Month: September 2015

7th c. skeletons unearthed at Temple of Concordia

Ancient, Medieval

Archaeologists and graduate students from the University of Palermo have unearthed what they believe are two 7th century skeletons at the feet of the Temple of Concordia in Agrigento, Sicily. They have yet to be radiocarbon dated, but if the archaeologists are right, the remains are evidence of an Early Christian cemetery in front of the temple in the period shortly after the temple was converted into a church.

The skeletal remains were found in a single grave. A fully articulated skeleton of what preliminary analysis indicates is an adult male is on top, his skull oriented west and his arms crossed on his chest. Underneath his legs are the bones of the other skeleton; its sex has not yet be determined. No grave goods or artifacts of any kind were found to aid in dating. Excavations are ongoing and the remains will be analyzed to pinpoint their age.

Here’s a video of the excavation shot by tour guide Rosa Maria Montalbano.

The Temple of Concordia was built around 440 B.C. in Archaic Doric style in the ancient Greek city of Akragas. It’s not certain which deity it was dedicated to, possibly the Dioscuri, the twin brothers Castor and Pollux. The name Concordia was assigned to it by 16th century Dominican friar and historian Tommaso Fazello, known as the Father of Sicilian history or the Sicilian Livy. He got it from a 1st century Roman inscription on a marble slab in the city of Agrigento which read: “CONCORDIAE AGRIGENTINORUM SACRUM RESPUBLICA LILIBITANORUM” or “[Erected] by the republic of the Lilybaeans, as sacred to the concord of the Agrigentines.” (The ancient city of Lilybaeum is modern-day Marsala, where the wine comes from.) Fazello translated that as “Temple of Concordia of the Agrigentines, made by the Republic of the Lilybaeans,” deducing from the inscription that the temple was constructed at the expense of the Lilybaeans after a military defeat.

In fact, the inscription doesn’t say what was erected and in any case it was carved 500 years after the temple was built, so it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate even if it were referring to the temple. Lilybaeum wasn’t founded until the late 300s B.C., so the city didn’t even exist when the temple was built. Historians starting with 18th century classicist Jacques Philippe D’Orville called out the errors in Fazello’s attribution and now it’s universally acknowledged to be false, but the name stuck anyway.

The Temple of Concordia was converted into a church in 597 A.D. by archbishop Gregory II of Agrigento (559-630) and there’s a wonderfully juicy story behind it. A biography written by the 7th century monk Leonzio, abbot of Saint Saba in Rome, tells the tale. After Gregory was appointed archbishop entirely against his will (he preferred a life of withdrawn contemplation), a priest and presbytery in Agrigento conspired to replace him as archbishop with a certain Leucio who had been exiled for his heretical beliefs on the incarnation. The conspirators bribed the guards and hid a prostitute named Evodia in Gregory’s chambers while he was at church.

The next morning the conspirators “caught” the prostitute and scandal erupted. They had Gregory arrested and imprisoned. The people of Agrigento loved their archbishop who took care of the poor and performed miraculous healings regularly so they didn’t believe the story. They insisted he be freed and caused enough of a stink that the Pope’s deacon had to smuggle Gregory on a ship to Rome for trial. When he got to Rome, he was jailed for two and a half years before his supporters in Agrigento were able to enlist the aid of the Byzantine Emperor Maurice and the Patriarch to finally secure a trial.

There were more than 100 jurors arrayed against Gregory and only a handful, including the imperial delegation, on his side. It seemed Gregory was doomed, but in a shocking Law & Orderesque twist, Evodia recanted her testimony on the stand, naming the conspirators who had coerced her into setting up the saintly cleric. The conspirators were exiled and Gregory returned to Agrigento, his reputation and position restored. Unwilling to preside over his congregation in a church that had been profaned by the usurper Leucio, Gregory turned his back on the city proper and looked to the Valley of the Temples for his new cathedral.

He chose the Temple of Concordia. Planting the signum, the cross of Christ, over its threshold, Gregory exorcised the ancient pagan demons of Eber and Raps who still dwelled in the temple. (The “demons” may be transmutations of an original double dedication, hence the theory that the temple may have been dedicated to Castor and Pollux.) Now consecrated and holy, the temple was converted into the new cathedral.

Gregory of Agrigento is the patron saint of the conservation of archaeological and architectural patrimony. That’s both ironic and appropriate, because while he destroyed significant parts of the temple to Christianize it, as a church it survived in far better condition than the other temples in Agrigento which were damaged in earthquakes and pillaged for construction material. In the conversion process, all of the temple’s decorative elements and the altar were destroyed. The back wall of the cella (the inner chamber) of the temple was demolished to make a new entrance, the columns walled up and 12 arches cut into the sides of the cella to give the building the nave and two aisles of a classic Christian basilica.

