Roamin' rabbits

The remains of a 2,000-year-old rabbit - found at an early Roman settlement at Lynford, Norfolk - may be the earliest example of rabbit remains in Britain.

The bones - which show evidence the animal had been butchered and buried - are similar to those of a small Spanish rabbit, common in Roman times.

It is thought rabbits were introduced to Britain following the Roman invasion in AD43.

From the BBC. Ironically, burrowing rabbits are now a threat to many Roman archeological sites; here is but one example.

More on salvage archeology at the Temple Mount

The Jerusalem Post has an article today on Dr. Gabriel Barkay's excavation of the dump sites for rubble taken from the Temple Mount by its Muslim overseers. We originally posted on this a few months back, but the more publicity the archeological devastation of the Temple Mount receives, the better.

Thanks to reader Daniel Aronstein for the pointer.

Cockerell cup to Fitzwilliam

The Cockerell cup is named after its last owner, the late Sir Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the hovercraft. The cup, painted by one of the most renowned Athenian pottery decorators, and in outstanding condition, was acquired by the museum, with a £50,000 grant from the Art Fund charity towards the £100,000 purchase price. . .

The museum is a peculiarly appropriate home for the cup, because though Sir Christopher bought the vessel from a London dealer in the 1960s, his father, Sir Sydney Cockerell, was a former director of the Fitzwilliam, and himself a renowned collector.

Best known for his work with medieval illuminated manuscripts, though not mentioned in the article.

The academic and art historian was reportedly disgusted when his son showed early genius for engineering rather than fine art. When the young Christopher chose the book The Boy Electrician instead of a biography of Rembrandt as a birthday present, his father snorted that he was "no better than a garage hand".

From the Guardian; a Christopher Cockerell obituary may be read here.

Pregnant dinosaur fossil

What a time to be a palaeontologist!

The first dinosaur eggs found complete with shells in the body of the mother has solved the long-standing mystery of how dinosaurs laid their eggs. The evidence shows they laid a clutch in a series of sittings, like birds, rather than all at once like crocodiles and other living reptiles.

The pair of eggs come from a fossil found in the Jiangxi province of China which includes the pelvis and part of a leg of an oviraptor - a two-legged dinosaur that roamed between 100 and 65 million years ago.

From New Scientist.

Christopher Dresser at auction

Now, more than 100 years after the death of metalworker Christopher Dresser, the world’s most exclusive tea party is coming to Edinburgh.

A major collection of his work is expected to fetch more than £500,000 at auction in the Capital next week.

Some of Dresser’s most famous designs are all going under the hammer, including a square teapot expected to sell for £200,000, a toast rack valued at £22,000, a tureen (with ladle) for £6000, and a sugar bowl with an asking price of £9000.

Recently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the National Design Museum in New York, it is the largest collection of the Glasgow designer’s metalwork to come to market.

The 50 Dresser creations are being sold by Lyon & Turnbull at its Broughton Place auction house next Tuesday, and are expected to attract massive international interest.

From the Scotsman; the auction catalog may be viewed online here. The V&A's Dresser exhibition website is here.

"Hobbit" update

I've not been posting much on the controversy following the Indonesian find of a diminutive hominid, in large part because so much of the fuss appeared to be a turf battle in which I have had little interest, but also because it has been apparent that it would be a while before reliable and authoritative assessments would be available.

Now, however, we have a rather strong dismissal of the most widely trumpeted claims, from one who initially -- though with due qualification -- endorsed them:

. . . I disavow any suggestion that LB1 or any of the Flores fossils are australopithecines.

Along with four of the best anatomists that I know, I had the opportunity to see detailed pictures of the LB1 postcrania.

The specimen is beyond any doubt or question pathological.

This is very clearly shown by many details that are either not depicted or are not clear in the photos in the original Nature paper . . . this specimen has morphological characters that would indicate severe developmental abnormalities even if the skull had never been found. This is in no way a close call. . .

My suggestion of australopithecine affinity was based strongly on the anatomy of the pelvis and the size of the brain. Since the specimen is pathological, I no longer trust that either feature characterized the Flores population rather than this single individual. . .

The bottom line is that this specimen cannot be assumed to be representative of the population from which it came. Any interpretation that starts with the assumption that LB1 is normal should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Drinking yourself to death

This is somewhat old news, but for many word still hasn't gotten out:

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

An increasing number of athletes - marathon runners, triathletes and even hikers in the Grand Canyon - are severely diluting their blood by drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say.

From today's NY Times, which also notes:

Doctors and sports drink companies "made dehydration a medical illness that was to be feared," said Dr. Tim Noakes, a hyponatremia expert at the University of Cape Town.

