Month: December 2013

New clues to fate of lost Roanoke colony?

Modern(ish), Renaissance

Last year, an intriguing new clue to the fate of the lost colony of Roanoke was found hidden under a patch on a 16th century map of Chesapeake Bay. The map in question was drawn by artist, cartographer and governor John White who founded the settlement on Roanoke Island that so famously disappeared when he was overseas attempting to secure supplies for them. It’s called La Virginea Pars (a partial map of the Virginia territory) and it is an impressively accurate survey of the east coast of North America from present-day Cape Henry, Virginia, to Cape Lookout, North Carolina. Originally made for Sir Walter Raleigh around 1585, the map has been owned by the British Museum since the mid-18th century.

There are two patches on the map, one at the southern end over the coast of what is today Pamlico Sound, the other on the northern part of the map where the Roanoke and the Chowan Rivers meet on Albemarle Sound. Adding paper patches to the maps to correct errors was common practice at the time so nobody thought much of it until last year when Dr. Brent Lane of the First Colony Foundation asked the museum to investigate them. He was researching the location of the Algonkian village of Secotan noted on White’s map and it occurred to him there might be some relevant information hidden under the patches.

Because the patches are original and were thoroughly glued in place by White, they cannot be removed without damaging the map. The British Museum therefore used a variety of imaging techniques including transmitted visible light (shine a light through the map in a light box), infrared and ultraviolet. They found that the southern patch was indeed covering an earlier, less accurate drawing of the coastline, as expected. The northern patch, on the other hand, was obscuring a large four-pointed star outlined in blue and filled in red. There was also a small red circle on the coast to the right of lozenge.

The First Colony Foundation historians believe the four-pointed star marked the location of a fort whose presence was a military secret, hence the cover-up in case the map fell into unfriendly hands. This is highly significant to the question of the Lost Colony because there are contemporary reports from the Jamestown colonists that the fleeing colonists were sighted in the Albemarle Sound area.

A quick recap of how the colony got lost: In 1587, Raleigh, holder of the Virginia land patent, assigned White the task of assembling settlers for a permanent colony in the Chesapeake Bay area. Unlike the previous expedition by Sir Ralph Lane in 1585, this colony was meant to be self-sustaining and thus included women and children. Among them was John White’s daughter Eleanor and her husband Ananias Dare. The new colony of 118 souls was established on Roanoke Island in late July 1587. They used the buildings left behind by the Lane expedition and built new ones. Just a couple of weeks later, on August 18th, 1587, Virgina Dare was born to Eleanor and Ananias. She was the first English child born in North America.

Her grandfather tried to make friends with the local Native Americans, but they weren’t having it. There was still tension leftover from their encounters with the Lane group and they were in no mood to sustain more hapless English who had arrived too late to plant any crops. Realizing they would have a hideous time of it once the ship supplies ran out, White left Roanoke in late August to return to England for fresh supplies. He arrived in November but was unable to turn right back around. Then there was the small matter of the Spanish Armada and subsequent brouhahas that made his return trip impossible for two more years.

When he finally landed on Roanoke in August of 1590, he found the island deserted. The colonists had built a fort and on an entrance post they left behind White’s only clue to where they might have gone: the word “CROATOAN.” This was the name of a friendly Indian tribe and the name of an island 50 miles south of Roanoke (today known as Hatteras Island) that they inhabited. John White searched for them for a short while, but weather prevented him from reaching Hatteras and when he started to run out of food and water, White was compelled to return to England. White never saw his daughter and granddaughter again. Nobody that we know of ever saw any of them again.

Later colonists, like those at Jamestown in 1607, looked for the Roanoke settlers. For centuries there have been rumors of east coast Indians with blue eyes and English-sounding words, but hard evidence of where they went has been nonexistent. They weren’t all slaughtered on the spot as the colony buildings appear to have been broken down in an orderly fashion. The likeliest scenario is that they broke up into small groups and sought shelter with local tribes none of which could have supported 119 people on their own.

The discovery that there may have been a fort on Albemarle Sound increases the possibility that the Roanoke colonists moved west inland rather than south to Croatoan Island. It was a much shorter and less treacherous trip and the location at the mouth of two well-trafficked rivers with establish trade routes to other Native American tribes, some of them friendly, would have given the displaced settlers a variety of options.

