Learning to write

From today's NY Times:

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.

And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. . .

In two decades of education reform, the teaching of reading and arithmetic has come under intense scrutiny, with increased state regulation and a host of new assessment tests. But until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing.

And it is no false alarm -- ask anyone who teaches at the university level. One telling indicator from my own experience has been how often foreign students' papers prove to be much better structured than those of the American students, even if the English is shaky. This is not a matter of students not being able to write stylishly: this is a matter of functional expression, where even intelligent students cannot make themselves understood, let alone construct a convincing logical argument.

Bamiyan: what now?

This article in the NY Times describes the controversy over what to do with the rubble-filled niches where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood. While I shudder to think of what may result if local boosters attempt to "reconstruct" the Buddhas, I am also quite sympathetic to the position articulated by Afghan vice-president Karim Khalili:

Other Unesco officials say that building a replica will turn an ancient site into a Disneyland. Last year, Prof. Ikuo Hirayama, the chairman of the Japanese National Commission for Unesco, advocated leaving the blasted niches empty "as a symbolic reminder of the barbaric destruction of culture by human beings."

That suggestion incensed Mr. Khalili. "I told Unesco that if you give this as a reason, then you should clear all the people out of Afghanistan, to make the country a memorial to Taliban atrocities, and you should leave the Twin Towers as they were, as a monument to what terrorism did," he said.

Morgan Library closing

After next weekend, there will be one fewer museum to visit in Manhattan, though the loss will be only temporary. The Morgan Library will close its doors until early 2006 for a $100 million expansion and renovation.

As a kind of goodbye present to visitors, the museum will waive its requested fee on May 3 and 4, when admission will be pay-as-you-wish. . .

. . . the Morgan has made sure that highlights from its collection will still be available to the public after it closes. It has organized two traveling exhibitions to raise money for its operating expenses and to let other parts of the country see some of its treasures. One show, "Illuminated Best Sellers: Books of Hours From the Morgan Library," will go first to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth from Oct. 12 through Jan. 18, 2004, and then to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from Oct. 18, 2005, through Jan. 8, 2006. The second, "Imagine: British Drawings and Watercolors, 1600-1900," which was at the Morgan in 1998, will go to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati from May 14 through Aug. 15, 2004, and then to the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh in late 2005.

Closer to home, the museum has already lent some of its prized objects to the Metropolitan Museum. In November, several of the Morgan's medieval artworks went on view at the Met's Medieval Tapestry Hall, where they are to remain for at least two and a half years. In February, two sculptures from the Morgan went to the Met's Egyptian galleries.

When the Met opens "Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. From the Mediterranean to the Indus" on May 8, the show will also include some loans from the Morgan. . .

One department at the Met that has particularly benefited from the Morgan's recent loans is European paintings. In the first of the Met's Netherlandish galleries is a wall of seven portraits by Hans Memling. Three are from the Morgan.

From the NY Times.

Primitive ballistics goes digital

The atlatl - pronounced "at-la-tal" - is a hand-held spear-thrower that was developed in northern Africa 25,000 years ago. Now high-speed video imaging of modern-day atlatl throws could help to settle archeologists' debates about the design and construction of the simple but effective gadgets.

Atlatls spread all over the world before being largely superceded, around 10,000 years ago, by the bow and arrow. The atlatl's springy lever action flings flexible, lightweight darts at speeds of more than 100 kilometres per hour over distances of more than 200 metres.

From digitized footage of atlatl throws, Californian electronics researcher and primitive-technology enthusiast Richard Baugh, has developed a computer model of the weapon's performance. By varying its parameters, such as the mass and flexibility of the atlatl or dart, Baugh can explore the effects of these

From Nature. For modern sporting use of the atlatl, look here.

Australopithecus "Little Foot" not so young as he looked

Scientists using a new method of dating fossils has found that a celebrated find of apeman remains in South Africa is around four million years old, a discovery that could reshape our knowledge about the possible forerunners of human beings.

The new dating technique, used for the first time on biological fossils, dated "Little Foot," a remarkably intact Australopithecus skeleton, at 4.17 million years old, instead of 3.3 million years old by the initial dating.

Little Foot, found in 1997, is the star of the Sterkfontein caves, a treasure trove of fossils about 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

Read the rest at Discovery News.

Leith excavations

Update from Scotland:

Excavations in the shadow of a multi-million pound housing development are set to shed new light on life in medieval Leith. The archaeological dig next to the 110-home apartment block at Ronaldson’s Wharf is regarded by experts as one of the most significant medieval excavations in Scotland.

