Month: August 2022

Cambridge medieval medical texts digitized

Modern(ish)

The University of Cambridge has embarked on a two-year project to catalogue, digitize and conserve 180 medieval medical manuscripts in the Cambridge Libraries collection. About 8,000 medical recipes spread in manuscripts at the University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and in a dozen individual Cambridge colleges will be published for the first time in the Cambridge Digital Library. High-resolution photographs of the recipes will be accompanied by transcriptions of the text and detailed descriptions of the historical context of the recipes and manuscripts.

The books vary widely. There are alchemical treatises, devotional books, legal books and of course medical texts, including personal compilations of home remedies. They are written in Latin, French and Middle English. Most of them to the 14th or 15th centuries with some outliers. The oldest manuscript is 1000 years old. Some are richly illuminated, containing elaborate diagrams of the human body and a prodigious diversity of urine color/smell/taste flowcharts.

The recipes themselves consist of lists of ingredients and instructions for preparation. A great many of them are common plants like herbs and flowers, but when animal ingredients are involved, things get uncomfortably close to that Neo-Babylonian ghost-raising ritual Irving Finkel wanted to try for Halloween a few years ago.

One treatment for gout involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage and roasting him over a fire: the rendered fat was then used to make a salve. Another proposes salting an owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder, mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve, and likewise rubbing it onto the sufferer’s body.

To treat cataracts – described as a ‘web in the eye’ – one recipe recommends taking the gall bladder of a hare and some honey, mixing them together and then applying it to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights.

The medical recipe texts of Cambridge form one of the largest medieval medical writing collections in the UK and well-used by scholars, but only a small percentage of interested have had the opportunity to explore the books in person. Many are too fragile to be freely accessed at all and need emergency conservation before they can even be digitized.

The project team’s transcriptions will open the manuscripts’ contents to health researchers and historians of medicine, enabling keyword searching, surveys of treatments for specific ailments, or quantitative analyses of particular ingredients or preparatory techniques.

Cover-to-cover digitisation will enable researchers to see the recipes in their original setting: where they were written on the page and how they were presented, and whether they were added by different hands or at different times. Conservation will also guarantee continued physical access to the material for future generations of researchers.

“All of the digital images made by the Library’s Digital Content Unit, together with the detailed descriptions and transcriptions produced by the project cataloguers, will be published on the Cambridge Digital Library – making them available to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection,” said Dr Freeman.

Suprise medieval double grave found inside circular ditch

Medieval

Archaeologists have discovered an early medieval double grave at the center of a circular ditch in Kirchheim am Neckar, southern Germany. Two plots of land in an area of Kirchheim designated as a cultural monument were excavated in advance of development. The presence of a burial ground was known since the 19th century (hence the designation), but the discovery of a double grave inside a ring ditch was unprecedented.

The double grave was found at the southwest end of the burial ground. The circular mark on the ground is all that remains of a large tumulus. The burials consist of two adjacent wooden chamber graves built over carved rock. One belonged to a woman; one to a man. The graves had both been looted in antiquity, but the tomb raiders only pillaged from the knees up. The areas below the knees were untouched, and the looters really missed out.

Below the foot of the buried man were a large ornate bone comb, a ceramic pot, silver sheet bands, a glass tumbler, horse bridles and a bronze vessel filled with organic material and animal bone and a large egg-like object beneath a ceramic bowl. A gold coin was also found in the dead man’s mouth as an obolus [, also known as Charon’s obol, a coin to pay for passage to the underworld].

The remains of a decapitated horse were buried just outside the ring ditch. The presence of horse bridles in the man’s grave suggests the horse was a companion burial.

The woman’s burial was richly furnished as well, despite having been looted. Grave goods found in her grave include a pearl necklace, a gold pendant inlaid with almandine garnets, a disc brooch, a weaving sword, scissors, a glass beaker and a chatelaine with a decorative disc and a Cypraea snail shell hanging from it. These were high value objects, jewelry and household goods alike. The Cypraea was imported from the Indian Ocean and was a very expensive charm to hang from a belt.

The excavation of the two properties found 22 more graves, all of them simple inhumations without funerary offerings. These were the kinds of graves archaeologists expected to find at the site, comparable to the ones discovered there in the past. The occupants of the double grave were set apart in the burial ground, separated from the hoi polloi both in location and in the distinctive grandeur of their burials.

Rare Neolithic, Migration Period graves found near Danube

Ancient

Rare graves from the Neolithic and early medieval Migration Period have been discovered in Tuttlingen, in southwestern Germany near the Danube Sinkhole. A preventative archaeology excavation at the site of a planned rainwater retention basin unearthed a Stone Age grave of the Corded Ware culture containing grave goods including a characteristic pot of the type that gave the culture its name, and dozens of Migration Period (ca. 375-568 A.D. ) graves containing weapons and jewelry.

Only one Neolithic grave has been found so far — Corded Ware culture graves are rare in southwestern Germany — but archaeologists did discover the remains of a prehistoric settlement. The grave contained a corded ware beaker, decorated at the neck by winding a rope around it when the clay was still wet to create a dimpled effect.  It also contained a stone axe with a neat hole in the middle where the handle was once mounted and a flint blade. The Corded Ware grave dates to the 3rd millennium B.C.

The Migration Period cemetery is large with about 140 burials, and many of them are richly furnished. This was a period of mass movement of people throughout Europe in the wake of the collapse of Roman power. They usually travelled in tribes of about 10,000-20,000 lead by a warlord until they found a place they wanted to settle. The cemetery dates to the later Migration Period.

“Most burials contain grave goods such as weapons, e.g. swords, lances, shields, and jewelry such as glass beads, earrings, belts or belt pendants,” said Dr. Andreas Haasis-Berner, responsible area officer at LAD, today (August 18, 2022) presenting the current results in Gutmadingen together with the excavation company and the city. Bone combs or a drinking glass are special features. Based on these grave goods, the burial ground can be dated to the 6th century.

Avocadoes foiled by largest megalithic complex in Spain

Ancient

Archaeologists have discovered the largest megalithic complex in Spain near Heulva, on the southwestern border with Portugal. An extraordinary profusion of more than 500 menhirs, dolmens, stone cists, circular enclosures and standing stones have been documented at the site, plus associated finds like extraction areas, engravings, dry stone structures and quartzite hammers. Samples from the site are still in the process of being dated, but preliminary estimates are that the first vertical stones were erected between the Middle Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age, from the 5th millennium B.C. to the 2nd. The sacred spaces were then reused over the centuries.

The megaliths were found in 2018 during a survey of a 600-hectare farm whose owner wanted to plant avocadoes. Andalusian authorities would only grant a permit for the avocado plan on condition that archaeologists get to explore the site first. Several megaliths have been found in the area before and previous farming of the land had significantly altered the landscape, so archaeologists were dispatched to perform an intensive surface survey before the estate was further transformed by agricultural use.

The team recorded all of the visible megaliths and documented four delimited groupings: a group of dolmens, a set of menhirs and two stone circles. They documented 526 megaliths in different shapes and sizes, most of them erected close to the outcroppings where the builders had sourced the stone.

One of the most striking things was finding such diverse megalithic elements grouped together in one location and discovering how well preserved they were, said Primitiva Bueno, co-director of the project and a prehistory professor at Alcalá University, near Madrid.

“Finding alignments and dolmens on one site is not very common. Here you find everything all together – alignments, cromlechs and dolmens – and that is very striking,” she said, hailing the site’s “excellent conservation”.

An alignment is a linear arrangement of upright standing stones along a common axis, while a cromlech is a stone circle, and a dolmen is a type of megalithic tomb usually made of two or more standing stones with a large flat capstone on top.

Most of the menhirs were grouped into 26 alignments and two cromlechs, both located on hilltops with a clear view to the east for viewing the sunrise during the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, the researchers said.

Located on a hill above the Guadiana River, La Torre-La Janera is the highest altitude site in the area, so these megalithic groupings would have been highly visible in the landscape as well as having a fine view for solar ceremonies.

The avocado plantation has been officially laid to rest. Instead, the site is undergoing a rigorous six-year project of excavation, study and conservation that is scheduled to run through 2026.

Florence Baptistery apse, wall mosaics restored

Medieval

After five years of restoration, the eight internal walls of the Baptistery of Florence adorned with three different colors of marble inlay and magnificent mosaics have been liberated from scaffolding and can be seen again in all their newly-revived glory.

The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the governing body that administers Florence’s cathedral complex which includes both the Duomo and the Baptistery, began a comprehensive restoration of the internal walls of the Baptistery at the end of 2017 following repairs to the external walls and roof. The project was enormously complex. There are 12,000 square feet of marble inlay surfaces, more than 2,000 square feet of mosaics and more than 1,000 square feet of gold leaf.

The parietal mosaics were created in the 14th century as extensions of the motifs and pictorial style of the exceptional mosaics applied to the interior of the dome, which was still ongoing when work began on the apse.

The mosaics of the scarsella [the apse] differ from the parietal ones both in the narrative complexity and for the execution technique. In fact, in these mosaics, extremely minute tesserae were used and an extraordinary chromatic variety of glass pastes and other precious materials including coral – which to date does not appear to have been used elsewhere in mosaic art – branches or in cross-sections that form microscopic circular or teardrop shaped tesserae.

If the mosaics on the other seven internal facades of the Baptistery represent prophets, holy bishops and cherubs, those in the scarsella stage a rich iconographic program. In the vault the mirror images of the Madonna and the Baptist seated on the throne are represented, flanked by four telamons that support the large central wheel. This is divided into eight spokes, occupied by solemn figures of biblical patriarchs and prophets who foretold the coming of Christ, symbolized in the lamb in the center of the wheel with an epigraph, which translated from Latin reads “Here is almighty God indicated by the meek lamb”. Other figures of prophets appear in the intrados of the triumphal arch, while on the external ring there are represented busts of Apostles, Evangelists and Saints flanking the Baptist in the center.

The vault and triumphal arch of the apse and the gallery of the matroneum were clad in marble originally, so when officials decided to install mosaics there too after the completion of the dome mosaics, Florence’s mosaicists had to invent a new technique to apply mosaics onto marble veneers. They used bespoke hollow terracotta tiles, each made to specific measurements, that were then cut and mounted to the marble walls with iron linchpins. Even the mortar was completely customized, closer to an adhesive than a traditional mastic.

The unique approach and materials posed an enormous challenge to conservators. The team started by collecting data, performing the first diagnostic analyses of the parietal mosaics ever done. They found evidence of the original techniques used to install the mosaics, questionable later repairs and materials like traces of gold leaf on one of the column capitals that suggests all of the capitals were originally gilded.

The restoration was repeatedly interrupted and delayed by the pandemic and ultimately cost 2.6 million euros, but that hasn’t deterred the Opera from moving forward with an even more complex project: the restoration of the mosaics on the Baptistery’s octagonal dome. They have designed a new restoration scaffold system of horizontal platforms supported by a central column. This will allow restorers to shift upwards as they focus on new surfaces while still keeping the dome visible from the ground.