Month: June 2018

Opulent imperial-era home found at Milvian Bridge

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an opulent imperial-era residence on the banks of the Tiber near the Milvian Bridge. The site was found last November during a preventative archaeology survey in advance of utility works, but excavations were suspended and trenches filled in out of concern that the seasonal rise of the water level in the Tiber would damage the ancient remains.

Excavations have started again in the spring. Only a fraction of the structure has been unearthed and the team still sin’t certain whether it was a villa or smaller private dwelling. The part that has been exposed is contains mosaic floors in the luxurious opus sectile, a mosaic style which used polychrome marbles instead of the small, even tesserae tiles, arranged in a variety of floral, geometric and figural shapes. The floors in this building feature floral motifs, at least the ones revealed so far.

They are of exceptional quality, the colors of the marbles vivid and diverse. The homeowner must have spared no expense. It is incongruous, however, that such a high-end edifice decorated in precious materials would have been built so close to the bank of the Tiber.

Battlefield dig finds Napoleonic mass graves

Modern(ish)

The Battle of Wagram took place on July 5 and 6th, 1809, near what is today the Austrian town of Deutsch-Wagram. In the clash between the forces of Napoleon’s French Empire and the Austrian Empire, an estimated 55,000 soldiers died, one of whom was the Baron Jean-Baptiste Deban de Laborde, the French Hussar whose sons would later be so memorably depicted in miniature version of his uniforms.

The general area of the battlefield was know but its precise location was not and no archaeological explorations were done until circumstances — ie, the construction of a new highway from Vienna to Slovakia — forced a survey in accordance with cultural heritage laws. Archaeologists with the firm Novetus were contracted to excavate the route of the highway that goes through Deutsch-Wagram.

Excavations began in March of 2017 and it’s such a complicated project covering such an emormous territory — one site out of many is the size of 27 football fields — that it’s expected to continue until at least the end of 2018. They have definitely found the battlefield, first and foremost, and several mass graves where the dead were buried where they fell. They have also unearthed a wealth of artifacts, including a soldier’s whistle, metal uniform fittings like buckles and buttons, small glass vials that may have contained medicines and scads of ammunition.

The researchers are mapping the hastily dug mass graves and campsites, as well as the thousands of musket balls, bullets, buttons and personal items that were dropped on the field. They hope to get a more detailed look at how the two-day battle went down. Bioarchaeologists are also examining the bones of the soldiers — and discovering just how unhealthy many of them were before they died in the war. […]

Of the 50 skeletons excavated so far, most of the individuals are young men between about 16 and 30 years old, and Binder said their bones bear traces of scurvy from vitamin C deficiency, inflammation of the joints from long marches carrying heavy loads, and infections like pneumonia and other diseases that would have spread in the cramped conditions of the military camp.

The battlefield of the Battle of Aspern-Essling which took place only six weeks before Wagram was excavated earlier and a comparison between the conditions of the bodies unearthed at the sites shows a marked increase in respiratory diseases in the month and a half between the battles. Napoleon’s forces were defeated by Archduke Charles of Austria’s at Aspern-Essling, the first time he’d lost a battle in a decade, but he was able to retreat without crippling losses (both sides has the same casualty count of around 23,000; 7,000 French troops killed in action, 6,300 Austrian) and regroup to win the day at Wagram. The study of the remains shows the real toll taken on soldiers’ bodies by the constant campaigns, win or lose.

Executed Anglo-Saxon found at wind farm

Medieval

The skeleton of a man from the late Anglo-Saxon period has been discovered during an archaeological survey along the cable route of the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm in the South Downs region off the coast of Sussex. Archaeology South East were contracted by European electric company E.ON to excavate the installation path of the cable that will carry the wind farm’s power and have so far unearthed archaeological material — flint tools, pottery, evidence of cultivation — dating from the late Neolothic to the Bronze Age, Roman era, Middle Ages and the post-medieval period. The complete skeleton interred in a grave hewn from the chalk bedrock South Downs is famed for is the most exceptional of these finds.