Six archaeologists have been digging the final 12-metre-square section and have uncovered evidence of settlement dating back as early as the 11th century. Other artefacts show the trading links that may have once existed between Leith and other countries, as well as other surprising finds including Chinese and Japanese pottery and 16th-century cannonballs.

City archaeologist John Lawson said: "As a whole, this is one of the most important medieval sites in the whole of Scotland."

Anzac Day

From the BBC:

Australians [what about the New Zealanders? -- D.] have been marking Anzac Day with dawn services and marches to honour their war dead held throughout the country. The day commemorates the 25 April 1915 when allied forces, including thousands of Australian and New Zealand volunteer soldiers, known as Anzacs, landed on the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula in north-west Turkey.

The World War I attack, designed to gain a foothold in Turkey that would lead to the capture of Istanbul, triggered a disastrous eight-month campaign in which more than 300,000 men died.

Up to 8,000 people were expected to gather at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli National Park for a service at dawn on Friday, but amid fears of an increased terrorist threat this number is much lower than last year's 15,000.

I visited Gallipoli back in summer of 1992. There weren't many other Americans around, but lots of Aussies and Kiwis of all ages.

For more extensive coverage, take a look at the Sydney Morning Herald and the New Zealand Herald.

Antiques Roadshow goes to Baghdad

A bit of humor from the Las Vegas Mercury. . .

Colossal squid on display Down Under

Wish I were in New Zealand to see this:

A 5.4 metre example of the colossal squid will go on display at the National Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa in Wellington until Sunday May 4.

The squid, of a species larger and more aggressive than any other known, was recently found in the Southern Ocean. The mantle, arms and tentacles of this squid are on display.

We reported on the discovery of the colossal squid here.

Capital punishment in Japan

Death penalty opponents worldwide regularly protest executions in the United States. For some reason, however, one never seems to hear a similar outcry over executions in Japan. Perhaps it is because so many educated people are unaware that Japan even has the death penalty -- not so surprising, considering how non-Japanese typically think they know a lot more about Japan than they actually do.

These thoughts were prompted by the following from the BBC:

Prosecutors in Japan have called for the death penalty against cult leader Shoko Asahara, who is accused of masterminding a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. . .

Mr Asahara - the founder of the Aum Shinrikyo, or Supreme Truth, movement - stands accused of a series of crimes which shocked Japan. Nine members of Aum Shinrikyo have already been sentenced to death for their part in the Tokyo attack, which killed 12 people and left thousands ill.

Some Baghdad loot trickling back?

According to the NY Times, some items are making their way back to the National Museum in Baghdad. But all too few, it seems, since most of those who took artifacts from the museum probably weren't like pianist Namir Ibrahim Jamil:

As Mr. Jamil stepped out of [his] van carrying a priceless and broken statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C., he broke down and wept and fell into the arms of Donny George, the curator of the museum, who also began weeping. . .

Mr. Jamil's pieces — which included a bronze temple relief from the fourth century B.C. and other artifacts, in addition to the statue of the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III — are part of a slow trickle of objects being returned voluntarily. Mr. Jamil said he was fleeing Baghdad in his car during the final days of the war when he was blocked by American troops who were entering the city. As he drove back home, Mr. Jamil said, he passed the museum and saw a scene of chaos and plundering as Iraqis carried off artwork, statues, pottery, artifacts and just about anything else.

"They were breaking and smashing everything," said Mr. Jamil, who said he ran in with some relatives, looked for what seemed to be important items and carried them off in order to save them. The other day Mr. Jamil contacted museum authorities and said he felt safe enough to return the antiquities, accompanied by his brother, Mortadha, and brother-in-law, Nabil Fadhil.

The same story is also recounted in this Washington Post piece, which also notes:

Just minutes after Jamil arrived with his second van load, a U.S. Army truck pulled up at the museum carrying about 80 Iraqi paintings, the oldest of them dating to the 19th century. Officers with the 308th Civil Affairs Brigade said they recovered the paintings from a sewage-flooded vault in a heavily damaged building about a quarter-mile from the museum.

Some of the paintings had frames still dripping with water, some had jagged rips in the canvas. "They had these paintings just sitting in the water," said Col. Vincent Foulk, of Urbana, Ohio. "In some cases, you could see paint literally dripping off."

Museum officials said they expect to recover other items that had been locked away at locations outside the museum, including gold objects moved for safekeeping before the war. Finding people with keys to the safes, however, has been vexing, according to U.S. civil affairs officers.