"Everyone becomes dehydrated when they race," Dr. Noakes said. "But I have not found one death in an athlete from dehydration in a competitive race in the whole history of running. Not one. Not even a case of illness."

Several years ago my wife gently rebuked a student for sucking away at a water bottle in class; the student cited her need to rehydrate after the hour-long dance class she took immediately before. I thought this "need" was pretty absurd at the time . . . .

Battle of the Nile veterans to be reburied

The remains of 30 British men, women and children, who perished serving Horatio Nelson in the Napoleonic wars, will be buried with full military honours in Egypt next week after their discovery on a tiny windswept island off Alexandria.

Nearly 207 years after the Battle of the Nile - long considered the Royal Navy's most daring operation - the sailors, soldiers and service personnel who died fighting Napoleon Bonaparte's fleet will finally be laid to rest. The burials include James Russell, the first navy commander identified from the period.

Read the rest here in the Guardian.

Deep genealogy

It's the Genographic Project; as Dienekes' Anthropology Blog describes it:

The Genographic Project is a new initiative by National Geographic and IBM, headed by Dr. Spencer Wells, in which ordinary people can participate, for about $100. For this price you will learn your mtDNA [or] Y-chromosomal "deep ancestry", and it seems like a really good bargain for anyone interested on the subject, in addition to being part of a real research project!

UPDATE: Some important qualifications added here -- doesn't look like such a deal after all, especially given that only the women will be getting any "deep ancestry" info out of the test.

FURTHER CORRECTION and clarification in the comments.

Google tells terrorists to hit the road

At least that's what's been up on Google News all day:

"Suspected al-Qaida Terrorist Await Trail in Great Britain"

As long as they leave Hadrian's Wall alone . . . .

Ancient Cypriot pottery unearthed in Cheshire

Ancient pottery; modern deposit:

A QUEST for a missing wedding ring has helped uncover a collection of ancient treasures dating back up to 4,000 years.

Thought to be from tombs on the holiday island of Cyprus, the [priceless] collection had been collecting dust in a Cheshire attic for nearly 40 years, with the belief they were old holiday trinkets.

Full story here.

Armor excavated at Jamestown

Interesting find, misleading info in many of the writeups. Essentials here:

Archaeologists sifting through the remains of America's first permanent English settlement have discovered a rare, largely intact example of Elizabethan-era body armor known as a coat of jacks.

Used by 17th-century settlers as a defense against Indian attacks, the quilted canvas-and-iron-plate garment was the colonial version of a modern-day [flak] jacket, said Bly Straube, curator of artifacts at the Jamestown Rediscovery project. . .

Though considered obsolete in England by that that time, the sleeveless coat of jacks - which reach back to the early 1500s - still saw use in Virginia by offering valuable protection against Indian attacks.

"The Spanish went back and used them, too, because the quilted plates were more effective against arrows [than] plate armor," Straube explained. "They absorbed the blow instead of being pierced."

This may be a misquote, since plate armor gave much better protection against arrows. Indeed, Straube was quoted differently here:

"With a garment like this you could rest the butt of the gun against your chest and it wouldn't slide around," she said. Also, Spanish settlers to the south found that flexible armor could stop an arrow while also absorbing the force. With other types of armor, an arrow could bounce off and hit someone nearby, Straube said.

Yet that article in turn included the following highly misleading statement:

The piece of armor, weighing an estimated 175 pounds, was discovered Friday during excavation of a trash pit.

As it was lifted from the site, with all the surrounding accretions, soil, and consolidants, I'm sure it did weigh close to 200 lbs. As it was worn in the 17th century, however, it likely weighed in closer to 30-40 lbs.

Nothing yet on the Jamestown website; other recent finds are noted here.

British Library to give up Codex Sinaiticus?

Not an open and shut case, but not unthinkable now, either:

The 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, arguably the world’s most important Christian manuscript, entered the library’s collection in the 1930s. . .

Greek Orthodox monks of St Catherine’s have long believed that the manuscript was wrongfully taken from them in the 19th century by a German scholar, Constantine Tischendorf, who was apparently acting as an agent for Tsar Aleksandr II of Russia.

He took 43 leaves to Germany, which are in the University of Leipzig, and another 347, which he gave to the Tsar. They remained in the Imperial Library until 1933, when the Soviet Government sold them to raise money. . .

Tischendorf is thought to have convinced the monks that he was borrowing the leaves for copying purposes. He did publish the text.

In an 1859 letter, which was found in the monastery’s archives in 1960, he had promised to “return (the Codex), undamaged and in a good state of preservation, to the Holy Confraternity of Mount Sinai at its first request”. But the ownership question is clouded by another letter, of 1869, in which the monastery’s archbishop seems to have offered the Codex as a gift to the Tsar, after a donation of money and gifts to the monastery.

