The diamond first entered the historical record in 1570 when it was purchased in Constantinople by diplomat, financier and jewel expert Nicolas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy. It was purchased by Henri IV of France for his wife Marie de Medici in 1604. From then until now, the “Beau Sancy” has never been in non-royal hands (as long as you consider the sellers, the House of Hohenzollern, still royal, even though their last scion to sit on a throne was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany).

Five bidders from North America, Europe and Asia vied for the “Beau Sancy” and one of them won. Sotheby’s won’t disclose any more information than that, so sadly this probably means a stone that has been at the center of European royal history for more than 400 years has now been sucked into the black hole of private collections never to be seen again until the next public sale.

Perhaps we’ll get lucky and the buyer will loan it to the Louvre so it can be put on display in the Apollo Gallery along with its cousin the “Sancy” diamond, a 53-carat pale yellow shield-shaped modified brilliant cut that was once the center stone of the fleur-de-lis on top of Louis XV’s coronation crown. The “Sancy” was replaced by a replica in 1729 at the king’s command, and the Revolution and later French Republics looted, dispersed and sold the originals. After many vicissitudes, including decades of being hidden away in anonymous private collections, the “Sancy” found its way back home again when William Waldorf Astor, 4th Viscount Astor, sold it to the Louvre for one million dollars in 1978. So there’s hope that like its cousin, the “Beau Sancy” might end up in a museum, even though it could take a few centuries.

See the catalogue notes on Sotheby’s website for more details about the fascinating history of the “Beau Sancy” diamond. I found the information about the connection between the light-giving symbolism of royalty and the newly-invented cut particularly interesting:

The fact that the Beau Sancy was first worn by Marie de Medici in 1610 as the principle [sic] stone and centrepiece of her coronation crown indicates very clearly the importance of the diamond at this time as the supreme emblem of Royalty. On a symbolic level, diamonds are associated with the sun, our “Daystar”, the dynamic centre of our cosmos and thus the source of all life and light. What better stone therefore could be used to illustrate the parallel with the position and central role of the Monarch within his Kingdom? Indeed, later the same century, King Louis XIV would go a step further and call himself “Le Roi Soleil”.

The Beau Sancy, which was cut and polished towards the end of the 16th century, exhibits the first attempts to liberate the ‘fire’ inherent in the stone – a property of diamond so familiar and so admired today, but which, due to the absolute hardness of the crystal which rendered cutting so difficult, had only just begun to be exploited. By the use of the newly-developed ‘rose’ style of cutting, which employed a myriad of triangular facets covering the entire surface of the crystal, the light which entered the stone was reflected and dispersed, broken up on the way into the colours of the rainbow. This was totally new.

University of Central Florida archaeologist Dr. John Schultz worked with the forensic specialists to ensure the site was handled as an archaeological dig instead of just as a pure crime scene. They didn’t find the remains of a murdered child, but they did find two crania, a dozen shards of pottery, bits of newspaper from 1978, textiles including an embroidered purse still carrying woven slings and a netted bag with a strap made out of non-human hair. When Dr. Garavaglia X-rayed the skulls, she and Dr. Schultz were able to confirm that they were at least hundreds of years old.

The skulls belonged to an adult male and a child, and they both had “Inca bones,” a triangular interparietal bone that sometimes develops where the posterior fontanelle used to be. It’s not exclusive to them, but it is highly characteristic of Peruvian mummies, particularly Andean Inca tribes between 1200 and 1597 A.D. Researchers identified the style of the pottery and textiles as coming from the Chancay culture of coastal Peru. Their dates are in keeping with the Inca bone period, between 1200 and 1470 A.D.

At this point it became clear that the Winter Garden swimming pool was a secondary burial site. Someone had placed these artifacts in the ground after March 16, 1978 (the date of the newspaper), but who and exactly when remains a mystery. We do know that the land which is now a subdivision used to be a camp for migrant orange pickers. For thirty years until the mid-1980s, migrants from all over Central America and the Caribbean lived in wooden barracks in the area. It’s possible that the remains and artifacts could have been buried by one of those migrant workers, perhaps as part of a religious ritual, perhaps for safekeeping. It’s also possible that tourists brought them back from a trip to South America, although the purchase and removal of archaeological artifacts has been illegal in Peru since the early 20th century.

Developers bought the land and built it into a subdivision four years ago. They had to grade it extensively in order to build the orderly houses and streets, so it’s an incredible stroke of luck that they missed the spot that happened to contain ancient human remains and incredibly delicate textiles. Then the house was built on the property just a year ago, and they fortuitously missed the spot too.

The bones and artifacts will remain at the Medical Examiner’s office for now. Dr. Schultz intends to study them extensively with an eye to publishing the results so they can be used as examples for future crime scene/archaeological finds. The ultimate goal, however, is to return the pieces to Peru.

One of the parents was knowledgeable about the laws regarding Native American artifacts, so the group left the pot in place and reported it to the U.S. National Park Service who in turn alerted the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management which protects and manages the 13 million acre conservation zone.

