Month: May 2020

Roman leather toy mouse found in Vindolanda scrap bag

Ex Cathedra

Curators at the Vindolanda Museum have discovered a Roman leather mouse in a bag full of scraps and off cuts. The flat piece of leather cut in the shape of a mouse dates to the early 2nd century. It is an angular, geometric outline and rather fat-tailed, reminiscent more of an Escher lizard than a mouse at first glance, but upon closer inspection there are dashes indicating hairs on the body and down the tail.

There are more than 7,000 leather objects in the museum’s collection, preserved in the anaerobic soil of the ancient fort site. Some of the Roman leather pieces now on display at the Vindolanda Museum are tents panels, patches, bags and enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos blush. Excavations have also unearthed many leather scraps which are in storage, not notable enough on their own to warrant going on display. Curators discovered the mouse in a box of leather offcuts and scraps that had been found in the period IV/V residence of the  commanding officer in 1993. That dates the mouse to around 105-130 A.D.

The Trust’s Curator, Barbara Birley said “One of the most wonderful things about the Vindolanda collection is that we never know what we are going to find next. Even though we have had to delay the start of our 2020 excavations this year we see the collection still has hidden treasures to be revealed. Although we have a significant amount of evidence of children at Vindolanda we have very few toys, it would be wonderful if this little mouse had been a toy and a source of entertainment for a child here on the northern frontier”.

Real mice were indeed everywhere in ancient Vindolanda, in every fort, likely to be present in all houses and spaces and would have been a consistent pest and companion to the people who lived there. When the Vindolanda granaries were excavated in 2008, the bones from thousands of dead mice were uncovered below the floors of the building, where they had been living and feasting on the ears of grain that dropped between the flagstones. It is quite wonderful that someone 2,000 years ago crafted this toy mouse from leather, in the knowledge that their creation would not have sharp teeth nor eat them out of house and home.

The museum will study and conserve the newly-discovered rodent and will then put it on display in the leather case.

Largest Pictish settlement identified in Aberdeenshire

Ancient

A hill fort in Aberdeenshire has been revealed to be the largest Pictish settlement in Scotland. The remains of ancient dwellings on Tap O’Noth, a hill in the village of Rhynie in northeastern Scotland, were radiocarbon dated to the 5th-6th centuries A.D. and the origins of the settlement may go back further to the 3rd century.

Excavations beginning in 2011 and recent drone surveys have pinpointed about 800 huts clustered on the hilltop around what the original fortified perimeter. That was expanded to cover the entire hilltop which was ringed by the Pictish fortification.

Professor Gordon Noble, who led the research, said: “This makes it bigger than anything we know from early medieval Britain.

“What was previously thought to be the biggest fort in early medieval Scotland is Burghead, at about five and a half hectares (13 acres).

“In England, famous post-Roman sites such as Cadbury Castle and Tintagel were around seven hectares (17 acres) and five hectares (12 acres) respectively.

“The Tap O’ Noth discovery shakes the narrative of this whole time period.

“If each of the huts we identified had four or five people living in them, then that means there was a population of upwards of 4,000 people living on the hill.

“That’s verging on urban in scale and in a Pictish context we have nothing else that compares to this.”

Not for another six centuries as least would settlements get this large.

The hill fort’s importance is reflected not just in the sheer numbers of huts and therefore residents, but also in the structures and objects found at the settlement. One of the huts is significantly larger than the others, an indication that the residents may have had an established social hierarchy. Artifacts unearthed at the site also indicate it was a high-status settlement. Large fragments of a 5th to mid-6th century Roman amphora imported from the Mediterranean area are of a type found at major royal centers like Tintagel in Cornwall, but the first ever found in eastern Britain and nothernmost ever found in the world.