From the Times of London.

The Codex is in fact split (unevenly) four ways: in addition to the leaves at the British Library and Leipzig, there are others remaining at St. Catherine's and some in Russia's National Library. An initiative to digitize all surviving leaves was recently announced, and can be read about here.

UPDATE: A comprehensive survey of the situation now available from the Art Newspaper; but do note the very misleading:

The Codex Sinaiticus was one of the original 50 Bibles copied in Greek at the order of Emperor Constantine, or . . .

The "or . . . " of course, is the escape hatch for a reporter presenting an unprovable hypothesis as (apparent) fact in the lead. Further comments at Palaeojudaica.

Potato row in Belgium

A mussel and chips festival, intended to unite Belgium's feuding Dutch and French-speakers through their shared love of moules frites, has instead provoked a political row over who provides the potatoes. . .

Read the rest in the Telegraph.

Anglo-Saxon pendant find in Shropshire

The West Shropshire pendant was found in a mystery location near Oswestry by the couple from Wrexham. The find was declared treasure at Shrewsbury Coroner's Court by coroner John Ellery today. . .

The oval pendant is described as having well polished garnet or possibly glass stones and is set in gold and is likely to date from 600-650AD. . .

The gold pendant was sent to the British Museum and is currently being kept there awaiting a treasury valuation.

Full story here.

Should have used a fly

Albania's most wanted man fought off special police and eluded capture for years only to blow himself up while fishing with dynamite, police and newspapers said Friday.

Dubbed the "Last Cowboy" in northern Albania because of his gunfights with the law, Riza Malaj, 34, failed to accurately gauge the length of the fuse as he tried to blow up trout.

From Reuters.

Dambusters memorabilia at auction

A menu signed by the WWII Dambusters from a 1943 dinner celebrating their decoration has sold for £4,465.

Also for sale at Bonham's auctioneers in Oxford was a cap worn by their leader, Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, which sold for £3,055.

From the BBC.

Bonhams' Nelson sale

A valuation day for Nelson memorabilia is being held in Whitstable in the run-up to an auction this summer.

Items to be sold by auctioneers Bonhams in July already include a model of a ship figurehead thought to have been carved at the dockyard in Chatham. And a lock of Nelson's hair presented by Emma Hamilton has been given an estimated value of £10,000 to £15,000. . .

The London sale, Nelson and the Royal Navy 1750-1815, is being held on 5 July as an event to mark the bi-centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

A spokesman said that a gold Trafalgar medal belonging to Admiral Sir Charles Tyler was expected to fetch £40,000 to £60,000.

From the BBC. The Bonhams sale website is here.

PX15

Forgotten explorers:

On July 16, 1969, mankind had its eyes fixed on the stars as Apollo 11 headed toward the moon . . .

Two days earlier, an equally perilous mission saw six men lock themselves inside the submersible Ben Franklin, or PX15, for a 30-day dive into the Gulf Stream off Cape Canaveral.

The men were on a voyage to map the Gulf Stream, chart its life and, more important, find out how men could exist in a sealed, self-sustaining environment for an extended period of time.

The deep-sea mission is now the subject of a TV documentary; read more here.

Spamusement

Was looking over the offerings at spamusement.com, where spam subject lines serve as inspiration for cartoons. For some reason I was particularly taken with "I Flew To London for $75 Round Trip" ("amazing new pleasure for men" is pretty funny, too).

Cheese Day!

In an attempt to alert the nation to the gradual disappearance of its splendid and varied cheese heritage, hundreds of events were held across France [on April 9] to celebrate National Cheese Day.

"In the past 30 years, more than 50 varieties of French cheese have disappeared for ever. Other types are down to their last two or three traditional producers," said Véronique Richez-Lerouge, head of the association which promotes traditional French cheeses. "The share of the market taken by industrial, pasteurised cheeses, which are actually fake cheeses, with a fraction of the true taste and character, is growing all the time."

France has probably lost more cheeses than most other nations ever had:

President Charles de Gaulle once famously said that it was impossible to govern a country with 365 different kinds of cheese. This was an understatement. France has at least 600 distinct kinds of cheese. Some "fromagophiles" insist that it has more than 1,000. Only Italy can begin to match that kind of diversity.

From the Independent.

Rhinos at the beach

And you were thrilled to find a pretty shell . . .

A group of palaeontologists has lifted a 70,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros skull from a Kent beach.

The skull, found by amateur Chris Milburn at Swalecliffe, was in danger of being washed away by the sea.

The spring tides on Sunday gave the group just two hours to rescue the skull. It was lifted to loud cheers just minutes before the waves came in. . .

And while the skull was being lifted, the group discovered the jaw of another young woolly mammoth complete with a tooth nearby.

