The History Blog

Romans buried their dead outside the city walls, traditionally, or inside a church. A 6th c. tomb in the middle of someone’s house is pretty much unheard of.

That’s not all that’s unusual about this find.

Two skeletons were found. One was of a woman between the ages of 25 and 30, with teeth in excellent condition and no signs of arthritis. [...]

The other skeleton was a child of indeterminate sex between the ages of five and seven. The position of their bones showed that the woman had been laid to rest first. The tomb was then re-opened to bury the child and the woman’s spinal column was pushed to one side. A hole in the stone slab covering the tomb allowed visitors to pour libations for the dead.

“This shows that the long-established, originally pagan, rite of offering libations to the dead clearly continued into early Byzantine times,” observes Wilson.

Yet, the presence of a Christian cross on a lamp found in the room and on the underside of a grave slab suggests that the deceased were Christian. As well, the skeletons were wrapped in plaster, a practice believed to be Christian for preserving the body for resurrection.

This is the earliest plaster burial found on Sicily.

The tomb was disturbed at least once more, possibly by thieves, although whoever tidied up before they left.

Excavators have found all kinds of food preparation areas, amphorae, stemware. It’s almost like a butler’s pantry. People were clearly stocked up for long-term libation which makes this tomb a glimpse into a fascinating transitional moment as well as an interesting anomaly on its own.

Archaeologists digging west of Stonehenge have found a child buried with a chalk hedgehog figurine. The child was buried about 3000 years ago.

Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy - perhaps placed there by a doting father - is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history. [...]

Dr Joshua Pollard, of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said: ‘Representational art from this period is very rare and so far as I’m aware, if the identification is correct, it’s the only known prehistoric depiction of a hedgehog from Britain.’

Hmm… Not quite seeing the hedgehog there. It does remind me of a Zuni animal fetish, though.

It looks like the Mayor of Rome has stopped construction on the Pincio parking lot.

Instead of a new 700 space lot, 500 new spaces will be added to the existing parking deck a few blocks away at Villa Borghese. Why didn’t they do that from the beginning, you ask, especially since the Borghese parking lot isn’t full most of the time as it is?

This editorial has a handy local croneyism explanation:

The original idea was to get cars off the street in the areas around Piazza di Spagna by selling the slots in the Pincio car park to residents in the historic centre, as well as to parliamentarians and their staff at the chamber of deputies and the senate. It was never made totally clear exactly who would be the beneficiaries of the 700 slots, but they were certainly going to be privileged people.

So. There weren’t going to be tourist rent-a-car and commuter carpools in that deck anyway. They were going to gut the Pincio so legislators and their clerks could park a block closer to work.

Breathing. Breathing. In with anger out with love. It’s over now.

Until the next time.

Breathing. Breathing.

Remember back in July when the Italian government declared Pompeii to be in a “State of Emergency”? At the time, I quoted them saying this:

The “state of emergency”, which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.

Makes sense, I thought. It’s about time, I thought. Pompeii needs all the extra funds and special measures it can get. Turns out my idea of extra funds and special measures differ drastically from the current Italian government’s.

My idea of extra funds is additional moneys added to the budget. Berlusconi’s idea of extra funds is slashing Pompeii’s preservation budget from $75 million last year to $15 million this year.

My idea of special measures is additional security and expanding the area under active preservation. The government’s idea is to rent space in the ruins of an ancient villa in downtown Pompeii for a theme restaurant.

Guzzo said he at first was unable to explain why—now—the Culture Ministry found Pompeii in sudden distress. Then he realized the attention was not on the ruins themselves.

The emergency was declared days before the Berlusconi government took aim at another financial woe — the nation’s sagging economy.

All arts and restoration funds were frozen, and more than $1.3 billion was slashed from Italy’s culture budget for the next three years.

In other words, that state of emergency thing was a ruse, some PR misdirection crap to make a decimation of government support look like a heroic defense. I’m so angry I could spit.

… is a great second wife.

Australian professor Martin Jarvis thinks Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johan Sebastian Bach’s second wife, wrote some of the music attributed to him, including the cello suites.

The self-styled music detective became suspicious about Bach’s work when he was a teenaged student at the Royal Academy of Music in London. While playing Bach’s “cello suites” he became convinced there was something wrong.

“In 2001, I deconstructed the ‘cello’ pieces and came up with 18 reasons why they weren’t written by Bach,” Jarvis said.

Over the years, he said he found two famous 1713 Bach manuscripts in Anna Magdalena’s handwriting.

Including manuscripts that apparently pre-date Anna and Johan’s meeting. The smoking gun, according to him, is a manuscript with “Written by Mrs. Bach” on the cover.

I’m not sure how smoking a gun that is, but the back-dating of the manuscripts and the handwriting analysis are certainly intriguing (if accurately reported).

A new exhibit of antiquities on display in the Colosseum is showcasing the long history of Italian efforts to fight tomb raiders from the Renaissance to the present.

Some 60 works from Italy and abroad, most dating back to classical times, are arranged on the second tier of the Colosseum.

All these works were originally saved from raiders and traders by art protection movements and laws.

Among them are a 100BC Roman statue called The Haranguer or Orator from Florence’s Archeological Museum; the famous Birth of Bacchus from Budapest; the Gustiniani Hestia statue of an austere noblewoman from Rome’s Torlonia collection; and the ‘Dea Roma’ (Rome Goddess) from Ostia.