Unfortunately, the organized robbers seemed to have an easier time find the keys than the good guys. There's also this reminder:

Some of the museum's collection was carried off in the 1990s by members of Hussein's government, according to Iraqi antiquities officials. Archaeologists who work for the Culture Ministry said today that Baath Party officials periodically confiscated gold and other valuables from the museum, possibly to be sold on international underground markets. The officials said they don't expect to see those valuables again.

Perils of a not-so-free market

A Shanghai man is stuck with 32,000 pairs of shoes after buying them in an auction. He thought he had picked up a bargain when he successfully bid about £2 a pair for the Dunlop shoes. But then he learned he could not resell them because he was not an authorised dealer of the shoe company. . .

No retailer can sell the shoes in China without Dunlop's authorisation, Zuo was told.

From Ananova.

Shutting the barn door. . .

Although the following story may seem surprising, it has been all too common for institutions public and private not to report thefts that might sully their eminent reputations. Needless to say, this makes recovery of the stolen items rather difficult:

Hoping to solve an archaeological crime after more than two decades, the University of Alabama has revealed a major 1980 theft of Indian artifacts. Jim Knight, chairman of anthropology at the Tuscaloosa campus, said Monday that the disappearance of 264 pottery vessels, dating back some 800 years, was the largest recorded antiquities theft in the South.

Knight said the theft, which occurred from a storage building at the university's Moundville archaeological site, was never made public; only a brief notice was placed in a scholarly journal. . .

A university statement issued last week said the stolen items were appraised in 1980 at $1 million, which equals about $2.3 million today after inflation. The pieces included many of the best artifacts ever excavated at Moundville, an area near Tuscaloosa where mounds mark the site of an Indian community that dates back a thousand years. . .

The loss was staggering: About 70 percent of the university's exhibit-quality artifacts were gone. Only the best items were taken, leading Knight to conclude that whoever took them knew what they were after.

Read the full article here.

Who owns Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto?

As reported in La Repubblica, Piero's famed fresco, long resident at the municipal museum at Monterchi is now being reclaimed by the bishop of Arezzo, who wishes to see it returned to devotional use. First court date is set for November, but don't hold your breath. The fresco has been the property of the city of Monterchi for some 218 years, and if the bishop's claim isn't dismissed outright, the legal proceedings could drag on nearly as long.

10th-century knight's house found in France

Once again, I cannot find any other mention of this story from La Repubblica. Here's our translation of the essentials:

An aristocratic medieval residence built before the beginning of the Capetian dynasty (AD 987) has been found during exploratory excavations near a branch of the Dordogne river at Pineuilh in the Gironde. According to archeologists, the site is the second of its type known, the first being that of 'Chavarines' near Lake Paladru, discovered at the end of the 1970s, which gave historians their first direct view of the life of country knights c. 1000, at the dawn of feudalism. . .

The site at Pineuilh would seem to represent a similar dwelling. About a meter deep, the archeologists have found a platform of earth and the remains of a half-dozen oak columns 40 cm in diameter, which would have supported a wooden structure. But the greatest importance lies in the thousands of objects and fragments found preserved in the muddy soil. Among these: two pawns from a chess set; remains of leather shoes; a ceramic oliphant; wooden plates; iron spearheads; a comb; belt buckles; hunting ornaments; and knife blades.

Medieval justice in Wales

This just in from Carmarthenshire:

A rare mediaeval Grand Jury swung into action yesterday in the latest instalment of a planning row at Dylan Thomas's boathouse.

The Foreman of the Grand Jury of the Corporation of Laugharne, a title and body that dates back to the 13th century, installed a bollard in the middle of the footpath leading through the bluebell wood above the Boat House. It is intended to succeed where the local authority has failed, by preventing an ice cream king from neighbouring Pendine using the path as a road. . .

The bollard effectively prevents businessman Eric Eynon, who made his money selling ice cream in Pendine, from reaching his property by vehicle. It means he will be unable to get builders and building material to the 300-year-old Ferry House, next door to the Dylan Thomas Boat House, except by foot or boat.

Mr Eynon outraged local residents by bulldozing the 15-metre-high cliff behind the Ferry House last Easter, undermining the remaining cliff face and forcing the Boat House Museum to take emergency safety measures and close off the steps that Dylan used to reach his home. . .

The council decided last month that there was nothing to be done except to grant Mr Eynon retrospective planning consent for the work he had already carried out. But the action of the Laugharne Corporation, a body granted by charter to the 520 burgesses in Laugharne by the Norman Marcher Lord Sir Gwydo be Brione, builder of Laugharne's castle and church, leaves Mr Eynon facing bills totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, with nothing but a site with no access to show for his spending.

