Month: August 2020

150+ Jewish headstones found under market square in Poland

Modern(ish)

The remains of more than 150 Jewish headstones desecrated by Nazis for use as road pavers were unearthed under the market square of Leżajsk in southeastern Poland. The tombstones were found just eight inches underground when construction work pealed back the asphalt surface of the street on the southwest frontage of the square. It’s one of the biggest finds of plundered matzevot in Poland.

Last month, bricks laid in a herringbone pattern were discovered under the street running along the southeast side of the market square. At first the brick road was believed to date from the late 19th or early 20th century when Leżajsk was part of Galicia, a province of the Austrian Empire. The discovery of the desecrated tombstones reveals a more recent and far more sinister history.

Leżajsk had an important Jewish community from the early 16th century until it was all but obliterated under Nazi occupation. One of the founders of the Hasidic movement, Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum, was born and died there in the 18th century, his tomb becoming a center of pilgrimage. Between the World Wars, an estimated third of the town’s population, around 1,500 people, were Jewish. Most of them were deported to the Soviet occupation zone. The rest would be confined to a ghetto which was liquidated in September 1942 and its residents ultimately deported to Belzec extermination camp.

The German occupiers began paving the market square street in late 1939 using brick from the synagogue they had burned down on September 15th, two days after the  Wehrmacht captured Leżajsk. When they ran out of brick, they plundered the Jewish cemetery of its headstones, cut off the curved tops to fit them together easily, and used them as pavers. They were then covered with a layer of sand and asphalt.

Aside from the shorn tops and 50 or so stones that had been cut up into smaller pieces to fill gaps, the matzevot are in unusually good condition. Their burial under sand helped preserve original reliefs, gilding and painted lettering lost on the few headstones surviving in the cemetery. (The cemetery was rebuilt from ruins after the war, including the tomb of Rabbi Weissblum which today sees thousands of Hasidic pilgrims a year.)

Some of the headstones still retain gold lettering and coloured painting. The blue, green, yellow and red colours of the inscriptions are clear and vivid.

Ornamental crowns, candlesticks, flowers, lions and hands are perfectly visible. One has gold-painted letters. […]

So far, little is known about the age of the matzevot or who they belonged to. “We can’t read the years, because everything is in Yiddish. Some matzevot are made of sandstone, others of concrete.

These are better preserved, because the sandstone cracked in contact with water. They are in different condition, but they are really beautiful,” said Ewa Kędzierska, the archaeologist supervising the work on the market square in Leżajsk.

The headstones are now being stores on property belonging to the Leżajsk council. Town and regional heritage officials will consult with the Rabbinical Committee for Cemeteries to determine the final disposition of the tombstones.

Complete Bronze Age horse harness found in hoard

Ancient

A hoard of Bronze Age artifacts including bronze buckles, a bronze sword in its scabbard with its hilt still attached and a unique horse harness complete with surviving leather and wood has been unearthed in the Scottish Borders. The hoard was buried there around 1000-800 B.C., the Late Bronze Age.

Metal detectorist Mariusz Stepien was scanning a field near Peebles on June 21st when he found a small bronze object buried a foot and a half under the surface. His detector indicated there was more to be found in that spot, emitting a strong signal around the bronze piece. Instead of continuing to dig, he stopped everything and alerted Scotland’s Treasure Trove unit.

That is always a best practice, but in this case his caution was of paramount archaeological importance because the preserved organic components of the horse harness could easily have been destroyed by even the most careful digging. After 22 days of professional excavation, the hoard in its entirety (minus a handful of loose pieces) was raised in a soil block for painstaking excavation and analysis in  laboratory conditions.

The archeologists found the sword, still in its scabbard, which had been adorned with straps, buckles and chariot-wheel axle caps, alongside remnants of a decorative “rattle pendant” that would have hung off the horse’s harness – the first to be found in Scotland and only the third in the UK.

Treasure Trove, which is overseeing the recovery and assessment of the find, said the soil had preserved the leather and wood found among the items, allowing experts to trace the straps that connected the rings and buckles together to make the harness, something that has “never been seen before in Britain”.

The unit’s head, Emily Freeman, said: “This is a nationally significant find – so few bronze age hoards have been excavated in Scotland. It was an amazing opportunity for us to not only recover bronze artefacts, but organic material as well. There is still a lot of work to be done to assess the artefacts and understand why they were deposited.”