Other significant works are the ‘Marciante’ Artemis, recovered in 2001 after a five-year fight against traffickers who commissioned no fewer than five copies in a bid to sidetrack art cops; an Apollo found at the villa of famous Ancient Roman jurist Domitius Ulpianus at Santa Marinella near Rome; and a statue of the tragic Greek mythological mother Niobe from an ancient Roman villa, reunited for the first time with its head, recently identified in Poland.

That’s just the beginning. The exhibit lays out the history of the rise of a sense of Italian cultural patrimony, a feeling which grew from the Renaissance and long pre-dated political unification.

For example, the British Museum, not satisfied with the fruits of Elgin’s rape of the Acropolis, had its leer fixed on the Doric friezes of the Greek temple complex in Selinunte, Sicily. These friezes are in a unique style and widely considered to be the oldest extant examples of Greek sculpture.

They were saved from a fate worst than death by a law passed in pre-unification Italy. The BM had to be content with plaster casts.

Cool, right? I had no idea.

I love the scope of this exhibit. You can’t beat the location, and it’s such great publicity for the Carabinieri art squad, who have done an amazing job addressing the problem of systemic looting of heritage sites not just in Italy itself, but also when they were deployed in Iraq after the invasion.

For more detail on the exhibit, see this New York Times story.

A a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a neolithic site in Serbia shows that copper was being used in Europe earlier than we thought.

The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age’s neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency.

‘Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,’ she said.

Archaeologists excavating the site also found pots and furnaces with metal residue, suggesting people might have fabricated metal goods on the site, not just used them.

Eritrea, the small country nestled between Sudan, Ethiopia and the Red Sea, was Italy’s one venture into colonialism. Architecturally, it seems to have paid off.

The desert air and the years of warfare have managed to keep the country in something of a time warp. There’s almost no crime, no pollution, no big crowds, the weather is like Hawaii, the hotels are cheap and in the 30’s Italians packed the place with crazy cool architecture.

Asmara [the capital] became an Art Deco laboratory during the 1930s for designs that seemed, well, just too out there for mainland Italy. Rationalism, Novecento, neo-Classicism, neo-Baroque and monumentalism are among the varied avant-garde styles played with here. The result today is hundreds of aging, sherbet-colored buildings that are still standing, some needing a coat of paint — or two — but otherwise intact. With its plentiful palms and sunshine, the whole city has a decidedly Miami Beach vibe, minus the miniskirts and Ferraris.

The star of the show, and for good reason, is the Fiat Tagliero gas station, designed in 1938 by Giuseppe Pettazzi to look like an airplane, a spaceship or possibly a bat. Mr. Pettazzi’s extraordinary flourish was the concrete wings that jut out a total of more than 90 feet. The municipal authorities at the time required him to build pillars under the wings so they wouldn’t collapse, which was an unforgivable insult to Mr. Pettazzi. According to local legend, Mr. Pettazzi installed detachable pillars, and at the station’s opening, he pulled out a pistol and forced the builder to remove the supports. Needless to say, the wings are still there.

There’s a coal-fired steam engine built by the Italians beginning in the 1880’s, still chugging along. Oh, and there’s Italian everywhere! Language, food, all the good stuff.

I simply must make my way to Eritrea someday, perhaps when diplomatic relations with the US are smoother than they are right now.

Placido Domingo sang at Chichen Itza Saturday night. “The world’s greatest tenor at one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World,” the publicity materials say. “The world’s greatest tenor should be in the slammer,” the archaeologists retort.

Domingo’s concert inside Chichen Itza violates a law that requires the ruins to be preserved to educate Mexicans about ancient cultures, said Cuauhtemoc Velasco, a leader of the archaeologists’ union.

“These monuments are not there so that rich people can hold events at them” said Velasco, noting the tickets cost between $45 and $900 in a country with a minimum wage of about $4.50 per day.

For present-day Mayas like Amadeo Cool May, who hosts a Mayan-language radio program, the concert “is an event for foreigners who come here on vacation. It is something completely alien to the Mayas, because of the ticket prices and the type of music.”

Judging solely from the sketchy info in the article, I would say the legal beef is a tad thin on substance. The concert is not going to destroy the ruins or keep them from educating Mexicans about Mayan culture.

The cultural argument, otoh, has some bite. The government in charge of protecting Mayan sites is basically selling them out to events that have no relevance to the Mayan community. I can see why they’d be pissed about that, especially when long-term health of the ruins can be compromised by excessive use.

Workers in Istanbul are currently excavating a rail tunnel underneath the Bosphorus. Like the Chunnel linking France and England, only this one will link the continents of Asia and Europe.

The 2.6 billion dollar project began in 2004 and almost immediately encountered a major archaeological roadblock in the form of the 4th c. port of Eleutherios harbour where a railway hub was supposed to go.

Since then, they’ve found enormous piles of stuff, including over 30 shipwrecks transporting material from far and wide. These discoveries are writing a whole new chapter in the history of Byzantine trade.

Keep in mind that these shipwrecks are the first ever found in Istanbul, despite its fortuitous location straddling two seas.

For more on the Bosphorus finds, see this AFP story: