Pristine 200-year-old sweater found in impounded parcel

A sweater knitted 217 years ago in the Faroe Islands and still in pristine condition has been discovered in a package that was seized and impounded by the British Navy in 1807. It was opened as part of the Prize Papers Project which is working to catalogue and digitize the huge quantity of documents, including 160,000 undelivered letters, in the UK’s National Archives captured by the Royal Navy in wars from 1652 to 1815.

The sweater was made of fine wool in a pattern of tiny black and white florals against a vivid red background. The pattern, fitted waist, short length, half-sleeves and open neckline is very similar to the jumper of the Faroese national dress. It was sent by one Niels C. Winther of Tórshavn to Mr P Ladsen in Copenhagen with an accompanying note written in Danish stating “my wife sends her regards, thank you for the pudding rice. She sends your fiancé this sweater and hopes that it is not displeasing to her.” He described it as a “sweater for sleeping.”

Margretha Nónklett [head of ethnology at the Faroe Islands national museum] said: ‘This is a tremendously exciting find. There are very few pieces like this and we have none with this particular design. It would have been handmade at home with hand-dyed wool.’

Dr Amanda Bevan, of the National Archives, said: ’This is a rare example of a parcel surviving in the Prize Papers, which often contain letters consigned to ships for delivery by sea.’

The Winthers’ parcel sailed from Tórshavn aboard the cargo ship Anne Marie, one of two ships owned by the King of Denmark that had the monopoly of trade with the Faroes, on August 20th, 1807. The news had not yet reached the islands that the British Navy had begun the Second Battle of Copenhagen four days earlier. The British engaged in the naval battle and bombardment of Copenhagen in the attempt to seize or destroy the Danish fleet before the Danish king succumbed to French pressure to join forces with Napoleon. If neutral Denmark was swayed to the French side, the British feared its navy would their vital military and commercial access to the Baltic Sea.

The Anne Marie was boarded by the crew of the HMS Defense off the coast of Norway on September 2nd. Captain Jurgen S Toxsvaerd and the rest of the Anne Marie‘s crew were imprisoned and the mail and cargo it was carrying seized. The battle raged until September 7th when the Danish fleet surrendered to the Royal Navy. Toxsvaerd was later released in Copenhagen. He reported the Anne Marie’s seized cargo as “49,000 pairs of woollen stockings, eight tons of dried fish, 100 cases of candles, 250 barrels of tallow, 19 barrels of train oil and 10 barrels of feather.”

A handful of those woollen stocking in Toxsvaerd’s report were found in another shipment opened at the National Archives. The parcel contained a bundle of finely knitted women’s knee-length stockings and some fabric samples. Fine woollen stockings were a top export from the Faroe Islands during this period.

Paper rix-dollars were also found among the letters, with a wad of them wrapped around 18 silver coins, which include Danish skillings dating back to the reign of Frederick III of Denmark, 1648-1670.

There are also two samples of barley being returned to sender with a note complaining about the quality of an earlier shipment: ’Out of 416 barrels of grain sent, 399 have taken some damage’. 25 barrels were so bad they couldn’t sell them, they wrote.

All of the letters and photographs of package contents from the Anne Marie will be digitized and made available in the Prize Papers database. The project is immense in scope with an estimated 3.5 million document images to be digitized and made freely available online. It will take two decades to complete.

San Francisco Diego Rivera mural saved

Diego Rivera’s masterpiece of self-reference, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, a mural on the wall of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) campus that was at risk of being sold off when the institute defaulted on a bank loan, has been saved by a nonprofit organization.

In debt to the tune of $20 million, the San Francisco Art Institute declared bankruptcy in April of last year. That summer, the bank announced it would sell the institute’s collateral, namely all of its facilities down to the bricks, with Diego Rivera’s two-story mural, appraised at $50 million, as the juiciest plum. It would have been sold on its own to the highest bidder who could then dismantle it and move it out of the old facility and even outside the city.

