or some other natural process. The carved timber was sent to the Newport Ship Centre where a 100-foot-long 15th century ship discovered buried in the banks of the River Usk in 2002 is being preserved and examined. They have the facilities to preserve the timber and to 3D laser scan it so the putative carving could be recorded in detail.

With the scans in hand, a team of archaeologists and paleo-entomologists examined the carvings and confirmed that they were not natural features. This conclusion was supported by the lack of any such designs on the other timbers found at the site, all of which are oak and all of which spent thousands of years in the same environment, like a handy ancient wood control group.

“In archaeological circles, this is the is equivalent to winning the lottery,” [Richard Scott Jones, an archaeologist from Heritage Recording Services Wales,] said.

“Finding a piece of decorative art like this is incredibly rare in this area of Wales, especially on uplands. And in terms of timber, this is truly unique. It gives us an idea of the sophistication in terms of artwork around at that time.”

The only other decorative art of this kind from this era has been found on pottery or carved into standing stones like the passage grave slabs in the Neolithic cairn at Gavrinis in Brittany. Researchers believe it may have been used a boundary marker of tribal property, of a hunting ground or maybe even a sacred site.

Archaeologists returned to excavate the discovery site in the hopes of finding something associated with the carved timber, perhaps tools used to carve, perhaps more pieces of it, but they didn’t find anything. The took some samples of the environment which are now in the process of being analyzed.

The timber is at the York Archaeological Trust being preserved with polyethylene glycol (PEG). It is also having its tree rings counted so it can be dated more precisely. The PEG treatment should take about a year. Once that’s done some time in 2014, the timber will be moved to the National Museum Cardiff. The eventual plan is for it to go on permanent display at the National History Museum, St Fagans, in the new galleries that are currently being built.

New Snake queen stele fills blanks in Maya history

Ancient, Treasures

Excavations under the main temple of the royal Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in northwestern Guatemala have uncovered a stela that adds a new chapter to our knowledge of Maya history. The engraved hieroglyphic text tells the story of two 6th century kings of the Wak or Centipede dynasty — King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin (meaning “He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle”) and his father King Chak Took Ich’aak (meaning “Red Spark Claw”) — and Lady Ikoom, a queen of the powerful Snake dynasty of Calakmul, none of whom were previously known to historians.

The stela, officially dubbed El Perú Stela 44, was commissioned by King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin around 564 A.D. in honor of his father who had died eight years earlier. For the first hundred years of its existence, the stela stood out of doors, exposed to the elements. Its hieroglyphics are worn from a century of erosion. Around 700 A.D., the stela was moved inside the main temple by order of King K’inich Bahlam II, probably as an offering for the funeral rites of his wife, the one, the only Lady K’abel, daughter of King Yuhknoom Ch’een the Great of the Calakmul Snake dynasty, Supreme Warrior of the Wak kingdom and Lady Snake Lord.

It’s likely that the king particularly prized the stela because as a scion of the Snake dynasty Lady Ikoom would have had a familial connection both to him and to his wife. Fragments of another stela, Stela 43, found in the walls of the temple last year also mention Lady Ikoom.

There is a gap in the region’s hieroglyphic record for more than a hundred years starting in the early 6th century at Calakmul and extending through 692 A.D. at Tikal. In Waka’, the gap starts in 554 A.D. and ends in 657. The stela is thus a unique source of information about the history of this “dark period,” shortening “The Hiatus” by a decade. It tells a riveting story of war and political intrigue.

The front of the stela … features a king standing face forward cradling a sacred bundle in his arms. There are two other stelae at the site with this pose, Stela 23 dated to 524 and Stela 22 dated to 554, and they were probably raised by King Chak Took Ich’aak. The name Chak Took Ich’aak is that of two powerful kings of Tikal and it is likely that this king of Waka’ was named after them and that his dynasty was a Tikal vassal at the time he came to the throne, the research team suggests.

The text describes the accession of the son of Chak Took Ich’aak, Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin, in A.D. 556 as witnessed by a royal woman Lady Ikoom, who was probably his mother. She carries the titles Sak Wayis, White Spirit, and K’uhul Chatan Winik, Holy Chatan Person. These titles are strongly associated with the powerful Snake or Kan kings who commanded territories to the north of El Perú-Waka’, which makes it very likely that Lady Ikoom was a Snake princess, Guenter argues.

“We infer that sometime in the course of his reign King Chak Took Ich’aak changed sides and became a Snake dynasty vassal,” [research director David] Freidel said. “But then, when he died and his son and heir came to power, he did so under the auspices of a foreign king, which [epigrapher Stanley] Guenter argues from details is the reigning king of Tikal. So Tikal had reasserted command of Waka’ and somehow Queen Ikoom survived this imposition.

“Then in a dramatic shift in the tides of war that same Tikal King, Wak Chan K’awiil, was defeated and sacrificed by the Snake king in A.D. 562. Finally, two years after that major reversal, the new king and his mother raised Stela 44, giving the whole story as outlined above.”