Moshe Dayan: to archeologists, no hero

This is no news at all to anyone familiar with the recent history of the antiquities trade, but is surely generally unknown to the general public:

Stunning military victories made Israeli general Moshe Dayan an iconic figure on the international stage, but his reputation for looting antiquities is little known outside the country where his myth was born.

Across three decades until his death in 1981, Dayan, of the trademark eye patch, established a vast collection of antiquities acquired through illicit excavations. He also traded in archaeological finds in Israel and abroad, antiquities experts say.

“Moshe Dayan didn't deal in archaeology. He dealt in antiquities plundering,” said Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “He was a criminal. He knew he was breaking the law. He knew that all his activity was against the law, and he did it nevertheless” . . .

The best known of Dayan's “collecting expeditions” — and one he wasn't able to deny — occurred near Tel Aviv in 1968. There, he was badly injured in a landslide while robbing a burial cave and hospitalized for three weeks . . .

Nor did he limit his activities to Israel proper, taking advantage of his positions in the military to extend his trajectory to territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. . .

“Probably most of Dayan's looting was done in areas conquered after 1967 and under his own military rule,” Kletter wrote. “There he faced no democratic institutions to oppose him.”

Read the rest here.

Roman coin hoard in Wales

Farm contractors have unearthed 2,000 Roman coins beneath a field at a farm near Carmarthen. . .

The exact location of the discovery is being kept secret to protect the site from treasure hunters. The HM Coroner has been informed.

The coins are thought to have been lying just 12 inches beneath the surface of a field

From the BBC.

Etruscan paintings revealed by tombarolo

A REPENTENT tomb raider led Italian police and historians to what has been described as a spectacular find - 2,700-year-old murals by the Etruscan people.

The paintings are the oldest of their kind in the world and were discovered after a 'tombarolo' who was arrested in another investigation turned informer. . .

The murals were found at the site of the Etruscan city of Veio, 25 miles north of Rome. . .

Full article here. More in the Times of London, with a picture.

The Cloisters' new old glass

What's been happening at the Cloisters? Quite a bit, lately -- including a major new stained glass installation. Catch up on the story in the NY Times (with slide show).

Two scoops of octopus on a sugar cone, please

One more for the list of things available only in Japan. Cute logo, too.

MORE here on some other special Japanese ice cream flavors: cactus, fried chicken wing, crab, eel, fish and brandy, shrimp, and wasabi.

Not that the gaijin can't hold their own. Blue cheese ice cream, anyone?

Prehistoric waterbird discovery

Dozens of fossils of an ancient loon-like creature that some say is the missing link in bird evolution have been discovered in northwest China.

The remains of 40 of the nearly modern amphibious birds, so well-preserved that some even have their feathers, were found in Gansu province, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found. . .

The remains were dated to about 110 million years ago, making them the oldest for the group Ornithurae, which includes all modern birds and their closest extinct relatives.

Full article here.

Paying not to wait

Markets in everything, indeed:

Drivers in three US cities will soon be able to earn a buck or two just for vacating a parking space. SpotScout is a website that matches people about to leave a parking spot with those looking for one. Using a cellphone, drivers tell SpotScout when they will leave their parking spot, where it is, and how much they will sell this information for.

From the ever-estimable Marginal Revolution.

Strictly speaking, SpotScout's new service is establishing a market not in parking places, but in information (though their website makes it clear that they are also doing the former -- as in allowing customers to sublet private parking places and even driveways as timeshares). And if the idea were to be implemented fully, participation shouldn't be restricted to drivers: passersby should also be able to cash in by calling in and reporting parking spots that are empty or being vacated, or for that matter parking meters that are soon to expire. Designing parking meters that automatically call in their expiration times might be the next logical development, providing another income source for cities (or parking meter operators, if meter operations have been subcontracted).