Archaeologists couldn’t just pack up their gear and start digging, though, because the spot marked by the X is privately owned. This year researchers got permission to scan the area using magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar.

[Elizabeth City State University research associate Malcolm] LeCompte and his team found a previously undiscovered pattern that indicated the possibility of multiple wooden structures approximately 3 feet underground.

“I don’t know if it’s one or a group [of structures],” he said, adding that they “could be joined or they could be close together.”

The mere presence of the buried structure indicates that there was a colonial presence in the area.

That’s not evidence of Roanoke colonists’ presence in the area, of course. The structure could be the remnants of the fort White documented or of something else entirely. We won’t know what it means until the landowners agree to allow digging and the funds are raised for an archaeological excavation.

152-year-old shipwreck found in Lake Huron

Modern(ish)

Great Lakes shipwreck hunter David Trotter has found the wreck of the Keystone State, a wooden sidewheel steamer that sank into the cold, clear waters of Lake Huron with all 33 hands on board in November of 1861. It was discovered about 50 miles north of Port Austin, the last place it was sighted already in distress, and unlike some of the other 100 shipwrecks Trotter’s team has found which sank straight down and remained virtually intact on the lake floor, much of the Keystone State was found scattered along the bottom. However its most dramatic features — two massive paddle wheels 40 feet in diameter, its engine and two boilers — were standing where they fell in 175 feet of water.

The Keystone State was both a jewel and a workhorse in its day. It was built in Buffalo in 1849, a 288-foot steamship designed for the transportation of rich travelers, poor immigrants and considerable cargo.

It was the second-largest steamship on the Great Lakes at the time and was among a class known as palace steamers, said maritime historian, author and artist Robert McGreevy.

“The interiors were made to look like the finest hotels. They were quite beautiful inside,” he said. “They had leaded glass windows and carved arches and mahogany trim.”

Along with posh accommodations for the wealthy, its steerage had plenty of space for immigrant travelers heading from Buffalo to destinations like Chicago or Milwaukee. Records show the boat also had room for 6,000 barrels of freight.

It was almost passé from the time when it was born, thanks to the advent of the railroads which would soon make canal and lake transportation obsolete, and in 1857 it was taken out of operation because it cost more to run than it could make. With the arrival of the Civil War, the old wooden steamships were pulled out of mothballs because there was profiteering to be done. The Keystone State was refurbished and sent to Detroit to pick up its cargo.

The planned route was hugging the western coast of Lake Huron up to Cheboygan, then crossing the Straits of Mackinac into Lake Michigan and going south to its final destination in Milwaukee. The ship was last seen by witnesses off the coast of Port Austin around November 9th, 1861, then nobody heard or saw anything of it for the next couple of days. Finally some wreckage washed up in Lexington, south of Port Austin closer to where the ship began its journey than where it ended.

This final voyage was a mysterious one. It left in a hurry without any lifeboats. Its cargo manifest claimed it was hauling iron hardware, farm equipment and grain, but who buys that stuff in November in Wisconsin? It’s not exactly prime planting or threshing season. Also, given the inclement weather on the Great Lakes in November, hauling farm gear doesn’t seem like sufficient motivation to brave the journey so late in the year. Rumors quickly sprung up that she was on a secret mission, surreptitiously carrying Civil War arms and munitions or gold bullion or gold coins.

The diving team saw no evidence of mysterious cargo or the gleam of golden treasure in more than 30 dives to the site from July through September of this year. The cargo hold was completely empty, perhaps because the crew dumped its freight in a desperate attempt to save the disabled ship. Thus the mystery of the Keystone State‘s last trip remains unsolved.

Here’s a video describing the significance of the wreck and the discovery. The boat work start around 1:55. You can see the wreck beginning at the three minute mark. Those paddle wheels look magnificent in the crisp blue waters of Lake Huron.