The plan caused an outcry from the arts community and historical preservationists. The city’s Board of Supervisors quickly stepped in to grant the mural landmark status, immediately blocking any alterations to the fresco not approved by San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission. The everything-must-go firesale was officially off.

The new nonprofit, funded by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, formed an LLC to buy the two-acre campus on Russian Hill, negotiating a price of $30 million, including the fresco, which is a bargain considering the property was valued at $40 million not counting the Rivera mural. The nonprofit plans to use the campus as an arts institution, possibly with artists-in-residence, administered by an advisory committee that includes Jobs and local leaders of the arts.

Those plans are a long ways off, however, because the campus is in dire need of renovations. The full extent of the repairs are not yet known. The facilities are certainly in poor shape, as the SFAI was too broke at the end of its life to maintain them properly and it was abandoned entirely after foreclosure. The red clay tile roof is leaking and the departing staff left behind office equipment that will need to be cleared, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“We’re energized by the tremendous community support we’ve seen for restoring the site, keeping the mural in place, and reopening as a nonprofit arts institution that will bring in a dynamic new generation of artists,” [Brenda Way, founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Oberlin Dance Collective and advisory committee member,] said in a statement to the Chronicle. “We’re building on a brilliant cultural history and looking toward a boundless artistic future, one that will affect and be affected by the vibrant culture of San Francisco. Now the real work begins.”

That work includes addressing heavily deferred maintenance at the property, the extent of which has yet to be fully investigated. The group’s spokesperson estimated that restoring the campus will require about two to four years of construction activities, and that a full assessment must be still conducted “before we can be more specific.”

Bronze Age axes, sickles found in Poland

A group of Bronze Age metal objects including axe heads and sickles has been discovered outside Słubice in western Poland. Members of a local metal detecting group scanning with the permission of the Lubusz Provincial Conservator of Monuments found the deposit two weeks ago scattered in an area known as Lynx Field. The grouping consists of three sickles, two axes, four bracelets (three of them with engraved decoration), six rings, two pieces of wire and a part of a bronze pin. There was also a remnant of foundry waste.

Archaeologists have not yet commented on the significance of the find. However, it is difficult not to associate it with previous finds of the so-called foundry or bronzesmiths’ treasures. This is indicated by the heterogeneous nature of the discovered objects (ornaments, weapons, household items) and foundry waste. For example, the previous such find, from the vicinity of Gubin, is associated with the creation of the Lusatian Urnfield culture community from the Bronze Age and is tentatively dated to the 4th period of the Bronze Age (1000-800 BC). In fact, there have already been several such discoveries in Lubuskie. Because times were turbulent then and bronze was worth its weight in gold, bronze makers often hid their treasures.

Access to the find site has been blocked to other metal detectorists until authorities have the opportunity to explore it further. The artifacts will be transferred to a museum for study and conservation.

Wood spikes from Roman fort conserved

The deadly sharped wooden spikes from Roman forts unearthed near Bad Ems, Germany, have been unveiled in all their threatening glory after conservation at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology (LEIZA) in Mainz. The 23 wooden skewers have been undergoing conservation for almost three years and posed a multi-layered problem. Conservators had to stabilize the wood to keep it from drying out and shrinking or cracking. They also had remove the thick layers of sediment which were attached to the wood with unusual strength.

The spikes were discovered in a 2019 excavation at the site of two previously unknown early imperial military camps on the river Lahn. Found in a v-shaped trench still in their original upright or angled positions, ready to impale an unwary attacker, the carved wooden spikes were preserved in exceptional condition by the waterlogged clay soil. Known from ancient sources like Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, these are the first (and so far only) examples of this type of defensive barrier ever found.

