Month: February 2022

Vindolanda marks 1900th anniversary of Hadrian’s Wall with altar find

Ancient

The excavation season hasn’t begun yet but the Vindolanda Roman fort has launched the 1900th anniversary year of Hadrian’s Wall with a surprise archaeological find: a stone altar. It wasn’t even at the excavation site. The altar was found in Vindolanda Stream next to the site’s museum when staff were cleaning a tree felled by violent storms the weekend before last.

The altar is damaged, broken and heavily worn from exposure to the water and harsh elements of Northumberland. There is no visible inscription to identify the dedication, but archaeologists believe it dates to the 3rd century.

Andrew Birley said: “Originally, it would have stood well over a metre, but the surviving part is around 40 – 45cm tall. Looking at it, it’s most likely from the 3rd century – most were made in this buff, grey sandstone. It’s probably a local stone.”

“It’s another piece of the jigsaw. It’s probably part of the edge because it’s smashed! But if other pieces come up, maybe we’ll be able to cobble it together. All the finds are important, even if this one doesn’t tell us a huge amount because there’s no writing on it. However, it’s part of the rich fabric of the site.

More parts of it may turn up as the water levels drop, so Vindolanda staff and volunteers will do a follow-up search around the find site when the weather permits.

Vindolanda has an exciting year planned to celebrate the 1900 years since construction of Hadrian’s Wall began, as are other communities along the wall. Historic England has funded 10 bursaries for students between ages 16 and 19 who attend school near the wall to join in the summer dig at Vindolanda. If you are lucky enough to be that young and are attending or have recently attended one of three high schools in the Tyne Valley, apply here by February 18th. Learn more about events and activities that will be held this year at sites across Hadrian’s Wall on the website of the 1900 Festival.  Also behold the awesome cake custom made by a local baker to celebrate the launch of the festival. Happy 1900th birthday, Hadrian’s Wall!

Will reveals existence of Marco Polo’s daughter Agnese

Medieval

Researchers at the State Archive of Venice have discovered that the explorer Marco Polo had a previously unknown daughter named Agnese. The sole surviving record of her existence is a fragment of her will. It is dated July 7th, 1319, and names as fideicommissarii (executors) her husband Nicoletto Calbo, her father Marco Polo and another relative, Stefano Polo.

“Agnese’s testament,” says [Ca’ Foscari University researcher] Marcello Bolognari, “depicts an intimate and affectionate portrait of family life. She mentions her husband Nicolò, known as Nicoletto, as well as their children Barbarella, Papon (i.e. “Big Eater”) and Franceschino. The diminutives that she used to refer to her children tell us that this young mother wanted to leave something behind for her husband and children, but also — as the document shows — for the children’s tutor (magister) Raffaele da Cremona, their godmother (santola) Benvenuta, and the maid (famula) Reni.”

Before this discovery, Marco was recorded as having had three daughters — Fantina, Bellela and Moreta — with his wife Donata Badoer, but Agnese’s birth predates his marriage in 1300. Marco Polo returned to Venice from his epic voyage east in 1295. He was taken prisoner in 1298 after a naval battle between Venice and Genoa and was released from Genoese prison in 1299, so there is a very brief window for Agnese’s possible birth year.

As far as we know, he only married the one time, which might explain why Agnese was kept so firmly on the down-low that we only found out about her 700 years later. That’s not to say she was necessarily born out of wedlock. Her will does not mention a mother, but it’s possible the mother may have died when Agnese was a baby, leaving Marco a widower. If they were married, however, there are no known records of it, nor is there evidence of Marco raising his first daughter with her stepmother and half-sisters. We know from her will that she did live in the same neighborhood (the contrada or parish of St. John Chrysostom Church) as her father and the rest of the extended Polo family.

Marco died less than four years after Agnese wrote her will. He had a will drawn on up while he was on his deathbed, appointing his wife and their three daughters co-executors. His will was detailed with several individual bequests. Agnese is not named. Again, that doesn’t necessarily imply a secondary status, given that she was sick enough to write a will in 1319 when she was in her early 20s and in all likelihood died before her father’s final illness.

It’s only a slight tangent to note that issues related to Marco Polo, his daughters and wills come up in a big way in the Venice state archives later in the century. In 1366, Fantina, Marco’s eldest daughter with his wife took the family of her deceased husband to court for stealing the vast sums she had inherited from her father who had returned from the court of Kublai Khan absolutely laden with riches and made even more upon his return working in the family trading business.