Medieval bones go online at Digital Diseases

Medieval, Modern(ish), Multimedia

More than 1,600 archaeological bones, mainly Medieval, from collections across the UK have been scanned and digitized to create a rich online database of pathological specimens accessible to all. These bones cannot be seen in person by laypeople because they are restricted to scholarly research. In some cases, they are so fragile that even scientists aren’t allowed to handle them. The Digital Diseases team has used 3D laser scanning, computer tomography scans and high resolution photography to create photo-realistic 3D digital models that visitors to the website will be able to examine at a forensic level of detail that wouldn’t be possible in person.

This record of bones affected by more than 90 pathological conditions like leprosy, bone tumors, tuberculosis, congenital deformations, force trauma both sharp and blunt will be an invaluable resource for medical students, doctors, historians and researchers all over the world who have no access to pathological specimens. The fact that they’re archaeological remains makes them particularly significant because researchers will be able to study the skeletal impact of disease and injury on people who in all likelihood experienced nothing or very little in the way of effective medical intervention. It also gives archaeologists the chance to examine bones taking all the time they need without concern that they won’t be finished before legal reburial requirements kick in.

“We believe this will be a unique resource both for archaeologists and medical historians to identify diseases in ancient specimens, but also for clinicians who can see extreme forms of chronic diseases which they would never see nowadays in their consulting rooms, left to progress unchecked before any medical treatment was available. These bones show conditions only available before either by travelling to see them, or in grainy black and white photographs in old textbooks,” said Andrew Wilson, senior lecturer in forensic and archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford and the lead researcher on the project He added: “I do think members of the public will also find them gripping – they do have what one observer called ‘a grotesque beauty’.”

They’re also just plain interesting. You don’t have to have an aesthetic appreciation of, say, a giant benign bone tumor on a mandible, to find it worth examining and reading about.

The Digital Diseases website officially opens any minute now. It is being launched at an event at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and judging from the project’s Twitter feed, the party has started. The site has a preview on the landing page, but hasn’t gone fully live yet as of this typing. Some images are still missing, some menu links go nowhere, there’s no search function I could find and the home page doesn’t quite exist yet. Still, you can browse categories and click on some examples for more details. Once it is live, visitors will be able to examine bone models in 3D via their web browsers or to download them to their smartphone or tablet device.

The project’s blog is a good place to start right now while the site is still being tinkered with. During the course of the two years spent digitizing the specimens, team members have been blogging about their efforts and particularly interesting bone pathologies they’ve encountered. Take a look at the big hole in this right femur.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/R3T76gjWBw0&w=430]

That’s some gunshot wound. There’s no date on it (I’m sure once the site is functioning we can find that info there), but judging from the big round hole, that was ball shot, like from a musket. Amazingly, the bone is healed, so the injury did not prove to be fatal.

This vertebral column and ribs is an example of advanced ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory arthritis that can eventually result in fusion of the spine. That’s what has happened here. Even the ribs have fused to the vertebrae via the ossification of the ligaments attaching them to the spine. Galen first documented some symptoms as distinct from rheumatoid arthritis in the second century A.D., but it wasn’t until the late 19th century that doctors fully identified the disease.

This skull has played a supporting role in the archaeological story of the year/decade/century, the discovery of the skeletal remains of King Richard III. It once belonged to a man who met a bloody end along with so many others during the War of the Roses at the Battle of Towton on March 29th, 1461, Palm Sunday. Inside a mass grave from the battle discovered in 1996, archaeologists found the full articulated remains of 37 men. This was a highly significant find because often in mass graves the remains are so jumbled up it’s impossible to put individuals back together. Articulated skeletons can tell us much more about the injuries sustained in battle and before.

This skull and other bones from the Battle of Towton grave were used by University of Leicester osteologist Dr. Jo Appleby to compare wounds with the skull of the scoliotic skeleton found at the Greyfriars dig site. Richard III and this anonymous but not forgotten fellow both fought and died in the same war, albeit more than 20 years apart (Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth on August 25th, 1485). To confirm that the Richard III candidate’s extensive head wounds properly fit the period’s weapons and battle tactics, Dr. Appleby and Bob Woosnam-Savage, Senior Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries, examined the Towton skull’s peri-mortem weapon injuries. As we now know, they were found to be compatible.

The Digital Diseases database will make that kind of work possible on a far vaster scale since most people in the world aren’t able to visit these collections in person.