York Minster to charge admission

From the BBC:

A voluntary donation scheme has failed to raise enough money for the cathedral's future spending plans. The Archbishop of York Dr David Hope has said he is "dismayed and saddened" by the decision.

The level of charge has not been confirmed, but voluntary donations were set at £3.50 while Canterbury Cathedral charges £4. . .

Only one in four visitors to the Minster, Europe's biggest mediaeval cathedral, gave a donation last year.

Baghdad loot -- so where is it?

"Where's the loot?" asks this article in the Washington Post:

Despite scattered rumors of artifacts turning up from Tehran to Paris, not a single one of the 90,000 or 120,000 or 170,000 plundered artifacts -- no one knows for sure how many -- is known to have been offered for sale anywhere in the world. And investigators and legitimate art dealers think they know why.

If not still stashed in Baghdad, the pieces are already trickling out of the country in trucks and suitcases, headed for a shadowy world of high-end, high-risk collectors of such loot who fancy themselves art connoisseurs and get a charge from owning forbidden objects. . .

"They're not going to try to get this stuff out of the country right away. I think they're going to sit on it until some of the pressure dies down," said Robert Wittman, an FBI agent who has worked on several cases of art and antiquities theft and is headed to Iraq next week. . .

With a mix of educated guesswork, speculation and solid knowledge of how the trade in looted antiquities works, dealers and industry-watchers are starting to piece together scenarios about where the plundered objects might be headed. In the process, many are concluding that chances are good some might be recovered.

Perhaps eventually, but by all prior indications (as noted later in the article), not likely anytime soon. Art loot from the WW2 era is still coming out of the woodwork, and it should also be kept in mind that dealers with deep pockets often keep artworks in inventory for decades.

In legitimate markets, "the major pieces are absolutely unsellable because they're so well known," said Jerome Eisenberg, owner of New York's Royal-Athena Galleries and founding editor of Minerva magazine, which covers the antiquities business. "But I could visualize some multimillionaire hiding a piece away and gloating over it." Looters and smugglers sometimes wait years for market conditions to improve before selling their plunder. Items looted more than a decade ago in Iraq during the first Gulf War are still "dripping onto the market," Eisenberg said. . .

The possibility of damage to the pieces is extremely great now, as is the temptation for looters to melt down gold artifacts that are too well known to sell -- a fate too horrible to contemplate for many. . .

Looters first swept through the Baghdad museum on April 10, barely 24 hours after U.S. tanks pushed into the city center. Museum officials have said the first wave of looters went straight for the most valuable objects, including clay tablets with some of the oldest writing known to man, and a 4,330-year-old bust of an Akkadian king that is the earliest known copper casting in existence.

Once the most valuable pieces were gone, more looters picked through the rest for the next two days, grabbing, bagging or smashing countless smaller objects including pottery, coins and statuettes. . .

Some of the looters knew the combinations to locks on cases or carried glass cutters, suggesting they were experienced pillagers working with help from current or former museum employees. In another sign it was no mere smash-and-grab operation, the looters took pains to destroy thousands of documents in the museum's archives, making it much more difficult for curators to give police information or images that could be used to recover the pieces. Some are so well known that identifying documents aren't needed; thousands more are now gone without a trace.

"Everything about it sounds like an inside job, at least in the beginning. They knew which objects to go for, they had the combinations, and they destroyed the documentation. It was done by people who obviously had some knowledge of antiquities," said dealer Torkom Demirjian, who sells expensive Greek, Roman and Near Eastern artifacts at his Ariadne Gallery in New York. "Clearly they did have [buyers] in mind."

Judging from his knowledge of trade routes for illicit antiquities, Demirjian said the Iraqi loot would probably find its way overland in trucks or on foot to Iran and from there by plane to Japan and Western Europe. Syria is not a likely destination because U.S. troops are keeping close tabs on the border -- not to keep loot from flowing out but to prevent weapons and suicide bombers from coming in.

"I don't think much of it is going to turn up on the market soon," he said. "This was not some sleepy act that happened when no one was watching. This was a barbaric act that happened in front of the whole world, and no one can claim ignorance about it. . .

Dealers said few of the Iraqi museum objects would reach the United States because of tight customs controls and federal laws involving stolen property. More likely destinations would be Switzerland, known as a transshipment point for looted antiquities, and other European countries, such as Germany and Belgium, that have not signed or ratified a 1970 international treaty intended to combat the trade in illicit antiquities, dealers said. The United States ratified it in 1983, France in 1997 and Britain last year. . .

