A pit filled with ancient shells at The Cairns site in South Ronaldsay, Orkney, has been radiocarbon dated to the 5th or 6th century. The Iron Age community at the site cooked 18,637 shellfish in the pit, ate them, and then threw the shells back in, all in one massive clambake. That’s more than half of all the shells found at The Cairns, all devoured in a single party.
The site director at The Cairns is University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute lecturer Martin Carruthers.
He said: “This is an astonishing number of shells for a short-lived, single-event context. This suggests it may have been part of a special food event, a feast involving the whole community of the site or even beyond.”
The majority of the shells, which were analysed by UHI Archaeology Institute Masters student Holly Young, belonged to limpets (84 per cent), with common periwinkles making up the rest.
The new radiocarbon dating results confirm that the great periwinkle gorge took place at the same time that a souterrain (an underground passageway) next to the pit was in use. It’s possible the association was more than temporal, that souterrains may have played a role in social and religious practices of feasting at the site. A second cache of shells was found on top of the stone slab roof the souterrain.
The first phase of occupation at the Cairns was in the Neolithic. In the Middle Iron Age (1st century B.C. – late 2nd, early 3rd century A.D.), a broch, a drystone roundhouse, was built, as were other dwellings and enclosure ditches around the settlement. As new structures went up in the settlement, the original broch fell into disuse and was partially built over. When the Iron Age community was throwing its shellfish party, the broch had been infilled. The souterrain was constructed going from outside to inside the former entrance to the broch.
Archaeologists also discovered whale bones from this period of activity. One bone from a giant fin whale, the second largest species after the blue whale, was carved into a vessel containing a human jawbone. It was positioned at the entrance to the broch next to red deer antlers and a broken quern, and the placement indicates they way they were laid out held symbolic value. More than 100 whale bones have been found from the Iron Age occupation of The Cairns, the largest collection of prehistoric whale bones.
Archaeologists have discovered more than a dozen gold artifacts in three Copper Age graves at the Bükkábrány lignite mine in northeast Hungary. About 6,000 years old, these artifacts date to the early centuries of goldsmithing in Europe. The oldest gold jewelry in the world found in the Varna Necropolis, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, dates to between 4,600 and 4,200 B.C., six to two hundred years before the Bükkábrány pieces.
The mine site has been excavated since 2007 when large trunks of swamp cypress from the Miocene era were discovered not petrified, but mummified from having been encased in sand eight million years ago. A natural valley formed by the Csincse river, the area has seen human occupation from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. There is archaeological evidence of millennia of human settlement, including communities from the middle Copper Age Bodrogkeresztúr culture. The latest excavation unearthed 34 Bodrogkeresztúr-era graves, identified by the characteristic pottery style.
Most of the graves were modestly furnished, but three adult women were buried with prestigious gold ornaments. The gold objects found inside the three graves include hooped and conical pendants. The hoops are tabbed with four holes in each tab. Archaeologists believe they may have originally been mounted onto a headdress. Gold was still extremely rare in the Carpathian Basin at this time and while similar pieces have been discovered at other Copper Age sites, these objects are exceptional for the quality of gold and craftsmanship.
A fourth burial of note did not have any gold artifacts, but contained the remains of an adult man buried with a cracked stone blade, a polished stone axe and copper pick weighing two pounds. The pick was almost certainly not a practical implement. That much metal weight would have been exorbitantly expensive and it was probably more of a leadership symbol like a scepter than a tool.
It is not clear from the style of manufacture whether the objects were made locally or imported. They will be studied further and conserved at the Herman Ottó Museum in Miskolc.
Too Much Johnson was one of Orson Welles’ innovative theories that failed so thoroughly in practice that audiences wouldn’t get to see it for 75 years. It was meant to be an accompaniment to a play of the same name, an 1894 farce of adultery, false names and mistaken identity adapted from a French original by William Gillette who would go on to become hugely famous portraying Sherlock Holmes on stage more than 1,300 times. Welles’ theatrical company, The Mercury Theater, was staging the play with his trusty stable of actors including Joseph Cotten and Arlene Francis. His idea was to create a Keystone Kops-style slapstick silent movie introduction before each of the three acts. He filmed it on shoestring budget in 10 days and edited 25,000 feet of highly flammable nitrate film in a hotel room to create a 66-minute rough cut.
It was never shown. The Stony Creek Theater in Branford, Connecticut, where the play was staged, was not equipped to project the film. Welles had heavily edited the play to blend seamlessly with the filmed intros, so without it the theatrical production flopped too. That was August 1938, a month after the Mercury Theater’s radio productions began, two months before one of those radio productions would adapt a certain H.G. Wells alien invasion story into a news broadcast style and make headlines around the country. Suddenly very much in demand, Orson Welles packed up the 10 reels of Too Much Johnson and went on with his life, cutting the sweet deal with RKO that would result in his immortal third movie, Citizen Kane.
