Month: July 2016

NYU student finds 12th c. brooch on Irish beach

Medieval, Modern(ish), Treasures

An American film student at New York University discovered a rare 12th century brooch during a field trip in Ireland earlier this month. McKenna McFadden was on a walking tour of Omey Island in Connemara, western Ireland, led by archaeologist Michael Gibbons when she spotted the back of a metal brooch while exploring rabbit burrows on the shore.

“When I first looked at it, I really thought nothing of it! It was really pretty and I thought someone had possibly dropped it,” [McFadden] recalled, not thinking that whoever dropped it did so centuries ago.

“I kept it with me until I caught up with Michael and he was very intrigued. He had me take him back to the site at which I found it. I didn’t fully realize how important the find was at the time. Now, I’m amazed and surprised and I’m very happy that I was able to place it in the hands of people who would appreciate it.”

A local radio personality took umbrage at an American making such a discovery in between stops on her bus tour of tourist traps. They worked it out with Ms. McFadden later after their listeners took them to task for being mean, but she didn’t get a chance to explain on the air that while it is her first time in Ireland, she’s gone quite a bit beyond the cheesy leprechaun-logo tour. McFadden is enrolled in NYU’s Summer in Dublin, a six-week program based at Trinity College, Dublin, in which students study Irish culture through multi-disciplinary classes in sociology, history, literature, Irish language, creative writing and faculty-led educational and cultural excursions like the one she was on when she stumbled on a 12th century kite brooch poking out of the sand.

The radio people went off on a goofy fantasy ramble about the great diplomatic incident that would ensue should McFadden have kept the brooch, but there was never any question of that. According to Ireland’s National Monuments Act, all archaeological objects found in Ireland belong to the Irish state. Anyone who makes an archaeological discovery must report it to the government or face a fine of up to 60,000 euros and five years in prison. Of course Connemara-born Michael Gibbons, a professional archaeologist with 30 years experience, was well aware of the legal requirements, and McFadden was just delighted to have found so beautiful and significant an archaeological treasure on her archaeology field trip to Omey Island.

They reported the piece to Galway city heritage officer Jim Higgins who identified it as a kite brooch from the 12th century. These types of pins were used to fasten cloaks and shawls 900 years ago. Only a handful of them have ever been found in Ireland. The brooch is now at the National Museum of Ireland where it will be studied and conserved.

Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I saved!

Modern(ish), Museums

Thanks to an outpouring of support from the public and big donations from private organizations, the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I has been purchased by the Royal Museums Greenwich for £10 million ($13,225,500). It will now enter public ownership for the first time in its more than four centuries of existence.

The Royal Museums Greenwich and the Art Fund launched the campaign needing to raise £8.6 million ($11,374,000) to meet the asking price for the painting. The museum had contributed its entire annual acquisitions budget, £400,000 ($530,000), the Art Fund £1 million, but unless they could come up with the full asking price, the painting would be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Painted in around 1590, the oil-on-panel depicts Queen Elizabeth I presiding serenely over a vast new global empire while in the windows behind her the English navy and divine intervention in the form of great winds defeat the Spanish Armada. The unusual landscape orientation, the queen’s lavish adornment, the famous sea battle in the background have made this portrait iconic, used in textbooks and period movies alike as a classic image of Elizabeth’s rule and the English Renaissance.

Two other versions of this portrait, probably by different unknown artists, are already in public museums, but this version is exceptional because it was owned by Sir Francis Drake, who probably commissioned it. Drake was vice admiral in command of the English fleet when it went up against the great Spanish Armada in 1588, so he was in the thick of the action depicted at Queen Elizabeth’s back. The painting has been passed down by his descendants ever since, for 425 years. When they decided to sell, the Tyrwhitt-Drake family offered the state first crack at it.

The campaign was launched on May 23rd and quickly captured the public’s imagination. Prominent historians vocally supported the cause. Seven-year-old Christina Ryder threw a bake sale at her school to donate to the fund, making cupcakes with an awesome frosting Elizabeth I on top inspired by the Armada Portrait.