Demirjian speculated that the main market for Iraqi loot would be Japan, which he said has a culture of secrecy among collectors, little interaction with museums and a long-standing taste for Mesopotamian antiquities.

Tooth fairy harvests stem cells

Your seven-year-old's baby tooth may be worth a lot more than the quarter the tooth fairy left under the pillow. Scientists have discovered that the pulp inside deciduous teeth is a treasure trove of fast-growing stem cells. Naturally-shed choppers could thus provide an easily accessible new source of these sought-after cells for clinical studies of stem-cell transplantation and tissue engineering.

When his six-year-old daughter pulled out her baby tooth, Songtao Shi of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Md., washed it off to prepare it for the tooth fairy. Holding his daughter's partial tooth, the stem cell researcher noticed living tissue inside and wondered whether it might contain relatively young stem cells.

The story continues here.

More perspectives on the looting in Iraq

The looting of Iraqi cultural assets was an outrage and a tragedy, but it seems that the charge that military planners simply didn't care about artifacts isn't true. For as is becoming increasingly clear, even sites of vital importance for military intelligence were also left to be plundered, as the Washington Post reports:

Because ad hoc discoveries might occur anywhere, the U.S. military is racing belatedly to lock down files and equipment at scores of potentially sensitive facilities in Baghdad that went unguarded in the chaotic days immediately after the fall of Hussein. Beginning late last week, U.S. combat forces in the Iraqi capital moved to take custody of all 23 government ministries and more than two dozen other locations they said might yield valuable intelligence.

Senior U.S. officials with responsibility over postwar Iraq were highly critical of the delay in securing those facilities. One official interviewed in Kuwait described it as "the barn-door phenomenon." He said retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, the occupation governor of Iraq, sought special protection for 10 Iraqi ministries, identifying them as potential repositories of weapons data, but that only the Oil Ministry remained intact after U.S. ground forces took possession of Baghdad. Combat commanders, the official said, gave "insufficient priority to getting into these places," and "there wasn't enough force to accomplish that initial sequestering of buildings and records."

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reveals:

In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters. "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the March 26 memo. . .

The museum was No. 2 on a list of 16 sites that ORHA deemed crucial to protect. Financial institutions topped the list, including the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it.

"We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks," said an angry ORHA official, one of several who spoke to The [Washington] Times on the condition of anonymity.

As noted before here, however, defending the banks has been much rougher work than anyone anticipated, while this article from the Chicago Tribune further clarifies what an aggressive defense of the Baghdad Museum would have entailed:

Two days before Iraq's National Museum was looted of priceless objects, leading curators said they fled the museum complex when Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas entered the courtyard and fought U.S. Army tanks.

"When we saw these people in our garden firing at tanks, we said, `Oh, we'll be hit,'" said Donny George, a museum official. George and several others headed for safety, returning five days later to discover the museum trashed by looters and several of the collection's most valuable pieces missing. . .

Museum officials say the looting could have been stopped if U.S. forces had maintained a presence at the site. U.S. troops counter that they were engaged in a major battle in the heart of the city.

The museum is across the street from a Special Republican Guard compound and transmission center, both of which were heavily bombed during the war. The compound contained three armored vehicles and a recoilless rifle mounted on the back of a truck. . .

Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, commander of Task Force 164 of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said during street battles in the later days of the war his men were 500 yards from the museum at a key intersection. "They went to that intersection and took some pretty intense enemy fire that came from the museum," he said. "RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], AK-47s. My soldiers got pelted pretty good. We fired one tank round into the museum."

The tank round left a hole in a front arch of the museum. Bloodstains were seen on the walls, according to Army and museum officials. Some weapons, including an unexploded grenade, and uniforms were found on the museum site, according to U.S. forces. "There's a common misconception that American forces arrived and stood around as looting took place," said 2nd Lt. Erik Balascik, who was helping guard the museum Saturday and who participated in the battle around the museum grounds. "We didn't observe any looting at all," Balascik said. "There are back doors. They came in through the back and out the back. We never observed the actual looting of the museum. However, the whole city was being looted at the time."

Balascik said it would have taken a larger force than his Task Force 164 Charlie Company to secure the museum during the battle. "And it would have opened the flank of our task force," he said. "Our security would have been gone."

By the way, while Mickey Kaus has quite a bit on this whole controversy, his comment on Sunday that "our forces didn't even know for several days that there was a museum there to protect" is a less than accurate paraphrase of the following sentence, which appears in the Tribune article cited above: "Moreover, some troops said they didn't know for several days that they were in a battle around a museum filled with priceless antiquities".

