Month: February 2014

Good morrow, Richard III nerds; you are early stirring

Medieval, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Okay, it’s not that early. I just couldn’t resist mooching from Shakespeare for obvious reasons. This is your official History Blog wakeup call: one hour from now the St. Louis University colloquium on the excavation and identification of the remains of King Richard III kicks off. Station yourself on the R3@SLU website to watch the event streaming. Geneticist Dr. Turi King and the dig’s fieldwork director Matthew Morris will be on hand to discuss the find along with history, humanities, forensic pathology and English professors from SLU.

The colloquium lasts six hours but they will break for nature and lunch, so you probably won’t have to use that Snapple bottle you haven’t recycled yet. Alternatively, you could just wait for the entire video to be uploaded to the site after the discussion is over. Dr. Jonathan Sawday from the St. Louis University English department and one of the organizers of the event, was kind enough to comment on the first post to assure us that the video will be available, and the site now confirms it will be found on the Schedule page.

Right now that page contains the actual schedule. Matthew Moris and Turi King will be on in the afternoon, but don’t skip the St. Louis University talks because it all looks like gold, Jerry. There’s something for everyone. As I am also a forensic pathology nerd, I am very much looking forward to Dr. Michael Graham discussion of Medico-legal Death Investigation: Now and Then.

I’ll be watching today, updating this post with any nerdy commentary as the proverbial spirit moves me. Join me in the comments, if the proverbial spirit moves you. :boogie:

And we’re on! It’s cool to hear to the perspective of Leicesterians from Dr. Sawday.

Oh hey, I didn’t know Sir Walter Scott invented the term “War of the Roses.”

Archaeologist Thomas Finan: Leading a dig is “less of an Indiana Jones experience and more of an Eisenhower experience.” Nicely put.

Dammit, the stream has stopped for me. :angry: Okay it’s back. I missed a chunk of Dr. Finan’s presentation about his finds in the UK which I will catch up when the full video is uploaded.

Archaeologists see an unidentified skeleton as a sample of the wider population, a source of information about the population’s health, age, diet, physical attributes, etc. The individual’s cause of death is not often writ on the skeletal remains. If they’ve died of disease or old age or a sudden heart attack, say, you’re not going necessarily going to find evidence of that on the bones.

Now that the recovery of ancient DNA is possible, it opens the door to a whole new investigation into the remains as an individual rather than as a source of data for the wider population.

It’s pathology time! Ooh, interesting that China was doing forensic death investigations in the 13th century.

The coroner’s office was established in England in the 8th or 9th century. That is crazy. They didn’t include autopsies until much later, however, so even if Richard’s death had been investigated, his body would have been looked at but nothing more.

The US is still under the coroner system today. Frontline did a fantastic and terrifying expose’ of what a slapdash disaster death investigations can be in the United States. You can watch that program online on the PBS website and I highly, HIGHLY recommend it.

The choppiness is getting me down, y’all. I might have to wait for the finished video.

Stab wound with hilt mark and hesitation marks on the wrist. That slice with the lined up pinpoints indicate a serrated weapon was used, in this case a saw. Wound interpretation is fascinating.

Now there’s what I’m sure is a compelling round table conversation on how archaeologists, curators, etc. handle human remains in a respectful way but it’s like an audio version of a strobe light and I just can’t take it anymore. I’m giving up for now, but I’ll try again regularly.

Huh. They seem to have gone back to Dr. Finan’s presentation and it sounds and looks fine. I’ll take it!

Okay, it appears they used the break to replay the presentation that was so choppy. Now it’s back to the live colloquium with Dr. Anthony Hasler’s talk Richard’s World. There are still some moments when the stream has to catch up with itself, but that constant choppiness has cleared up.

Spoke too soon. The choppiness is back.

Okay it’s 1:20 EST and they’re replaying Anthony Hasler’s presentation during the lunch break. The replays all seem to be work well, which means the final video will be good quality.

…. Aaand choppiness again. I’m officially conceding defeat. I’ll try again after lunch.

