Domesday Book online

At Christmas 1085 William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey to discover the resources and taxable values of all the boroughs and manors in England. He wanted to discover who owned what, how much it was worth, and how much was owed to him as King.

It was a massive enterprise, and the record of that survey, Domesday Book, was a remarkable achievement.

And as of today, the National Archives has placed it online. Check it out here.

UPDATE: Didn't realize until I started looking that the service is not only not free, it isn't even reasonably priced. £ 3.50 per .pdf page is pretty steep, and I very much wonder how many takers they will get. Casual browsers won't be buying, and serious researchers will probably go to a library where they can consult a Domesday facsimile or other Domesday reference volumes (more on such resources here).

Massacres of the innocents

A county in south-west China has ordered all 50,546 dogs to be killed to fight a rabies outbreak which has killed three people, state media say.

It has taken five days, but authorities in Mouding County in south-west China say they have killed almost all of the 50,000 dogs in the area.

Some of the dogs were clubbed to death in the street as their owners watched. Other dog owners took matters into their own hands, poisoning or electrocuting their pets. They were paid around $0.60 (£0.32) for each dog in compensation.

From the BBC, which also reports:

A second Chinese local government has launched a controversial mass cull of dogs in a bid to tackle rabies.

Officials in Jining, in eastern Shandong province, said 16 people had died of the disease this year.

They said they would kill all dogs within five km of 16 villages where rabies had been found, suggesting 500,000 dogs were under threat.

Be safe, be wirelessless

If your computer can connect to wireless networks, there's a good chance it is vulnerable to being hacked. The problem is the device drivers for the wireless connection, so all operating systems are at risk. Read more here; if the term "wirelesslessness" takes off, you can say you first spotted it here.

UPDATE here: apparently Apple tried to make it look as if the fault lay with third-party drivers, though now it seems Apple's own drivers are equally vulnerable.

More on the Hermitage thefts

Not surprisingly, the original reports of the value of the missing artworks were on the low side:

The museum estimates the value of the 221 objects at $5 million, but art experts who have seen the full list told the newspaper Izvestia that the market value was 20 times that.

Meanwhile, at least one of the missing items has turned up:

A religious icon that was among more than 220 items stolen from the Hermitage Museum has been found in a rubbish bin in St Petersburgh.

Police said an anonymous phone call led them to the wooden object, known to some as the Church of the All Saints, which was recovered from a bin outside their office.

Inventory control at the Hermitage does not seem very tight:

Police have said that theft could have taken place at any time in the last 30 years

The NY Times reports:

In an article posted on its Web site, the daily newspaper Izvestia provided what it described as a list of the missing items, including gold-plated silver cups from the 18th and 19th centuries, silver and gold crosses, and dozens of icons encased in silver and gold. It did not give a source for its information but said some of the items had been gifts to Czar Nicholas II.

Returned Kirchner to auction

Barely a week after the German government returned a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of Jewish collectors who owned it before World War II, Christie’s said yesterday that it would auction the work in New York on Nov. 8.

Experts estimate that the painting, “Street Scene, Berlin,’’ a colorful canvas of an urban crowd painted mainly in blues with a prostitute in a bright red dress toward the left, could sell for $18 million to $25 million. It is considered one of Kirchner’s finest street scenes, painted at the height of his career.

From today's NY Times.

Ancient frog marrow found

This Discovery News writeup gets it wrong in the first line:

The first fossilized bone marrow has been found in the bones of 10-million-year-old frogs, salamanders and tadpoles by scientists working in northeastern Spain, the leader of an international research team said.

The significance of the find is precisely that the marrow isn't fossilized, as comes out a few paragraphs later:

"The original organic material is still there," according to McNamara, whose research was published in this month's Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America.

"It is still organic in composition, whereas most traces of soft tissues you find in the fossil record, which are very rare anyway, have rotted away and just the shape of the tissue is preserved in mineral," she said.

Preserving digital photos

The BBC reports today on a study showing that while nearly all Britons have digital cameras, relatively few are doing much to back up or otherwise safeguard the pictures they take. No surprise to anyone, I'd think, but a good occasion to note that your best and most practical option is probably burning the image files onto an archival-quality CD or DVD. With the sheer number of optical disks out there, there won't be any problem finding something to read them for many years to come.

Previous post on archival disks here; most of the links no longer seem to work, though they did up until very recently. Google caches of some here and here.

Bronze Age boating in Scotland

IN ANCIENT times, when Scotland was virtually covered in dense forest, there was only one way to get around. Traveling by boat helped early Scots to find food and trade goods with their neighbours.

Now, with the excavation of a 3,000-year-old log boat, archaeologists are hoping to learn more about how prehistoric Scots used the vast network of rivers and lochs. . .

While the remains of 30 log boats survive today – the oldest was a stern portion of a log boat, carbon dated to 1800BC found in Dumfriesshire in 1973 – most are in extremely poor condition. The Carpow boat is not only still in one piece but it also has an intact transom board at the stern.

Full story here.

Kerdruelland

Have you heard of it? You will. Hint: it's near Carnac in Brittany.

Archaeologists working on the Kerdruelland site over the past nine months have discovered not one but 60 "lost" menhirs. They believe that they were erected - and then destroyed - during the "middle period" of the standing stones era in western Europe, in around 2500 BC. . .

Because the Kerdruelland menhirs have been preserved in mud and silt for 4,500 years, they should offer important new information on how such alignments were created and why. At the well-known sites, such as Carnac and Stonehenge, some of the stones have been moved or propped up or stolen or added over the centuries. Here the stones, up to 2m long, lie just as they did after they were felled four-and-half millennia ago.

At neolithic sites elsewhere, the soil of the period has been eroded by the ravages of time and man. At Kerdruelland, the neolithic sub-soil - the soil on which the stones were erected - has been preserved intact. This offers a cornucopia of possible new archaeological finds. Already, a brief dig has yielded a rich harvest of flint tools and shards of pottery.

Full article here.

Impending collapse on the Palatine

Everyone has heard of sinking Venice, but only a restricted circle of academics wring their hands over crumbling Rome. Yet, for lack of funds, the city's ancient centre is inexorably deteriorating.

Now, though, the issue has been given new urgency by climate change. One night last November, a wall on the Palatine Hill collapsed. . .

The wall's collapse raised an alarming question: if the rain could bring down an apparently solid, 400-year-old structure, what might it do to 2000-year-old buildings suspected to be unstable? . . .

As the authorities wait for the engineer's report [on the structures of the Palatine], emergency repairs are being carried out on two areas where the risks are all too visible. One is Tiberius's palace, which cascades down the north side of the Palatine, overlooking the Forum. The other is the Domus Aurea, Nero's palace, beyond the Colosseum.

Full article here.

Hermitage theft

Russia's famed State Hermitage Museum on Monday reported the theft of more than 220 works, including jewelry and enameled objects, worth around $5 million, an incident that highlighted the poor security at Russian cultural institutions.

The Hermitage -- housed in the ornate Winter Palace of the Russian czars in St. Petersburg, overlooking the Neva River -- said museum employees were likely involved in the thefts.

In a statement, the museum said staff members learned of the missing items during a routine inventory check. When the check started, the curator in charge of most of the collection where the theft occurred died suddenly at his workplace, the statement said. The museum did not identify the curator or say when or how he died. It also did not identify specific items that were stolen

Read the rest here, including this bit of background:

In 1996, customs officials in St. Petersburg detained a Russian tourist heading to New York with three suitcases full of antique books, documents signed by Peter the Great and other Russian czars, and rare drawings and postage stamps.

Some of the books were marked as belonging to the "Imperial Hermitage Library," and the entire haul had an estimated value of millions of dollars.

That same year, an ex-army officer pilfered 200 leather-bound volumes, some dating back centuries and worth as much as $2 million, from Moscow's State Public Historical Library.