Month: June 2016

The rediscovery of a Pictish silver hoard

Medieval, Modern(ish), Museums

In 1838, a Pictish hoard of silver was unearthed on the grounds of Ley Farm near Fordyce, Aberdeenshire. Two prehistoric stone circles, Gaulcross North and Gaulcross South, were located a few hundred yards from the farmhouse, and the hoard was discovered a few feet south of the north circle. Maybe. Found by labourers clearing the land for agricultural use by the new tenant, the silver pieces were poorly documented at the time. The precise find spot was not recorded, nor were the pieces themselves. There were vague, conflicting accounts of what was found. Some said a silver chain four feet long, assorted buckles, pins and brooches; others reported just a silver chain, pin and armlet. The stone circles were all but destroyed during the brutal clearing process (dynamite was involved), leaving just one stone standing by 1867 when the first account of the hoard was written by John Stuart. He said the artifacts were buried inside the stone circle.

The fate of whatever pieces were found was also unclear. The property owner, Sir Robert Abercromby, 5th Baronet of Birkenbog, was said to have kept the hoard. He was also said to have given some pieces to the Banff Museum (his maternal grandfather was Alexander Ogilvie, 7th Lord Banff) in Aberdeenshire or to the Antiquarian Museum in Edinburgh. The three surviving pieces of silver were in fact at the Banff for a while. They are now at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

In 2013, the University of Aberdeen’s Northern Picts project and National Museums Scotland’s Glenmorangie Research Project combined their efforts to investigate the site in the hopes of finding out more (anything, really) about the context of the original Gaulcross Hoard. Since they didn’t know exactly where the first pieces of the hoard had been found in the 19th century, the team had to cover a great deal of ground. A geophysical survey of the site was followed by metal detector enthusiasts scanning the Gaulcross site.

Archaeologists expected to find no more than a few fragments of silver here and there, just enough to pinpoint the find site, but on the second day metal detectorist Alistair McPherson found three Roman silver siliquae (a type of 4th century Roman silver coin that was widely cut up for use in the 5th century when fresh Roman currency was no longer imported into Britain), pieces of folded hacksilver, the endpiece of a silver strap and a silver bracelet fragment. With the tantalizing prospect of greater finds than they had expected and the daunting prospect of the field being ploughed and planted soon, the team got cracking with metal detectors and two trenches.

They ultimately unearthed more than 100 pieces of hacksilver chopped up from Roman and Pictish coins, jewelry, dishes, flatware, between the 4th and 6th centuries. It is the northernmost hoard of pre-Viking hacksilver ever discovered. The finds also included intact artifacts: a crescent-shaped pendant with double-loops at each end, a double-link chain, and two silver hemispheres that may have originally been part of a single piece.

Compared to other two other hacksilver hoards found in Scotland — the Traprain Law hoard and the Norrie’s Law hoard — the discovery of so much material left in the ground after the 1838 find gave researchers new insight into the evolution of silver in Scotland since its introduction during the Roman era.

Silver was not mined in Scotland during this period, instead it had its origins in the Hacksilber from the late Roman world, as exemplified by the Traprain Law hoard. The differing compositions of individual objects in the three Scottish Hacksilber hoards will show how, through time, late Roman silver was recycled and re-cast into high-status objects that underpinned the development of elite society in the post-Roman period. During the process of recycling, the Roman silver was remade into new objects, but its origin may not have been entirely forgotten. Some of these later objects may have also directly referenced the late antique world, with items such as hand-pins showing the adaptation of late Roman military styles, both in terms of design and decorative techniques. As Gavin notes, the use of Roman models may have been intended to evoke military prowess and ostentation amongst elites in early medieval Britain and Ireland.

You can read the full report of the investigation and discoveries in the journal Antiquity.

Pierced Roman sling-bullets whistled when hurled

Ancient

Archaeologists studying Roman artillery at the ancient Roman battle site of Burnswark Hill in Dumfriesshire, southwest Scotland, have discovered that a type of sling-bullet that whistled when thrown. They believe this was a deliberate design intended to instill fear in enemy troops under assault.