Baghdad loot hits the world art markets, continued

Customs agents at a US airport believe they have seized at least one item taken from the Baghdad museum, which was looted of thousands of valuable artefacts as Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.

The FBI refused to say at which airport the object had been confiscated or the nature of the artefact, but customs officials across the country have been put on high alert amid suspicions that many of the stolen objects will end up on the US market.

Many objects from Iraq, looted both at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 and during the last, have already started turning up for sale at online auctioneers, experts say.

"You won't find the big, expensive pieces on the internet, but the smaller things that won't command as much attention," Dr Neil Brodie of the UK's Illicit Antiquities Research Centre told BBC News Online. "It's these pieces that are much harder to track down."

From the BBC.

Fighting over David

A long-running project to restore Michelangelo's 500-year-old statue of David, widely regarded as the embodiment of male perfection, has been halted by a furious row between the two women in charge of cleaning it.

After six months painstakingly preparing one of the world's greatest masterpieces for its first thorough cleaning in more than a century, Agnese Parronchi, Italy's foremost restorer of Michelangelo's sculptures, walked out last week in a disagreement with her boss over the best method to use.

She accused Franca Falletti, who runs Florence's Accademia gallery, where the statue is kept, of trying to dictate use of a "dangerous" cleaning technique which would endanger the 16ft-high marble statue.

Ms Parronchi, who previously oversaw restoration of Michelangelo carvings in the Medici Chapel, said she had wanted to restrict cleaning to the delicate but slow "dry" method. This uses a combination of tiny badger-hair brushes, cotton buds, rubber erasers and chamois cloths to tease out grime from the surface of the work.

However, she complained, her "superiors" - a committee of experts led by Ms Falletti - were trying to force her to use a "wet" technique employing distilled water.

The very public dispute has pitted the down-to-earth Ms Parronchi, 46, a bespectacled native Florentine, against the elegant Ms Falletti, 10 years her senior but an enthusiast for more modern techniques. It has also made public the jealousies and personal rivalries that are rife in the city renowned as one of Europe's greatest cultural gems. . .

The sculpture, which stood outdoors for almost 400 years, was last cleaned late in the 19th century using a mild solution of acid, which modern restorers fear damaged the protective oil coating applied by Michelangelo himself. Since then it has been kept indoors, but its surface has continued to gather grime.

Ms Parronchi had just completed a detailed survey of the statue's surface, and was about to begin careful, inch by inch cleaning over the sculpture, using "wet packs" only on particularly stubborn patches of dirt.

She said the method favoured by Ms Falletti - whom she dismissed as "just an art historian, not a restorer" - would uniformly strip David both of its dirt, and of its remaining protective patina.

From the Telegraph.

Final excavation of medieval ship abandoned

Archaeologists around the country are united in outrage with local campaigners over the decision to abandon any attempt to rescue the stern of a unique medieval [ship] discovered by chance last summer on the banks of the river Usk, during the construction of an arts centre in the heart of Newport, south Wales. . .

The main timbers of the Newport Ship have been recovered, but the city council says it is too dangerous to excavate the stern, which experts on ancient ships insist is vital for understanding its construction. The stern could have been plain, or an elaborate castle shape.

The ship, built around 1465, is a unique discovery in Britain, and one of only a handful of well preserved vessels from the period found anywhere in Europe.

From the Guardian.

Mis-teaching European history

Political correctness seems to be taking its toll on the other side of the Atlantic, as well:

Children are being taught a sanitised version of European history in which Napoleon is depicted as primarily a reformer and the Vikings are portrayed as peace-loving traders. . .

The move is part of a new drive towards political correctness in which national identity, as well as controversy and conflict, have been wiped from secondary school textbooks. . .

'Children are not being given the full picture of their history,' said Dr Yasemin Soysal, president of the European Sociological Association, who has spent three years researching the issue for the Economic and Social Research Council. 'They are being presented with a more peaceful and bland image of European creation than actually took place.'

Read the full article here.

Mortars bursting in air?

Do you know what a mortar is?
Here is the definition from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms: "A muzzle-loading, indirect fire weapon with either a rifled or smooth bore. It usually has a shorter range than a howitzer, employs a higher angle of fire, and has a tube with a length of 10 to 20 calibers." A quick look at general English-language dictionaries turns up nothing significantly different.