BLM archaeologists removed the pot this week. It is 18 inches high and 14 to 16 inches wide, and was discovered almost intact. Because of this stroke of good luck, archaeologists were able to determine from its size, shape and decoration that the pot is between 800 and 1,000 years old, possibly the work of the Mogollon culture which inhabited the area from 150 to 1400 A.D. It is a major find and the first significant piece discovered on New Mexico Bureau of Land Management land in ten years.

Donna Hummel of the BLM said the find could be unique and the students may not fully understand its importance. “This is very significant. We hope they appreciate that this could be a once in a lifetime discovery,” said Humme.

When told that the pot could be around 900-years-old, students expressed amazement.

“That’s crazy. I think we were probably some of the first people to see so that’s really cool,” seventh-grader Cole Schoepke said.

The Bureau has yet to release any photographs of the pot because they want to consult with the surrounding pueblos first, but there’s a charming interview with some of the students who made the discovery in this TV news story.

Trepanation involves the removal of a piece of skull by scraping or cutting with a sharp tool and has been practiced at least since the early Neolithic 10,000 years ago. It was common in prehistoric and ancient Europe, but there’s considerably less evidence for it in the Middle Ages, possibly due to a philosophical rejection of surgery in favor of “pure medicine” like leeches sucking the bad humours out of people along with their blood. In some parts of Europe, for example modern Hungary, the practice almost entirely disappears from the historical record after the onset of Christianity.

Thus researchers from the Universities of Oviedo and Leon were surprised when they found two trepanned skulls in the medieval San Miguel hermitage cemetery. They were even more surprised when they found that one of the skulls belonged to a woman. Even when trepanation was widely performed, most of the patients were men.

The two skulls found in the cemetery in Soria belong to a male between 50 and 55 years and a woman between 45 and 50 years. The expert points out that “another interesting aspect of this finding is that trepanation in women is considered rare throughout all periods in history. In Spain, only 10% of those trepanned skulls found belonged to women.”

The trepanation technique differs in each of the skulls. The skull of the male has been grooved with a sharp object and it is unknown whether trepanation occurred before or after his death. López Martínez confirms that “if the procedure took place whilst still alive, there is no sign of regeneration and the subject did not survive.”

In the woman, a scraping technique was used while she was still alive. According to the researchers, she survived for a “relatively long” amount of time afterwards given that the wound scarring is advanced.

Trepanation was performed to repair skull fractures by removing the fragmented section, and has a solid record of effectiveness as emergency surgery on head wounds. (It is still used today, in fact, to clear bone pieces and relieve subdural hematoma.) It was perhaps less effective as a remedy for a variety of other conditions like seizure disorders and mental illness.

The hieroglyphs include columns of numbers reflecting the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. Tables track the phases of the moon, and some calculations appear to be attempts to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars. In a touching link to educators 1200 years later, there are numbers painted in red that correct the calculations painted in black next to them.

The real headline-grabber is that the calendar counts through 17 Bak’tuns. That’s a total of 7,000 years and takes us far past our current 13th Bak’tun cycle which is scheduled to end on December 23rd of this year in the fiery apocalypse that will destroy us all. How convenient that “scholars” and “experts” who have always claimed that the Maya 2012 apocalypse notion is a ludicrous misinterpretation of Maya calendar cycles find four more cycles JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME.

The calendar is not the only uniquely important aspect of this find. The murals are painted on the walls and ceiling of a small dwelling. It’s a room about six and a half feet wide, six feet long and 10 feet tall. This is the first time murals have been found somewhere that is not a temple or palace. Also, the room was filled in an unusual way, from the inside backing out through the doorway. Usually the Maya just flattened the roof of a building when they were done with it, and then built on top of that. The peculiar filling approach taken with this room ensured that the paintings on three of the four walls plus the ceiling were preserved.

The archaeologists working on the site never expected that. Boston University undergraduate Maxwell Chamberlain was looking into an old looting trench during his lunch break when he saw some faded paint on the wall. BU archaeologist and team leader William Saturno figured it was worth exploring the chamber in case there was any paint left, but he assumed there’d be only traces at best so they’d just map the room and perhaps be able to figure out its dimensions at the time the murals were painted.

Instead they pulled a Howard Carter and found an archaeological treasure trove (minus the gold). In addition to the calendar hieroglyphs on the east and north walls, they found several unusual murals. On the north wall:

An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king’s portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.

On the west wall:

Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. “We haven’t seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before,” Saturno said. “It’s clearly a costume of some kind.” One of the figures is particularly burly, “like a sumo wrestler,” and he is labeled “Older Brother Obsidian.” Another is labeled as a youth.

Saturno thinks the room was a writing room, a study for Maya scribes. The figure holding a pen indicates a connection to scribes and the repetition of hieroglyphs on the east wall complete with corrections in red suggests that the calculations could have been practice for later work in the formal halls of religious and political power.

The discovery has been published in the May issue of the journal Science (subscription only). There’s a fascinating interview with Saturno in the latest Science podcast which I’m embedding below.

Pictures are courtesy of National Geographic which sponsored the expedition. Their website has an awesome gigapixel zoomable image of the mural here, and a video of the find here: