The Year in History Blog History

Time marches inexorably on, devouring our precious remaining minutes, hours and days like Cronus did his children, and miring us in so many end-of-year retrospectives and best-of listicles that we can’t help but embrace the new year if only for the novelty of it. So it’s for your own good, really, that for the third time in a row I will close out the year with a look back at The History Blog’s 2013.

First a little glimpse into the statistical man behind the curtain. This year we had 1,570,000 total pageviews, slightly short of last year’s high of 1,650,546. That’s actually way better than I expected, because earlier this year I experienced for the first time the frigid wrath of a Google denied. You might recall that towards the end of January the blog moved to a new server. This was made necessary by my unquenchable thirst for large pictures taking up so much space that I finally had to ditch the old one and move to a plan that gave me room to grow.

Or so I thought. In fact, it was a complete disaster, way too small to handle my bandwidth and even the overall hard drive space was larger, it was still pretty damn stingy in terms of file size maximums. As soon as the blog moved, it was taken down by an exceeded bandwidth error and remained down for what felt like an eternity but was actually something like eight hours.

As far as Google’s algorithms are concerned, those eight hours might as well have been an eternity. The high ranking I had built up over six years of daily blogging plummeted resulting in a dramatic drop in traffic. I watched, horrified, as my views per day plunged to levels not seen since the end of 2011, beginning of 2012, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. A second bandwidth exceeded takedown struck at the end of March and that was the end of my dealings with that server company. I moved to a new service (hi Westhost! Love you guys!) in mid-April with unlimited everything and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

Alas, the search engines weren’t done punishing me. They still aren’t done, in fact. The numbers only started to crawl back up in September, believe it or not, and even now we’re tens of thousands of views away from the intoxicating highs of January. I am very much looking forward to the new year so I can draw a firm albeit arbitrary line after the Bad Days and usher in Better Days, daring even to hope they might be Best Days.

The busiest new entry this year was the one about the Seikilos epitaph, the oldest ancient song to survive complete with lyrics and musical notation, sung by Newcastle University Classics professor Dr. David Creese. It got 7,811 views on November 3rd, most of them courtesy of a link from io9. Overall this year the Seikilos epitaph got 13,254 pageviews. That wasn’t the most viewed entry of the year, however. That honor goes to last year’s Hatfields & McCoys entry, which continues to draw crazy traffic with 22,719 views in 2013.

My favorite incoming link of the year wasn’t about bringing in the view numbers, though, which were tiny. It was from a Greek foot fetish forum in which the virtues of Napoleon’s sister’s tiny feet and shoes were extolled. I loved it because it’s the perfect niche audience to appreciate details like the memoirs describing Pauline Bonaparte’s terribly risquée pedicures.

It was a great year overall for the audio-visual arts. Notre Dame got some much-needed new bells for her 850th birthday and on Palm Sunday they made a glorious noise along with the one surviving pre-Revolutionary bell, Emmanuel, installed in 1685. Mary Pickford’s first star-billing film was restored and shown after being found in barn. Orson Welles’ long-lost second film, Too Much Johnson (yes I do snicker at that every time), debuted in theaters in Italy and the US after years of painstaking restoration. Meanwhile, in France, the world’s oldest surviving movie theater reopened after an extensive renovation.

I found the rare sound recordings of Florence Nightingale, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Martin Leonard Lanfried, trumpeter of the 17th Lancers, hauntingly beautiful. I loved hearing Florence Nightingale express hope in the recording itself that her voice might keep her cause alive long after her death. Audio recording technology was so new then, but her instincts were right on the money. We also got to enjoy the distinct privilege of Alexander Graham Bell ordering us to hear his voice. The first and only known recording of Alexander Graham Bell, it allows this great inventor of live voice transmission technology to finally transmit his own voice to us.

Advanced technology revived the music played by the the toy pig that saved its owner’s life during the sinking of the Titanic, but to be honest the music was less important to me than the pig itself, which is adorable. I simply cannot resist an adorable pig.

Nor can I resist a good, solid medical oddity, which is probably for the best because there’s nothing like an ancient calcified teratoma from the pelvis of Roman woman to counterbalance the cute piggies. The teeth alone are just so freaky. How could a brain boiled in its skull 4,000 years ago compete? You’d probably need a whole online database of diseased medieval bones to even begin to have a chance against it.

The 3D printed skull of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici wearing her Electress Palatine crown isn’t gruesome at all, at least to my eyes, but it is a fascinating glimpse of where the technology could take archaeology going forward. So many things that should not be touched due to condition issues will be able to be examined again thanks to the combination of laser scanning and 3D printing. It’s Anna Maria’s herculean efforts in saving the patrimony of her famous family, the greatest patrons of the some of the greatest art ever made, that should grant her an august place in history. She’s nowhere near as well known as she should be, since she single-handedly ensured that the art that makes Florence a top tourist destination today remain in the city rather than get plundered and scattered around the courts of Europe after her death in 1743.

Anna Maria’s story was probably my favorite biographical post of the year. Although, if the entry about Michelangelo’s time in hiding under the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo and the astonishing charcoal sketches he drew on the walls to keep himself sane counts as biography, that one’s a favorite of mine too. Teddy Roosevelt’s early years were great fun to delve into as well, because even though he felt he looked like a “dissolute democrat of the fourth ward,” he sure didn’t act like one.

Which reminds me, I must take a moment to give all proper praise to the best political button in history. May all your wet dreams be of Al Smith. Oh, and quick update: the button ended up selling for $8,962.50 including the buyer’s premium. It’s a steal, if you ask me.

The original Batmobile from the 1960s television series was a steal at any price, even $4.62 million, because of its unparalleled awesomeness. Even before it was the greatest of all Batmobiles it was already epic as a Lincoln Futura concept car. I loved researching that because it reminded me of Homer Simpson’s dream car that bankrupted his long-lost half-brother Herb. (Most things remind me of The Simpsons in some way.)

That Batmobile went to a private collector as did the Maltese Falcon (sold for $4,085,000 including buyer’s premium). The debonair 1950s robot Cygan sold to a private collector, but he has contacted me and he is restoring it most judiciously so huzzah! I love the Cygan entry even more now, incidentally, because I had to research the Windmill Girls to write it which means I was able to get the reference to them on the Christmas special of Call the Midwife that just aired on my local PBS station. (Nurse Lee reassured an overdue patient that the midwives are like the Windmill Girls: open all day. Naughty!)

Museums won big this year too. The exquisite lost golden chest of Cardinal Mazarin, the largest known lacquer artifact in the world once used as a TV stand and bar, sold for $9,544,000 including buyer’s premium to the Rijksmuseum. The Royal Museums Greenwich were able acquire the Gibson family shipwreck pictures which will make this invaluable resource available to the public.

My favorite discoveries of the year are both vast and modest in scope. There are the ever so many would-be Pompeiis: the pre-construction excavation revealing 400 years of Roman London, the remains of a 5th century fort massacre on Öland, the man in armor trapped by the eruption of Mount Haruna in the early 6th century A.D. and the slice of Thessaloniki’s history from the Roman era through the 9th century. Thankfully nobody called the
monumental 6th c. Maya frieze found in Guatemala a Pompeii; its enormous size, fine preservation and sheer beauty give it all the cachet it needs.

Then there are the exceptional little local treasures like the medieval coins found buried in a shoe in Rotterdam, the first Earl of Sandwich’s recipe for iced chocolate, the outline of a foot carved by a bored Viking on the deck of his ship 1100 years ago, the papyrus spreadsheet in hieroglyphics complete with headers in red and black gridlines, or the medieval leather peytrel found in Cork castle.

Tiny in size but not in import is the ostrich egg globe that may be oldest globe to include the New World. I’m also partial to the 18th c. wooden railway found in Newcastle shipyard which was standard gauge a century before there was a standard, and to what may be the
first images of Native Americans drawn in Europe, found during restoration of a Pinturicchio fresco in the Vatican’s Borgia Apartment.

It was a good year for shiny things as well. The intensely beautiful Cheapside went on display for first time in all its glory. A modest farm in Denmark yielded a collection of
elite Viking jewelry that was in part reminiscent of the oeuvre of H. R. Giger. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ golden statue of Diana the Huntress that once perched on one foot over the second Madison Square Garden, a fine vantage point for witnessing the scandalous murder of architect Stanford White, is being regilded after years in the elements stripped her of her original glitter. A 12th c. bishop’s ring that was stolen from St. Peter’s Cathedral in Bremen was found when the culprit voluntarily confessed because his conscience bothered him.

If only the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena had the baseline honesty of a German drug-addicted thief, then Cambodia would have four of its invaluable statues looted from the Prasat Chen temple in Koh Ker during the chaos of the early 1970s. As it is, they have the two Kneeling Attendants, returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Duryodhana, returned by Sotheby’s after years of legal wrangling.

