Puritanism vs preservation in China

A centuries-old brothel teetering on the verge of collapse has red-faced Chinese officials pondering heritage versus morality behind closed doors, state media reported on Thursday.

A local government in Jinggang, a town in central Hunan province, must decide whether to restore crumbling Hongtaifang, a brothel established in 1733, and face the ire of residents who see it as debauched, Xinhua news agency said.

From the Scotsman.

Medieval pollution, still with us

Scientists have tracked down the source of high levels of heavy metal pollution at a site in southern France: medieval metallurgical workshops. Sandrine Baron, Jean Carignan, and Alain Ploquin of the Center for Petrographic and Geochemical Research in Nancy, France, report that the lead, antimony, arsenic, copper, and zinc residues left behind there more than 800 years ago still pose a potential health threat. . .

Mont-Lozère Massif, the site of medieval workshop remnants that they studied, is in the Cévennes National Park, where people fish, hunt, farm, and camp.

Full story here.

Hermitage theft update

Russia's prosecutor general's office announced Thursday that charges of theft have been levelled against the husband and son of the late curator who had been in charge of the collection, as well as another man known to the family.

Charged are Nikolai Zavadsky, his son Nikolai Zavadsky Jr. and Ivan Sobolev, a university professor.

Authorities believe the thefts from the museum's precious metals and stones collection had been going on for a long time with the help of the late Larissa Zavadsky, who died in 2005.

Full article here. Meanwhile, this just in:

Another item stolen from the Hermitage Museum has been found in St. Petersburg, the local police said.

"A silver-framed icon was found at 14.00 Moscow time [10.00 GMT] in a luggage locker at the Finlyandsky railway station," a police source said, adding that the location had been revealed in an anonymous phone call.

The icon is the 25th recovered item on a list of 221 works of art reported stolen from one of the world's richest art collections in the world. The theft had been uncovered during a routine check at the end of July.

Looks like the Russian police are playing rough, if this story is any indication:

Russian prosecutors have released Maxim Shepel, detained on suspicion of the Hermitage museum theft in St. Petersburg. The antiquarian’s lawyer, Andrey Pavlov said Shepel had become a witness. The new status in the trial cost him dear. Maxim Shepel suffered an eye injury and was admitted to a psychiatric ward of the jail hospital.

Ancient Peruvian artifact recovered in London

An ancient Peruvian headdress looted from an archaeological site almost 20 years ago was recovered by police in London yesterday.

The golden headdress, depicting a sea god, which dates from the end of the Peruvian Mochica civilisation around AD700. It was handed to a firm of solicitors in central London by one of its clients, who did not know it had been stolen, Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad said yesterday.

Full story here.

English tornado

Oz, here we come:

Five archaeologists were hurt when the temporary canteen they were using to shelter from a freak tornado was picked up and thrown through the air.

The archaeologists and students working at Baston Fen, Lincolnshire, were inside the portable building when the twister struck during a storm, flipping them over as the structure was thrown around.

From the Telegraph.

ADDENDUM: More here, including photos.

Craziness in the air

While we're waiting to hear if Catherine Mayo is certifiably insane, what about this?

Local authorities, working with British officials, continued to investigate yesterday how she managed to board the flight with the water, cigarette lighters, and hand lotion. Mayo also had a short screwdriver and matches, both of which are permitted.

Why would matches, of all things, still be permitted aboard when even bottled water had been banned? There is no conceivable purpose to having matches in the cabin on a no-smoking flight.

Happy birthday, H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft has been high on my to-reread list for a number of years; I'd never been to Providence when I read Lovecraft the first time through, and now I live only five minutes' walk from his old neighborhood.

The Rhode Island Historical Society is sponsoring a Lovecraft birthday walking tour this Saturday. Read about it here.

Minimus mus

It's only a couple of weeks more until the kids go back to school, but until then it's still summer schedule for our family, and by extension, Cronaca.

I see that Paleojudaica is back from Vindolanda; it is to Jim Davila's review that I just purchased Minimus the Mouse's (actually, Barbara Bell's) Starting out in Latin. My seven-year-old immediately seized on it and hasn't put it down yet. She's very keen on languages (listen here to what her father taught her when she wasn't even two and a half), but I regret to say that to date we've not been very good about settling on just one to learn really well. She does have a very broad, if haphazard, foundation established, though . . . .

Portrait of Mary Queen of Scots rediscovered

A painting of Mary Queen of Scots, one of only two thought to have been made in her lifetime, has been discovered - in the National Portrait Gallery's very own store. The portrait was bought for £50 by the gallery in 1916 at Christie's. But later it was written off as an 18th century fake and was left to gather dust.

One day, however, Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th-century collections at the gallery, decided to take a second look at the work, her instinct telling her it could just be original. The work was x-rayed. Beneath a layer of ugly yellow varnish and a dull, dark background lay an oval device framing the face, painted to look like marble, and the words Maria Scotiae (Mary of Scotland). The overpainting is thought to date from the 18th century.

From the Guardian. Can't find anything on the National Portrait Gallery's website, but the BBC has an article with pictures before and after cleaning; a previous article notes:

Mary Queen of Scots' death mask, her sapphire ring and a casket worth £1.5m have gone on show in Edinburgh. . .

The items come from the stately home of Lennoxlove in East Lothian.

Columbus, the tyrant

Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians.

As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people's ears and noses, parading women naked through the streets and selling them into slavery.

From the Guardian.

Lost Maltese catacomb rediscovered

After almost 50 years, one of Malta’s most intriguing Roman catacombs has been re-discovered by officers of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage within a traffic roundabout close to the Malta International Airport on Friday.

The important archaeological discovery was made at Hal Resqun, a site on the outskirts of Gudja. The discovery consists of a Roman Catacomb which had been originally excavated by Sir Temistocles Zammit in 1912. However since then the catacomb has been completely obliterated under a wave of debris and asphalt.

Read the rest here.

Burrowing trilobites

Trilobites, the extinct marine creatures famous to fossil-hunters everywhere, may have once done digging of their own, say British and Swedish researchers.

Rocks found in a Swedish limestone quarry contain the remains of trilobites inside networks of tunnels, which appear to have been subsurface thoroughfares for the little bug-like critters.

From Discovery News.

Chicken of the sea? Not!

Scientists in Australia have discovered a fossilized ancient relative of the blue whale with a fearsome razor-toothed appearance that has seen it dubbed "the T-rex of the oceans".

The fossil is the latest in a list of ancient creatures including sabre-toothed kangaroos, horned "devil wallabies" and the unlikely-sounding "demon duck of doom" that are reshaping views of Australia's prehistoric past.

Full story here. And there's more coming:

Museum Victoria's head of science John Long will also this week present findings from expeditions into a cave in Australia's remote Nullarbor Plain that yielded a fossil treasure trove, including the only complete marsupial lion skeleton ever found.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime fossil," Long said. "For the first time we could see the complete limbs and feet, revealing an opposable thumb with a huge retractable claw which was used to disembowel prey.

"It was like the velociraptor of the mammal world."

Victory Day

Rhode Island goes its own way: first in declaring independence, last in ratifying the Constitution, and now the last to continue commemorating the end of WW2. The Providence Journal has a roundup of the events here.The actual anniversary of the Japanese surrender is tomorrow.