The skeletal remains of the adult male were found in 2015 on Truleigh Hill near Shoreham, West Sussex. Osteological analysis indicates he was between 25 and 35 years old when he died and likely lived a hard life up until then. There is evidence of a healed fracture on his left arm and repetitive stress on the vertebrae caused by bending or twisting movements. The skeleton was intact, missing only a few small bones from the hands and feet. There is no evidence of a coffin. He was placed in the grave on his back with his arms at his side in the east-west alignment typical of Christian burials.

Bone analysis put the date of his death between 1010 and 1023, while cuts to the neck pointed to a violent end. […]

Jim Stevenson, Project Manager for Archaeology South East, said: “Radiocarbon dating has revealed that the skeleton is most likely to be an execution burial of the later Anglo Saxon period.

“Most significantly two cut marks made by a sharp blade or knife were found at the mid length of the neck, which would have proved fatal.”

The grave site was located in an area known to have prehistoric graves. Apparently there were once burial mounds visible, but they were excavated flat in the 18th and 19th centuries and the digs were poorly documented so it’s not possible to pinpoint their location today. Isolated burials were sometimes found near the mounds. Perhaps this fellow having been condemned to death was denied access to a Christian cemetery and buried at an ancient holy site instead.

Branwell Brontë’s portrait of his sisters goes home

Modern(ish), Museums

The only known surviving portrait taken from life of sibling literary luminaries Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë has gone home. Part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the painting is on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth for the first time since 1984 to take part in an exhibition honoring the bicentenary of Emily’s birthday (July 30th, 1818). Emily, author of Wuthering Heights, was the fifth of six children, born between brother Patrick Branwell and youngest sister Anne. This is the only undisputed portrait of Emily (experts disagree about whether another painting by Branwell is of Emily or Anne).

It was painted by Branwell Brontë around 1834 at the Haworth parsonage, the family’s home on the Yorkshire moors for many isolated years of their childhood. That parsonage is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It usually has to make do with a copy of the famous group portrait, but the original work is now being exhibited in the place where it was painted in Emily’s honor. The honor is a transitory one, however. The painting will only be on view at the parsonage through August 31st.

The work has quite the checkered history. Branwell originally included a self-portrait in the group between Emily and Charlotte, but for unknown reasons he painted himself out, covering his likeness with a weirdly random green ectoplasmic pillar. Because of that odd feature, the painting is known as the Pillar Portrait.

Patrick died in September 1848, followed less than two months later by Emily. Anne died five months after her sister in May of 1849. Charlotte was the last survivor of the Brontë siblings.

Her friend and biographer, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (author of Cranford and North and South, among others) saw the portrait when she visited Charlotte at Haworth in 1853. She described it in less than glowing terms in her bestselling biography of the author, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857:

I have seen an oil painting of [Branwell’s], done I know not when, but probably about this time [1835]. It was a group of his sisters, life-size, three-quarters’ length; not much better than sign-painting, as to manipulation; but the likenesses were, I should think, admirable. I could only judge of the fidelity with which the other two were depicted, from the striking resemblance which Charlotte, upholding the great frame of canvas, and consequently standing right behind it, bore to her own representation, though it must have been ten years and more since the portraits were taken. The picture was divided, almost in the middle, by a great pillar. On the side of the column which was lighted by the sun, stood Charlotte, in the womanly dress of that day of gigot sleeves and large collars. On the deeply shadowed side, was Emily, with Anne’s gentle face resting on her shoulder. Emily’s countenance struck me as full of power; Charlotte’s of solicitude; Anne’s of tenderness. The two younger seemed hardly to have attained their full growth, though Emily was taller than Charlotte; they had cropped hair, and a more girlish dress. I remember looking on those two sad, earnest, shadowed faces, and wondering whether I could trace the mysterious expression which is said to foretell an early death. I had some fond superstitious hope that the column divided their fates from hers, who stood apart in the canvas, as in life she survived. I liked to see that the bright side of the pillar was towards her — that the light in the picture fell on her: I might more truly have sought in her presentment — nay, in her living face — for the sign of death — in her prime. They were good likenesses, however badly executed.

Charlotte lived at Haworth until her tragically premature death in 1855. She had married her father’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and became pregnant shortly thereafter. She and her unborn child died nine months after the wedding. Charlotte was just shy of her 39th birthday.