He thought the never-seen experimental film had been destroyed in a fire at his home in Madrid in 1970, but thankfully he was wrong about that. Too Much Johnson, all 10 reels of it, was found in a crate of old Welles films that had been abandoned in the Pordenone warehouse decades earlier. Nine of the reels were in surprisingly good condition. The tenth was decomposing rapidly and had to receive specialized treatment by film conservators.
The film society that rescued and identified the collection in the shipping warehouse crate reached out to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which is world-renown for its film conservation department. They secured a grant to restore the picture and in October 2013, Too Much Johnson finally had its world premiere at a silent movie festival in Pordenone. It made its US debut days later at the George Eastman House in an exclusive showing for museum members. Too Much Johnson had its cable television premiere on Turner Classic Movies in May 2015. The National Film Preservation Foundation digitized the restored film and made it available online with notes on the sidebar explaining how the film was designed to interact with the play.
The Eastman showings had special features only seen there, including a new piano score by Philip C. Carli who used the original Mercury Theater stage score for inspiration, and a voice-over commentary by Anthony L’Abbate, preservation manager, and Caroline Yeager, associate curator, of the George Eastman Museum who worked on its restoration. The museum has now released their special edition of Too Much Johnson on Vimeo.
“For the first time, people from all over the world will have access to this unique material with the voice-over commentary and musical accompaniment, previously only available for in-person screenings,” said Peter Bagrov, curator in charge, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum. “The original commentary was written by the museum and has been performed all over the world. It is essential for the understanding of this unfinished work by one of the great masters of cinema; the context it provides enhances the viewing experience for everyone.”
The voice-over commentary includes a story of the print’s discovery and the meticulous preservation process, as well as the history of the film’s creation—its casting, the filming locations in New York City (many of which are now gone), and why it never made it to the big screen.
It opens with a brief introduction about the film’s conservation and the research that went into piecing together how the film was shot. At 6:44 the movie begins, and as someone who has watched three versions (the TCM version, the NFPF version with side notes and this one), I can unequivocally state that this voice-over commentary is essential. It adds so much to the viewer’s understanding of the movie, what is going on in the story, where the scenes are being filmed. It turns a fascinating glimpse into Welles’ nascent directorial genius into a full-featured documentary. I wish every commentary were recorded by film conservators instead of woolgathering directors and verbose actors.
A section of mosaic flooring from one of the Nemi Roman ships, lavish floating palaces built by the profligate Emperor Caligula, that for decades was used a coffee table by a couple in New York City has gone on permanent display at the Museum of Roman Ships in Nemi. Antique dealer Helen Fioratti and her husband Nereo acquired the opus sectile mosaic in Italy in the 1960s. The broker claimed it had belonged to the noble Barberini family, but there was no ownership record. The Fiorattis had it mounted in a marble frame and put it on a pedestal in their living room where it served as coffee table and much-admired conversation piece in their Park Avenue apartment for 40 years.
Its secret identity was first rediscovered in 2013 when Dario Del Bufalo, an expert in ancient marbles and author of several books on the subject, was in Manhattan for a book signing. His book on porphyry included an old photograph of the mosaic, which has unusual circular tiles made of the precious dark red marble. He was able to authenticate the panel as one of the luxurious decorations salvaged from the ships thanks to those circles of porphyry and a crack that had been restored. The museum that housed the Nemi ships burned down in 1944 in a battle between Allied forces and the Nazi troops occupying the museum. The hulls of the ships, raised in an arduous lake-draining operation the late 1920s and early 30s, were destroyed in the fire, an incalculable loss, as were many of its salvaged parts.
The mosaic was not in the museum at the time. It was removed before 1944 eventually, nobody knows how, wound up in an antiques shop in Rome couple of decades later. After a four-year investigation, the mosaic was seized by the Manhattan DA’s office and returned to the Italian consulate in October 2017. It has been displayed at temporary exhibits in Italy since its repatriation, but now has a permanent home with the other rare surviving artifacts from Caligula’s great floating palaces.
Lake Nemi was sacred to the goddess Diana. She was worshipped in a sacred grove on its slopes as far back as the 6th century B.C., and the Temple of Diana Nemorensis was built on the north shore around 300 B.C. By the time of Caligula, it was a popular pilgrimage site. By Roman law, no ship could sail on sacred waters. Caligula probably complied with the letter of the law by keeping them mostly anchored. He also built temples on board — both ships had rotating statue platforms believed to have been used for cult figures — which gave him another loophole to the no sailing on sacred waters law. As a devotee of Isis who was syncretically identified with Diana, he likely used his superyachts on her sacred lake to throw lavish parties for religious festivals like the Isidis Navigium, an annual celebration invoking the protection of Isis on sailors at the opening of the navigation season on March 5th.
Despite being built to the exacting standards of Roman seagoing vessels — their hulls were clad in lead sheets to prevent the depredations of shipworms which do not live in freshwater lakes and both ships were equipped with long steering oars — Caligula’s barges couldn’t have done much sailing on the lake even if hadn’t been a sacrilege to do so. Nemi is a small, roughly circular lake formed from the crater of an extinct volcano. Its average width is 1 kilometer. The barges were 73 x 24 meters and 70 x 20 meters, so it only would have taken a voyage of 14 ship lengths to cross its full width. They were lake palaces, not a means of transport, and if they left the shore at all, they were at most rowed (in the case of the smaller boat) and/or towed (the larger had no means of propulsion) to the center of the lake.
He built two ships with ten banks of oars, after the Liburnian fashion, the poops of which blazed with jewels, and the sails were of various parti-colours. They were fitted up with ample baths, galleries, and saloons, and supplied with a great variety of vines and other fruit-trees. In these he would sail in the day-time along the coast of Campania, feasting amidst dancing and concerts of music.
The Nemi ships had the same luxurious decorations and amenities, even though they had nowhere to go, as attested to by the floor mosaic which is of highest quality in materials and craftsmanship.
Today the museum houses 1/5th scale replicas of the ships, although last summer the mayor of Nemi was making noises about asking Germany to fund full-scale replicas by way of reparations. The problem with that notion is that there is no direct evidence that the Nazis burned the ships. Allied planes bombed the museum striking at the German anti-aircraft artillery nest which was deliberately installed there in the hope that priceless archaeological patrimony would act as a shield. The bomb drop did minimal damage to the exterior of the museum, and hours later museum staffers saw Nazi occupiers with torches walking around inside just before the fire broke out the night of May 31st. The Germans cleared out that night. US ground troops arrived four days later.
Here’s a silent but deadly (in a good way) British Pathé newsreel documenting the exposure of one of the ships in 1930.
Archaeologists have discovered a unique Bronze Age ceremonial sword in the village of Håre on the Denmark island of Funen. The sword dates to the Bronze Age Phase IV, about 3,000 years ago, which makes it an extremely rare find, but what makes it unique is that it is completely intact, from bronze blade to wood grip. Even the plant fibers it was wrapped in are extant.
The site was excavated as part of a year-long project to survey the 37-mile-long route of the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline. Odense City Museums archaeologists were on the last leg of their excavations in west Funen when they discovered the remains of an ancient settlement where the sword was ritually deposited 3,000 years ago.
The swords was removed to the Odense City Museums for cleaning and conservation in controlled conditions. Because of the diversity of materials used in its construction, the sword had to be dismantled to see to the different preservation needs of each piece. The fiber grip winding, which may be bast from linden wood, was unraveled and the wood and horn components separated from the metal of the blade. Samples were taken to identify the materials. The sample from the plant fiber will be radiocarbon dated to determine when the sword was made.
The sword weighs almost three pounds (1.3 kilos), a large and very expensive amount of bronze to secure at that time. The grip was cast together with the blade shaft of the sword and covered in wood and antler/bone for a comfortable hold. The metal was likely imported from Central Europe and then crafted by a local blacksmith. The sample from the bronze alloy of the sword will be tested to identify its exact composition and its source location.
When conservation and study is complete, conservators will reassemble the sword and put it on public display, probably at the Odense Møntergården museum which has permanent exhibits on the ancient history of Funen.
A pit filled with ancient shells at The Cairns site in South Ronaldsay, Orkney, has been radiocarbon dated to the 5th or 6th century. The Iron Age community at the site cooked 18,637 shellfish in the pit, ate them, and then threw the shells back in, all in one massive clambake. That’s more than half of all the shells found at The Cairns, all devoured in a single party.
The first phase of occupation at the Cairns was in the Neolithic. In the Middle Iron Age (1st century B.C. – late 2nd, early 3rd century A.D.), a broch, a drystone roundhouse, was built, as were other dwellings and enclosure ditches around the settlement. As new structures went up in the settlement, the original broch fell into disuse and was partially built over. When the Iron Age community was throwing its shellfish party, the broch had been infilled. The souterrain was constructed going from outside to inside the former entrance to the broch.