There are other indications that Rhynie held a special position in Pictish society. In the valley at the base of the hill, archaeologists discovered glass drinking vessels from France, wine imported from the Mediterranean and extensive local production of metalwork. Eight Pictish symbol stones have also been found there, including the famous Rhynie Man, a slab six feet tall with the carved figure of a bearded man carrying a slim-handled axe over his shoulder. The stylized axe and the man’s head dress suggests he held a ceremonial role, represented a Celtic deity (the god Esus was often depicted with an axe) or perhaps a Pictish king.

16th c. castle remains found in Kyoto

Renaissance

A massive stone wall from a 16th century castle built by warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi has been unearthed on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace. The remains of the wall and a filled-in moat were discovered under the foundations of the Kyoto Sento Imperial Palace, the compound within the palace complex where emperors lived after they abdicated.

One section of castle wall, constructed in a north-south direction, measures about eight meters in length. The wall measured between 1 meter and 1.6 meters high in places and was comprised of three to four stone layers. Although the upper portion had collapsed, the wall in its prime was likely around 2.4 meters high.

The techniques used to construct the castle wall likely date to the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1568-1600) based on the careful manner in which blocks of stone were placed.

Researchers theorized that the moat was originally at least three meters wide and 2.4 meters deep.

Its age and owner were confirmed by the discovery of gold-plated roof tiles bearing Toyotomi’s crest in the fill of the moat.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was born in 1537, the son of a peasant and infantry grunt. Orphaned at seven, Hideyoshi made his way in the world working as a servant and later as a fighter for powerful daimyō Oda Nobunaga. Within 10 years, he was one of Nobunaga’s most successful generals. Nobunaga was assassinated by enemy samurai Akechi Mitsuhide in 1582. Hideyoshi fought Mitsuhide and won, cementing his power and influence in the Oda Clan and from there quickly rising in the military and political ranks.

In 1585 he attained the positions of Chancellor of the Realm and Imperial Regent (“kanpaku”). He ruled Japan in all but name by this point, wresting province after province from their local potentates to unify the country. He built a number of castles, including the massive Osaka Castle that is today one of Japan’s most important landmarks, and the Jurakudai in Kyoto.

The palace whose remains were just found was completed in 1591, the year before Hideyoshi’s death. The current Kyoto Imperial Palace was built in 1855, but it was eighth iteration to be built on the site, a common practice as palaces were constantly burning down and getting rebuilt. Hideyoshi’s castle was adjacent to the imperial palace.

The only surviving records of this castle were written by courtiers who refer to it as “Kyoto Shinjo,” meaning “new Kyoto Castle,” so a generic term rather the actual name of the building. The scant references suggested it was relatively unremarkable, a dwelling surrounded by a defensive wall, but the archaeological remains prove otherwise. The massive wall and the gold tiles point to this having been a grand, opulent structure.

“This is the greatest discovery this century related to an excavation of a Japanese castle,” [University of Shiga Prefecture professor and castle expert Hitoshi] Nakai said.

He added that Hideyoshi likely built it so Hideyori could succeed him to the court rank of “kanpaku,” the title for an individual who served as chief adviser to the emperor. […]

About a decade before constructing the Kyoto castle, Hideyoshi built the Jurakudai palace where he carried out his political duties as kanpaku and also resided. Hideyoshi turned over the Jurakudai palace and kanpaku rank to his nephew, Hidetsugu. But with the birth of Hideyori, Hidetsugu was compelled to commit suicide. Hideyoshi then ordered the Jurakudai palace to be demolished.

Kazuto Hongo, a professor of medieval Japanese history at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, said the Kyoto castle showed that the ancient capital still held immense importance to Hideyoshi even after he tore down the Jurakudai palace. […]

Hongo speculated that Hideyoshi built the castle as a means of passing on the authority of the high court ranks he held to his successors. Hongo noted that Hideyoshi was concerned about Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) gaining control of the nation after his death.

He was right to be concerned because that’s exactly what happened.

Norway to excavate first Viking ship burial mound in 100 years

Medieval, Modern(ish)

In October 2018, a geophysical survey of a field in Halden, southeastern Norway, revealed the presence of Viking ship burial. The landowner had applied for a soil drainage permit and because the field is adjacent to the monumental Jell Mound, archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) inspected the site first. Using a four-wheeler with a georadar mounted to the front of it. The high-resolution ground-penetrating radar picked up the clear outline of a ship 20 meters (65 feet) long.

The ship was found just 50 cm (1.6 feet) under the surface. It was once covered by a burial mound like its neighbor, but centuries of agricultural work ploughed it away. Subsequent investigation of the area found the outlines of at least 11 other burial mounds around the ship, all of them long-since ploughed out as well. The georadar also discovered the remains of five longhouses.

In order to get some idea of the ship’s age, condition and how much of it is left, in September of 2019, NIKU archaeologists dug a test pit was dug to obtain a sample of the wood of the keel. The keel was of a different type to ones from other Viking ship burials known in Norway. It is thinner and smaller than usual. The two-week investigation and analysis of the sample found that the ship does indeed date to the early Viking era. The wood was felled between the late 8th century and the start of the 10th century. 

In more distressing news, the analysis of the sample revealed that the wooden remains were under severe attack from fungus. The use of fertilizer on the farmland above the ship encourages the fungal growth and not only is the keel plagued by soft rot, the remains even at the deepest point where preservation conditions are the best possible are under acute distress.

Norway’s government has responded to the archaeological emergency by allocating 15.6m kroner (about $1.5 million) to excavate the Gjellestad Viking Ship and get it out of the ground before it rots to nothingness. While other Viking ship burials have been excavated in recent years, the last Viking ship burial mound to be excavated was the Oseberg ship in 1904-1905. If the Norwegian parliament approves the budget, excavation of the Gjellestad Ship is slated to begin in June.

[Jan Bill, curator of the Viking Ship Collection at the Museum of Cultural History,] said that even if the vessel was less well preserved that the team hoped, it could still provide important new information on Viking ship burials, as the Tune, Gokstad, and Oseberg ships, which were excavated in 1868, 1880 and 1904, respectively, were not carried out to modern standards.

“It’s important because it’s more than 100 years ago that we excavated a ship burial like this,” he said. “With the technology we have now and the equipment we have today, this gives us a tremendous opportunity to understand why these ship burials took place.”

“These were very early excavations so there’s a lot of information that we really don’t have because of the way it was done at the time.”

He said that as well as the keel of the boat, there were also signs of burial goods and other matter inside the ship.

“We know that when we excavate we will be able to investigate some of those objects,” he said.

How the Arch of Janus was restored

Ancient, Modern(ish)

The last time I was in Rome which feels like a century ago but was actually a year-and-a-half ago, I happened upon a rhino in front of a large, thick, four-sided arch. The rhino is not material to this story, really, and remains an unsolved mystery, but the arch turned out to be a little-known gem of the city: the only surviving quadrifons (four-faced) arch in Rome.

It was built in the second half of the 4th century A.D. in the Forum Boarium, the ancient city’s cattle market. It was looted for materials in the early Middle Ages and converted into a fortress by the Frangipani family. Between 1827 and 1830 it was deconverted back to what was believed to be its original configuration, only the restorers were mistaken and the original attic was destroyed, shortening the soaring arch into a bit of a cube.

Tucked behind the huge tourist attraction of the Bocca della Verità and neglected when other monuments in the Forum Boarium — the the Temple of Portunus and the Temple of Hercules Victor — were restored in the 90s and 2000s, the Arch of Janus was placed on the World Monuments Fund watch list in 2014 for its precarious condition. That spurred a multi-year study and restoration program that concluded in 2017.

The World Monuments Fund released a video about the restoration which I described as showing “tantalizing but not satisfying snippets of the restoration.” Now Italy’s Cultural Heritage Ministry has released the mega director’s cut. At 24 minutes, it is 12 times longer than the trailer and goes into gripping detail on the cleaning, restoration and structural challenges of the arch. Great extended intro with aerial footage of Rome too.