Month: July 2018

New discoveries from the warship Mars

Modern(ish), Multimedia

The exploration of the wreck of the 16th century Swedish warship Mars 250 feet under the surface of the cold, dark Baltic Sea has been ongoing since its discovery in 2011, and despite the zero visibility and the life-threatening challenges involved in diving the wreck, new finds continue to be made.

“This year, we have come closer to the people aboard. We found more skeletal parts, including a femur with trauma around the knee which we believe to stem from a sharp-edged weapon,” says maritime archaeologist Rolf Fabricius Warming, who is one of the researchers involved in the investigation.

“We also found large guns and a hand grenade. We can see from the wreckage that it was a very intense and tough battle. Between 800 and 1,000 men were on board. That is comparable to the population of an entire medium-sized town at the time. Most of them died in the explosion or when the ship sank into the watery depths,” he says.

The ship was the largest in the fleet of King Eric XIV (r. 1560-1568), capable of carrying a crew of 800. The reason for the estimate of how many went down with the ship is that it sank mid-boarding. The Swedish navy engaged in battle against Denmark, Lübeck and the Polish–Lithuanian Union off the coast of Öland on May 30th, 1564. On the second day of ferocious fighting, the Mars was boarded by the Danish and Lübeckian forces who didn’t know that the ship was already on fire from a cannon shot. The gunpowder stores exploded with enormous force, blowing the front of the ship clean off — that part of the wreck was found 130 feet away from the main body of the ship — and killing whatever crew had survived up until that point died along with the enemy they had been fighting. Historians estimate that at least 300 of the dead of the Mars were Danish-Lübeckian boarders.

The diving team has also discovered a historic first this season.

This time, one of the most spectacular finds was a large grapnel (grappling hook) an anchor-like hook, which hung from the bowsprits of warships and was used to cling onto another ships in order to board it.

Grapnels are illustrated in historical sources from the 16th century, but no actual surviving examples are known apart from this particular one, says Warming.

“It’s totally unique. Together with other exciting finds, it can shed new light on Medieval and Early Modern naval warfare,” he says, and adds that the divers also found remains of possible arms and armour, including helmets and swords.

Alas, there are no pictures of the grappling hook which is a bummer, but we must forgive because visibility down there is so terrible that it’s a miracle we get any photos at all, never mind the exceptional ones we’ve gotten so far. The divers have to use high-intensity bright lights to see a foot in front of their masks and they film everything they see for the archaeologists to examine. They do this carrying big tanks with a special gas mixture to keep them from getting the bends/dying and under a crazy time crunch because for their own safety, they can only dive 40 minutes at a time.

That precious footage they’ve shot is being used to create a detailed ultra high-resolution 3D model of the shipwreck. It’s not complete yet, but here’s an all-too brief demo of the 3D photogrammetry model of the Mars and it’s awesome.

A riveting look at the Gardner heist via podcast

Looting, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Boston’s National Public Radio station WBUR and the Boston Globe have produced a podcast series dubbed Last Seen on the greatest unsolved art crime in history, the theft of 13 masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18th, 1990. The case has bedeviled authorities local and federal for 28 years and is still being actively investigated. The reward money is now up to $10 million, and yet, concrete evidence of any kind remains elusive.

The 10-episode series will look at the events of March 18th, 1990 and follow the track of the investigations, but it won’t be a retelling of what went down. There will be interviews with people who have never been interviewed before, among them the second security guard on duty that night and in-depth examinations of the investigative trail over the decades. The reporters have been given unprecedented access to the Gardner heist materials and many of those materials will be posted online in tandem with the podcasts.