The SpotScout website makes no mention of it, but it seems just a matter of time before we see something similar for, say, selling places in lines. My in-laws, for example, run estate sales; when there's a lot of good stuff, dealers will camp out overnight to be first in the door. Some will hire others to do the waiting for them, but many more would if only they knew how. Of course, it would be yet more efficient to simply auction off places in line and let everyone get a good night's sleep in their own beds. It's not going to happen anytime soon in this case, however: it's another instance of deep-rooted attachment to first-come, first-served as the embodiment of egalitarianism.

Although I wonder how much longer this will last. Lining up for days to get concert tickets may save paying the scalpers/ticket agents, but isn't exactly a realistic option for anyone gainfully employed. And once there is an open market in those tickets, how many of those obtained by long waits or by lottery end up getting cashed in on?

Getting back to examples in the antiques trade, I once got to a California show on the late side, and found myself at the end of a long line. I was debating whether to just bag it, when a couple of dealers came out and announced that they were giving away some extra tickets, each permitting immediate entry for two people. These tickets were quickly claimed, but I immediately asked the lucky couple nearest me if they would sell me their ticket for $60. They accepted, though flabbergasted (the husband kept saying, "that's crazy"), I ran to the entrance along with another savvy buyer who covered the other $30, and began shopping. Within a half-hour I had repaid my investment severalfold, with items that others would surely have scooped up before me otherwise.

Bat day

Not baseball (though today was our last T-ball game), but a real, flying bat -- a surprise visitor on our second floor last night. Still haven't figured out how it got in (through the fireplace?), but once an unscreened window was opened, it headed right out.

Which led by a rather convoluted path to the question of what the French word for bat was, and then why such a strange name. The word is "chauve-souris", or "bald mouse". What a weird feature to seize upon: of all things, baldness.

Japan vs the whales

Seems as if there's been much more coverage of this in the Australian and UK media than here in the USA:

Japan has succeeded in buying the votes that will give it control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) later this week, in a major step towards bringing back commercial hunting of whales.

The pro-whaling nation has gained the support of three more small countries to give it a definite majority in the IWC, and so begin in earnest its attack on the international whaling moratorium which has been in force for 20 years.

Full story here. Yet as the Times of London notes:

JAPANESE whalers have been throwing away tons of their catches at sea because of a slump in consumption that has resulted in a vast whale meat surplus. . .

“The whale meat diet is becoming more and more obsolete in Japan,” the author of the report, Junko Sakuma, of the Dolphin and Whale Action Network, said yesterday. “The Japanese Government has long been blatantly (telling) the world that we need whale meat as a nation, but it must be challenged”. . .

In 2000, the wholesale price of red whale meat was 3,760 yen (£18) per kg; today the same amount of meat has halved in value to 1,900 yen (£9). An opinion poll four years ago indicated that 13 per cent of Japanese eat whale meat.

The same article points out:

• Japan has recruited 21 developing nations into the International Whaling Commission, including several Caribbean and East African countries

• The annual fees for a developing country were £21,000 until 2002, when they were reduced to £10,500 and then further to £6,500 this year

• Several countries have indicated that Japan pays their annual fees, including the Dominican Republic and the Solomon Islands. Grenada’s funding is under investigation

• Japan has also made grants of between $14 million (£7.6 million) and $51 million in fisheries aid to Antigua and Barbuda, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent

• Some landlocked countries, such as Mali and Mongolia, are members of the commission, although they conduct no whaling. Japan has been Mongolia’s largest aid donor since 1991, and Mongolia’s presence is thought to be a result of Japanese recruitment

UPDATE: By the narrowest of margins Japan's coup was thwarted -- this time.

On with her head!

For the first time in possibly 170 years, a Roman marble statue of Venus will be reunited with its head. Both pieces are going to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where conservators will piece them back together.

The museum bought the charmingly prudish portrait of the goddess of love — called Aphrodite by the Greeks and Venus by the Romans — for $968,000 at a Sotheby's auction in New York on June 6. A private collector in Houston, Texas, agreed to sell the head at auction to the buyer of the body. The head, which sold for about $50,000, was last documented attached to the body in 1836.

From Yahoo News.

Laotian "living fossil" observed alive

Images have been obtained of a live Laotian rock rat, the animal science now believes to be the sole survivor of an ancient group of rodents.

The kha-nyou, as it is known locally, was trapped by an expedition in May.

The pictures show a friendly, furry creature about the size of a squirrel that waddles a bit like a duck.

Experts say the kha-nyou can trace its line to a rodent family that initial studies had suggested became extinct more than 11 million years ago.

From the BBC. Previous posts here and here.

Cretaceous cobwebs

Spiral orb webs, which to many people typify spiders, were catching insects in their sticky silk while the dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

True orb weaving spiders found trapped in amber from 121-115 million years ago are the oldest of their type yet found. . .

The fossil spiders were found embedded in amber from Alava in northern Spain. They date to the Lower Cretaceous.

From the BBC.

Old gear beats new?

How often do we hear about the handicaps past sportsmen and adventurers labored under? That may be true enough when it comes to, say, bicycles, but recent experiments suggest that old-time mountaineers did pretty well by their clothing:

The results of a unique experiment on Mount Everest confirm that the clothing of the 1924 climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine would not have prevented them from reaching the summit, as many had believed.

The findings are a step closer to proving the men could have reached the top, 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary.

Over the past few weeks, climber Graham Hoyland has been putting the old-style clothing worn on the fateful Mallory expedition to the ultimate field test on the world's highest mountain.

Wearing replica gear made from gabardine, wool, cotton and silk, he wanted to disprove the common myth that the 1920s climbers were ill-equipped to reach the summit.

Full story at the BBC. It seems the clothing was not just good enough, but in many respects superior to what is now state of the art:

The layered natural materials used to construct the garments were found to be excellent at trapping air next to the skin.

The outer layer of gabardine was hardwearing and water-resistant yet breathable. But the clothing was also lighter than modern gear - the lightest ever to be used on Everest.

Parsons said: "The results stand out as a challenge for future outdoor innovators because Mallory's clothing and footwear was 20% and 40% lighter respectively". . .

Hoyland also discovered that the clothes were more comfortable to wear than modern day gear.

Libraries in crisis

It's a problem everywhere, it seems -- though the situation in older American cities gets rather complex where the "public" library system is actually a private nonprofit:

When David Lammy, the culture minister, wrote to local authorities at the beginning of the year, urging them to keep public libraries open, about 50 were threatened with closure. His words, supported by no more tangible help, seem to have had a negative effect, for today the figure is more than 100, out of a total of just over 3,000. This is a crisis.

Councils, more heavily reliant than ever on central government funding, flounder in attempts to balance their budgets. First, they closed public lavatories; now it is the turn of public libraries, as an "easy option". Yet nothing could be as harmful to the people that councillors purport to serve.

Even in areas such as Buckinghamshire, where villagers have volunteered to take on the running of their libraries, they have done so with the galling knowledge that the proportion of the council budget spent on libraries has fallen by 60 per cent in the time that council tax has risen by 140 per cent.

From the Telegraph.

When the French fought alongside us

The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, in collaboration with the Rhode Island Rochambeau Commission, will host a symposium and historical re-enactment on Saturday, June 17, 2006, in commemoration of the 225th anniversary of the historic march to Yorktown, Va. The symposium, titled France and the American Revolution, will be followed by a horse-led procession from The College Green to the Rhode Island State House for a military review and ceremony. The public is invited to take part in the procession.

In 1781, American and French armies under the command of Gen. George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, embarked on a 600-mile march from Rhode Island to Virginia, where they fought and defeated the British on the Yorktown peninsula. The victory ended the major battles of the American Revolutionary War. Prior to the march, Brown University, then named the College of Rhode Island, served as an encampment site for French troops, and the College Edifice, now University Hall, was turned into a military hospital.

More on the symposium and related events and here and here.

Erasing the past in Turkey

An inscription at a medieval dungeon translated as "Where God does not exist" caused a politically-charged spat in Turkey Tuesday as the Islamist-rooted government faced accusations of having ordered the erasure of the sign.

