Month: October 2013

Heads from university anatomy collection repatriated

Modern(ish)

In early 2011, a collection of human remains from indigenous peoples around the world was found in storage at the University of Birmingham Medical School. Some of the skulls and bone fragments were labeled with their places of origin, but there was no documentation beyond that explaining how the collection came about, who donated what and when. The collection has never been on display, as far as anyone knows, nor has it been used in any known study or research. Keenly conscious of the ethical issues surrounding human remains being kept in museums as anthropological exhibits, the university decided to make every effort to return the remains to their ancestral homes.

The first group of remains welcomed home by their living descendants was a collection of seven complete skulls, each in their box, and four bone fragments. The bones were individually labeled as having been excavated from a grave in San Luis Obispo, California, (on the Pacific coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco). From there they were sold to a private collector who later donated the remains to the University of Birmingham at some point in the 19th century. Out of respect for the bodies, no radiocarbon dating or any other kind of testing was performed on the remains, so the university couldn’t be sure how old they were or which tribe to return them to. University biomedical ethics professor Dr. June Jones contacted representatives of the Native American tribes in the area — the Chumash and Salinan tribes both had territory in San Luis Obispo — and the Salinan tribe responded with alacrity that they would be glad to welcome the long-lost ancestors back to their homeland.

In May 2012, Dr. Jones carried the remains to California where they were first brought to the county coroner who confirmed by examination of the teeth that they are indeed Native American. (The standard test for this is to look at the molars. Traditional diets included a constant supply of grit that wore down the molars into a characteristic shovel shape. EDIT: This is the practice as described in Jones’ online diary. Stacey comments below that in fact incisors display the characteristic shovel shape, and it’s due to genetics, not diet.) Two days later, the skulls and bones were reburied in an undisclosed location to keep them from being immediately re-looted. According to June Jones’ short but very sweet diary of the repatriation, the ceremony was private, dignified and moving, with tribal members present and the Sheriff and Coroner also there to pay their respects. From the diary:

As one Tribal leader said to us as we gathered around the grave “tonight our ancestors will sit around the fire together in their own land for the first time in many years.”

The repatriation made the local news in California because it was the first time tribal remains were returned from outside the United States for reburial in their native soil. It was also notable because the University contacted the tribes first rather than the other way around, and paid for the repatriation. In the US, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act allows for tribe members to claim ancestral remains from museums, universities, private collections, etc., but the onus is on the tribes to file suit. It’s expensive and often fraught with conflict with institutions who are reluctant to let go of anything in their collections for fear of a domino effect of repatriation.

On Friday, October 18th, a year and a half after Dr. Jones’ trip to California, a second group of tribal remains — a tattooed mummified Maori head (known as a toi moko) and four skulls (known as koiwi tangata) — have been formally returned to their homeland. A delegation from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa received the remains in a traditional ceremony.

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Arapata Hakiwai, co-leader of the New Zealand museum, said the ceremony was important “for the elders to tell the ancestors they’re going to journey home soon”.

Te Herekiekie Herewini, manager of the repatriation programme, said: “In our beliefs your spirit and life force comes from the particular part of the country you’re from. It’s important for your life force to go back to that place. Repatriation allows both sides to reconcile their histories.”

The remains were then flown to New Zealand where they were welcomed in a traditional Maori ceremony in Wellington. Their final destination has yet to be determined. First Te Papa museum researchers will attempt to determine their precise origin so they can be buried in their homelands as per Maori custom. In the meantime, the museum will care for the remains in private with all proper cultural respects.

The Maori have been working for decades to reclaim their ancestral remains scattered in museums, schools and hospitals around the world but overwhelmingly in Europe. They’re increasingly successful as attitudes towards human remains in institutions shift from the impersonal to a recognition of their cultural and religious significance. The University of Birmingham has been a trendsetter in this, taking a strong stand in favor of repatriation and taking it upon itself to see that human remains in its collections find their way home. In ten years, the university’s repatriation program has returned more than 100 items. It also works with Te Papa to identify and return remains in other UK institutions, of which there are an estimated 400 pieces that we know of. There are probably many more still out there undocumented and unrecognized, like these heads were before their rediscovery in 2011.

Titanic violin sells for record $1.78 million

Modern(ish)

The violin believed to be the one played by bandmaster Wallace Hartley as Titanic sank the night of April 14th, 1912, has sold at auction for a record £900,000 ($1,454,000) hammer price, £1.1 million ($1,778,000) including buyer’s premium and taxes. The previous record price for Titanic memorabilia was just set in May of 2011 when the 33-foot-long plan of the ship made for the British Board of Trade’s inquiry into the disaster sold for £220,000 ($363,000).

