Month: January 2014

Getty launches free Virtual Library

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Yesterday, Getty Publications, publishers of exhibition catalogs, art history monographs and studies of archaeology, history, conservation, photography, architecture, and so much more, launched Virtual Library which makes freely available more than 250 titles published since 1966. The books can be read online or downloaded in their entirety in pdf format and are fully searchable.

The publications, the earliest of which dates from 1966, span the Getty’s rich publishing history, and include collection catalogues that highlight masterpieces from Getty collections, translations of groundbreaking texts on the visual arts, essential works of art historical research, exhibition catalogues, journals, and publications that serve as key resources in the conservation of the world’s cultural heritage. The Virtual Library includes titles published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute. Titles will be added to the Virtual Library on an ongoing basis.

There are some real treasures on the list. I’ve already downloaded Mummy Portraits in the J. Paul Getty Museum, a short 1982 text on the beautiful Roman Egyptian mummy portraits also known as the Fayum Portraits, The Colors of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases, sure to feed my fascination with the painstaking process of decorating Greek pottery, The Restoration of Ancient Bronzes: Naples and Beyond, an essay collection on the history of restoration and conservation of ancient Greek and Roman bronzes centered around Naples where so many bronzes were retrieved from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a thematically related book, History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculptures, which covers restoration practices from antiquity to today.

One of the great things about the Virtual Library books is the quality of the scans. Often pdf versions of books are so low resolution they’re really glorified text files for reading. The Getty, on the other hand, has seen to it that the images in these books are just as compelling as the text. You can zoom in to an impressive degree and enjoy flipping through the photographs just as you would with the hard copy. Since, let’s face it, looking at the pictures is the main reason people buy exhibition catalogs, this is an important facet of a library containing so many books on artifacts and paintings in the museum collection.

Some of the picture-intensive books I’ve got my eye on are Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Greek Gold from Hellenistic Egypt and Gardens of the Roman World. The second of those is a subject that I literally know nothing about, and according to the summary, the experts don’t know much about them either. The book is about a collection of glorious Hellenist gold jewelry in the J. Paul Getty Museum that is unprovenanced (looted?) and it covers the turbulent history of Egypt from Alexander the Great through the last ruler of his general Ptolemy’s dynasty: Cleopatra VII.

The Virtual Library is part of a larger initiative the Getty has undertaken to share their rich cultural and educational resources as part of their educational mission. Last year they launched the Open Content Program, a database of high resolution images of artworks in the Getty Museum collections and the special collections of the Getty Research Institute. There are more than 10,000 images available now, all of them free to download and use. I have lost many a weekend browsing the Medieval and Renaissance illuminations, photographs from the Civil War to Walker Evans and great art works in the museum.

Huge grant to help save Alaskan “melting village”

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The efforts to excavate the archaeological remains of the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Nunalleq before climate change erodes it into the Bering Sea have been markedly boosted by a £1.1 million in ($1,800,000) research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. University of Aberdeen archaeologists have been digging at the site since 2009 when they were called in by the Yup’ik living in the nearby village of Quinhagak who were alarmed to see their ancestral artifacts being swept out to sea.

Organic elements from human hair to woven grass baskets to wooden planking had been preserved in the permafrost for centuries after the village was abandoned around 1650, but rising global temperatures are melting the permafrost leaving behind brittle soil that is particularly susceptible to erosion. Add the rising sea levels and extreme weather events battering the coast and you have a recipe for destruction. Since that first excavation season, the coastline has lost more than 30 feet.

In order to preserve a uniquely rich archaeological record that project leader Dr. Rick Knecht describes as “one of the clearest records of the past that we know of anywhere in the north,” the University of Aberdeen team in conjunction with the local Yup’ik community have worked assiduously to recover everything they can from the site of the 700-year-old village. So far they’ve already unearthed thousands of artifacts. Highlight artifacts of the 2013 dig include an ivory carving of a mythological monster thought to be a Palraiyuk, a gator-like creature that lived in rivers and lakes emerging to devour humans and animals, and a ceremonial face mask that depicts a person, probably a woman, in the act of transforming into a wolf or fox.

The archaeologists excavating Nunalleq don’t just remove artifacts as they come across them; they remove the entire context so they can sift through the soil and organic matter looking for wood chips, plant remains, insects, tiny fish vertebrae, fur, human bone fragments and hair, all the unglamorous but essential sources of information on how the Yup’ik lived in Nunalleq from the 1300s until the village was raided and abandoned.

It’s important research because while the Yup’ik are the largest indigenous group in south-western Alaska today, they only came in contact with Europeans in the 1820s and the vast region they inhabit has barely been explored archaeologically.

Dr Knecht added: “This is our first look at pre-contact Yup’ik life. It’s been a complete revelation to both scientists and the local native community.

“The discovery of these artefacts is helping to reintroduce lost skills back into these communities – the skills used to make them may have been lost and are being re-learned. We literally have pieces being recreated within days of being discovered.

“I think the dig is helping to get the local young people interested in their heritage. A group of youngsters recently asked the village elders for permission to form a traditional dance group – something that was supressed by the missionaries more than a century ago. They did their first dance last year and the first song was about the storms washing the site away, and this year they did their first dance in Quinhagak itself – the first in 100 years – and they did it when we showed our summer’s finds to the community.”

The grant will allow archaeologists to keep digging for the next four years. Part of it will go to archaeological education and training programs, and to fund a regional survey that will identify more sites endangered by the eroding coastline.

The artifacts, bulk samples and other materials recovered have all been packed up and sent to Scotland for analysis and conservation. They all remain property of the people of Quinhagak and once the objects have been studied, they will be returned to the area. The plan is to build a local research center and artifact repository where the collection can be maintained in proper conditions. It will also be a pivot for ongoing site protection and rescue operations along the endangered coast.

For more pictures and wonderful write-ups about each day of the dig, do yourself a favor and read the Nunalleq Project blog. These folks work in challenging conditions — here’s Lindsey looking ridiculously cheery despite having to wear an eyepatch because A MOSQUITO BIT HER ON THE EYEBALL — but their commitment, dedication, work ethic and positive attitudes are irrepressible.

Can you read this World War I-era shorthand?

Modern(ish), Museums

Curators at the York Castle Museum were cleaning out the stores to make room for an upcoming exhibition when they stumbled on boxes of previously unknown archival material from the First World War. Two diaries written entirely in shorthand caught their eye. A card found with them identified the diaries as records of the Palestine Campaign in 1917-1918, written by Wass Reader of the 1st East Riding Yeomanry C Squadron.

Nobody at the museum is able to read this particular shorthand and they’re appealing to the public for any insight.

“We don’t know what kind of shorthand it uses – it could be a military style – so we would love to hear from people with expertise in military shorthand. The name Wass Reader is very unusual, so if anyone recognises that name we would like to hear from them as well,” [assistant curator of history] Katie [Brown] added.

Like so many other museums in the UK, the York Castle Museum will be marking the centenary of the beginning of World War I with an exhibition dedicated to the conflict. 1914: When the world changed forever opens on June 28th, the hundredth anniversary of the day Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo. The exhibition won’t focus solely on the war, but on its societal context, on the rapidly changing world of the turn of the century.

Curators are keen to include the newly discovered diaries, but they know nothing about them beyond what was written on that card.

Katie added: “It’s frustrating because we don’t know even really know when we acquired the diaries. We want to know whether this is a record of someone’s personal opinions on the war, or the mundane details of his day-to-day life.

“We want to know more about York’s links in the war as well, and these come from a local regiment.”

The diaries are even more intriguing because they come from the Palestine campaign, a part of the war that is not as well known as the European campaigns, she added.

Contact Katie Brown by phone at 01904 650363 or email katie.brown@ymt.org.uk if you have any information about the regiment, Wass Reader or the shorthand in the diaries.

On a tangentially related note, I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of The Great War, Joe Sacco’s 24-foot cartoon of the first day of the Somme, for Christmas and it is truly an astounding piece of work. To give you a sense of its breathtaking breadth, here is a video of the whole book unfurled:

It comes with a second book that is all annotations so you can follow along and make sense of the incredible density of visual information from Lord Kitchener doing the recruitment point before the title page to the massive explosions in the trenches at the end of the day.

Is this Alfred the Great’s pelvic bone?

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Last year, in the wake of the announcement that the remains of King Richard III had been discovered, the church authorities granted archaeologists permission to exhume an unmarked grave reputed to hold the bones of King Alfred the Great in the cemetery of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Winchester. To exactly no one’s surprise, they did not find the bones of Alfred the Great.

Alfred’s bones were moved several times after his first burial in Winchester’s Old Minster in 899. In 1110, the remains of Alfred, his wife Ealhswith, his son and successor Edward the Elder and Edward’s children were moved to Hyde Abbey. The Abbey was destroyed by Henry VIII’s marauders during the dissolution of the monasteries but reportedly the human remains interred there weren’t damaged. Construction of a prison on the site in 1788, on the other hand, appears to have been a riot of damage. A Catholic bishop named John Milner wrote about the destruction:

Miscreants couch amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and Edwards; and where once religious silence and contemplation were only interrupted by the bell of regular observance, and the chanting of devotion, now alone resound the clank of the captive’s chains and the oaths of the profligate! In digging for the foundations of that mournful edifice [the prison] at almost every stroke of the mattock or spade some ancient sepulchre was violated, the venerable contents of which were treated with marked indignity, A great number of stone coffins were dug up, with a variety of curious articles, such as chalices, patens, rings, buckles, the leather of shoes and boots, velvet and gold belonging to chasubles and other vestments as also the crook, rims and joints of a beautiful crozier, double gilt.

According to Captain Henry Howard who heard it from the foreman of the construction site 10 years after the events,

A great stone coffin was found, cased with lead both within and without, and containing some bones and remains of garnets. The lead, in its decayed state, sold for two guineas; the bones were thrown about and the stone coffin broken into pieces. There were also two other coffins and no more found in this part, which were also broke for the sake of the garden in which they lay, broken up and buried as low as the spring.

The stone coffins and expensive artifacts suggested these brutes may have desecrated royal graves, and for nothing because the prison didn’t even last 50 years. It was demolished in 1840. When antiquarian John Mellor excavated the Hyde Abbey site in 1866, he claimed to have found the Wessex dynasty tombs and identified one of five skulls he had unearthed as that of Alfred the Great based on a visual comparison with Alfred’s face on a coin. Yeah, he was a … creative fellow. He created several other entertaining tale tales about discoveries he purportedly made and also salted the site with supposedly 10th century artifacts. After the dig, Mellor gave the bones he had unearthed to the rector of Saint Bartholomew’s Church who buried them in an unmarked grave in the churchyard.

When University of Winchester archaeologists opened the grave, they found the skeletons of at least six people, including five skulls. After a few months, the Diocese granted them permission to clean and test the bones. Radiocarbon dating proved that these could not be the bones of Alfred and his immediate family. Alfred reigned from 871 – 899; his son Edward the Elder died in 924; Edward’s son Athelstan died childless in 939 and his other son Edmund I died in 946. The oldest of the bones from the unmarked grave dated to 1100. The rest dated from 1230 to 1500 and showed extensive signs of degenerative health conditions which suggests they may have been patients who died in the Hyde Abbey infirmary.

All hope was not lost, however. In 1999, an excavation of the abbey site done by the Winchester City Museum had recovered some bones. These were stored in two boxes at the museum but had never been thoroughly analysed due to lack of funds. After the St. Bartholomew’s Church bones were found to be too recent, Winchester University’s Dr. Katie Tucker, team leader of the exhumation project, was notified of the Winchester City Museum bones and arranged to have them tested. A piece of pelvic bone, recorded as having been found in a pit in front of the monastery’s High Altar, was radiocarbon dated to between 895 and 1017. Osteological analysis identified the bone as having probably belonged to an adult male who was between 26 and 45 at the time of death.

This is the only bone ever found to date to the era when Alfred and his family were interred. Its find spot in front the High Altar is also an important piece of the puzzle because only the royal family was buried there. This could indeed be a small piece of either King Alfred or King Edward.

Or not. The problem is the chances of actually identifying a third of a pelvic bone as belonging to a king who died 1100 years ago are infinitesimally small. With the Richard III discovery, they found a fully articulated skeleton in its original context. There was a wealth of circumstantial evidence derived from the bones — battle wounds, scoliosis — and they were able to extract DNA for comparison to modern descendants of Richard’s sister. One chunk of pelvis really can’t tell us much about its owner, and recovering historical DNA is already a great challenge even when the bones haven’t been moved and exposed to God knows what conditions multiple times over the centuries.

Even if they did catch the luckiest of breaks and were able to extract DNA from the bone, finding someone to compare it to for identification would be a whole other snipe hunt. A modern descendant, if there even are any, could take years to locate. DNA from Alfred’s granddaughter Queen Eadgyth (her remains were found in the Cathedral of Magdeburg in Germany in 2008) would have done the trick, but her bones were too damaged to extract a viable DNA sample.

They’ll give it the old college try, though. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in Alfred’s remains has renewed interest in the Hyde Abbey site. The University of Winchester team is hoping to parlay that into a new excavation.

BBC cameras have followed the team on their journey. The Search for Alfred the Great debuts on BBC2 on Tuesday, January 21st. They’ve released some clips from the show already, and by some miracle they are both embeddable and viewable outside the UK, so here you go.

Grog was made from local and imported ingredients

Ancient

A new study on residue found in Scandinavian artifacts from 1500 B.C. to the first century A.D. has revealed that the wide variety of ingredients used to make Nordic grog ranged from local fruits, grains, herbs and spices to grape wine imported from southern or central Europe. The ancient sources on the grog question are all Greek and Roman, written a thousand plus years after the earliest archaeological evidence. They aren’t exactly objective either, clearly disdaining the barbarous northern rustics and their uncouth alcoholic beverages. First century B.C. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus said the Celtic fermented brew was made out of “barley rotted in water.” His contemporary Diodorus Siculus said they strained their thick drinks through their mustaches.

These descriptions are less than useful from an archaeological perspective. They are aren’t geographically specific beyond referring to peoples north of the Alps and don’t delve into the details of the ingredients. To find out what Bronze and Iron Age Nordic grog was made of, therefore, researchers turned to artifacts discovered in burials and hoards from Denmark and Sweden.

Four archaeological samples were chosen. The oldest is a jar buried with a warrior in a tumulus in Nandrup, Jutland, northwest Denmark, that dates to Period II of the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1300 B.C.). The second is a strainer found in a hoard in Kostræde, southwest of Copenhagen, which dates to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1100–500 B.C.). The third sample came from a large bronze bucket (situla in Latin) found in the grave of a high-status woman in Juellinge, on the island of Lolland, southeast Denmark. It dates to the Early Roman Iron Age (ca. 200 B.C.). The last artifact tested in the study is a long-handled strainer-cup from a bronze wine-set from the Early Roman Iron Age (first century A.D.) that was buried next to a ring fort in Havor on the Swedish island of Gotland.

All four of the artifacts have ancient residue still attached in sufficient quantities to be tested for their composition. Researchers used a combination of analytic techniques including microscopic examination, infrared spectrometry and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

In the Nandrup jar, the residue was entirely composed by pollens — lime tree, meadowsweet and white clover — indicating the presence of a honey product. It wasn’t just honey, though. The residue is from an evaporated liquid and given the lack of any other elements in the residue, researchers believe the vessel contained unadulterated mead.

Honey was a rare and expensive commodity in the days before hive cultivation. Pure mead was reserved only for the elite, although the more ingredient-rich hybrid drinks could also be high status. The incredibly well-preserved grave of a young woman, a priestess or ritual dancer, from the same era found at Egtved in Jutland contained a birch bucket with residue of bog cranberries, cowberries, wheat grains, bog myrtle filaments, lime tree pollen, meadowsweet, and white clover. So it seems she was buried with the same mead the warrior had in his grave, but with the addition of barley beer and fruit elements.

The Kostræde sample returned birch tree resin, beeswax, pine resin, azelaic acid (probably a derivative of oleic acid, found in a variety of plants, but could also come from grains like wheat, rye, and barley), juniper, herb bog myrtle, grape wine and eucalyptol, a compound found in mugwort, cranberry and rosemary. In the Juellinge residue, testing discovered the remains of barley, bog cranberry, lingonberry, juniper, herb yarrow, grape wine, bog myrtle and yeast. The Havor sample was found to contain birch tree resin, plant products, grape wine and eucalyptol.

This is the first chemical proof of the use of bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper, birch tree resin and grape wine in Nordic grog. It testifies to the hybrid nature of fermented beverages in Bronze and Iron Age Scandinavia, how diverse the ingredients were. The discovery of the wine elements is particularly significant.

It demonstrates the social and ceremonial prestige attached to wine, especially when it was served up as ‘Nordic grog’ in special wine-sets imported from the south. It also points to an active trading network across Europe as early as the Bronze Age in which amber might have been the principle good exchanged for wine. The presence of pine resin in the beverages likely derives from the imported wine, added as a preservative for its long journey northward.