Gregory dedicated the new church to Saints Peter and Paul. In the late Middle Ages the church was rededicated to its builder and excellently renamed San Gregorio delle Rape, or Saint Gregory of the Turnips because the humble, ascetic Gregory was said to have tended to the vegetables of his flock. In 1748, Bourbon king Charles V of Sicily had the church dismantled and the temple restored as much as possible to its original form. Today it is considered the second best preserved Doric temple in the world after the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens which was itself converted into a Christian church in the 7th century.

There are known Early Christian burials cut inside the temple and in catacombs outside, carved into the rocky outcroppings west of the temple much like Greek catacombs were carved east of the temple hundreds of years earlier. The skeletons unearthed this month are the first indications that there may have been Christian burials in the ground in front of the temple, which in the 7th century would have been the back of the church.

Medieval skeleton pulled out of grave by uprooted tree

Medieval


The newly established Sligo-Leitrim Archaeological Services (SLAS) had a fasinating first commission: to recover skeletal remains torn out of the ground when a tree was uprooted during a storm.

The beech tree had stood outside Collooney, County Sligo, Ireland, for 215 years before a storm blew it down last winter, pulling out the roots and the top half of a skeleton with them. The body was snapped in two when the tree toppled, leaving both femurs broken while the lower legs remained undisturbed in the grave. The National Monuments Service hired SLAS to excavated the remains in the ground and to painstakingly remove the bones embedded in the tree’s root matrix. The found part of the skull and spine in the roots, but other bones were destroyed by the roots as the tree grew.

Preliminary analysis of the bones by osteoarchaeologist Dr Linda Lynch revealed that the deceased was a young man 17-20 years old when he died. Radiocarbon dating found he was buried between 1030 and 1200 A.D. While a strapping 5’10” tall in a time when the average height was 5’5″, the youth suffered mild spinal joint disease likely caused by heavy physical labour from a young age. There is evidence on the bones that he did not die an easy death. Sharp force injuries on the ribs and hand point to his having been cut repeatedly with a knife or sword.

He was given a formal Christian burial. His grave was aligned east-west and he was placed in the grave with his hands folded over his pelvic region. There are records from the 19th century that describe a church and graveyard nearby, but no other human remains or archaeological evidence of a church were found during the excavation. Also, the tree was planted in 1800, so any graveyard in the environs of the medieval body probably wasn’t in its immediate surroundings. He may have been an isolated burial rather than one of many buried in a cemetery.

The skeletal remains will studied in more depth and post-excavation work on the site continues.

6th c. B.C. home rewrites map of archaic Rome

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi

The remains of a home from the early 6th century B.C. discovered under a palazzo on the Quirinal Hill indicate the archaic city of Rome was much larger than previously thought. Built during the putative reign of legendary sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius (578–535 B.C.), it is one of the most ancient homes ever found in Rome and is uniquely well preserved.

The domus was built on a rectangular floor plan 3.5 by 10 meters (11.5 by 33 feet) with was divided into two rooms. The entry point was probably an attached porch. The foundation of the home was tufa, a soft volcanic stone Romans used to build everything from temples to the Cloaca Maxima. The walls were wood covered in clay plaster and about 10 feet tall; the roof was tile.

Palazzo Canevari, built in 1885 to house the Royal Geological Office and its vast natural history collection, is on the Largo di Santa Susanna, close to a mile northeast of the Roman Forum. Just before the Palazzo Canevari was purchased by a real estate firm in 2004, preventative archaeological surveys began. Initial excavations revealed a large block of tufa that was initially thought to be part of the Servian Wall, a section of which is still visible above ground in the Large of Santa Susanna.

A 2013 excavation unearthed more of the structure and determined it was part of the walls of a large 5th century B.C. temple complex. Judging from the extant sections of the walls, the temple was at least 25 meters (82 feet) wide and 40 meters (131 feet) long, which would have made it one of the largest temples in Rome. No evidence was found of which god the temple was dedicated to, but ancient sources record two temples on the Quirinale Hill: a temple of Quirinus and the Capitolium Vetus sanctuary dedicated to the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva.

Underneath the temple remains was found the skeleton of a newborn infant dating to the 7th century B.C. The temple and the burial fit with what archaeologists believed the Quirinale area was used for in the archaic period: a sacred precinct with temples and a necropolis. The discovery of the domus upends that belief.

“This building is basically absent in archaic Rome, and there are only traces in the Forum area. The home was probably used for about 50-60 years prior to when the temple was built that was discovered in 2013,” Mirella Serlorenzi said during a press visit, who directed the excavations on behalf of the superintendent’s office.