Also returned this year were the lost artifacts of two World War II veterans. The ring pilot David C. Cox had to trade to survive his imprisonment Stalag VII-A was returned to his grateful son by Martin Kiss of Hohenberg, Bavaria, who asked for no remuneration at all, not even shipping costs. The greatest tear-jerker of the year was the story of Peggy Eddington-Smith, who finally received the letter the father she never met wrote to her before his death in Italy. I defy anyone of human parts to read that story without crying.

And now off with ye all. Celebrate tonight with much revelry and come back tomorrow to read through squinted eyes and pounding head. Thank you for choosing The History Blog for your history blog reading needs in 2013. I hope to continue to make it worth your while in 2014. Happy New Year! :boogie:

100-year-old photo negatives found in Scott’s hut

Conservators with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have discovered a box holding 22 century-old photographic negatives frozen in a block of ice in explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s supply hut at Cape Evans, Antarctica. Scott built the cabin during his ill-fated last expedition to the South Pole (the Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-1913) that would claim his life. He didn’t leave the pictures behind, though. The photographs were taken during Ernest Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party, part of the 1914-1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The crew was there in advance of Shackleton on a depot-laying mission to ensure the explorer would have regular supply stops along his route to the South Pole. Ten of them wound up stranded on Ross Island after the team’s ship, the Aurora, blew out to sea on an ice floe during a gale in May of 1915.

The Antarctic Heritage Trust has been documenting and restoring Scott’s hut, thus far conserving more than 10,000 objects. The exposed but unprocessed cellulose nitrate negatives were found earlier this year clumped together in the darkroom used by Terra Nova Expedition photographer Herbert Ponting. Recognizing this conservation conundrum required the work of a specialist, the Trust sent the negatives back to New Zealand and commissioned Wellington photographic conservator Mark Strange to undo the Gordian Clump.

He painstakingly peeled the nitrate layers apart, cleaning them and removing copious mold, revealing 22 photographs from the Ross Sea Party taken between December 1914 and January 1915, just four months before the stranding on Ross Island. The Aurora is in several of the pictures, and others were taken from her although she is not visible. Strange was able to rescue them sufficiently so that New Zealand Micrographic Services could scan them. The digital scans were then converted to positives.

The images look otherworldly, even ghostly through the splotches, scratches and mold-stained edges, but the Antarctic Heritage Trust researchers were able to identify locations and people among the eerily beautiful stretches of footsteps in snow and nearly featureless horizons of ocean and sky. There are shots of Hut Point Peninsula, Tent Island and Big Razorback Island in McMurdo Sound, taken from the deck of the Aurora. One of them captures Alexander Stevens, the Ross Sea Party’s chief scientist and geologist and an apposite handsome model, standing on the deck with land and iceberg contrasting in the background. He’s in another picture on board the ship too, standing next to a stack of Shell Benzine cases on the left.

Trust executive director Nigel Watson:

“It’s the first example that I’m aware of, of undeveloped negatives from a century ago from the Antarctic heroic era. There’s a paucity of images from that expedition,” Watson said.

Trust researchers have not been able to confirm the identity of the photographer. Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith was the Ross expedition’s photographer, so in all likelihood it’s his work. Unfortunately Spencer-Smith did not survive his stranding. The Aurora limped into Dunedin, New Zealand on April 3rd, 1916. It needed extensive repairs and refitting and there was no money to do it. Finally the Australian, New Zealand and British governments funded a rescue mission and the Aurora set off, with Shackleton himself on board albeit not in command, to recover its crew. By the time the Aurora returned to Cape Evans in January of 1917, three of the ten crew members left behind had died, the photographer among them. He was buried on the Ross Ice Shelf.

You can leaf through the pictures on the website of New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust.

DNA may help explain Bronze Age couple burials

Dozens of burials in the southwestern Siberian village of Staryi Tartas have been found with human remains posed in pairs facing each other. The rare couple burials are among 600 graves dating to between the 17th and 14th centuries B.C. from the Bronze Age Andronovo culture. Although some subsets of the nomadic Eurasian cultural family cremated their dead, others are well known for inhuming them in crouched positions. The discovery that gave them their modern name, in fact, was a number of burials found in the village of Andronovo, southern Siberia, in 1914.

Unlike the Lovers of Valdaro and the so-called Romanian “Romeo and Juliet”, these burials are not necessarily romantic pairings. Some are of children, some are one adult and a child or children. Some are face to face, some are spooning, some are on their backs holding hands.

The grave goods help identify the burials as from the Andronovo Culture, but don’t provide any specific information about the deceased. Grave goods include pottery decorated in geometric patterns including swastikas, metal artifacts and weapons, bone arrowheads, even a very rare stone casting mould used to make metal jewelry. (The Andronovo were expert metallurgists who mined copper and tin and made bronze artifacts from them. As the migrated, they are thought to have brought metal working techniques with them.)

With little hard data to go on, speculation about the significance of the funerary arrangements is rife. The women paired with men could have been sacrificed after the death of the man, for example, as in some Scythian burials. It could have been a form of posthumous or ghost marriage, a practice seen in many cultures from Asia (China, India) to Africa (Sudan) and Europe (France during World War I). Alternatively, bodies could have been added over time and carefully positioned with the previous resident(s) of the grave instead of interred simultaneously. The symbolism could be more familial than romantic, an homage to the burgeoning importance of the nuclear family unit.

Researchers are hoping DNA analysis may illuminate the relationships between the buried and thus answer some of these questions.

“[W]e need to firstly establish unequivocally the kinship of those who were buried,” said Professor Molodin [of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences] referring to the necropolis close to the confluence of the rivers Tartas and Om. “Until recently archaeologists had no such opportunity, they could establish only the gender and age. But now as we have at our disposal the tools of paleogenetics, we could speak about establishing the kinship.” […]

“For example, we found the burial a man and a child. What is a degree of their kinship? Are they father and son or….? The same question arises when we found a woman and a child. It should seem obvious – she is the mother. But it may not be so. She could be an aunt, or not a relative at all. To speak about this scientifically we need the tools of paleogenetics.”

3,000-year-old bronze trove found in Chinese tomb

Archaeologists excavating a tomb complex from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 B.C.) in Baoji, Shaanxi province, northwest China, have unearthed 44 pieces of bronzeware and two pieces of pottery, a trove of national importance. The tomb was discovered in June of this year by villagers working the land. They alerted the authorities and state archaeologists have been excavating the site since August.

The bronzeware is divided among eight niches. The quantity of the bronze vessels and the system of niches they inhabit make it a very rare discovery that gives archaeologists a unique chance to study the burial practices of the early Western Zhou period. The pieces would have had a variety of uses — cooking, food storage, holding water or alcoholic beverages — The sheer numbers of bronzeware and their elaborate, delicate decoration point to this being the tomb of a nobleman, someone of great wealth and social standing in the area.

Lead archaeologist Wang Zhankui hopes the inscriptions on the bronze vessels once translation may identify who was buried in the tomb.

Last year, a Western Zhou-era tomb discovered in Baoji was found to contain a rich collection of bronze vessels as well, albeit less than half the number discovered here. One of the containers was still sealed. When archaeologists shook it, they could hear liquid sloshing inside which led to a speculative frenzy declaring it the oldest wine ever found in China. That was a hasty reaction, but the presence of what is probably some sort of alcoholic beverage in the vessel was of particular historical note given its burial with another bronze piece: a square piece three feet long called a “Jin” which was inscribed with admonitions against the excessive consumption of alcohol.

This is a recurring theme in early Western Zhou bronzes. A ding (a bronze cauldron on feet now in the National Museum of China) made during the reign of King Kang (1020 – 996 B.C.) bears an inscription to his minister Yu attributing the fall of the Shang Dynasty to alcohol and the rise of the Western Zhou to its prohibition.

In the Shangshu or Book of Documents, a collection of historical speeches and sayings by rulers from four dynasties up to the Western Zhou, includes an Announcement about Drunkenness, purportedly made by King Wen of Zhou, the titular founder of the Western Zhou dynasty although in fact it was his son who carried out his father’s plans and finally overthrew the decadent Shang Dynasty. King Wen directly blames the Shang king’s alcoholism for the fall of his dynasty:

“I have heard it said likewise, that the last successor of those kings was addicted to drink, so that no charges came from him brightly before the people, and he was (as if) reverently and unchangingly bent on doing and cherishing what provoked resentment. Greatly abandoned to extraordinary lewdness and dissipation, for pleasure’s sake he sacrificed all his majesty. The people were all sorely grieved and wounded in heart; but he gave himself wildly up to drink, not thinking of restraining himself. but continuing his excess, till his mind was frenzied, and he had no fear of death His crimes (accumulated) in the capital of Shang: and though the extinction of the dynasty (was imminent), this gave him no concern, and he wrought not that any sacrifices of fragrant virtue might ascend to Heaven. The rank odour of the people’s resentments, and the drunkenness of his herd of creatures, went loudly up on high, so that Heaven sent down ruin on Yin, and showed no love for it – because of such excesses. There is not any cruel oppression of Heaven; people themselves accelerate their guilt, (and its punishment)).”