The buyer is a British collector of Titanic artifacts who has of course chosen to remain anonymous. It took less than two minutes for the bids to go from £50 — an artificially low opening point that was a gift from auctioneer Alan Aldridge to two of his friends who just wanted to get a bid in — to £100,000. Within 10 minutes the final two buyers standing, both anonymous phone bidders, had battled it out to the rousing £900,000 finale.

There was a great deal of interest in this piece, not all of it approving. The circumstances of its survival and rediscovery read more like fiction than reality, so much so that an elaborate hoax seems at least as possible as it being Hartley’s violin.

It was found in a leather luggage case monogrammed “W. H. H.” (Wallace Henry Hartley) which also held a silver cigarette case, a signet ring and a letter written by the violin teacher who had given the objects to the current owner’s mother. On the tail piece of the violin is a silver plate inscribed “For Wallace on the occasion of our engagement from Maria.” Wallace Hartley’s fiancé Maria Robinson gave him a violin when they got engaged in 1910, and he brought it on the Titanic.

The violin teacher’s letter told the remarkable story that Maria Robinson’s sister Margaret had given the violin to the local Salvation Army after Maria’s death in 1939. Margaret told the Bridlington Salvation Army leader, Major Renwick, about the instrument’s history and Renwick gave it to one of their members who was a violin teacher. That teacher gave it to one of his students and that years later student’s son found in the attic.

The owner took the violin to auction house Henry Aldridge & Son to have it authenticated in 2006. That was no easy task. The very notion that the violin could have survived intact strapped to the chest of the dead musician while his body floated in the frigid north Atlantic for 10 days is a fanciful one, to put it mildly. Aldridge spent seven years analyzing the instrument, enlisting experts to determine if it was a forgery, a pastiche of period elements like a 1910 silver plate cobbled together and dunked in sea water to make it seem legit.

Henry Aldridge & Son felt they’d sufficiently established its authenticity to announce the find in March of this year. In May, one more test was performed: a CT scan at BMI Ridgeway Hospital in Wiltshire.

Astrid Little, Imaging Manager at the Wroughton hospital explains why a CT scan helped in the authentication process: “A 3D image of the violin was created from the CT scan, meaning the violin could be examined from the inside. The scan revealed that the original wood was cracked and showed signs of possible restoration. The fine detail of the scan meant the auctioneers could examine the construction, interior and the glue holding the instrument together.”

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After it was released from the hospital, the violin went on tour, stopping at two Titanic museums in the United States, Branson and Pigeon Forge, where 315,000 people viewed it over the course of three months. After that, it went back across the ocean to the Titanic Belfast, the exceptional museum overlooking historic slipways where Titanic and Olympic were built.

There are still many doubts as to how any wooden instrument could have survived intact the sinking of the Titanic and subsequent week and a half in the water. Still, somebody was willing to bet $1.78 million on the chance of it being the real deal.

Etruscan prince turns out to be a princess

Ancient

The skeletal remains of an Etruscan aristocrat found in an intact tomb in the ancient necropolis of Tarquinia last month turn out to be female. Archaeologists had assumed the person laid out on a funerary bed carved out of the rock with a spear placed by the body was a man, but osteological analysis has found that the bones belonged to a woman between 35 and 40 years of age. It’s the cremated remains found along with what appears to be an unopened jewelery box on the smaller bier across from the skeleton that belonged to a man. He appears to have been younger than the woman and his remains were placed in the tomb years after hers, suggesting they may have been mother and son.

The small bronze vessel known as a pyx that was found on her funerary bed was X-rayed and found to contain bronze or silver needles and what may be a spool. The pyx itself is considerably older than the 7th-6th century B.C. burial, so it may have been an heirloom handed down to the noblewoman.

The archaeologists’ initial gender assumptions based almost entirely on the placement of the grave goods — spear = male, jewel box = female — have thus been thoroughly upended. Alessandro Mandolesi, Etruscanologist with the University of Torino and dig leader, explains (translation mine):

“It’s not usual to find a woman’s body with a spear. For this reason, in the beginning, we thought we’d found a warrior. After seeing the results of the anthropological analyses of the skeleton and after finding the burials of the male, we have a clearly picture of what we’ve found. There is a high probability that the spear was placed as a symbol of unity between the two deceased.”

That last part makes zero sense to me. The spear was found next to the skeleton’s right shin, between the bones and the wall of the tomb. The ashes of the male are on the smaller bed against the opposite wall. In what way does the spear indicate connection, never mind unity, between the two residents of the tomb? When they thought the skeleton was male there was no talk of the spear as symbol of union because weapons are indicators of warrior or at least leadership status. Why should that most obvious of associations be discarded just because the skeleton is female? Notice there is no tortured attempt to explain the jewelry box on the man’s funerary bed as justified by his relation to the woman.