Burnswark Hill is an Iron Age hillfort embraced by two Roman camps, one of the north slop, one of the south. The camps were first believed to be siege camps built to assault the fort, but in the 1960s some archaeologists postulated they might instead be training camps. There are references in ancient sources to the assiduous Roman training procedures, but evidence of them in the archaeological record is almost impossible to pinpoint. Training exercises could be the reason for the large number of Roman projectiles — 130 lead sling-bullets, 11 ballista shots, nine iron arrowheads — found on Burnswark Hill in earlier excavations.

Initial research found that the bullets, cast from lead and thrown with a sling apparatus, came in two main varieties: type I, larger and lemon-shaped, and type II, smaller and acorn-shaped. When Dr. John Reid of the Trimontium Trust secured a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to survey and dig the site, his team found a third type: a small oblong in which a hole had been drilled on one side. The type III bullets weigh 20 grams (type I goes up to 60 grams) and the holes are just .5 mm in diameter. They are all the same standard size.

Drilling holes in cast lead is time and labour-intensive for a projectile that is going to be thrown and almost certainly lost. It also lightens the ball which means it will cause less damage in a direct hit. Reid at first considered whether the holes might have been used to deliver poison, a form of early chemical warfare, but his brother had a better idea.

Reid’s brother, a keen fisherman, offered some insight into their possible purpose when he suggested the bullets were designed to make noise in flight.

“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid; you’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You’re not an archaeologist,'” Reid joked. “And he said, ‘No, but I’m a fisherman, and when I cast my line with lead weights that have got holes in them like that, they whistle.'”

“Suddenly, a light bulb came on in my head — that’s what they’re about. They’re for making a noise,” Reid said.

Experiments with replica bullets and slings confirmed that Reid’s brother was onto something. They were useless for holding poison. The hole was tiny and there was no guarantee the small, ballistically inferior bullets would even penetrate the skin. While flying towards their targets, however, the projectiles did make a whistling or high-pitched buzzing noise like an irate bee. The replica experiments also confirmed that the bullets could be successfully thrown in small clusters of three or four for a grapeshot effect.

The point of the sound was to intimidate and make the enemy crouch down or dodge around in the attempt to avoid the strike. If you throw a projectile and it hits, you take out a guy, but if you throw a projectile and it makes a sound as it approaches, anyone in the line of fire is going to duck or dodge reflexively. In a full-on assault, the missile storm would generate a huge amount of noise as hundreds, even thousands of bullets whistled toward the enemy lines.

It total, the Burnswark Project found 700 sling-bullets, more than have been found on any other Roman battlefield in Europe. The projectiles ranged over a full half kilometer (third of a mile) across the battle front. The type III bullets are unique. They have been found on no other Roman battlefields. Examples of pierced sling-bullets have been found on Greek battlefields from the second and third centuries B.C., but they were ceramic, not cast from lead.

The Burnswark Project findings do not support the training camp theory. That high of an expenditure in effort and materiel would be wasteful in training. Reid believes the fort on Burnswark Hill was targeted by a sustained Roman attack probably during the reign of Antoninus Pius who went north of Hadrian’s famous border wall in an attempt to conquer Scotland. He did gain some ground — see the Antonine Wall — but Roman legions retreated to Hadrian’s Wall in less than a decade.

Dr. Reid’s full article on the Burnswark project, “Bullets, Ballistas, and Burnswark,” is available in the print edition of Current Archaeology. There’s a tantalizing exerpt of the beginning of the article on the magazine’s website. There’s also a cool drone flyover video of Burnswark Hill with Roman fortlet and camps labeled. There are sheep on the Roman north camp now and I don’t think they don’t like the drone much.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/GTJb0gaZMkE&w=430]

Here’s a recording of the sounds the replica type III bullets made when thrown with a replica sling. The thwack-pew combination is pretty badass. It would surely have been scary hurtling at you or whizzing past you, downright terrifying when multiplied by hundreds.

[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Bullets-sound.mp3″ titles=”Type III bullets whistle when thrown”]

Bones in Trondheim well confirm Norwegian saga

Medieval

On November 17th, 2014, archaeologists from The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research unearthed a skeleton at the bottom of a well on the grounds of Sverresborg, the castle of King Sverre Sigurdsson of Norway (r. 1177–1202). Bones had been found there before in 1938, but they weren’t removed or studied. The well was refilled to preserve the remains. Then World War II and the German occupation of the area blocked further archaeological investigation. The 2014 dig was the first time archaeologists returned to the spot in the hope there was still something left to excavate. There was.

The location of the remains was notable because it matched a story in the Sverris Saga, one of a series of sagas that recount the lives of historic kings of Norway. There are few other sources for the history of this period, so any evidence that might corroborate one the accounts in the Kings’ sagas is exciting.

From 1130 to 1240, Norway was gripped by civil wars in which pretenders and puppets of various factions vied for the throne. Sverre claimed the throne on the grounds that he was the illegitimate son of King Sigurd II Haraldsson who was killed by his brother in 1155. Magnus V Erlingsson had been installed as king in 1161 when he was five years old. His father Erling Skakke held the real power when his son was a child and after he’d reached his majority, fighting off pretenders with even more tenuous claims than Sverre’s.

Supported by Swedish earls and a Norwegian rebel party known as the Birkebeiner (birch bark shoe-wearers), Sverre challenged Magnus and in 1177 declared himself king. The king and his father begged to differ, however, and it took another seven years before Magnus was finally defeated and killed in the Battle of Fimreite on June 15th, 1184, and Sverre was elected king.

Sverre and the Birkebeiner were proponents of a strong centralized monarchy that brought the Church to heel as well as secular potentates. His choice to build Sverresborg on a plateau in the city of Nidaros (modern-day Trondheim), see of the archdiocese and center of Christian Norway, was a pointed one. The Archbishop of Nidaros, Eysteinn Erlendsson, had fled to England in 1180 and remained there until 1183. Sverre took advantage of his absence to build the castle. Conflict between the archdiocese and the king was abated for a few years only to flare up again in 1188 with Eysteinn’s death and the appointment of Eirik Ivarsson as his replacement.

Conflict between the Church and its supporters and the king and his supporters continued throughout Sverre’s reign. In 1197, a pro-Church faction that would later become known as the Baglers attacked Sverresborg when Sverre was wintering in Bergen after a successful but costly assault on Oslo. The small garrison of about 80 men held the castle thanks to its excellent defensive position, but their commander turned coat and let the enemy into Sverresborg.

The event is described in the Sverris Saga:

The [Baglers] seized all the property in the castle, and then they burnt every building of it. They took a dead man and cast into the well, and then filled it up with stones. Before they left the castle they called upon the townsmen to break down all the stone walls; and before they marched from the town they burnt all the King’s long-ships. After this they returned to the Uplands, well pleased with the booty they had gained in their journey.

The skeletal remains found at the bottom of the well in 2014 were indeed covered with stones, just as the saga said. A fragment of bone recovered from the site was radiocarbon dated and found to be about 800 years old, so just the right age to match the story of the Baglers poisoning the castle’s water supply with a dead body. Analysis of the bones indicated they belonged to a man of about 30-40 years of age when he died.

Now the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research has returned to the site to fully excavate the well and the entire skeleton.

The excavation of the stone debris down to the very first stone that hit the Birkebeiner’s body has given the archaeologists additional insight into the nature of events in 1197. In addition, it exposed the timber posts and lining for the large castle well. […]

“This is truly astonishing. As far as I know there is no known example of the discovery of an individual historically connected with an act of war as far back as the year 1197. And the fact that this actually corroborates an event described in Sverre’s saga is simply amazing,” says lead archaeologist at the site, Anna Petersén.

