Month: November 2020

Gjellestad ship emerges

Medieval

The excavation of the Gjellestad Ship, the first Viking ship burial mound to be excavated in Norway since 1904, has exposed the surviving structure of the ship. We’ve only seen its outline in a ground penetrating radar scan before, a pointed oval in the middle of a dark circle that marks the circumference of the mound that was built around it. Now the wooden skeleton of the ship itself is visible.

The ship was constructed around the 9th century and dug into a pit. Someone very important was laid to rest inside of it and then a mound was built on top to attest to the high rank of the deceased. The longship was an estimated 65 feet long when new. About 63 feet of its length (and 13 feet of its width) remains, with the losses concentrated and the front and back of the boat.

The excavation began at the end of June and time is of the essence because samples taken from the keel found the wood was ravaged by fungal growth and in imminent danger of disintegration. To preserve the fragile wood after it has been exposed to the air, the team drapes it in perforated plastic sheeting covered with wet cotton canvas. That keeps the soil and wood from drying out. Artifacts have been removed in soil blocks for excavation in laboratory conditions.

The most common artifact unearthed so far are nails, the iron nails with heads and square plates hammered to the end known as clinker plates. These plates were the fasteners, the means by which the planks of clinker-built ships were kept together. As most of the ship’s wood decayed in the soil, the iron nails remained, albeit damaged and fragmented by a millennium of corrosion. Last month, a whole row of nails was uncovered on the southern end of the ship, the area where the planks from stem to stern were nailed to the prow. A corresponding line of clinker nails was also found in situ on the northern section of the ship. Their discovery in their original positions will provide new information on how the ship was built.

While human remains have yet to be found, animal bones have been discovered the middle of the ship. Their large size suggests they belonged to an ox or horse that was ritually buried with the elite individual. The animal bones are located in the area of the boat where the central burial chamber would have been placed. The site has been interfered with, probably by looters when the tomb was still comparatively young, certainly by agricultural activity in the 19th century when the mound above the burial was destroyed to make way for planting. The upper parts of the boat were heavily damaged and archaeologists feared the funerary chamber was lost as well. The discovery of the animal bones gives hope that there might be something to find down there after all, because while the top layer of bones are in poor condition, the lower layers are much better preserved.

Follow the adventures of the Gjellestad excavation in this blog on the Viking Ship Museum’s website. Also, here is Kristofer Hivju, aka Tormund Giantsbane from Game of Thrones, looking like joy incarnate as he aids in the excavation.

If I disappear for a month after Christmas, this is why

Modern(ish)

A childhood dream of mine has been made flesh, or rather plastic brick. Just in time for people including yours truly to start begging for it for Christmas, LEGO is releasing its newest brick set: the Roman Colosseum. At 9,036 pieces, this is the largest set Lego has ever produced, colossal, you might say. The previous record-holder was the iconic Star Wars Millenium Falcon at 7,500 pieces.

One for the history buffs as well as the LEGO fans, this authentic LEGO brick recreation features many of the true-to-life details found at the real historical icon, including a recreation of the three distinct stories from the Colosseum, each made up of the columns of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders.

These columns have been faithfully recreated in LEGO brick form using a variety of creative building techniques, including decorative volutes that have been created using a re-coloured LEGO roller skate element that has been turned upside down to create an authentic look.

The Colosseum even includes 80 ‘ribs’ in the spectator stands (the exact same number as the original) and three different shades of brick to replicate the different columns and aging of the almost 2,000 year old landmark.

The LEGO Colosseum measures 10.5″ high, 20.5″ wide and 23.5″ deep and is built on an oval base. The base also replicates original features like the travertine paving stones and pine trees that lined the walkway In order to display architectural features like the orders of columns to their best advantage and convey the sense of monumentality in a miniature, the model’s cross-section is steeper than the proportion in the real Colosseum.

It makes for a striking display whether you position it with the northern side, the more complete wall with all the stories and columns, or the southern side whose low wall exposes the intricate interior from the elaborate hypogeum structures under the arena floor to the back of the vertically exaggerated north wall. Even though it’s huge, the LEGO Colosseum is still light enough to be easily picked up and examined. You can look through the arches, see the sunlight shine through them.

The set goes on sale November 27th, Black Friday, for $549.99, so unless Santa is a lot flusher than I thought, you can heave a sigh of relief that I won’t go AWOL after all. Buyers on Black Friday weekend will get a gift with purchase of a little chariot to go with your new Colosseum.

 

Then there’s this video. I just cannot even deal with how awesome it all is.

Color restored to temple of Esna

Ancient

The temple of Esna is a Greco-Roman era Egyptian temple decorated mainly in the Roman era (1st-3rd century A.D.). Only the pronaos (the front vestibule) of the temple survives today; the rest was lost in the Middle Ages.

The temple is in Esna, 60 kilometers south of Luxor in Egypt. Only the vestibule (called the pronaos) remains, but it is complete. At 37 meters long, 20 meters wide and 15 meters high, the sandstone structure was placed in front of the actual temple building under the Roman Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) and probably eclipsed it. The roof is supported by 24 columns, the capitals of the 18 free-standing columns are decorated with different plant motifs. “In Egyptian temple architecture this is an absolute exception,” says Tübingen Egyptologist Daniel von Recklinghausen.

The work on the elaborate decorations probably took up to 200 years. The temple of Esna is famous for its astronomical ceiling and especially for the hieroglyphic inscriptions. They are considered to be the most recent coherent hieroglyphic text corpus that has been preserved today and which describes the religious ideas of the time and the cult events at the site.

Its location in the middle of the city center probably contributed to the fact that the vestibule was preserved and was not used as a quarry for building materials as other ancient edifices were during the industrialization of Egypt. Indeed, the temple had become part of the modern city. Houses and shacks were built directly against some of its walls, in other places it protruded from a mountain of rubble, as can be seen on postcards from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the first half of the 19th century, the hall served temporarily as a warehouse for cotton.

The inscriptions were studied and documented in the 1960s and 1970s by French Egyptologist Serge Sauneron, but the temple was so caked in thick layers of soot, dirt and bird poop that photography was deemed an unnecessary extravagance when the inscriptions were published. In 2018, a joint campaign of Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities and the University of Tubingen’s Institute for the Cultures of the Ancient Orient was launched with the objectives of aiding in the cleaning and conservation of the temple and doing a full photographic documentation of the inscriptions and decorative elements once the layers of grime obscuring the original polychrome paint are removed.

The results have been a revelation. The cleaning revealed iconographic features — a wedjat-eye gradually exposed in stages representing the phases of the moon, new Egyptian constellations, details of clothing, inscriptions rendered in paint rather than carved in relief so Sauneron never ever knew they were there. The painted inscriptions on the astronomical ceiling record the name of previously unknown Egyptian constellations. The cleaning of a column capital revealed intricate depictions of grapevines and date palms that are striking for their verisimilitude and for the information they provide of the temple’s original color scheme — red, yellow, green, blue.

The restoration project continues even under the looming shadow of COVID. When a new section is cleaned, it is photographed and documented.

Mosaic floor of Roman villa found in Turkey

Ancient

Elaborate mosaic floors from a 1st-2nd century A.D. Roman villa have been discovered in the town of Kadirli, a town in Osmaniye Province on the Mediterranean coast of southcentral Turkey. One of the central panels features the named portrait of a woman who may have been the owner of the villa. There are also floors with intricate geometric patterns, with detailed scenes from mythology and of men on horseback at hunt. These are the only mosaics depicting human figures ever found in Osmaniye Province.

Modern-day Kadirli is believed to be located near the ancient city of Flaviopolis in what was then the imperial Roman province of Cilicia. Very little is known about the Roman town. Ptolemy notes it in passing in The Geography, but just as a dot on a map with no further information.

The first Roman-era mosaics were discovered at Kadirli in 2015 during a survey of the site of planned construction. Archaeologists found the remains of a public bath and a mosaic floor featuring animals — a leopard, a bull, a deer, a lion — outlined by elaborate geometric motifs. The quality of the mosaics was high, comparable to the world-famous mosaics at Zeugma, the ancient Commagene, which boasts the largest mosaic museum in the world. The site was declared a protected area and excavations have continued ever since.

Last year a figure holding a bunch of grapes in his right hand and a partridge under his left elbow was discovered. A radish in the bottom left of the panel was the first evidence of radishes being grown in the district in the 1st century. Another panel featured a man standing next to three amphorae of graduated size. All of these mosaics will be preserved in situ for exhibition.

Medieval metal faces found in Poland

Medieval

Archaeologists have discovered 200 metal and ceramic artifacts from the Middle Ages in the village of Poniaty Wielkie, east-central Poland. The artifacts are remarkably varied, ranging from jewelry to devotional objects to spurs, and date from the 11th to the 12th/13th century.

Two pieces are of particular note: a copper alloy fitting in the shape of a surprised face, and a small lead plate shaped like a placid/sleeping/contented face. The lead object may have been a seal. The Home Alone face was likely a garment fitting or belt buckle as it has clear mounting holes on the ears. These types of artifacts have not been found in what is now Poland before. They are stylistically similar to pieces made by the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian borderlands.

The area was known to have been settled in the Middle Ages, but it was never archaeologically excavated until 2019 before construction of new gas reservoirs. Two seasons of digs revealed evidence of the medieval town’s commercial activities — furnaces, wells, slag and partially finished metal goods.

Despite the fact that the settlement was situated within the borders of the then Polish lands, many monuments that have been discovered there so far come from the eastern territories, including in Rus, the discoverers point out.

According to [lead archaeologist Jakub] Affelski, the settlement in Poniaty Wielkie could play several roles: perhaps it was a metallurgical center that produced items for nearby castles in Nasielsk and Pułtusk. This is evidenced by the found fragments of slags and metal semi-finished products. In turn, numerous metal seals indicate that it was used for large-scale trade. It is unclear for researchers why there are so many metal objects left in the settlement, which were highly valued at the time. – There is no indication that its end was brought by the invasion – we found no evidence of armed aggression. It is still a big puzzle for us – he concludes.