Newspapers quoted the head of the Archeology Museum in Bodrum, Yasar Yildiz, as saying that the culture ministry ordered the 500-year-old inscription scraped away after government inspectors decided that it had "no historical and archeological value".

Full story here.

The Dangerous Book for Boys

A book teaching kids how to make paper aeroplanes, climb trees and play conkers has become a surprise best-seller.

The Dangerous Book for Boys has shot to number five in Amazon.co.uk's Hot 100 charts since it was published last month . . .

It explains how to build a treehouse, fish, skim stones and make a catapult. There are also chapters on insects, pirates, coin tricks, marbles and dinosaurs. . .

The book also includes stories of courage from historical heroes including Scott of the Antarctic, Robert the Bruce, Lord Nelson and Douglas Bader.

Conn added: "Their example is more important than ever. Not one of them would have understood the health and safety culture. If they had, Scott would have stayed at home and Douglas Bader might have kept his legs and lost the Battle of Britain."

From Ananova.

Teaching conformism and mediocrity: The Rainbow Fish

There are few children's books that I despise more than Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish. Encouraging sharing and openness is fine, but in its few short pages The Rainbow Fish manages to twist what ought to be a simple parable into something truly perverse, whose main message is that to be happy and accepted one should abandon all that makes one special and become just like everyone else. Forget respect for differences, forget appreciation of diversity: the lesson here is closer to the Japanese saying, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down."

Appallingly enough, my daughter's school has just assigned The Rainbow Fish as the centerpiece of their summer reading assignment for kids entering second grade -- the theme for discussion being "friendship". Yet there is no friendship in The Rainbow Fish, only conformity. No blame accrues to the fish who ostracize the Rainbow Fish, accepting him only when he gives them all that he has and all that they want (which ends up being the eradication of his individuality). You will look in vain for any suggestion that friendship is a two-way street, or that friendship can be mutually enriching, making the whole world a better place. The world of The Rainbow Fish is relentlessly zero-sum.

How is it that so many see nothing wrong with the book? Many among Amazon's reader-reviewers see it for what it is, but many others clearly don't -- a blindness shared, it seems, by a good number of teachers and school administrators.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this assignment. There's a snake in the garden, and it will have to be dealt with.

Lascaux

Back in the mid- to late 1960s, my family visited the famed caves of the Dordogne. Even in summer they were not heavily touristed, and we got to see cave paintings that have now been off-limits to the public for decades. Even then, however, access to the most famous French cave of them all -- Lascaux -- had been restricted. So I didn't get to see it as a boy, and it doesn't seem likely I'll see it as a man:

For more than 17,000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France survived the ravages of history, unseen and undiscovered. . .

But despite its robust longevity, Lascaux is surprisingly fragile. Five years ago, after the ill-conceived installation of new climatic equipment, Lascaux suffered a fungal infection that threatened to destroy in a few years what thousands of years had left largely unscathed. The cave's custodians are still struggling to eradicate this scourge, a nasty fungus called Fusarium solani . . .

. . . to keep the fungus in retreat, a team of restorers enters the cave every two weeks--dressed, as everyone who enters now must be, in hooded biohazard suits, booties and face masks--to remove filaments from the walls. "They tell us the cave's condition is stable," says a member of the Scientific Committee of Lascaux Cave, which the French Ministry of Culture set up in 2002 to deal with the problem. "But that's what they say about Ariel Sharon."

Full article in Time.

Redating the Edomites

In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites . . . and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon. . .

Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history?

An international team of archaeologists has recorded radiocarbon dates that they say show the tribes of Edom may have indeed come together in a cohesive society as early as the 12th century B.C., certainly by the 10th. The evidence was found in the ruins of a large copper-processing center and fortress at Khirbat en-Nahas, in the lowlands of what was Edom and is now part of Jordan.

From the NY Times.