Antikythera Mechanism was an astronomy text

Ancient, Modern(ish)

It’s been 115 years since sponge divers off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera recovered a bronze gear device that we now know as the first analog computer, and researchers are still working on solving the mysteries of the Antikythera Mechanism. The mechanism has been at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens since its discovery. For the first couple of years, nobody had any idea what a unique treasure it was. Museum staff focused on the more showy objects from the shipwreck — the divers had raised 36 marble statues, many pieces of bronze statues, jewelry, glassware, lamps and amphorae from the site — and paid little attention to the corroded lump of bronze in storage. In 1902, an archaeologist noticed there was a gear in that lump, and there were words on that gear. The lump broke up as corrosion loosened its grip, eventually splitting up into 87 fragments.

Launched in 2005, the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) brings together an international team of researchers and the latest technology to thoroughly reexamine the Antikythera Mechanism in the hopes of shedding new light on how it worked, what it was used for, who made it and a panoply of other questions raised by the remains of the complex device. The first research published in the 1970s dated the mechanism to around 80 B.C., but the AMRP has confirmed a later date, between 150 and 100 B.C., based on the form of the lettering.

The first inscriptions read from the mechanism in 2,000 years were “Venus” and “sun ray.” Within months another 600 characters were deciphered and published. The advances slowed down after that, with 923 characters deciphered into the 1970s. Using 3D CT scanning, surface imaging and high resolution photography, the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) was able to more than double the number of characters deciphered on the device. Their first publication in 2006 brought the total up to 2,160. The most recent data, presented on Thursday, June 9th, at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, brings that number up to 3,400 characters. There are 14,000 characters discovered this far on the device — even the smallest fragments have proved an important source of inscriptions — so there’s still plenty of deciphering left to do.

By examining the structure of the gears, the numbers of teeth, how they interact with each other, and the inscriptions, the AMRP confirmed that the device was an incredibly detailed astronomical calendar that could predict eclipses, calculate the dates of the Olympics, the positions of the sun, moon and planets in the solar system and more. There is nothing else like it known from antiquity, and no other mechanical device would even come close to its complexity until the Middle Ages.

The latest research suggests that this mechanism wasn’t used by astronomers in their daily work, however.

“It was not a research tool, something that an astronomer would use to do computations, or even an astrologer to do prognostications, but something that you would use to teach about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos,” Jones said. “It’s like a textbook of astronomy as it was understood then, which connected the movements of the sky and the planets with the lives of the ancient Greeks and their environment.”

“I would see it as more something that might be a philosopher’s instructional device.”

The letters — some just 1.2 millimeters (1/20 of an inch) tall — were engraved on the inside covers and visible front and back sections of the mechanism, which originally had the rough dimensions of an office box-file, was encased in wood and operated with a hand-crank.

There is so much more to be learned about this precious device, and hopefully there will be new pieces of the puzzle discovered. The Return to Antikythera project, which in October of 2012 began exploring the shipwreck site for the first time since Jacques Cousteau’s two-day 1976 survey, proceeds apace. Artifacts like pottery, sculptures, a huge anchor and a bronze spear two meters long have been recovered from the shipwreck. Fingers crossed they’ll find more of the Antikythera Mechanism too. The newly deciphered texts have given researchers a much better idea of what parts are still missing, so marine archaeologists have a precise idea of what to look for now. The new diving season began in late May.

This video, produced four years ago for the Antikythera Shipwreck exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, gives an overview of the wreck and its many inestimable treasures.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/UpLcnAIpVRA&w=430]

Also, I love this picture so much I had to feature it. It’s a marble statue of a wrestler that was half stuck in the sand and mud of the sea floor and half exposed to the water. One guess which side is which.

A romp through the Prelinger film archive

Modern(ish), Multimedia

It’s been a while since I had a proper weekend romp through historic films. The Prelinger Archive, a wonderfully eclectic group of home movies, commercials, government and corporate educational and instructional films and a wide range of other assorted clips is today’s fertile field.

Confused by those newfangled rotary dial phones? Have no fear, AT&T is here (or was, in 1927).

This is how you brush your teeth, boys and girls of 1928. To reinforce the message, Goofus and Gallant apply for a summer job to the man with the pince-nez glasses. Goofus’ blackened grill and busted outfit does not impress, while Gallant’s sparkly whites and sharp suit win the day. Mr. Gorman is pretty mean to poor Bill about it.

This is a 1945 Army picture about insomnia associated with what was then called Combat Fatigue and is now PTSD. It’s not the most compelling of reels — perhaps it was designed to help cure insomnia — but there are two elements of note: 1) the movie within a movie starring Donald Duck, and 2) Dick York, best known as the first Darrin from Betwitched, in the role of the lead insomniac’s friend Lucky who laughs uproariously at Donald Duck’s entirely unfunny antics and generally babbles way too much. Bonus points for the shower scene.

Lessons learned from a 1961 prom. Shake hands with the receiving line of chaperones. The boy fills in the dance card, putting his own name in the first and last positions. Showing off on the dance floor is bad; accompanying a girl off the dance floor “so she’s not stranded” is good. Shake hands with the exit line of chaperones. Enjoy the midnight supper offered by parents afterwards. Say goodnight. Nobody even come close to making out. Enjoy Coca Cola.

The Prelinger Archive was assembled in New York in the 1980s, but it acquired a collection of California pictures so they have quite a few films of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

It starts off in the Western Addition neighborhood which surviving the earthquake with limited damage. Many of its Victorian homes still stand today. A shot at the beginning shows one of those amazing thickets of overhead cables from electric and telephone companies so common in cities before consolidation and monopolies began to thin out the volume of them. Around the 3:07 mark, the view changes starkly from the comparatively unscathed Western Addition to the rubble-filled war zone of Market Street.

This one captures one of the fires that devastated the city even more than the quake had. It’s remarkable how crowded the streets are, and there’s one car zipping down the street, driving around horse-drawn vehicles, people and rubble. The film rate is sped up, so it’s not actually going fast as it looks to be, but you can see later in the film that other kinds of vehicles stayed in their lanes a lot more. There’s a running streetcar and the destroyed dome of San Francisco’s grand City Hall makes an appearance.

This one was taken from Market Street and has a wider view of what was left of the City Hall and Hall of Records complex.

San Francisco passed the first anti-drug legislation in the country in 1875 and opium was its target. The law made it illegal to own or frequent an opium den, but as usual, prohibition did nothing to stop the growth of opium in the city. By the turn of the century there were hundreds of opium dens in Chinatown. In the end it took force majeur to bring down the opium dens. Unfortunately the earthquake also took down the rest of the city with it. In 1907 the sale of the drug itself was outlawed, except for prescription purposes. The police tried to combat the scourge of opium with very public bonfires of confiscated opium and smoking accessories, but other than creating huge, dense clouds of opium smoke in downtown San Francisco for passersby to get inadvertently high off of, the autos-da-fé accomplished little.

Here’s a video of one of these opium bonfires from 1914. In an interesting contrast to the earthquake films, in the background you can see the new City Hall with its dome still under construction. It would open a year after this film was shot.

Speaking of vice, since it’s Saturday and one hopefully doesn’t have to worry about keeping one’s viewing safe for work, perhaps you might enjoy the archive’s significant group of old-timey stripper videos. This is burlesque dancing, mainly from the late 1940s and 1950s, I would guess, although there may be earlier ones in the mix. They are not dated, alas. There is a hint of nudity here and there — sheer undies, the occasional glimpse of underbutt or rhinestone pasties, that sort of thing — but nothing to clutch pearls over.

Red-Headed Riot has a Rita Hayworth thing going on.
“Dance of the Doves” involves no doves whatsoever, but rather one cockatoo and one macaw. Nora the Quivering Torso lives up to her name by moving more than the rest of them put together. This lady is unnamed but is notable for her proto-twerking skills and the black censor band built into her panties to obscure her scandalous butt cleavage.

Betty Rowland, “Burlesque’s Ball of Fire,” closes out the show. She starts off with a fine gown and ends up behind the curtain (still in her underwear, of course) à la Gypsy Rose Lee.