Nicholls stayed on as Patrick Brontë’s curate until the latter’s death in 1861, then he moved back to his hometown of Banagher, Ireland. He sold the contents of Haworth but kept manuscripts, ephemera and personal effects, including the group painting even though he apparently hated it. He put it on top of an upstairs cupboard and let people believe it was lost for decades.

It was rediscovered in 1913, seven years after Nicholls’ death, by his second wife and cousin, Mary. By then it was out of its frame, off its stretcher and folded in four. The widow told her niece that Nicholls “disliked them very much. He thought they were very ugly representations of the girls, and I think meant to destroy them, but perhaps shrank from doing so — you see, there is only one other existing portrait of Charlotte, and none at all of Emily and Anne.”

That last bit isn’t true. There was actually a portrait by Branwell of Emily or Anne, (scholars disagree) found on top of the same cupboard as the Pillar Portrait. It was cut out of a group portrait, the rest of which has been lost.

Mary Nicholls sold the group portrait in 1914 to the National Portrait Gallery. Most of the rest of the manuscripts and Brontë memorabilia she sold after her husband’s death or that was sold after her death in 1916 are now part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum collection.

Ramps, ropes used to place red hats on moai

Modern(ish)

Researchers have long sought to pinpoint how the monumental heads (moai) of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) were put in place. The statues are up to 33 feet high and weigh up to 81 tons. They were carved from volcanic tuff quarried in one place on the east side of the island Rano Raraku and then moved to their final locations, an arduous task, to put it mildly. The latest studies suggest they were likely walked into place, rocked left and right along carefully prepared roads much like we’d move a refrigerator today.

That still leaves the question of how hats (pukao) were put on some of the moai. The red scoria the pukao were made of was quarried from a different site on the west side of the island. While not as massive as the moai, the largest of the hats weigh 13 tons, so the logistics of transporting them to their final destinations on top of heads as much as 33 feet high were just as challenging.

Previously researchers hypothesized that they were joined to the moai and then put in place together, but a new study focused on the archaeological evidence and 3D imaging to determine that the pukao were added after the statues were already in place. Red scoria chips have been found around statues wearing the hats, which strongly indicates they were carved into their final shapes only after they’d been moved. As those final shapes are variants of cylinders and cones, they were probably carved into cylinders at the quarry and then rolled to where the statues, already firmly in place, awaited their chapeaux.

So far so goo, but how then to lift a dozen tons of hat onto 80 tons of head? The research team used photogrammetry (combining hundreds of high resolution photographs to create a detailed model) to identify any similarities common to all the hats on statues. They used 3D imaging to create models from the photographs that would allow them to analyze the pukao and moai in far greater detail than possible with the naked eye. They discovered only one feature common to all the hats: indentations at the base that fit the tops of the heads. Had the hats been slid into place, the edges of the indentations would have been ground down because the stone is so soft.

“The best explanation for the transport of the pukao (hats) from the quarry is by rolling the raw material to the location of the moai (statues),” said Lipo. “Once at the moai, the pukao were rolled up large ramps to the top of a standing statue using a parbuckling technique.”

Parbuckling is a simple and efficient technique for rolling objects and is often used to right ships that have capsized. The center of a long rope is fixed to the top of a ramp and the two trailing ends are wrapped around the cylinder to be moved. The rope ends are then brought to the top where workers pull on the ropes to move the cylinder up the ramp.

Besides reducing the force needed to move the hats, this arrangement also makes it easier to stabilize the hat on the trip up because the hat typically will not roll back down the slope. The researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, that 15 or fewer workers could move the largest preform hats up the ramps.

Once the hat was at the top of the ramp, it could not simply be pushed into place because of the ridges on the margin of the hat base indentation. Rather, the researchers believe that the hats were tipped up onto the statues.

First the hat would be modified to its final form, some including a second, smaller cylindrical piece on top.

The hats could be rotated 90 degrees and then levered up with small wooden levers to sit on the statue tops, or the ramp could be slightly to the side, so that rotation in the small space at the top of the ramp would be unnecessary. Then the hat would simply be levered and pivoted on edge and into place.

The ramps were then disassembled and became the wings of the platform surrounding the statues.

The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.