An overwhelming response from the public saw 8,000 donations in just 10 weeks, with every donation matched pound for pound, raising £1.5m in total. Major contributions were made by the Linbury Trust, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Headley Trust. In total, £10.3m has now been raised. The extraordinary level of support from the public makes this one of the most successful campaigns ever for a work of art.

Stephen Deuchar, Director, Art Fund, said, ‘This campaign has been a triumph of popular will. The painting captured the national imagination in 2016 as surely as the defeat of the Armada itself had done in 1588. Record numbers of donors, large and small, stepped forward with determination and generosity, creating an irresistible momentum that has brought this great work into public ownership at last.’

A big grant of £7.4 million ($9,787,000) from the Heritage Lottery Fund took them over the top.

The portrait will go on display at the newly renovated Queen’s House (construction completed in 1635), today part of the Royal Museums Greenwich. Designed by Inigo Jones, the Queen’s House was built just south of former Greenwich Palace, demolished in the 17th century, where Elizabeth I was born. The renovated museum will be able to maintain the fragile work in ideal environmental conditions. On October 11th, the portrait will be the star of the official reopening of the Queen’s House.

After a brief showing, the portrait will spend 2017 in treatment. It’s in dire need of conservation. It spent most of its life hanging over the mantlepiece of a fireplace in Shardeloes, the Buckinghamshire country house built for William Drake in the 18th century, ravaged by constant heat and moisture fluctuations, never kind to panel paintings. The all-important background was overpainted at same point in its past. There are areas of paint loss and varnish discoloration has given it an overall bilious hue. Once the Armada Portrait is conserved, cleaned and stabilized, it will go on permanent display at Queen’s House.

Here is historian David Starkey explaining the significance of the painting:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/U6lEq-5ScFw&w=430]

Grave of early Celtic woman found in Germany

Ancient, Treasures

The burial an early Celtic woman with rich grave goods was unearthed last August at Kirchheim unter Teck, 20 or so miles southeast of Stuttgart in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg. State Conservation Office archaeologists had been excavating the site slated for development on the outskirts of city since July of 2014, a comprehensive and thorough salvage operation to recover any remains from a Neolithic settlement from the sixth millennium B.C. that was known to have been at that location. They were shocked to find a far more recent archaeological treasure.

No skeletal remains have survived due to the high levels of lime in the soil, but archaeologists were able to get some idea of the layout of the burial from the position of the artifacts. Immediately visible were three small gold rings which may have been earrings and/or hair jewels, so they marked where he head would have been. Underneath the presumed skull area were two round objects made of sheet gold. Archaeologists believe they were part of a headpiece or hood of some kind which has not survived. A pair of bronze anklets and a bracelet of jet beads were also found.

The style of the gold jewelry dates the grave to around 500 B.C., which puts it within a few decades of the fabulously rich chieftain’s grave mound discovered at Hochdorf, less than five miles north of Kirchheim unter Teck, in 1978. Very few graves of Celtic women from such an early date have been found, even fewer with such high quality goods. It’s possible she too may have had a burial mound marking her grave. It has eroded to nothingness, but there are discolorations in the soil which suggest the was once a burial mound surrounded by a rectangular enclosure. She may not have been alone either, as evidence of two more enclosures was found nearby, but there were no artifacts or remains of any kind within them.

To preserve whatever microscopic fragments of organic material might be present and make sure they covered as much ground as possible, the team excavated a big soil block weighing 500 kilos (1100 pounds) which encompassed the artifacts. The block was then moved to the State Conservation Office in Esslingen where archaeologists could excavate it punctiliously in laboratory conditions. Quite literally punctilious, in fact, since among the tools used to excavate the artifacts from the soil block were porcupine quills.

It took two months to dig through the thick soil block with quills and small spatulas. They unearthed a total of six ornate gold rings and five sheet gold spherical objects. The pressure of being underground for 2,500 years has deformed the sheet gold artifacts, but the gold rings are in very fine condition.

The excavation of the Neolithic settlement ended in September of last year and the development of the industrial park on the site went forward. The artifacts from the Celtic woman’s grave will likely go on display at a museum in Kirchheim near where they were found.

Spanish colonial adobe bricks found at the Alamo

Modern(ish)

The Alamo Mission of San Antonio, location of an 1836 battle during the Texas Revolution that has attained legendary status and given the site reputation as “the shrine of Texas liberty,” is Texas’ greatest tourist draw, with approximately 2.5 million visitors a year. It isn’t in the greatest condition, however. Many of its walls were torn down and outbuildings burned by the retreating Mexican army when the war ended a few months after the Battle of the Alamo. Later construction, poor moisture control and political conflicts over ownership and restorations have left the complex in need of extensive refurbishing to emphasize its historical features. In conjunction with the 180th anniversary of the famous siege, the Reimagine the Alamo project seeks to effectuate much-needed renovations, repairing rotting wood beams and roof damage, removing eyesores like random storage shacks attached to the historic walls and condenser units and building new visitor and museum facilities.

As part of the Reimagine project, earlier this month archaeologists began the first systematic archaeological study of all five and a half acres of the Alamo complex. Only the the church and the lower floor of the long barracks of the 1836 fort still stand above ground. The project’s aim is to rediscover the footprint and any remains of the original 18th century Spanish mission, the Mission San Antonio de Valero, and the 19th century fortress, particularly the mission’s western and southern walls. They also hope to find materials from the mission period — ceramics, trash, glass, personal items — and from its military days — weapons, ammunition, household goods. The archaeology is integral to determining where the new facilities will be built and in the accuracy and rigor of the historical interpretation of the Alamo which last year was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The team started with a geophysical survey of the complex, using ground penetrating radar to narrow down areas of interest. Then they raised the flagstone pavers and began digging. On July 22nd, the excavation team unearthed the remnants of an adobe brick wall 23 inches below the surface. The Spanish colonial adobe bricks were found in what archaeologists believe was the location of the original mission’s west wall.

Discovery of the bricks on Friday marked a major step toward uncovering the construction history of the world-famous Texas landmark.

“Because we’ve got something from the Spanish colonial period, we know we are digging in the right place,” archaeologist Nesta Anderson said in a press conference Monday. “Now we know we can get information from the ground over here that will support the master plan and the reinterpretation.”

Adobe is very delicate and soft and these bricks have been hard-used by centuries of conflict and the elements. The team is studying the bricks to confirm their Spanish origin, pin down the date of construction and determine the wall’s place in the structure of the 18th century mission. As far as we know, the mission didn’t have a full exterior wall around its perimeter. Instead, the walls of some of the buildings became defacto outside walls. If the adobe bricks were not part of the western wall, they could have been part of another building on the mission grounds or even one of the Native American dwellings that grew up around the mission.

Here’s a short video of an archaeologist pointing out the adobe bricks in the trench.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/DHtJA2-5-W4&w=430]

The excavation is scheduled to last four weeks. For regular updates on the dig, follow Reimagine the Alamo’s Facebook page.

Stinky cheese found on 17th c. Swedish shipwreck

Modern(ish), Museums

Divers have recovered a tin of very old, very stinky cheese from the wreck of the Swedish royal ship Kronan off the coast of Öland in the Baltic Sea. The ship went down in 1676, so the cheese is 340 years old. (One hopes it hadn’t been on the ship a full year or more before it went down.)

“It looks a bit like some kind of granular Roquefort cheese. It’s been in the mud, so it’s reasonably well preserved, but at the same time it has been at the bottom of the sea for 340 years – we’re not talking Tutankhamun’s burial chamber,” [Lars Einarsson of the Kalmar County Museum] said.

Einarsson said the thick, gooey find smells strongly of cheese and yeast.

“I think it smells quite nice, because I like exotic food. But I would not want to taste it.”

I wonder why. What, you can’t handle 340-years worth of bacterial growth in unpasteurized cheese, Mr. Einarsson? Somebody get Andrew Zimmern over there.

The cheese is being kept cool at the Kalmar County Museum for now. It will be subjected to a battery of scientific test to identify it first as cheese (it’s almost certainly a dairy product, but it could have gone bad and been contaminated by God knows what to make it clumpy and smell like cheese), and then perhaps what type it is.

The royal ship Kronan was built by shipwright Francis Sheldon who had fled England after participating in a failed attempt to free King Charles I from prison. He was received in Sweden most warmly by King Charles X Gustavus who promptly put him to work building ships for his navy. In 1655, the Swedish admiralty hired Sheldon as master shipwright of the navy. He was in the right place at the right time. In the 1660s Sweden began a program of replacing its aging fleet with new warships, larger, more heavily armoured and armed, capable of withstanding the popular tactic of brutal broadside attacks that had replaced the old-fashioned style of short-range artillery exchanges culminating in boarding the wounded but functional enemy vessel.

Construction on the Kronan began on October 27th, 1665, when the keel was laid in Stockholm’s royal shipyard. It was meant to replace the previous flagship and bearer of the name which was by then 33 years old. Made entirely out of oak (about 20 acres of a 100-year-old oak forest was cut down to make the ship), the Kronan was 197 feet long and 42 feet wide, the third or fourth largest ship in the world at that time. It took another three years before the hull was laid. The admiralty and Sheldon fought the whole time, them accusing him of delaying construction by working on private projects, including a lucrative side business selling some of that oak to England; he accused them of holding back promised funds making it impossible for him and his crew to do the job.

Finally in 1672 the Kronan was finished. The gaudy ship, so known because of the decorative style meant to intimidate the enemy with gloriously gilded details, sailed for the first time in December in the celebration of Charles XI’s coronation. When loaded for bear, the ship carried 126 bronze cannons on three decks. It was manned by a large crew of 500 sailors and 350 soldiers. In 1675, the new Kronan officially became the flagship of Sweden’s royal navy. It only had a year to live.

During a storm before the beginning of an action at the Battle of Öland on June 1st, 1676, the Kronan capsized after making a sharp turn with too much sail unfurled. The gunpowder stores ignited and the bow of the ship exploded. Laden with cannon, coin, weapons and the personal items of nearly a thousand men who called it home much of the year, the Kronan sank rapidly, taking 800 souls with it. Only 50 men survived. Its fellow gaudy ship the Svärdet, whose wreck was found in 2011, sank after a fireship attack in the same battle, an immense toll on Sweden’s navy inflicted in just one encounter.

Some of the cannons were salvaged from the Kronan wreck in the 1680s, but it wasn’t until 200 years later that the wreck of the Kronan was rediscovered off the southwest coast of Öland and fully explored by maritime archaeologists. It was found by Anders Franzén, famous for having found the exceptional wreck of the Vasa in Stockholm harbour, and has been dived regularly ever since. In the 36 years since its discovery, more than 30,000 artifacts have been recovered from the wreck site, including Sweden’s largest ever find of gold coins — 255 ducats minted in Sweden, central Europe, Egypt, Syria and Turkey — and Sweden’s largest ever find of silver coins.

The dives this month that discovered the cheese also found another 14 gold coins, the most that have been recovered the Kronan in 16 years, a large number of pharmaceuticals, many of them for gastrointestinal illnesses (cheese, we’re looking in your direction), and a very rare gold and diamond ring. A jeweler in Kalmar who examined the ring said it was the oldest diamond ring he’d ever seen.

The wreck is about 90% mapped now. Lars Einarsson estimates it will take another three years of summer dives to complete the survey, which means the Kronan will have provided archaeologists with fascinating new material every year for 40 years. The Kalmar County Museum has a permanent exhibition dedicated to the Kronan with many of the artifacts recovered from wreck on display. Visitors can even load one of the cannons.