8th century Japanese statue digitally re-colored

Medieval, Modern(ish)

When the life-sized clay statue of the Buddhist deity Shukongojin was made for the Todaiji Temple in Nara, southeastern Japan, in 733 A.D., it was painted in vibrant colors and liberally gilded. Although much of the polychromy has been lost over time, there’s still an unusual amount of color paint and gilding surviving on the surface. So much has pigment has survived because Shukongojin is a hidden god — he is extra powerful because he is kept behind closed doors at all times and only revealed to the public one day a year — and has therefore been protected from exposure to the elements and our various emanations and effluvia.

The particularly great state of preservation of this oldest Shukongojin figure in the country has made it possible to extrapolate what the whole statue looked like when it was new 1,280 years ago. Researchers from the Tokyo University of the Arts and the Tokyo University of Science spent two years studying the statue to detect trace pigment remnants and recreating the original colors digitally.

The result is as striking in 8th century clay as it is in first century marble:

Gold was an indicator of divinity in Japanese Buddhist iconography, while red symbolized the quelling of demons and protection from illness. Shukongojin is a protector deity, the thunderbolt-bearing guardian of the laws of Buddhism and its faithful. His furious expression, crowned in bright red hair, and his thunderbolt ready to strike ward off the evil spirits who would bedevil the devoted at prayer in the temple. He was originally an Indian deity, one of the vajrapani or thunderbolt-holders who were said to have been personal guardians of the historical Buddha. His thunderbolt broke everything it was flung at while being itself unbreakable, a symbol of faith’s ability to destroy evil without being damaged by the encounter.

The bright colors and elaborate adornment served a political function as well. Emperor Shomu (reigned 724-749 A.D.) saw the establishment of government-controlled Buddhist temples and shrines as a means to unify and protect the country. His reign had been plagued with rebellions, smallpox outbreaks and crop failures. In 743, he issued an edict requiring people to help build temples and shrines in every province, with Todaiji as the head of all provincial temples. He believed a new, widespread piety would appeal to the Buddha and spare the country further disasters. Shukongojin, with his full armour, gold shine, blinding colors and powerful intensity of expression, was modeled after depictions of Chinese guardian generals. His role is religious, but his intimidating presence and elaborately decorated outfit are meant to convey the protection of a unified faith, already well-established in India and China, a protection inextricably linked to the emperor’s government at this time.

This particular Shukongojin has another connection to the early history of Buddhism in Japan. According to the Nihon Ryoiki, the oldest collection of Buddhist myths and legends in Japan (it dates to the late 8th/early 9th centuries), the monk Roben, second patriarch of the Kegon school of Buddhism and founder of the Todaiji Temple, was helped in the creation of the temple by a magical sculpture of Shikkongoushin. Tradition has it that this is that very Shikkongoushin who supported Roben’s work. It was first made for the Kinshoji, the temple Roben established in 733 a decade before the emperor ordered construction of Todaiji. The former Kinshoji is now the Hokkedo (Lotus Hall), the oldest building in the Todaiji temple complex, and is still Shikkongoushin’s home today.

Mr. Peanut goes to the Smithsonian

Modern(ish), Museums

A cast iron Mr. Peanut who once stood debonair watch on the fence post of a Planters factory will now stand debonair watch at the National Museum of American History. It was donated by Kraft Foods, which acquired the Planters brand when it bought Nabisco in 2000, and will be part of the museum’s upcoming American Enterprise exhibition which opens in 2015. Mr. Peanut will adorn the exhibition’s Marketing Moments section, as suits so iconic a brand logo.

“American advertising has gone through a tremendous transformation since the early years of the nation,” said John Gray, director of the museum. “But while it has become a high-tech industry deeply affecting the American experience, icons like Mr. Peanut demonstrate the resilience of branding and the use of spokes-characters throughout much of that transformation.”

It’s fitting that an exhibition on the history of American business should prominently feature the work of two first-generation Italian immigrants and one second-generation. The Planters Peanut Company was founded in 1906 by 29-year-old Amedeo Obici, an immigrant who had left his hometown of Oderzo, 40 miles northeast of Venice, when he was just 11 years old to join his uncle in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He worked at a cigar factory making 80 cents a week while he learned English going to night school. A year later he moved to Wilkes-Barre where he worked at a fruit stand that also sold roasted peanuts.