It’s 2:34 EST and Matthew Morris is up. The stream still stutters. I’m going to go ahead and wait for the completed video. :skull:

800,000-year-old footprints found on Norfolk beach

Ancient

Researchers have discovered footprints left during the Early Pleistocene between one million and 780,000 years ago on a beach in Happisburgh, Norfolk, on the east coast of England. These are the oldest hominid footprints ever found outside of Africa. They’re also the only Early Pleistocene human fossils ever found in the UK.

They were revealed last May at low tide after rough seas had beaten the sand off the foreshore exposing laminated silts that were soft sediments a million years ago. A team of researchers from the British Museum, Natural History Museum and Queen Mary University of London were exploring the shore as part of the Happisburgh Project when they spotted a large group of circular and elongated hollows. They look very much like human footprint fossils from the Holocene era, so the team decided to examine them more closely.

There was little time to document and study the find in depth. The scouring of the sand cover left the silts exposed to wave erosion that could flatten out the hollows in a matter of weeks. Because the tide carried sand and sea water into the hollows and a near constant rain made it impossible to clear them sufficiently for traditional field measurements to be taken, the team used laser-scanning and multi-image photogrammetry (MIP) to capture high resolution 3D images of the surface. On their hands and knees in the hard rain, they cleared off sand and scooped out water, trying to empty the hollows enough that they could be photographed and scanned.

Their heroic efforts were successful. A total of 155 hollows were identified and at least partially measured. Analysis of the MIP images found that orientation could be determined on 49 of them and they were oriented north-south. On 29 of the prints, the arch and either the heel or the front of the foot was visible which made it possible to determine they were going south. Twelve of the hollows were clearly outlined enough to be thoroughly measured. These ranged in dimension from 30–50 mm (1.2″-2″) deep, 140–250 mm (5.5″-9.8″) long and 60–110 mm (2.4″-4.3″) wide, all within the range of juvenile to adult hominid foot sizes. One footprint even has visible toes. Extrapolating from the foot size, the people who left the prints are estimated to have been between .93 meters (3′) and 1.73 meters (5’8″) tall.

Dr Isabelle De Groote, an anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who studied the prints, said: “We have identified at least five individuals here.
“It is likely they were somehow related, and if they were not direct family members they will have belonged to the same family group.
“The footprints were fairly close together so we think they were walking rather than running. Most were directly alongside the river in a southerly direction but also there were some going in all different directions like they were pottering around.
“If you imagine walking along a beach now with children then they would be running around.”

Since no hominid bones have been found, we can’t be certain was species left the footprints. One possibility is that they were relatives of the species Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man. Homo antecessor bones of similar age have been discovered at Atapuerca in northern Spain. They walked upright and were of the same general height range as the estimates from the footprints. Homo antecessor appears to have become extinct around 600,000 years ago.

It’s incredibly fortunate for us that this important find was made and documented in two weeks, because just as the experts feared, coastal erosion completely removed the prints by the end of May. They’re gone now, and who knows what other remains of major international significance are going with them.

You can read the paper on the find in the online journal Plos One. It’s eminently readable, not too jargon-intensive and quite short. I highly recommend it.

Proof found of Amenhotep III-Akhenaten co-regency

Ancient

There has long been a debate among historians and Egyptologists over whether Amenhotep III and his son, the future Akhenaten shared a co-regency towards the end of the father’s reign, with some experts positing a power sharing arrangement lasting as long as 12 years or as short as two years. Much of the recent scholarship on the controversy has argued against the co-regency theory altogether. There has been no solid archaeological evidence to resolve the debate, but on Thursday Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, announced that inscriptions found in the Luxor tomb of Vizier Amenhotep-Huy provide conclusive evidence that Amenhotep III shared power with Akhenaten for at least eight years in the waning days of the elder’s reign.

The inscriptions were carved onto architectural remains, collapsed walls and columns, in tomb number 28 in the El Asasif area of Luxor. Some of the inscriptions depict scenes of father and son together in the same space as one follows the other. There are also cartouches — the prenomen or throne name of a pharaoh surrounded by a protective oval — of both pharaohs next to each other. Traditionally, viziers’ tombs always bear the cartouche of the pharaoh they served under.