“The position of the house near the temple hints at it being a sacred area, and that whoever lived there was watching over what happened therein. But it is even more important that we can now retro-date the urbanization of the Quirinal zone. The Servian Walls encircled an area that was already inhabited and not a necropolis.” “This means that Rome at the beginning of the sixth century was much larger than what we expected and not closed in around the Forum,” she added, stressing that “the excavations will continue for months more. But everything depends on what we find.”

Today the building is owned by the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti bank who are planning on using it for office space. It’s not certain what they’d do about the archaeological treasure in the basement, but it will not be infilled. Other palazzi in Rome have full-on archaeological museums underneath them, like the Palazzo Valentini, for example.

Rare portrait ivories acquired by Scottish museum

Modern(ish), Museums

Ivory has been carved since the earliest days of human figural art. In Europe it reached its peak popularity in the high Middle Ages and Paris became the center of production in Europe. (See the caskets with scenes from Arthurian romances in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the British Museum for top notch examples of peak Gothic ivories carved in Paris.) The art form went out of fashion in the Renaissance and for a few century ivory carvings were found integrated into other media (faces on wooden figures, for example) rather than as stand-alone pieces.

The 17th century saw a revival of ivory relief ivory and sculptures, and Dieppe, a bustling Normandy port town on the English channel that was the main port of entry for West African ivory, became the new center of continental ivory carving. Dieppe ivory carvers were known for decorative items and consumer goods like large and complex model ships made hull to rigging from single pieces of ivory, folding fans, rosaries, combs and snuffboxes, many of which can be seen on display now in the spectacular ivory collection of the Castle-Museum of Dieppe.

David Le Marchand was born in Dieppe on October 12, 1674, to a family of Hugenot artists and ivory carvers. When the Edict of Nantes granting religious freedom to French Protestants was revoked by King Louis XIV in 1685, more than 3,000 Hugenots a significant percentage of the population, fled Dieppe for greener pastures. David Le Marchand, then just 10 years old, and his family may have been among them, or he may have fled in 1694 when an Anglo-Dutch fleet bombarded the city to rubble. Whenever he left Dieppe, we know he arrived in Edinburgh in 1696 because a document has survived granting “Liberty and Licence to David Lemerchand designer and cutter in Ivory to exercise the sd. Arte” on condition that he take on the aspiring artist sons of local burghers as apprentices.

Ivory was rare and expensive in Scotland and David Le Marchand’s skills were immediately in demand. The same year he arrived, he secured the patronage of the powerful Mackenzie family. His first dated and signed relief portrait medallion made in Edinburgh was of Sir James Mackenzie, the 22-year-old hellraising son of Sir George Mackenzie, 1st Earl of Cromartie. Three more low-relief portraits — one of the father Sir George, one of Lady Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, one of her 10-year-old son George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh — and one small portrait bust of Sir James followed in quick succession, all completed before 1700.

Other Scottish patrons include the Drummond family, the Earl of Leven, the Earl of Cromartie and the Duke of Perth, but even so illustrious a client list wasn’t enough to keep in Edinburgh after the death of Jean Cavalier, London’s premiere ivory artist, in 1699. With the competition gone, David le Marchand moved to London and again hit the ground running, quickly taking Cavalier’s place as the most fashionable portrait sculptor in the city. He counted among his patrons King George I, Queen Anne, the Duke of Marlborough, Sir Christopher Wren, John Locke, Samuel Pepys and Bank of England directors the Raper family. The Rapers commissioned one of his most famous pieces: a bust of Sir Isaac Newton donated to the British Museum by a Raper descendant which features prominently in a painted portrait of Le Marchand by Joseph Highmore now in the National Portrait Gallery.

The low relief, slender plaques of ivory of his early Scottish days evolved into much larger, more dynamic works once he was established in London. The carving on his portrait medallions went deeper, creating portraits that projected outwards. This is likely a combination of his artistic development and of his having better access to larger pieces of ivory in London than he had in Endinburgh. One of the greatest examples of Le Marchand’s later work in high relief medallions sold at Sotheby’s in 2013 for $478,732.

His career seems to have nosedived in the 1720s. The last datable portrait he carved was of antiquarian Reverend William Stukeley in July of 1722. Less than four years later, on February 3rd, 1726, Le Marchand was admitted to the French Hospital in Rochester, outside London, a charity for sick and destitute Hugenots. He died there a few weeks later on March 17th.