From the BBC.

Oldest Persian stylus?

Recent news from Iran:

The oldest Iranian Stylus, dating to the Middle Elamite era, 1550-1000 BC, which were used for inscribing mud tablets, has been discovered from Bondul Tepe, Fars province. . .

According to head of the excavation team of Bondul Tepe, Ehsan Yaghma'ii, the stylus has a simple structure and can easily be held in hand. One end of it is thick and triangular and the other is sharp and bold. The stylus is 9 centimeters long and is made of limestone. The inscribers could create texts in cuneiform by pressing the pen softly on the wet mud of the tablets.

Hadrian's Wall under siege

. . . under the boots of barbarians, no less:

HADRIAN’S WALL has survived barbarian invaders, smugglers and the 2,000-year march of history. Now its very survival has come under threat — from an army of walkers.

The erosion of the World Heritage Site is becoming so severe that the Roman wall could be placed on the World Heritage “in danger” list, experts told The Times yesterday.

Some 400,000 people have marched across the Hadrian’s Wall Path Trail since it was opened 18 months ago. They are banned from walking on the wall itself, yet many do so. One day last winter 800 Dutch bankers walked across the wall.

Although only a small fraction of the wall and its forts has been excavated, the fragile site is being eroded by heavy boots, archaeologists say. They note that only 20,000 visitors had been expected when the plans were made in the early 1990s.

From the Times of London.

York Minster stained glass update

Like all the stained glass at the Minster, the Great East Window – completed in 1408 – was removed for safety during the First and Second World Wars. Since being reinstalled in 1953, it underwent minor work in the 1970s.

Now, as part of a £30m project at the East End of the Minster, the 301 panels created by John Thornton, of Coventry, are to be removed in phases, cleaned, restored and returned. . .

Senior conservator Nick Teed said: "It is such a large scale proposition that it needs to be carefully thought through before we do anything at all. We have removed 12 panels for preliminary assessment from different areas, including the upper tracery."
Some of the panels have buckled badly over the years, while others are extremely dirty. Many have details with glass from other windows which does not match the original and extra lead has been added which today would not be necessary.

Full story here.

You don't buy art, you just rent it . . .

. . . at least that's the way the EU looks at it, now endorsed by a British parliamentary committee. The committee's report, "The Market for Art", covers much besides droit de suite (the BBC writeup focuses on the proposals to regulate art trading, which seem singlemindedly directed at the top end of the market with no consideration of the potential burdens on everyone else).

I confess to not having followed the debate over droit de suite that closely in recent years, but it seems terribly messy to have one region giving artists and their heirs a perpetual retroactive right to collect a commission on resale, while the rest of the world allows art buyers full and unconditional title to their purchases. On the other hand, a place that accepts the television tax might find nothing wrong with paying a tax on pictures that don't move as well.

Saving the first iron-framed building

Nobody passing a scruffy, half-derelict industrial estate on the outskirts of Shrewsbury would imagine that one of the battered, red-brick structures is the ancestor of today's skyscrapers - the first iron-framed building in the world.

Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of English Heritage, which has just bought the complex after helplessly watching it rot for years, is passionate about Ditherington Flax Mill, and describes it as "one of the most important buildings in England - or anywhere".

It was built in 1796 by John Marshall, a linen magnate, and his partners, the Benyon Brothers, who had good reason to dread fire in mill buildings: they had just suffered £10,000 worth of damage at a Leeds mill, of which only half was covered by insurance.

Read the rest in the Guardian.

Frida Kahlo's lost . . . clothes?

Hidden treasures have been found in the home of the iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo who died in 1954, including a wardrobe of 180 traditional dresses of the style in her famed self-portraits and earrings said to be a gift from Picasso.

A two-year renovation project had just started at the Blue House in the Coyoacan district of Mexico City, now a museum dedicated to Kahlo's life and art, when workers stumbled on the collection in a back room kept closed for many years. . .

The find includes shawls, shoes and indigenous jewellery as well as the Picasso earrings. Also found were images of the artist taken by her photographer father, a Hungarian immigrant.

Full story here.

Art theft updates

A Picasso painting which went missing from the Pompidou Centre in Paris has been recovered by police.

Following a tip-off, police traced the painting - worth 2.5m euros (£1.7m) - to a house in Paris where the painting was hidden behind a wardrobe.

Cubist painting Nature Morte a la Charlotte, completed in 1924, was reported missing in May last year from a restoration workshop.

From the BBC, which also is reporting:

Norwegian police have arrested and charged a man over the theft of Edvard Munch's masterpieces The Scream and the Madonna.

Police say they are optimistic they will now recover the works.

AND NOW a second suspect has been arrested.