The Etruscans certainly weren’t so narrow-minded. Greek and Roman sources were scandalized by Etruscan society (or at any rate by the urban legends they’d heard about it). The 4th century B.C. Greek historian Theopompus of Chios described gender relations in Etruria as shockingly liberated from the Greek perspective:

Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom. Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often, sometimes along with the men, and sometimes by themselves. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. They do not share their couches with their husbands but with the other men who happen to be present, and they propose toasts to anyone they choose. They are expert drinkers and very attractive.

The Etruscans raise all the children that are born, without knowing who their fathers are. The children live the way their parents live, often attending drinking parties and having sexual relations with all the women. It is no disgrace for them to do anything in the open, or to be seen having it done to them, for they consider it a native custom. So far from thinking it disgraceful, they say when someone ask to see the master of the house, and he is making love, that he is doing so-and-so, calling the indecent action by its name.

When they are having sexual relations either with courtesans or within their family, they do as follows: after they have stopped drinking and are about to go to bed, while the lamps are still lit, servants bring in courtesans, or boys, or sometimes even their wives.

The emphasis on sexual permissiveness in Etruscan society may be an assumption of his, incidentally, an automatic inference drawn from the mere fact that women in Etruria had so much freedom than Greek women did. In Greek and Roman society at this time, the only women present at dinners with men were prostitutes and servants. Respectable women did not socialize freely with men. Etruscans, on the other hand, had dinner with their wives and sometimes even had sex with them afterwards, much to Theopompus’ shock (horror?). If they recline on dinner couches with men not their husbands, goes the logic, then they must be sexually promiscuous.

The evidence we have from funerary inscriptions and artistic depictions indicates Etruscan women were prominent and had some measure of equality with men. For instance, many tombs inscribed with the name of the deceased mention both their parents’ names. The mothers keep their own names and can even pass it down to their children. They also owned property independently they could bequeath to their children. Etruscan couples are often depicted in a loving embrace on sarcophagi, like the beautiful 5th century B.C. Sarcophagus of the Spouses now in the Villa Giulia museum in Rome, or one from 6th century now in the Louvre.

That’s not to say that the headlines should now all scream “Tomb of Etruscan Warrior Princess Found!” Just because she was buried with a weapon doesn’t mean she was a military leader who actually wielded said weapon. It could be a symbol of leadership or strength. It could be of sentimental significance to her or something associated to her family.

Ancient Britons ate frogs’ legs long before the French

Ancient, Modern(ish)

University of Buckingham archaeologists excavating the Mesolithic site of Blick Mead near Amesbury, Wiltshire, just over a mile from Stonehenge, have found the charred leg bone of a toad along with the bones of other animals feasted upon between 6250 and 7596 B.C. This is the earliest evidence of cooked frogs’ legs ever discovered, pre-dating French examples by 8,000 years and throwing a beloved ethnic slur into turmoil.

Excavations at the Blick Mead site have been ongoing since 2005. Beginning in May 2010, a large number of flint pieces and animal bones dating to the Mesolithic era were discovered. In three trenches, one 20 x 13 feet in size, the other two just six and a half feet square, archaeologists unearthed 12,000 pieces of worked and burned flint, plus more than 650 bone fragments. The flint tools were in exceptional condition, some of them so sharp they actually cut the fingers of the archaeologists who discovered them. The burned pieces are evidence of very large and hot fires built on or very near this site.

Last year researchers examined the bones. They found that a large majority of them, more than 60%, were aurochs bones. Aurochs were large wild cattle which ones roamed the forests of Europe. Highly prized by hunters, they were extinct in England by 2,000 B.C. Their size and fierceness made them quarries as desirable as they were formidable, and they probably held symbolic significance in Mesolithic society, hence the large percentage of aurochs remains in Blick Mead. The bones of other large animals were identified as well, among them an unusually large red deer and wild pig.

It’s a little bone that is making the big splash today, though: the tiny humerus of a toad.

David Jacques, senior research fellow in archaeology, said: “It would appear that thousands of years ago people were eating a Heston Blumenthal-style menu on this site, one-and-a-quarter miles from Stonehenge, consisting of toads’ legs, aurochs, wild boar and red deer with hazelnuts for main, another course of salmon and trout and finishing off with blackberries.

“This is significant for our understanding of the way people were living around 5,000 years before the building of Stonehenge and it begs the question – where are the frogs now?”