The hoard pit was scanned before the soil block was removed to make a 3D model of the finds in situ.

Malignant cancer found in dinosaur bone

Ancient

Researchers have discovered an osteaosarcoma on the lower leg of a Centrosaurus, the first time a malignant cancer has been discovered in dinosaurs.

The fossilized fibula of a Centrosaurus apertus, a horned dinosaur that lived about 76 million years ago, was discovered in a large bonebed replete with Centrosaurus fossils in Alberta, Canada in 1989. The fibula appeared to be malformed, perhaps the result of fracture that healed poorly. It was stored in the Royal Tyrrell Museum with other pathological dinosaur bones.

The fibula was rediscovered by Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist David Evans and McMaster University pathology specialist Mark Crowther who were looking for evidence of malignant bone cancer in dinosaurs. Tumors have been found in dinosaur bones before, but not malignancies. Evans and Crowther recognized that the malformation in the fibula was not in fact a break. Together with their multidisciplinary team of pathologists, radiologists, orthopaedic surgeons and palaeopathologists, they determined it was bone cancer.

“Diagnosis of aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify,” says Crowther. Using a normal fibula from a dinosaur of the same species, as well as the fibula of a human with a confirmed case of osteosarcoma, the researchers were able to confirm the diagnosis. The extensive invasion of the cancer throughout the bone suggests that it persisted for a considerable time period of the animal’s life and may have spread to other parts of the dinosaur’s body prior to death.

“Diagnosis of aggressive cancer like this in dinosaurs has been elusive and requires medical expertise and multiple levels of analysis to properly identify,” says Crowther. Using a normal fibula from a dinosaur of the same species, as well as the fibula of a human with a confirmed case of osteosarcoma, the researchers were able to confirm the diagnosis. The extensive invasion of the cancer throughout the bone suggests that it persisted for a considerable time period of the animal’s life and may have spread to other parts of the dinosaur’s body prior to death.

Yarm Helmet is only Viking helmet found in Britain

Medieval

An iron helmet that was discovered in Yarm, North Yorkshire, during sewer work in the 1950s has been confirmed to be an extremely rare Viking-era helmet, only the second nearly complete Viking helmet in the world and the first and only one found in Britain.

It was referred to as the Viking helmet from the beginning, but its real age has been an open discussion since its find. It has design elements found in earlier forms from the Anglo-Saxon and Vendel era, and because the only other helmet in the world confirmed to date to the Viking era, the Gjermundbu Helmet found in Haugsbygd, Norway, in 1943, was not a direct comparison, it was difficult to conclusively identify the Yarm Helmet as an Anglo-Scandinavian piece. A new study by Durham University researchers has used recent archaeological finds and analysis of the iron and corrosion products to narrow down its age of manufacture. It is indeed an Anglo-Scandinavian helmet made in northern England in the 10th century.

With all the traveling and combat during the Viking era from Lindisfarne (793 A.D.) to the last raids by Magnus Barefoot in 1103, you’d think the archaeological record would be replete with Viking helmets, or at least that there would be a few out there. Instead, the early medieval helmets that have been found pre-date the Viking era. They are highly decorative ceremonial pieces discovered in graves. By the 10th century, most Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Scandinavians were Christian, ergo no more grave goods, ergo extremely rare survivals of helmets. The Gjermundbu Helmet was part of an elaborate funerary furnishing complete with chain mail shirt and weapons, but the Yarm Helmet seems to have been hidden in the watery bank of the River Tees rather than being a burial good.

[University of Durham researcher] Dr Caple commented: “We were initially alerted to the object by our colleagues at Preston Park Museum. It was a challenging project, as the thin iron sheet is now very susceptible to corrosion (it has to be kept in very dry conditions), so it was not simply a question of only showing the date at which it was created, but working out how it had survived until it was unearthed in the 1950s. Our analysis showed that it was initially preserved in waterlogged conditions, only later becoming damaged and starting to corrode. Fortunately it was discovered before it corroded away completely

“Although there are half a dozen early medieval helmets from Britain, the Sutton Hoo and Coppergate helmets being the most famous, this is the first Anglo-Scandinavian (Viking) helmet from Britain.

“Whilst the Saxon helmets were often highly decorated and were worn by warrior leaders, as much symbols of authority as helmets, by the 10th century we can now envisage that most professional warriors had helmets like the Yarm Helmet. They were simply manufactured, well designed to protect the wearer (rivets flush with the surface so they did not catch bladed weapons) but no longer decorated. Together with a mail hauberk (shirt of chain mail), a helmet was essential personal protective equipment for a warrior. We see almost all the combatants in the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry wearing helmets and hauberks.”

The helmet predates the founding of the village of Yarm. It was discovered on the east bank of a loop in the River Tees, which may have been a quayside before the town was established. It is made of simple thin iron plates riveted together with iron bands. At the top of the lateral band is a decorative knop. Attached to the brow band is an iron semicircle divided into two by an iron nose band to form a spectacle mask. A mail curtain was likely attached by holes in the brow band. There are hammer marks visible on the surface and the infill iron plates are ragged at the edges. This was a plain, workmanlike piece intended for hard use, not display or ceremony.

The Yarm Helmet is on display at the Preston Park Museum in Stockton. The results of the study have been reported in the journal Medieval Archaeology.

Gold pelican’s wing found in shipwreck

Modern(ish), Treasures

A gold wing from a pelican figurine has been recovered from the Douglass Beach Wreck off Vero Beach, Florida. The little right wing was found resting comfortably in a bed of crushed shell and is in excellent condition, completely with three sections of chain on a ring.

The wing is part of a gold statuette that was discovered in 2010 from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, one of 12 ships in the Spanish treasure fleet that were lost in a hurricane in 1715. Diver Bonnie Schubert found the gold pelican using an underwater metal detector.

Made of 22 karat gold, the figurine is 5 1/2 inches tall and weighs 177 grams. The head and shoulders of the bird are connected to the tail and legs by hinges. Archaeologists believe it was a reliquary, because there’s a cavity between the top and bottom halves that would have held something like the relics of a saint, or  perhaps incense or a jewel. It would have been hung from its chains in a chapel, not been worn like jewelry. (The chain attached to the wing wasn’t a hanging mount; it connected the two wings of the statuette to the bird.)

At first it was thought to be an eagle, but scholars identified it as a pelican in piety. The pelican in piety was a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, a popular motif based on the accounts of medieval bestiaries that pelicans draw their own blood to feed or revive their young. Here’s a version of the tale from Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire written ca. 1210:

There is a wonderful thing about the pelican, for never did mother-sheep love her lamb as the pelican loves its young. When the young are born, the parent bird devotes all his care and thought to nourishing them. But the young birds are ungrateful, and when they have grown strong and self-reliant they peck at their fathers face, and he, enraged at their wickedness, kills them all. On the third day the father comes to them, deeply moved with pity and sorrow. With his beak he pierces his own side, until the blood flows forth. With the blood he brings back life into the body of his young.

Pelicans do not do any of this in real life, needless to say. This bestiary, like others of the epoch, wasn’t an attempt at recording natural history like Pliny, say, that missed the scientific mark a little, but rather a compendium of moral and theological lessons conveyed by animal stories, a sort of Christian Aesop.

Bonnie Schubert and her sole crewman, her 87-year-old mother Jo, searched for the missing right wing for two months at the find site and in different locations over the next two years, but were unsuccessful. A decade later, Capt. Henry Jones and crew member Tracy Newman followed in the Schuberts’ footsteps, exploring the waters off Douglass Beach on South Hutchinson Island near where the pelican had been discovered.

“Captain Jones and I were diving when his metal detector got a ‘ping. He brushed away some crushed shell, and the tip of the wing popped up. It was pretty and shiny and gold. He pulled the wing out of the sand, and things seemed kind of surreal. I was thinking, ‘This can’t be real,’ but at the same time I knew exactly what it was.”

Even more surreal, Newman had joked about finding the wing that morning.

“People have been looking for that wing since the bird was found 10 years ago,” Newman said. “We’ve looked for it numerous time. We had a huge map spread out on the floor of the condo trying to figure out where to go that day. I told Henry, ‘Let’s go find the bird wing.’ “

The gold pelican was sold to an anonymous private collector for $150,000 by 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC which owns the salvage rights to treasure fleet wrecks. The collector is ecstatic about the discovery of the missing wing and hopes to have the opportunity to acquire it. The state of Florida gets a percentage of the salvage and first dibs, so it’s not a foregone conclusion that the wing and pelican will be reunited. If they are, the collector is reluctant to reattach the wing as the parts are so delicate. Displaying them together would be enough for him.