The inheritance was not marital property — a rare jolt of economic autonomy for a married woman at the time — but her snake of a husband Marco Bragadin just snatched it out from under her and then had the gall to leave “his” wealth to his snake family. They refused to return it to her and entrusted it to the custody of two Venice magistrates acting as administrators of the late Marco Bragadin’s assets.

Fantina, who by then was 65 years old, was not having it. Defying her powerful in-laws and the magistrates who obviously now had a huge vested interest in seeing Fantina continue to be cut off from her inheritance, she and her lawyer presented her father’s will, a full inventory of his treasures and all the evidence that they had been stolen from her to judges Marco Dandolo, Giovanni Michiel and Natale Ghezzo. The Polo inheritance recorded in the records of the suit includes 40 horse silks, six silver belts, 12 carpets, bolts of Chinese silk, 16 garments in vermillion silk woven with gold thread, 91 other silk garments, a bag of cashmere, 537 chests with amber beads, a large gold table, rings of gold, silver, ruby and turquoise, a sack of aloe wood and one piece of silk described as “almost changing color.”

After a long court battle, the judges ruled in her favor, not just against the Bragadin family, but against their fellow magistrates, the estate administrators Andrea Contarini and Niccolò Morosini. The Bragadin’s had to reimburse her in full for her purloined inheritance and Contarini and Morosini had to pay her legal costs in the amount of nine gold ducats.

Child mummy with mullet CT scanned

Ancient, Multimedia, Museums

The latest episode of the British Museum’s excellent YouTube series Curator’s Corner looks at the museum’s use of a high-resolution CT scanner to study the mummies in its collection. There are still many things we don’t know about Egyptian mummification processes because almost no written material about it has survived (only three papyri are known), and because even modern non-destructive methods of analysis like X-rays and CT scans have been deployed on a small number of examples.

To expand the available data of mummification, the museum has undertaken a comprehensive re-examination of its mummies from the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms through the Roman period, spanning the millennia from 2000 B.C. to 300 A.D., discovered at different sites in Egypt. The scanner they are using is leaps and bounds ahead of scans taken just 10 years ago, capable of capturing extremely thin elements — surviving skin, hair, textiles — as well as the dense elements like bone.

The episode illustrates the British Museum’s CT scanner at work on the cartonnage mummy of child from the mid-1st century that was discovered in the necropolis of Hawara in 1889. The mummy is tightly enclosed in a case made of linen, plaster and resin and wrapped with a painted burial cloth. Over the head is a tempera portrait depicting a young boy wearing a white tunic with a red ribbon or corded necklace. An amulet was probably affixed to the case at the apex of the necklace, but that has been lost.

His hair is cut in a distinctive business-in-the-front short bang with a party-in-the back unbound lock flowing on both sides of his neck. This may be a variation on the side lock, sometimes referred to as the Horus Lock, which is common in iconographic depictions of children from the Old Kingdom through the Late Antiquity.

The painted shroud is decorated with images of deities, including Nut with outspread wings flanked by sphinxes. Below her the shroud is divided into four panels with images of rituals performed by priests in front of deities. The CT scan revealed the painted decoration on the sides that was too damaged or faded to be seen with the naked eye. Isis is on one side, her sister Nephthys on the other, their wings spread in a gesture of protection around the face of the child. The scan also detected the presence of four wax amulets placed directly on the child’s skin.

The Curator’s Corner episode shows some excellent images of the highly detailed CT scans explained by Egypt and Sudan department curators Daniel Antoine and Marie Vandenbeusch.

40 decapitated skeletons found in Roman cemetery

Ancient

Archaeologists excavating the site of HS2 high speed rail construction in Fleet Marston, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, have unearthed the remains of a small but busy Roman town and associated cemetery that contains 425 bodies, more than 40 of them decapitated.

As was typical in the late Roman period, the cemetery predominantly contained inhumation burials but also included some cremation burials. The number of burials, along with the development of the settlement, suggests that there was a population influx into the town in the mid to  late Roman period, linked perhaps to increased agricultural production. There are two separate areas of burials suggesting the cemetery may have been organised by tribe, family, ethnic grouping.

Amongst the buried population at Fleet Marston are a number of decapitated burials, approximately 10% of those buried there. There are several instances of the head being placed between the legs or next to the feet. One interpretation of this burial practice is that it could be the burial of criminals or a type of outcast, although decapitation is well-known elsewhere and appears to have been a normal, albeit marginal, burial rite during the late Roman period.

Fleet Marston is a medieval town, but previous archaeological discoveries of pottery and coins indicated it had been preceeded by a Romano-British settlement.  The town was traversed by a major Roman road linking  Verulamium (modern-day St Albans) to Corinium Dobunnorum (modern-day Cirencester) and intersected at the town with several smaller roads. One of only two surviving intact Roman chicken eggs was found discarded in an ancient malting pit in nearby Berryfields.

The crossroads location and density of pottery and coinage found suggested the Roman settlement may have been a market town and/or government administrative center. HS2’s archaeological program, therefore, dedicated more than a year to the excavation of Fleet Marston, unearthing as much of the ancient town as possible on both sides of Akeman Street, the Roman road that crossed it.

They discovered the remains of domestic, commercial and industrial structures in a ladder pattern along the road, and remains of the limestone surface of the road itself and its drainage ditches.

The team has also discovered over 1,200 coins along with several lead weights, indicating that this was an area of trade and commerce.  Parts of the widened road may have been used as a market, with extra room for carts and stalls.  Other metal objects, such as spoons, pins and brooches, were of a more domestic nature, while gaming dice and bells suggest that gambling and religious activity occupied people’s time here too. Apart from being home to many inhabitants, the settlement is likely to have been an important staging post for travellers and soldiers passing through Fleet Marston on their way to and from the garrison at Alchester.

One of the most ancient Buddhist temples found in Pakistan

Ancient

One the most ancient Buddhist temples in the world has been discovered in the ancient city of Barikot, in Pakistan’s Swat valley. It has been securely dated to the second half of the 2nd century B.C., but there’s evidence that it might date back further to the 3rd century B.C. when the area was part of the Maurya Empire.

Barikot first appears in ancient sources as one of the cities besieged by Alexander the Great during his expedition to India in 327 B.C. It was an important city by then, an administrative center for all the agricultural products grown in the valley which has a unique microclimate that allows two rounds of crops to be sown and harvested in the same soil in the same year. Barikot grew wheat and rice and stored it. Alexander availed himself liberally of its granaries to supply his Indian campaign.

There is archaeological evidence that Barikot was settled continuously from around 1700 B.C. to the 16th century. In October 2021, archaeologists from the Italian Archaeological Mission excavated a site in the center of the ancient city that had been dug up by looters. They unearthed the remains of the walls of an ancient Buddhist temple that had been vandalized over the centuries.

The temple is over three meters tall and has a particular structure and shape. It is built on an apsidal podium on which stands a cylindrical structure that houses a small stupa. It is clearly an example of Buddhist architecture. On the sides of the front of the monument are a minor stupa, a cell, and the podium of a monumental pillar or column. The staircase leading to the cell has been reconstructed in three phases, the most recent dating back to the 2nd-3rd century AD, coeval with a series of vestibule rooms which used to lead to an entrance that opened onto a public courtyard overlooking an ancient road.

The oldest stairway of the monument bore in situ half of a step-riser with a dedicatory inscription inKharosthi, that can be dated to the 1st century AD on palaeographic grounds. The other half of the step-riser was found turned upside down, reused as a floor slab in the later phase of the monument. Moreover, archeologists found some coins in the inferior strata, along with many inscriptions written on ceramics in Kharosthi script. The monument was abandoned at the beginning of the 3rd century AD, when the lower city was destroyed by a devastating earthquake.

During the excavations, archaeologists discovered that the monument was built on the remains of an earlier structure flanked by a small, archaic stupa which precedes the Indo-Greek period, around 150 BC, during the reign of the Indo-Greek King Menander I or of one of his first successors. According to Indian Buddhist tradition, Menander I converted to Buddhism. Yet the site held even more surprises for the archaeologists — in December 2021, a few days before the end of the mission, they noticed that some parts of the Indo-Greek monument had been built on an even older structure whose strata included pottery materials and terracotta figurines which are likely to have been used in Barikot during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

More than 2000 objects have been documented and catalogued from the discovery, including pottery, coins, inscriptions, seals and jewelry. The dates will be confirmed by radiocarbon analysis of the semi-carbonate soil samples.