As if that weren’t bonanza enough, the inscriptions date to a very specific time: the first Heb-Sed of Amenhotep III. The Heb-Sed was a feast like a royal jubilee celebrated by a pharaoh 30 years into his reign and then every three years after that. Since Amenhotep ruled for approximately 38 years (1388–1351 B.C. or 1391–1353 B.C.). Records survive referring to his 38th regnal year and some historians believe he may have begun his 39th but died very soon into it. That means father and son were co-regents for at least eight years.

Amenhotep III has the most surviving statues of any pharaoh, 250 of them from the beginning of his reign all the way through to the end. The ones towards the end depict an ailing man. Forensic examination of his mummy found evidence of arthritis, obesity and a plethora of dental caries and abscesses which must have been excruciatingly painful. He was in his 50s at the time of his death, so it makes sense that after ruling over Egypt since he was a boy, he enlisted his son to help him when his myriad illnesses made the business of pharaohing increasingly difficult.

The vizier’s tomb was first unearthed in 1978. A multi-national team led by the Instituto de Estudios del Antiguo Egipto de Madrid have been excavating, recording and studying the architectural elements of the tomb since 2009. You can read more about on the website of the Vizier Amenhotep-Huy Project. It’s in Spanish, but if you can’t read it in the original it’s worth it to use an online translator to explore the excavation diaries for each season. There are some great videos of the digs too.

Window in Le Corbusier chapel smashed

Modern(ish)

A stained glass window in the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, designed by Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier was smashed to smithereens in a break-in last month. On the night of January 17th, a person or persons broke through the stained glass window, hand-painted with a yellow flower, dark red clouds and the moon on a blue background, and stole a heavy concrete collection box from inside the church. The box contained no money; it was torn open and abandoned on the chapel grounds. The door leading to the library and gift shop also shows the tell-tale signs of attempted forced entry.

Le Corbusier painted all the simple, richly colored windows in the building, but the one destroyed was reportedly the only one bearing his signature. It’s very hard to see in pictures of the intact window because he signed the dark cloud underneath the moon, but if you look closely on the bottom edge of the cloud you can just make out some light vertical scratch-like things. That’s the signature which reads “L .. C 14 Mai 55,” the artist’s initials and the creation date, May 14th, 1955. You can see heart-breaking views of the broken window in this French news story:

Initial reports described the damage as irreparable, but all the glass fragments that could be found have been collected in two large bags and sent to master glassmaker Pierre-Alain Parot in Côte d’Or. Parot has restored some of the most exquisite stained glass windows in the world, including those in the Strasbourg Cathedral and is scheduled to begin work on the windows of Sainte Chapelle in Paris shortly. Despite his workshop’s undeniable skill, the job is a daunting one. When the thieves broke through, it busted into thousands of tiny pieces.

The good news is restorers have already found few pieces of the signature. They’ve begun by grouping like with like, much as you would put together a jigsaw puzzle. You can see the glassmakers at work in this news story (also in French):

The bad news is this is doubtless going to be a very costly, time-consuming rescue mission, and the decision about how far to go in the attempt is in the hands of the private owners of the chapel, the Association de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame du Haut. The master glassmaker and experts from the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) will first have to determine just how much of the window they think is salvageable and then present their conclusions to the Association. At the very least, this process will give experts the chance to study paint and glass samples, identify microorganisms or environmental issues at risk of damaging the paint, and determine what approach would be the most effective in conserving the surviving windows.

This disaster has put the Association de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame du Haut’s record of securing and maintaining the chapel under the microscope. The Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, an organization founded by the architect himself to ensure the conservation of his work, is displeased, to say the very least. The chapel is afflicted with moisture problems and serious damage to the concrete and masonry. While upkeep on the 60-year-old building is neglected, the Association chose to spend €10 million ($13,522,000) on a Renzo Piano-designed monastery built into the hillside next to the chapel. Boasting housing units for the Poor Clare sisters, an oratory for pilgrims, a large new visitor’s center, the new addition was completed in 2011.

