Month: April 2018

18th c. shipwreck hull scanned for posterity

Modern(ish)

The remains of a rare 18th century shipwreck caused much excitement when they were discovered by beachcombers on Ponte Vedra Beach in northeastern Florida last month. All that’s left of the ship is a large section of wooden hull, but 47-feet sections of 300-year-old ships don’t wash up ashore all in one piece very often, and this one is surprisingly well-preserved. Wooden pegs and Roman numeral markers used in its construction are still intact.

Julia Turner and her eight-year-old son stumbled on the wreckage during a walk on the beach on March 28th, 2018. They had been looking for shark teeth and shells when the found a ship’s hull instead. At first Julia thought it was just some old fencing or maybe part of a pier, but she soon realized it was the remnants of a shipwreck.

Archaeologists from the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum started documenting the discovery that very same day. They made field drawings, mapped the hull and its context. Because it was found on state land — Ponte Vedra is a public beach — the shipwreck cannot be moved or interfered with in any way. Even the archaeologists could only observe very carefully, take copious notes to share with any relevant state authorities who would then determine what to do next. The next day, officials decided to attempt recovery, but the heavy crane necessary to remove such a large and heavy section of ship got stuck in the sand. A second attempt on Friday also came to naught.

The news of the find spread quickly and drew crowds, some of whom were a little too keen to get up close and personal with the wreck. The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office had to deploy a deputy to guard the hull while archaeologists did their thing to keep the overly enthusiastic from interfering with the fragile artifact.

Since archaeologists weren’t officially tasked with salvage and the wreck could be reclaimed by the ocean at any time, the team went with plan B and arranged for a laser scanner to be brought to the site from the University of South Florida. On Saturday, March 31st, four days after the hull washed ashore, it was laser scanned for posterity. Now, barely two weeks later, the first 3D model of the Ponte Vedra Shipwreck has been made available online.

Ponte Vedra Shipwreck in VR/AR by University of South Florida Libraries on Sketchfab

Coleridge’s remains found in a wine cellar

Modern(ish)

The remains of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge have been rediscovered in a bricked-up wine cellar. Their loss was of recent duration. Just before his death in 1834, the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was lodging at the home of a doctor in Highgate, north London, who was attempting to treat him. When those attempts failed to prevent the poet’s death, he was buried in Old Highgate Chapel near the parish church across the street.

In 1961, an alarm was raised about the condition of the vault. It was derelict and Coleridge’s remains were no longer safe. A fundraising campaign that received contributions from all over the world was launched and its success allowed Coleridge’s remains, those of his wife Sarah, his daughter Sarah, her husband and their son to be moved to St. Michael’s Parish Church where they were placed in a section of the crypt that in the 17th century had been a wine cellar. When the church was built on the site of the former Ashhurst House in 1831, the old wine cellar had been absorbed into the large crypt of the new St Michael’s and largely forgotten. Coleridge got a marker in the floor of the church, but the coffins themselves were bricked up and forgotten about.

[I]n the words of Drew Clode, a member of the St Michael’s stewardship committee, “poor Coleridge was moved from a tip to a tip – they put the coffins in a convenient space which was dry and secure, and quite suitable, bricked them up and forgot about them, and never did anything about the rest of the space”.

As people died or moved away from the parish, the exact location of the coffins was forgotten, until a recent excavation revealed the entrance to the wine vault. The gap was just large enough to shine a torch through the ventilation block in the 1960s brick wall, and the excavators discovered the five lead coffins. They lay not where most thought, in the far corner of the crypt, but almost directly below the inscription “Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge” on the prominent memorial slab in the nave. “So that was a bit of a clue really,” said Clode.

Pilgrims do visit the church to pay their respects to the poet, and it would be nice to have more than just a marker for them to see. St. Michael’s authorities want to clear the crypt and make it accessible without having to follow a labyrinthine path through piles of brick and stone.

“From a safety point of view it would be quite impossible to bring members of the public down here,” said the vicar, Kunle Ayodeji. “But we hope that the whole crypt can be cleared as a space for meetings and other uses, which would also allow access to Coleridge’s cellar. I don’t think we would open up a view of the coffins, but we could place a suitable inscription on the wall.”

Ancient Peruvians buried with extra limbs

Ancient

The excavation of the Huanchaco district of Trujillo which last month revealed the remains of sacrificed children of the Chimú civilization has now unearthed another highly unusual burial: people from the Virú culture buried with extra legs. The Las Lomas Rescue Project, a salvage archaeology mission to fully excavate and remove any cultural heritage discovered at the site of sewer and water extensions, has discovered more than 50 Virú burials.

The little-known Virú culture, named for the Virú Valley which runs from the Andes mountains to the Pacific, thrived in the area between A.D. 100 and 750, before the Moche took control of the region. Campaña’s excavations have revealed a small coastal settlement along with the burials.

“It’s a complex little fishing village,” he says.

There’s particular complexity in many of the burials, Campaña adds, noting that around 30 of the 54 mostly adult burials appear to include not only complete skeletons, but also additional body parts. Most of the bonus limbs appear to be arms and legs. In one case, an adult was buried intact, along with two additional left legs interred right beside the body.

Many of the bones show the tell-tale signs of trauma, both sharp and blunt force. Interestingly, the remains with the trauma also had the greater complement of additional limbs.

This practice is specific to the Virú people in Peru. The Moche sometimes buried individuals with their amputated limbs or with sacrificial victims by their sides, but not with additional limbs alone.

At this time, the archaeologists can only speculate about the motivation behind the unusual Virú burials. One suggestion is that the extra limbs may have served as a sacrificial offering to accompany the dead to the afterlife. Additional lab work will determine if there was any sort of relation between the individuals buried and the owners of the additional body parts.

Other items of archaeological interest found in the burials were pottery vessels decorated with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motifs, coppery sheets, jewelry, and a large copper fish hook wrapped with gold foil around the center of the shaft. The four-inch-long hook is typical of that used to catch sharks and other large fish.

Now is the portion of the entry when I date myself in an extremely dorky way based solely on my reaction to a picture. Does anybody remember those monkey/koala clips people clamped to their pencils in elementary school in the 80s? It was such a huge thing when I was a kid. I know I had at least three of them. Anyway, this Virú monkey pot reminds me of those koala clips, only it’s even cuter.

FBI recovers stolen Chagall 30 years after theft

Modern(ish)

A Chagall oil painting that was stolen in a heist of valuables from the apartment of a New York couple in 1988 has been recovered by the FBI. Ernest and Rose Heller were 85 and 88 years old respectively when they returned to their Manhattan apartment after an Aspen vacation to find it had been burgled. Missing along with the Chagall were jewelry, china, silver and 13 other paintings from their small but significant collection by artists including Renoir, Hopper and Picasso. The building’s security system had remained silent the entire time.

Because of security having been neutralized, authorities at the time suspected it was an inside job. One man who worked there and had access to the building’s security system would later be convicted on federal charges of moving stolen goods across state lines. Some of the counts related to the Heller theft, others to art stolen from other New York homes, so it seems the Chagall fell into the hands of a whole theft ring with multi-state operation.

Even with the insider arrested and convicted, none of the loot from the Heller apartment was recovered. Ernest was quoted in the press at the time of the theft saying that he didn’t think he’d ever see any of the pieces from “a lifetime of collecting” again. Sadly, he was right. He and his wife passed away many years ago, leaving their possessions almost entirely to charity.

The FBI’s Art Crime Team tracked down the painting with the help of a gallery in Washington, DC. According to a complaint filed today in US District Court and titled United States v. One Oil Painting Entitled Othello and Desdemona by Marc Chagall for the District of Columbia, “Person 1” approached “Person 2” in the late 1980s or early ’90s, for help selling the stolen Chagall to persons involved with Bulgarian organized crime. The deal fell through, and the first party accused the second, who wound up with the painting, of stealing the work. (Because of the ongoing investigation into the other paintings whereabouts, the FBI is not revealing the names of any of the parties involved.)

Person 2 brought the painting to the DC gallery in 2011, and again in 2017. An unidentified third party had previously brought the painting to the gallery back in 1989. All three times, the dealer said they could not help sell the piece without proof of ownership and provenance. Encouraged by the gallery, Person 2 finally contacted the FBI, who took possession of the painting in January 2017.

Because the insurance company paid out for the stolen objects, it is technically the owner of the painting, and would be even if the Hellers were alive. In this case it has agreed to waive its legitimate ownership claim and the painting will be sold auction to benefit the charities in the Hellers’ will.

Chagall paintings can go for dizzying sums these days. The most recent windfall went to the former owners of Les Amoureux, which sold at Sotheby’s in New York last November for a record $28.45 million. Experts are doubtful that this piece would be one of the artist’s multi-million dollar sellers, however. The image is a little muddy, not particularly appealing and its many decades on the lam have not done its condition any favors. A similar work recently sold for $600,000, so that’s what it’s been appraised at. On the other hand, Ernest Heller was intrigued by its early date — it was painted in 1911 — and his own father bought it in Paris just two years after it was made for $50, likely from Chagall himself. Also its recent history might make it more desirable because heist stories are always juicy.

Medieval cheating dice found at Bergen

Medieval

Archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) excavating a medieval neighborhood of Bergen, Norway, have discovered a die with a non-standard numbering system (to put it extremely charitably) on four of its faces. Where the numbers one and two should be, there are an extra four and five instead giving this die a limited but suspiciously valuable range of rolling options: three through six.

In other words, somebody 600 years ago was either playing a game none of us today know about, or they had them some cheatin’ dice. The first interpretation is the least plausible. Plenty of dice have been found in Bergen from this period (more than 30), and none of them have idiosyncratic numeration like this one.

“The dice were found close to a wooden street that dates back to the 1400s. So when looking at the context and the dice design, there is just as much chance that someone has got rid of it, as they have lost it,” says Per Christian Underhaug who is the project manager for the excavations in Bergen,

“This part of Bergen was a densely populated district with several inns and pubs, and it is not unlikely that there were lots of games being played in them,” says Underhaug.

It’s very likely, as a matter of fact. Gambling was so widespread in Bergen that in 1276 the city banned it. Violators were subject to having all the money on the table confiscated and paying a significant fine on top of that. The prohibition of gambling didn’t stop it, of course, which is why more than a century later people were still playing dice games and finding ways to sweeten the odds.

The excavation is one of several taking place Vågsbunnen, one of the city’s lesser known medieval districts. Archaeologists hoped to make different finds here than in the other medieval areas of Bergen because it hasn’t been explored so thoroughly and because it was a working class neighborhood rather than a wealthy one. Also, once you dig down to cultural levels, the soil is very wet. This dig required use of a concrete coffer dam, lowered into the trench as soon as the team reached the first artifact layer, to keep them from being swamped. The challenges of excavating such an environment are offset by the potential preservation of organic material, as in the case of this discovery of the wooden die in fine condition.