Blick Mead’s close proximity to Stonehenge and Bluehenge makes it of particular interest to archaeologists investigating the origin of Stonehenge, its Mesolithic context, why it was built on the Salisbury Plain, what the religious significance of the area may have been before the first ditch was dug. Radiocarbon dating of Mesolithic remains found that the site was occupied every millennium between 7550 and 4700 B.C. That’s 3,000 years of if not continuous use, regular use and reuse. It’s what is known as a “homebase,” a Mesolithic residential site revisited repeatedly over time. This is the oldest place of residence found in the Stonehenge area.

It’s also a contemporary of the only other Mesolithic discovery in the Stonehenge environs: four, perhaps five (one might be the result of a tree falling accident) Mesolithic postholes found underneath the visitor parking lot in the 1960s. They date to approximately the same time as the frog humerus and other bones, ca. 7,500 B.C., and both Mesolithic sites are just over a mile from each other. Perhaps knowledge of these ritually significant spots was passed down through the generations over the site’s 3,000 years of use, cementing its religious symbolism so firmly that it outlasted the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic and inspired the builders of Stonehenge around 3000 B.C.

One possible element of ritual meaning might be the natural springs in the area. The flint and bones were found where once burbled a constant-temperature spring. Bluehenge also has a spring adjacent to it. There are Bronze Age weapons deposits that suggest the Blick Mead spring continued to hold specific religious meaning in 1,400 B.C. and artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon era and 10th-11th century Amesbury Abbey period point to a continuing ritual significance of the area even when the rituals changed enormously.

Andy Rhind-Tutt, chairman of Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust and co-ordinator of the community involvement on the dig, said …: “No one would have built Stonehenge without there being something unique and really special about the area. There must have been something significant here beforehand and Blick Mead, with its constant temperature spring sitting alongside the River Avon, may well be it.

“I believe that as we uncover more about the site over the coming days and weeks, we will discover it to be the greatest, oldest and most significant mesolithic home base ever found in Britain.”

“Currently Thatcham – 40 miles from Amesbury – is proving to be the oldest continuous settlement in the UK with Amesbury 104 years younger. By the end of this latest dig, I am sure the records will need to be altered.”

Otzi has living relatives after all

Ancient, Modern(ish)

When the full genome of Otzi the Iceman’s mitochondrial DNA was mapped in 2008, researchers found that his subhaplogroup type matched no modern samples, that barring the existence of some rare isolated genetic strain of people in the Alps, his maternal line had gone extinct. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from women, so the 2008 comparisons could only rule out surviving descendants of Otzi’s sisters or aunts, not direct descendants of his or male relatives who shared the same Y chromosome.

Last year, scientists from the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) and from the Institutes for Human Genetics at the University of Tübingen and Saarland University took a sample of his hip bone and sequenced Otzi’s full nuclear genome from it. They discovered all kinds of interesting facts about the 5,300 man, like that he had brown eyes, was lactose intolerant and had a predisposition to cardiovascular diseases. They also confirmed the results of the mitochondrial sequencing which pointed to a shared ancestry with the modern inhabitants of the Tyrrhenian Sea area even though his particular genetic branch didn’t survive.

It wasn’t a direct study of Otzi’s genes that identified living relatives, however. It was a study exploring the distribution of the Y-chromosome haplogroup G among the population of the Austrian Tyrol, including in remote areas of the Alps. This kind of research can illuminate pre-historic migration routes by tracing the movement of genetic haplogroups and researchers wanted to see how the topography of the Alps affected the movement of peoples. The G haplogroup is common in the Middle East, but rare in Europe. The Tyrol is an exception. In certain areas of the Tyrolian Alps like the Upper Inn Valley there’s a spike in the values of haplogroup G, but in adjacent Landeck the numbers plummet back down to normal European levels. This suggests that Landeck was close to impassable from the south 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

To get a decent statistical sampling for the study, the scientists collected DNA from the Y chromosome of 3,700 Tyrolian men. Among those 3,700, 19 of them were found to share the haplogroup and thus an ancestor with the Iceman.

The team found that about 19 men shared a genetic lineage, called G-L91, with Ötzi. It’s possible that at least one of these men may directly descend from the Iceman, part of an unbroken line of sons going back 5,300 years.

However, “the chances are so extremely low that I would be tempted to say no,” [study co-author Walther] Parson said. “There are just too many other possibilities.”

None of the 19 men have been notified that they share a common ancestor with the famous man who was bashed on the head, shot with arrows and died in the Ötztal Alps leaving his body to freeze into a most fascinating mummy. Researchers plan to expand the study to neighboring countries that share Tyrolean territory, the Val Venosta in the autonomous Alto Adige region of Italy and the Swiss Engadin valley. They’ve already found research partners in Italy and Switzerland keen to participate.

Perhaps once all of Otzi’s likely relatives are located, they’ll have a tri-country family reunion. They should all get a stripey tattoo in his honor.