Coverage of the fighting in Iraq, however, demonstrates that many journalists (and their editors) don't know what a mortar is. In fact, they routinely use "mortar" to describe a mortar's projectiles (properly termed mortar shells, or rounds). An example from yesterday's NY Times Magazine:

Advance units set up sniper positions and machine-gun positions a few hundred yards farther up the road; beyond them, American mortars and bombs, fired by units near and behind Colonel McCoy's position, were loudly raining down.

And another:

. . . Colonel McCoy's battalion was at that moment lobbing so many bullets and mortars and artillery shells across the waterway. . .

Wonder what they were using to launch those mortars? Unconventional warfare indeed -- hurling whole artillery pieces at the enemy! And while I'm being picky, while "lob" might be appropriate for grenades, mortar rounds, howitzer shells, and tennis balls, it's a distinctly weird descriptor for the flat trajectory of a rifle bullet at short range.

PS Here's a picture of a modern mortar in action (and no, it is neither flying through the air, nor exploding).

Baghdad loot hits the world art markets

A good summary of the situation in today's Telegraph:

It's fast, easy and encouragingly cheap to enter the booming market in Iraqi antiquities. How about an early Sumerian glass-beaded necklace for only $24? A 2,000-year-old bronze arrowhead for $14? Or an ancient cuneiform tablet, moulded from Mesopotamian clay, and bearing the imprint of a barter deal for sheep or wine, for $1.25? They can all be found within a few seconds on eBay and other websites on the internet, and there's plenty more on the way.

The sacking of Iraq's National Museum last week may at first have looked like an act of random vengeance against a convenient emblem of the state. . . [but] the more the scale of the losses became apparent - at least 170,000 items are missing or destroyed - the less sense it seemed to make. . .

It now appears that the looting of the museum was neither spontaneous nor random. In all probability, it was planned well in advance of the American-led invasion, and the thieves almost certainly benefited from inside help. . .

Witnesses have spoken of seeing well-dressed men with walkie-talkies at the scene, and of artefacts being transported away in orderly convoys of vans rather than over the heads of the crowd. "We already have reports of exhibits being offered for sale in Switzerland and Japan," says Karl-Heinz Kind, Interpol's specialist officer for art and antiquity trafficking. "Even in a war zone, even with the country practically sealed off, these things can move with incredible speed". . .

Long before the latest war began, millions of pounds worth of Iraq's ancient treasures were quietly flooding each year into the hands of Western and Far Eastern collectors. . .

In recent years Saddam's own officials appear to have given the stamp of approval to the lucrative business of selling antiquities abroad. Last year a large sculptural frieze, originating from a 3,000-year-old Assyrian palace in north eastern Iraq, weighing more than a tonne and measuring more than six feet square turned up for sale on the British market. Art experts believe it unlikely that such a major piece could have been exported without the acquiescence of someone in authority.

Julian Radcliffe, the chairman of the Art Loss Register, the organisation which identified the frieze, says: "There may have been theft from Iraqi museums by their own government working with the staff or by criminal elements working with the staff. Curators have often been worried about keeping the roof on the building of the museums they work in and desperately need the money to pay for it". . .

And the devastation continues. The latest target of the looters is the museum at Nebuchadnezzar's palace - home of the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient world. Thieves smashed their way in through a brick wall, stealing statues, vases, burial masks and relics of the ancient Babylonian kings. . .

Behind the looting of the National Museum lies a triumph of street smartness over military intelligence. The Pentagon may have been unsure how the battle for Baghdad would play out, but the local gangs, flush with orders from wealthy overseas collectors, seem to have anticipated that the city's fall would be swift and made their plans accordingly.

Certainly Koichiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, the United Nations educational and cultural agency, knows whom to blame. "It is those bandits who looted their own heritage," he said, at a meeting of 30 Iraqi and world antiquities experts in Paris. "These were conditions of confusion and turmoil, and they took full advantage."

Even as he was speaking, the lost treasures of Iraq - a 5,000-year trove of learning and beauty - were speeding through the channels of the underground art market into the hands of foreign collectors. If the prices seem reasonable it's because there is plenty to go around.

Britain loses to Germany, but feeling no pain

British teams claim drinking too much beer made them lose in the 72nd World Marbles Championships against Germany for the second year in a row. . .

Several hundred people watched the action as it unfolded in the 6ft diameter rings set up in the car park of The Greyhound pub.

However, as the effects of alcohol set in among some of the British entries, reigning champions Saxonia Globe Snippers held their nerve to retain the World Marbles Cup after winning it for Germany for the first time last year. . .