He is very keen, therefore, to ensure his own people do not fall victim to the dangers of spirits.

King Wen admonished and instructed the young nobles, who were charged with office or in any employment, that they should not ordinarily use spirits; and throughout all the states, he required that such should drink spirits only on occasion of sacrifices, and that then virtue should preside so that there might be no drunkenness.

And should admonishment not suffice, then sterner measures are in order.

“If you are informed that there are companies that drink together, do not fail to apprehend them all, and send them here to Zhou, where I may put them to death. As to the ministers and officers of Yin who were led to it and became addicted to drink, it is not necessary to put them to death (at once); let them be taught for a time. If they follow these (lessons of mine), I will give them bright distinction. If they disregard my lessons, then I, the One man, will show them no pity. As they cannot change their way, they shall be classed with those who are to be put to death.”

1000-year-old vineyards found in Basque Country

Archaeologists from the University of the Basque Country have unearthed the tell-tale signs of viticulture dating to the 10th century at the archaeological site of Zaballa, in the Álava province of Basque Country, northern Spain. Zaballa is one of 300 rural settlements in the Álava region that were deserted hundreds of years ago. It’s the one that has been most thoroughly excavated and published.

Discovering the history of this remote, rural site is a challenge because there is very little written documentation and few surviving structures or archaeological materials. The only stone building was the 10th century church while peasant dwellings have long since disappeared. Not even pottery has been found because there was a general dearth of such daily use items in the archaeological record of the Basque Country during the early Middle Ages compared to other periods. Recent agricultural use of the land has also damaged the site.

This discovery, therefore, is of particular interest to archaeologists since it provides new information about the way the land was used and provides a glimpse into the unrecorded social history of its occupation.

“Archaeo-botanical studies of seed remains found in the excavations and pollen studies have provided material evidence of the existence of vine cultivation in a relatively early period like the 10th century,” explained [Juan Antonio Quirós-Castillo, director of the University’s Cultural Heritage and Landscapes Research Group]. This evidence is also supported by the metal tools discovered and which had been destined for this very use, and the study of the agrarian spaces, “which owing to the nature of the crop spaces built and the agrarian practices developed, they are not compatible with cereal crops but they are with vines,” he added.

Zaballa was occupied beginning with one small farm in the 6th century. That developed into a peasant village in the 8th century. An aristocratic family appears to have taken control in the second half of the 10th century, marked by the construction of a stone church in the village center. This is confirmed by the scant documentary evidence we do have of Zaballa written in 1087 that describes a monastery, probably the nearby Saint Tirso monastery, founded by lordly Castilian family of Tello Muñoz. The village was soon rebuilt in the neighboring valley while around the church large silos were built to collect the percentage of the peasants’ agricultural product claimed by the ruling family. The silos suggest grain cultivation. The discovery of the earlier vineyards points to a major reorganization of Zaballa’s planting culture.

There are no other buildings found in the area that indicate the presence of the family in the area in the 11th and 12th centuries, just a hoard of 30 coins and some jewelry from the late 11th century, so it seems likely that the lords were absentee landowners. In the 13th century the village was partially abandoned as the aristocracy streamlined its agricultural output, possibly to increase revenues during an economic downturn. Some of the population probably moved to the new towns growing in the region. By the beginning of the 15th century, Zaballa was under the control of the monastery of Badaya and within a few decades the monks evicted the remaining villagers so they could reorganize the land under their own rules. That was basically the end of the human occupation of the settlement, except for a short spurt at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century.

Almost all of this information is the result of archaeological study, and even though it seems like a relatively obscure pursuit given the tiny size of the settlement and its long-since abandonment, it paints a portrait of people who lived and worked in the area for nearly a thousand years but never made it into the historical record.

In Quirós’ view, these microhistories constitute small windows into the past that allow one to analyse relatively complex historical processes directly, bottom upwards, “in other words, to see how the peasant community itself gradually adapts to the political and economic changes that take place in the medieval era and later.”

What is more, the analytical study of these places of production allows one to abandon those more traditional points of view of history which “conceptualize the high medieval periods as a time of technical simplification, as a meagre period in economic terms, since they point to considerable social and economic complexity. Specifically, it has been possible in these studies to see that there are various important moments in the Basque Country, 5th to 6th centuries and 10th to 11th centuries, which were decisive in the construction of our landscapes.”