“Our reporters have spoken to key people who have never before publicly talked. They have seen places and documents that no other reporters have seen before. Their work even led federal authorities to conduct a high-stakes excavation in a residential neighborhood in Florida. It all comes together in a provocative look not only at the crime and all the colorful characters around it, but at the investigation that has failed to solve it,” said Jane Bowman, Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, The Boston Globe. […]

Who pulled off what the FBI describes as the largest property crime case in U.S. history? Was it a mob associate who ran the TRC Auto Electric repair shop in Dorchester, the Irish Republican Army and Whitey Bulger, two wannabe rock ‘n’ rollers or someone else entirely? Last Seen looks at these and many more suspects as hosts Horan and Rodolico travel from Boston to Philadelphia, Florida, Ireland and Italy investigating motives, scenarios and dead bodies with key players and leading experts on the robbery.

The series begins on September 17th and subsequent episodes will air every Monday. There’s an associated Facebook group you can join to comment on the podcasts and discuss it with other listeners. If you have iTunes (I broke up with it years ago and it was a nasty split), you can subscribe to the podcast here. The podcast will also be available for streaming on WBUR’s Last Seen page and for streaming and download in any other of your favorite podcast purveyors (here it is on Podbay.fm, for example).

Get a tantalizing taste of Last Seen in this excellent trailer. That old-time radio announcer opening and the clips of statements from investigators, witnesses and suspects give it a genuinely haunted crime-thriller vibe.

[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/BUR4439350468.mp3″ titles=”A First Listen To Last Seen”]

Black sarcophagus of DOOM opened

Ancient

Because the Internet is a silly place, the 30-ton black granite sarcophagus unearthed in Alexandria earlier this month became something of a meme. It looks so deliciously ominous that the plan to open it sparked a viral wildfire welcoming/warning the demonic powers sure to be unleashed once the lid was pried up.

Fearing no plague-wielding revenants or curses from ancient gods, a team of experts dispatched by the Ministry of Antiquities opened the sarcophagus on Thursday. The first glimpse inside revealed a red fluid filling much of the coffin. It smelled so putrid that the team left the lid off for an hour before attempting to remove enough of the liquid to see what else might be in the sarcophagus.

The foul fluid was removed one large jug at a time. When they got down to the lees, the team found the skeletal remains of three individuals. They had originally been mummified, but the liquid turned out to be sewage water that had leaked into the coffin via a crack on the east side and it had eaten away at the mummified tissue leaving only the bones.

The lack of inscriptions on the sarcophagus indicated that it did not belong to a pharaoh or king. When it was first discovered, Antiquities Minister Mostafa Waziri surmised that it might hold the remains of a priest as someone who would have had the social significance to command so large and impressive a coffin. Preliminary examination of the bones tells a different story. One of the skulls has multiple fractures, the result of sharp-force trauma that indicate he died in battle. The other two skulls are intact. All three appear to be male.

The mummies are being moved to the Alexandria National Museum which has a state-of-the-art laboratory for the conservation and study of ancient remains and artifacts and the high-tech security system to keep them safe during the process. There they will be X-rayed and analyzed to determine their ages at time of death, map their facial features and pinpoint their dates.

The sarcophagus will be raised from the pit with a mechanical loader. Cars have been temporarily exiled from the street to make way for the behemoth that will lift the black granite behemoth out of the ground and transport it to the Military Museum in the adjacent military northern region. The pit will then be scanned with metal detectors and excavated further to make sure all artifacts are recovered.

Lastly, the miasmic nameless horror that was released by these unwitting fools will spread over the world and swallow us all until we hear naught but the grinding of gizzard stones and taste naught but the burning bitterness of stomach acid for all eternity.

Cornplanter’s tomahawk back at museum 70 years after theft

Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

A historic pipe tomahawk has returned to the New York State Museum 70 years after it was stolen by person or persons unknown. The tomahawk belonged to Allegheny Seneca war chief Cornplanter who received as a diplomatic gift from President George Washington in 1792. As war chief, Cornplanter had led the Seneca as allies of the French against the British in the French and Indian War. He took on the war chief mantle again during the Revolutionary War, this time on the British side. His involvement was against his better judgment as he thought the Iroquois nations should remain neutral. He was outvoted, however, and reluctantly did his duty.