The Mackenzie portraits remained in the family for 300 years, unpublished, unphotographed and known only from published correspondence until 1996. When John Ruaridh Grant Mackenzie, the current Earl of Cromartie and chief of Clan Mackenzie, decided to sell the collection, he wanted to ensure this unique group remained in Scotland. Instead of putting them up for auction, he negotiated privately with National Museums Scotland which was able to acquire the portraits with funding from National Museums Scotland Charitable Trust and the Art Fund.

Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said: “This interesting group of ivories, with its excellent provenance and rich object biographies, is an ideal fit for National Museums Scotland, particularly given the Museum’s interest in Scottish identity and its relationship with the rest of the world. Scotland now has a meaningful presence of works by Le Marchand, which will appeal to scholars, students, artists and families alike. I look forward to seeing them in the new galleries.”

Neolithic skeleton is UK’s oldest case of rickets

Ancient

A recent study has found that a skeleton unearthed on the Scottish island of Tiree a century ago is the UK’s oldest case of rickets.

In spring of 1912, A. Henderson Bishop, a wealthy pig-breeder and amateur archaeologist, led a small team of antiquaries to excavate an area near the town of Balevullin on the northeastern part of the island where artifacts and architectural remains had been exposed by wind erosion. They focused their attentions on an early Iron Age structure and its environs, collecting artifacts like flints and hammer-stones from the sandy soil. While gathering surface artifacts, they came across a flat stone pile under which they found skeletal human remains. A little digging turned up another three inhumations.

The islanders heard about the finds and protested that the team was digging up their ancestors to ship them to a London museum. They reported their suspicions to the Duke of Argyle who told Bishop and his team to leave Tiree without taking anything with them. Hoping for a reprieve, they showed their modest artifacts to the local Factor (estate manager) who allowed them to take their finds, including the first skeleton, off the island. It would up in the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian collection.

Because the inhumations were found near the Iron Age structure, the skeleton was classified as Iron Age. This misclassification proved to be the reason why it has now been properly classified. A recent accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating project by University of Bradford and University of Durham researchers sought to date human remains found at Iron Age sites in Scotland. When the Balevullin skeleton was tested, it was found to be much older, dating to between 3340 and 3090 B.C., late Stone Age, not Iron Age.

The result took everyone by surprise, firstly because it was clear from a visual examination of the bones that this individual had suffered from rickets, a disease usually (but not always) associated with the endemic malnutrition and gloom of early modern slums rather than the fresh outdoorsy life of the Neolithic Inner Hebrides. It was also unexpected because while Britain is replete with Neolithic funerary structures — mainly monumental chambered cairns — with individual inhumations, monumentless inhumation cemeteries are extremely rare. Only one other flat inhumation cemetery in known in Britain: two adults and a child buried at Barrow Hills in Oxfordshire.

The Balevullin skeleton is 68% complete which allowed researchers to determine the individual was likely a woman. She was around 25-30 years old and between 4’9″ and 4’11” tall, very petite even by the standards of Neolithic Britain. Her sternum is severely deformed with a condition known as pigeon chest. The ribs exhibit associated deformations, as do the humerus bones whose shafts are bowed and rotated. The one surviving femur is also deformed although less so than the other bones.

All of these bone deformations are classic signs of vitamin D deficiency. Some of them point to rickets during infancy, and all of them are typical of childhood rickets. Evidence of bone repair suggest she suffered repeated periods of vitamin D deficiency in early and later childhood. This was confirmed by stable isotope analysis.

Strontium, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon isotope analyses performed on a tooth and rib revealed that the individual grew up in the Northern or Western Isles of Britain, so was probably a local Tiree girl. Her diet was based primarily on terrestrial plants and proteins with very little in the way of marine vegetables and fish. As weird as that seems, it is consistent with other Neolithic remains from farming communities on the western seaboard (and with medieval Viking settlers in Greenland). It seems the island life in the Neolithic era did not involve eating much of the abundant fish and seaweed all around them. The levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the layers of dentine in the tooth indicated a major dietary or physiological stress between the ages of four and 14, perhaps a result of weaning or the removal of marine proteins during a period of famine or illness.

Professor Ian Armit, from Bradford University, said: “The earliest case of rickets in Britain until now dated from the Roman period, but this discovery takes it back more than 3,000 years. There have been a few possible cases in other parts of the world that are around the same time, but none as clear cut as this.”

Professor Armit said it was unclear how the woman would have developed rickets.

“Vitamin D deficiency shouldn’t be a problem for anyone exposed to a rural, outdoor lifestyle, so there must have been particular circumstances that restricted this woman’s access to sunlight as a child,” he said.

“It’s most likely she either wore a costume that covered her body or constantly remained indoors, but whether this was because she held a religious role, suffered from illness or was a domestic slave, we will probably never know.”