Dubbed pila fossata (ditch spears) by the archaeologists (there are no specific names for them in the ancient sources), they were made of oak and were an average of 65 cm (26 inches) long and 4.5-6cm (1.7-2.3 inches) in diameter. They were sharped on both ends and had two notches, one cut out of the bottom and the other at the top on the opposite side of the stake, giving it mean barb to look extra threatening and making it harder for anyone who had the misfortune to fall onto it to extricate themselves than a plain sharpened spike would be. The bottom notch appears to have been used to hammer it into the dense clay soil, as the wood fibers in the notch were squashed down from the impact. The top notch was cut into the opposite side of the stake. They were installed angled outwards, upwards and inwards, bristling in all directions at once much like the barbs on barbed wire. Between the pila were thin rods or branches of brushwood extending lengthwise along the trench. They may have been tossed into the ditch when the camp was dismantled and their defenses buried to prevent the enemy from using them.

The traces of the two Roman military camps, which were occupied for a few years around the middle of the 1st century AD, were uncovered as part of the three-year scientific project between 2017 and 2019. The evaluations could be completed in 2023. The camps are most likely related to the search for silver veins under the Roman governor Curtius Rufus, which was reported by the Roman historian Tacitus. The larger of the two camps, with an area of ​​​​around 8 hectares, had space for 3,000 men. It was fortified with pointed ditches, an earthen rampart and wooden towers. This discovery was only made in 2016 by the volunteer monument conservator Jürgen Eigenbrod.

Until now, the area in the forest on the “Blöskopf” was considered a Roman ironworks since the 19th century due to its location above the Bad Ems silver mines and in the vicinity of historical mining traces (Pingenfelder). Due to its proximity to the Limes, it has been dated to the 2nd to 3rd centuries. After prospecting and excavations between 2018 and 2019, the researchers found that it was a small fort measuring approximately 0.1 hectares, which apparently served to control a Roman mining area around 50 AD. Inside this small fort is one of the second oldest stone buildings on the right of the Rhine, which could be identified as the central defensive structure in the complex.

Tomb of gold-adorned Coclé lord found in Panama

The tomb of a high-status man of the pre-Hispanic Coclé culture richly furnished with gold and ceramics has been unearthed at the El Caño Archaeological Site in Panama. The grave dates to 750-800 A.D. and is filled with ceramic artifacts buried as offerings. He was also laid to rest with a spectacular set of gold objects including five pectorals, two belts of gold beads, four bracelets, two anthropomorphic earrings (one of a male figure, the other female), an earring of a double crocodile, one necklace with small circular beads, five earrings made of sperm whale teeth covered in gold, a set of gold plates, two bells, bracelets, skirts made of dog teeth and a set of bone flutes.

Dr. Julia Mayo, director of the El Caño Foundation and director of the archaeological project for 18 years, since the excavations began in 2008, explained that this collection could have belonged to a high-status adult male from the Rio chiefdom. Big.

Dr. Mayo stated that the tomb was built around the year 750 AD and is that of a great lord, but also of other people who died to accompany him to the “beyond.”

She explained that the excavation of the burial has not been completed, therefore, it cannot be determined at the moment how many people were buried with him, but what is known is that he was buried face down, a common way of burial in this society, on top pf the body of a woman.

Located about 100 miles southwest of Panama City, the El Caño site was discovered in the 1970s when sugar cane tractors churned up Coclé artifacts. Subsequent archaeological explorations discovered funerary mounds encircled by massive standing stones. The enclosure within the circle of monoliths also contains a ceremonial area with wooden buildings. The burials belonged to a pre-Hispanic culture that occupied much of the modern-day province of Coclé from around 200 B.C. to 1550 A.D. The El Caño necropolis was built around 700 A.D. and abandoned around 1000 A.D.

This discovery is important, among other things, because it presents a very special type of burial that “we know as multiple and simultaneous burials and we call them that because they consist of burials of a variable number of people (between 8 and 32 people) in a “The same tomb of high-status people who were buried along with others previously sacrificed to serve as companions,” explained specialist Mayo.