The Association de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame du Haut which owns and runs the site has done little to preserve the Chapel itself which is quite literally falling apart, with the white pebbledash cracked and crumbling away and the bare concrete eroding at the edges. Given the huge sums paid for the Piano project and the income from roughly 80,000 tourist tickets a year, this is scandalous, as is the failure to guarantee security. The building urgently needs restoration.

The Association is therefore going to be under heavy scrutiny for their response to this violation.

The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut was a center of religious pilgrimage long before it was a center of architectural pilgrimage. The hilltop was a sacred space at least as far back as the Romans. The first Christian chapel was built on the site in the 4th century. The second chapel was destroyed during World War II. When the Catholic Church decided to rebuild after the war, reformers enlisted Le Corbusier to create a modernist spiritual space, a clean break from the decadent associations of the past.

Because access to the hilltop was a challenge, the architect had to build the chapel without the mechanical tools of construction that had become part of his trademark approach. Thus the modern building was constructed using wooden forms, cast concrete, steel reinforcement all done by hand. The chapel curvilinear shapes, thick walls and swooping roof are unlike anything else Le Corbusier made. Many consider it his masterpiece. Indeed, it was finished in 1954 and declared a national Historical Monument just 13 years later.

Anne Frank’s toy marbles rediscovered

Modern(ish)

In the summer of 1942, shortly before Anne Frank and her family moved into the secret annex on the Prinsengracht Canal that would be their entire world for two years, Anne approached her neighbor and playmate Toosje Kupers to ask her for a favor. Anne was concerned that her treasured marble collection would fall into the wrong hands, so she asked Toosje to keep them for safe until her return. She also gave Toosje a tea set and a book she had gotten for her 13th birthday for safe-keeping. The Kupers family also agreed to take in the Frank’s cat Moortje, although to perpetuate the ruse that they had quickly fled the country, they left the cat behind in their home and the Kupers pretended their decision to adopt her was spontaneous.

As we know, Anne never did return. She and her family were betrayed and on August 4th, 1944, they were arrested. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhyus at Bergen-Belsen in March of 1945. Their mother Edith died in Auschwitz. Father Otto Frank was the only survivor. He made it out of Auschwitz alive and returned to Amsterdam to look for his wife and daughters. By the summer of 1945, Otto knew that his entire family was dead.

Toosje Kupers had kept her promise to Anne. The marbles, tea set and book were still safe. She offered to return Anne’s treasures to her father, but Otto Frank told her to keep them. And so she did, for decades, eventually forgetting that she still had them. Toosje rediscovered Anne’s things in her attic just last year when she was packing up to move. She contacted the Anne Frank House Museum and offered to donate the precious artifacts of Anne’s childhood to the museum.

The book and tea set have gone on display in the year since their rediscovery, but the museum has been saving the marbles for a special occasion. The colorful set is part of an exhibition called The Second World War in 100 Objects that was officially opened Tuesday by His Majesty King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands at the Kunsthal Rotterdam. The 100 objects come from 25 Dutch war and resistance museums and give members of the general public.

They include the spectacles worn as a disguise by Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft; a folding motorcycle that literally fell out of the sky during the parachute drops of Operation Market Garden; a decoy paratrooper dummy (known as a “Rupert”) used by the British to deceive the German troops; the grave cross of American pilot James M. Hansen, who lies buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery at Margraten; and a sweater made from dog’s hair during the “hunger winter” of 1944-45.

The marbles fit right in as poignant symbols of how Anne Frank, despite the extraordinary circumstances of the last two years of her life and her great writing talent, was still just a little girl who collected colorful marbles and kept them in a tin box.

[Teresien da Silva, head of collections at the Anne Frank House museum,] said Frank was one of many Jewish children who gave away their toys before going into hiding or being deported.

“For children during that time, marbles were a treasure. They worked very hard to win them,” she said.

While the marbles are old, she said, they are in good condition.