This inspired the young Amedeo to get a fruit stand of his own with a peanut cart and a cheap roaster that he modified himself from scrapyard parts. He added a steam whistle so his cart would go off like a tea kettle when the roasting was done and an automated stirring mechanism which allowed him to focus on his customers without concern that the peanuts would burn. Showing an early understanding of marketing that would soon blossom into the dandiest of anthropomorphic peanuts, Obici called himself “The Peanut Specialist” and was soon doing very brisk business from the back of a horse-drawn wagon. By the time he was 18 years old in 1895, Amedeo had saved enough money to bring his mother and siblings to live with him in the United States and still had money left over to buy his own restaurant that specialized in roasted nuts and, weirdly, oyster stew.

There he experimented further with the roasting process. He added salt — can you imagine the days before peanuts were a salty snack? — and, since salt sticks better to peeled and skinned peanuts, started blanching them first to remove their outerwear before roasting them in oil and salting them. He also made chocolate-covered peanuts to cover all bases, savory and sweet.

It was when he joined forces with his future brother-in-law Mario Peruzzi that the Planters we know today was born. Peruzzi invented a superior process for blanching and roasting whole peanuts. When the Planters Peanut Company opened its doors in 1906, their focus was on quality. Obici wanted to elevate the lowly peanut, then considered animal feed, or at best for people who couldn’t afford anything better (hence the phrase “peanut gallery,” meaning the distant seats cheap enough for peanut-eaters). That’s why he picked the name “Planters,” because the thought it redolent of the landed aristocracy.

The company was successful, its product genuinely superior to many of its competitors’. To cut out the middlemen and decrease exorbitant transportation costs, in 1913 Obici moved the main peanut processing factory to Suffolk, Virginia, where the peanut plantations were. That’s where the second-generation Italian comes into the picture. In 1916, annoyed by the many inferior imitations of Planters’ roasted nuts that had sprung up in the wake of their success, the company ran a contest for a new trademark design that would appeal to adults and children alike. The chosen design would win five dollars. The lucky winner was a 13-year-old Suffolk boy by the name of Anthony Gentile. He drew a smiling peanut in the shell with arms, legs and in at least one drawing, a cane. He named it “Mr. P. Nut Planter — from Virginia.”

There is some question as to whether there may have been some bias in the selection. The Italian community in Suffolk was small and it’s highly unlikely that the Obicis and Gentiles were strangers. They certainly weren’t from that point forward. Amedeo Obici payed Anthony’s way through college and medical school, and he paid for the college education of all of Anthony’s surviving siblings (minus one who didn’t want to go). Anthony Gentile died of a heart attack when he was just 36 years old.

He lives on his immortal creation, however. Obici sent Anthony’s drawings to a commercial artist in Wilkes-Barre to gussy them up for the campaign. The artist, whose name has sadly not come down to us, added the top hat, white gloves, monocle and spats to give Mr. Peanut that classy look Mr. Obici was always keen to project on his modest fare. The first official Mr. Peanut made his debut in the April 20th, 1918, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Notice the focus in the early ads on branding, on the unmistakable identification of the quality genuine Planters peanut versus the pale imitators who have neither the transparent bag nor the Fred Astaire of peanuts to distinguish them. This was the first national advertising campaign for roast salted nuts.

He was a raging success, soon becoming a highly coveted item in his own right thanks to the company’s vast array of promotional products. Cast iron versions like the one now in the Smithsonian decorated Planters factories and along with other such pieces pioneered the practice of outdoor three-dimensional advertising. He was even enlisted in the war effort, appearing butched up and stripped of all his fancy accessories on one of the greatest of all World War II propaganda posters issued by the Department of Agriculture to promote the many uses of peanuts in wartime.

To this day Mr. Peanut remains highly collectible and widely beloved. Planters ran an online poll in 2006 asking which new accessory — bow tie, cufflinks or pocketwatch — Mr. Peanut should don and all were rejected in favor of keeping him just as he is.

For more about the National Museum of American History’s American Enterprise exhibition, see its dedicated website. It has an overview of the show and some interesting articles like this one about the history of pawnshops and their symbol.