Championship spokeswoman Julia McCarthy-Fox said: "The British players have lost their marbles altogether. It was too much alcohol and not enough practise.
"They have had so much to drink they are not even too bothered at the moment. They are vowing to practise and win next year."

From Ananova.

"Lance of Longinus" reexamined

In today's Sunday Times Magazine, the cover story is on the recent reexamination of the spearhead in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, long known as the Lance of Longinus and treasured as a relic of the Crucifixion.

While the spearhead's documented chain of ownership runs back through the Holy Roman Emperors to the tenth century, by all indications it is an ordinary early medieval weapon, to be dated no earlier than the 7th century. The extent to which devotees of the occult have fixed upon what they term "the spear of destiny", however, is quite remarkable. The article covers these perfervid imaginings in some depth, as will likely the BBC2 version to be shown in May

Not all discoveries are welcome. . .

Galleries around the world are delighted when Sir Timothy Clifford offers to rummage through their archives, following his discovery of a Michelangelo sketch worth £8m in the back rooms of a New York museum last year.

But now they might be more cautious. The flamboyant director of the National Galleries of Scotland has announced that two sketches held at the Uffizi gallery in Florence, attributed to Michelangelo and believed to be worth millions of pounds are in fact the work of the lesser Italian artist, Parmigianino.

In an article published in Apollo. . . Clifford reveals that the pen-and-ink studies of eagles on two sides of a sheet of paper are “characteristic mature work by Parmigianino”.

Clifford, who made the find while taking a sabbatical last year, said: “If it was a Michelangelo, it would be worth millions. As a drawing by a follower in his school, it would be worth several thousand pounds, but as a Parmigianino, it is a drawing that is worth about £50,000.”

From the Sunday Times.

Some Baghdad museum loot recovered

This from today's Sunday Times:

Bearing white sacks that had once been used to carry rice, two furtive-looking men arrived at the gates of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad last Thursday and presented themselves to the US Marines outside. Inside one of the sacks were two delicately painted ceramic pieces that looked like salad bowls. The string loops that had been used to hang them in an exhibit were still attached. In the other were two miniature heads of ancient kings carved in black stone. “We have been keeping them in our homes to protect them from thieves,” was the dubious explanation.

The men were ushered through into the grounds of the low, sand-coloured museum building. Gunfire, apparently from looters shooting at one another, could be heard in neighbouring streets. On Friday morning another 20 pieces, including glazed pottery and several metallic objects, were returned by individuals encouraged, perhaps, by reports that rewards might be paid for their return.

More than a week after treasures were stolen from the museum and countless others smashed in an episode of cultural vandalism that shocked the world, a few items are finding their way back. . .

Too few, however; and it now seems clear that the most serious thefts were not opportunistic grabs by those likely to be tempted by reward offers or promises of amnesty:

Among the items that vanished were two giant vases dating from 3500 BC. A bronze statue from the Akkadian period was also carted off, even though it weighs more than 660lb. Bronze reliefs were stolen along with Assyrian statues of kings and heads of Roman statues.

Jabir Khalil, chairman of the board, said an administrative section had also been looted “most savagely” and it would take days, if not weeks, to establish just what had gone. “They smashed their way in through the walls,” he said. “I suspect they knew what they were looking for.”

He was confident, however, that the museum’s collection of ancient manuscripts was intact. They had been removed to safety before the war.

Chasing down fake paintings in the Dominican Republic

[Alberto Ulloa] is an artist given to the grand gesture and bold stroke, and true to his credo of "love me, love my work," he is the fiercest defender of his name and oeuvre, found in collections and museums in both Europe and the Americas. Late last year, he became the first artist in the nation's history to demand and secure criminal convictions for two people who trafficked in crude fakes that were sold at very real prices.

The increasing popularity of Latin American art has also raised the profile of leading Dominican artists like Mr. Ulloa, Gillo Pérez and Ramón Oviedo. But their newfound success has also brought one unwelcome distinction: a growing underground industry of forged copies of paintings sold to would-be collectors and unsuspecting tourists.

Some of them have even been used to barter for furniture, wine and new cars. The fakes are part of a wider problem that includes counterfeits of everything from the usual knockoffs of sneakers and videotapes to more exotic appropriations like an amber-colored Chinese elixir that is hawked as Viagra.

The authorities, fearful of trade penalties by the United States, have begun to protect intellectual property more aggressively, bringing almost 600 cases under an ambitious law passed in 2000. Lawyers and art experts said a case involving Mr. Ulloa's paintings — the only one involving works of art — set a precedent they hoped would stem the flood of fakes.

From today's NY Times.