Cornplanter, fighting with Loyalist forces, was successful as a war leader. Pro-Independence settlers were killed and their properties were burned, and the Colonists did the same to Iroquois towns. George Washington dispatched Major General John Sullivan to eliminate the Iroquois in New York state and he did just that, first defeating them in pitched battle and then systematically burning every village, farmed field, food store and animal from May to September of 1779. When winter came, the surviving Iroquois had nothing to live on. The refugees headed up to Canada, Cornplanter trying his best to get them to safety, but many of them died from starvation and cold.

With the war lost and the Colonists colonists no more, Cornplanter turned to his diplomatic skills. He helped negotiate and was a signatory of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 and met personally with President George Washington in 1790 to protest how the Seneca and other Iroquois nations were being treated, treaties notwithstanding.

Pipe tomahawks were significant objects of intercultural exchange in the 18th century and could be used as smoking pipes; smoking was a common ceremonial practice between parties after reaching an agreement. The meetings between Washington and Cornplanter, also known as Gy-ant-waka, in the 1790s eventually led to the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), which established peace between the sovereign nations of the U.S. and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.

Cornplanter died in 1836. There is no record of the movements of the ceremonial pipe tomahawk until 1850 when it was donated to the New York State Museum by Seneca statesman, civil engineer, attorney and Union lieutenant colonel Ely Samuel Parker. He acquired it from the widow of a Seneca man named Small Berry. The haft was not original when Parker got the tomahawk, but Cornplanter’s name in the Seneca language, Gy-ant-waka, was engraved on one side of the blade identifying it as the historic piece. The name John Andrus engraved on the other side is unknown but is thought to have been the manufacturer.

Small Berry’s widow described the original haft to Parker, so he replaced the replacement with a replica that came as close as possible to her description: curly maple decorated with bands and geometric spade/arrowhead-like shapes of silver inlay. While he was at it, Parker added a brass plate engraved with his own name to the bore end.

The pipe was an important piece in the museum’s ethnographic collection for decades. It disappeared between 1947 and 1950, it’s not clear exactly when or how. Whoever snatched it, it wound up in the murky penumbra of private collections until June of this year when one last anonymous collector finally had the decency to return it to the State Museum. It is now on display in the museum’s main lobby through December 30th.

Leicester Roman mosaics go on display

Ancient, Museums

The large sections of a Roman mosaic floor discovered at the old Stibbe factory site in Leicester the winter of 2016/2017 is now on public display. This is the first time the public has had a chance to see the cleaned and conserved mosaics.

The University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) was contracted to excavate the site before construction of new apartments in late 2016. They discovered most of a Roman block, including the remains of two townhouses with sections of mosaic floors in several of their rooms. The largest surviving section in one of the homes was about seven by ten feet in area, an estimated quarter of the size of the original. The design and style of the mosaic suggest it dated to the late 3rd century or early 4th.

That was exciting enough, but the largest mosaic pavement in the other home spanked its neighbor soundly with a stretch just shy of 33 feet long. It is the largest and highest quality Roman mosaic floor found in Leicester in 150 years.

Because the apartment building was going to go up Roman insula or no Roman insula, the ULAS team had to raise the mosaics in a meticulous and complex salvage operation. The mortar sealing the mosaics had long since degraded so archaeologists had to use glue and fabric to keep the tesserae together.

The public was invited to see the mosaics in situ on one weekend of May 2017, but since then the priceless pieces have been treated behind closed doors. Their return to public view will be brief (for now). The exhibition opened on Monday at BBC Radio’s studio in Leicester and runs until Friday, July 27th. Admission is free and visitors can see it Monday through Friday from 9AM to 5PM.

Those of us who can’t Uber our way to Leicester in a timely fashion will have to make do with not inconsiderable consolation of Sketchfab.

Fine Roman mosaic
by Archaeological Services (ULAS)
on Sketchfab

Highcross Street – Roman mosaic in-situ
by Archaeological Services (ULAS)
on Sketchfab

Highcross Street – Roman mosaic restored
by Archaeological Services (ULAS)
on Sketchfab