Another Turkish museum scandal

The manager of a Turkish museum's storehouse was arrested Tuesday after 545 ancient coins were switched with fakes on his watch, officials said Tuesday.

The Culture Ministry, already embarrassed by the revelation last month that at least two pieces in a separate museum - from the 6th century B.C. treasure of King Croesus - were also fakes, had pressed for the manager's arrest. . .

The 545 silver coins were dated to the 4th century B.C. and were changed with fakes in 1998, Anatolia said. It did not say where the original coins ended up.

From the Guardian.

"Smart dust" is here

Tracking devices are getting smaller all the time:

Smart Dust takes this all to a new level by being small enough to be disguised as dirt, the kind you can pick up in your shoes or clothing. Each bit of Smart Dust can be given a unique serial number that, when hit with an "interrogation signal" from troops on the ground, or aircraft overhead, is broadcast back. Some forms of Smart Dust are believed to be in use in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also believed that Smart Dust played a role in the recent death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

From StrategyPage. Now if only we could sprinkle a layer of smart dust over vulnerable archeological sites to help track illegal excavations . . . .

Spy vs Spy, redux

A court in the Czech capital Prague has begun hearing a 50-year-old Cold War murder case in which the wife of a senior French politician was killed. . .

Two former agents of the communist-era secret police are accused of sending a parcel bomb disguised as a cigar box. . .

Prosecutors say the Soviet KGB got the two Czechoslovak agents to send the bomb in 1957. . .

Mr Tremeaud - the intended target - was working for the EU's earliest precursor, the European Coal and Steel Community.

According to prosecutors, the KGB hoped that by killing him and blaming neo-Nazis, they could destroy the Franco-German rapprochement driving the fledgling European integration.

From the BBC. Yet another reminder that the Cold War was far from cold. I must look up a reference to link, but I recall reading some years back an estimate of the number of political assassinations in western Europe carried out by Soviet agents, and the toll came to several hundred. The awareness of which -- along with my own memories of growing up under the shadow of nuclear armageddon -- leaves me shaking my head whenever I walk by campus posters bewailing the present-day "climate of fear".

Ring tones for dogs

. . . and kids:

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear. . .

"When I heard about it I didn't believe it at first," said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. "But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could."

From today's NY Times. Check out if you can here it here (warning all kids -- I can hear it, and it's really annoying).

Ironic, given this:

The cellphone ring tone [is] the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

Though what about their poor toddlers, and faithful dogs?

Big questions from little questioners

In the words of our five-year-old:
"Where does stuff come from?" and "How does stuff come alive?"

It would be easier if she would just ask, say, why the sky is blue. . . .

Return of the long-lost California millipede

The world's leggiest creature is missing-in-action no more. A scientist found a rare species of millipede, last seen 80 years ago in central California, and has collected several of the inch-long bugs for study.

This millipede has more than 600 legs, about twice the average millipede — despite the name, which means "thousand-legged." Of the estimated 10,000 species, only one, Illacme plenipes, comes close to living up to its name and thrives only in California.

From Discovery News.

The other battle of 1066

The final push in a long-running fight to save the site of the "other battle of 1066" will begin tomorrow.

Campaigners will be appealing against a housing development on a water meadow near the scene of the Battle of Fulford, which is on the outskirts of York.

It was seen by some as a crucial factor in Saxon King Harold's defeat less than a month later by William, Duke of Normandy, at Hastings.

Objectors believe that a proposed approach road for the 750-home project will obliterate the heritage site.

From the Telegraph.

Hitler's bunker

THE site of Hitler’s bunker, long one of Berlin’s best-kept secrets, is now officially a tourist attraction.

After more than 60 years the city has reversed a policy of concealing the location of the underground rooms where the Nazi leader steered the Third Reich towards its downfall, and where he killed himself with poison and a pistol. There is now a sign in German and English on the site, close to the Brandenburg Gate.

One in four visitors to the city is curious about the bunker but, until yesterday, was given no help in finding the patch of grass and concrete.

From the Times of London.