Polonium mystery

There's been a lot of contradictory information published recently about the availability of polonium 210; today's NY Times has an article that cuts through a lot of the smoke:

Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. . .

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

And though it has now been reported that British scientists have traced the polonium 210 that poisoned Alexander Litvinenko to a Russian nuclear power plant, the NYT article explains why this is not at all as significant as one might assume:

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices”. . .

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world’s polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products, meant that investigations of the toxin’s provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

UPDATE: If you want to buy American, however, you can do it here (hat tip to reader Glenn Bowen).

Curse tablet find in Leicester

The 1,700-year-old tablet to the Roman god Maglus, discovered at a site on the city's Vine Street, features an ancient curse aimed at a thief.

Written on a sheet of lead in the second or third century AD, the curse reads: "To the god Maglus, I give the wrongdoer who stole the cloak of Servandus. Silvester, Riomandus (etc.) ... that he destroy him before the ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandus?" The tablet also features a list of 18 or 19 suspects, all of them inhabitants of Roman Leicester.

Article here; note that the subtitle (which appears on several other writeups as well) claiming that the excavators are calling this "the oldest curse in the world" is surely mistaken: the antiquity of curse tablets is well known to archeologists, who would surely not have made such a claim for this relatively late example. More on British curse tablets here, and on Greek curse tablets here.

Early Christian find in the heart of London

Archaeologists excavating near the edge of Trafalgar Square in London have found evidence of early Christianity in England, suggesting the area has a much older religious significance than was originally believed.

A team from the Museum of London has discovered a hoard of what is almost certainly royal treasure, buried in a mysterious, empty human grave laid out in the traditional Christian manner - east to west. . .

St Martin-in-the-Fields - immediately to the north of Trafalgar Square, the empty grave appears to form part of a previously unknown ancient cemetery, dating back more than one and a half millennia. Archaeologists have also discovered 24 other graves on the site, all still holding the remains of their occupants. . .

The empty grave, judging by its treasure, and several of the other early graves in the cemetery are estimated to date from the time that Bertha was Queen of Kent - 590 to 610.

And there's more:

The excavations have also revealed a second mystery. At least one of the other graves was pre-Anglo-Saxon and dates from the very late Roman or immediate post-Roman period. The burial, in a stone sarcophagus, was also Christian - like virtually all the others - but was 200 years older.

This raises the possibility that the site had Christian links long before the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England, possibly as the location of a small church or mortuary chapel built there in the very late Roman period, immediately before the Anglo-Saxon pagan conquest. This would mean St Martin-in-the-Fields is London's oldest surviving ecclesiastical site, predating St Paul's by some two centuries

Full article in the Independent. Another article on the excavations, with a rather different slant, at the 24 Hour Museum. And yet another at the BBC.

Rembrandt/not Rembrandt

Some disputes are destined to remain forever unsettled -- although the give and take does usually add considerably to our stock of knowledge:

The arguments [over Rembrandt attributions] seem certain to run for some time yet, judging by a new exhibition in which the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford concludes that four works dismissed as imitations by critics are in fact Rembrandt masterpieces.

Dr Christopher Brown, whose analysis of the works forms the basis of the exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London, delivers a withering critique of the Rembrandt specialists who have rejected them in the past.

One of the works, Good Samaritan (1633), was dismissed by the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), which has been classifying the artist's works since the 1960s. The work revealed an "execution so weak and the architectural details so insecure, that the painting must be considered an old copy after a lost original," the RRP said.

But after a discoloured varnish was removed from the piece in cleaning, a fluent, confident handling of the subject was exposed, plus a palette consistent with that period of Rembrandt's work and the monogram RHL (Rembrandt, son of Harmen, of Leiden).

Full article here. The Wallace Collection website is here. More at Codart.

Mummygate!

A village postman was detained by police yesterday after offering for sale a lock of hair and other items from the mummy of the Pharaoh Rameses II.

Jean-Michael Diebolt, from St Egrève, near Grenoble, was facing possible charges of receiving stolen property after he put an advertisement on the internet offering the hair, samples of the embalming resin and fragments of bandages from the 3,200-year-old remains of the Egyptian ruler.

The affair was being taken seriously because the 50-year-old postman, who is a part-time journalist and writer, said that his father was a member of a team of experts who analysed the mummy in France in 1976. . .

While police were trying to check the authenticity of the items, Mr Diebolt’s action sparked a diplomatic incident between Paris and Cairo. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said: “If these elements are authentic, it would be a scandal that would risk harming relations between France and Egypt.”

The French Foreign Ministry said that it was following the affair closely.

From the Times of London.

I see no active listing on eBay France matching the description noted above, although one joker is proclaiming himself the modern Ramses and offering his own hair for sale, eliciting some banter from questioners.

Antikythera update

More at the BBC on perhaps the greatest artifact of ancient technology:

The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles.

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses.

The elaborate arrangement of bronze gears may also have displayed planetary information.

"This is as important for technology as the Acropolis is for architecture," said Professor John Seiradakis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and one of the team. "It is a unique device."

It ought to enjoy parallel fame; that it does not says quite a bit about the teaching of history.

Writing in Nature, the team says that the mechanism was "technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards".

First the museums, now the collectors

Though collectors at a rather special level, it must be noted:

Seeking to build on its success in bargaining with a few American museums, Italy has asked the New York collector Shelby White to consider returning more than 20 ancient artifacts that it argues were illegally mined from its soil, officials involved in the negotiations say.

The request was relayed this month in a letter to Ms. White’s lawyers, they said. Rather than implicitly threaten legal action, however, as it occasionally has in pursuing objects in major museum collections, the government hopes to rely on moral suasion, said Maurizio Fiorilli, a lawyer for the Italian Culture Ministry. He said negotiations would begin in earnest in December.

Nicely put. There can be no doubt what lies inside the velvet glove, however.

Ms. White declined to be interviewed for this article. In recent years she has said that she and her husband never knowingly bought any stolen artifacts and that she has returned objects when warranted. Her lawyer, Lucien Burstein, wrote in an e-mail message that while the discussions with Italy were only preliminary, his client hoped “that a constructive resolution will be reached.”

It is noteworthy that White may have taken the initiative here:

Italian officials first signaled that they might go after objects in Ms. White’s private collection about a year ago, when they were negotiating for the return of two dozen antiquities acquired by the Met. . .

As the rumblings about her collection intensified, Ms. White approached the Italian Culture Ministry through a representative to discuss its claims, Mr. Burstein said.

From today's New York Times.

Fakes at the V & A

The Victoria & Albert's had a gallery of fakes on display for quite a few years, but now it is hosting a special exhibition, not open to the public, focusing more on fakes currently in circulation:

On one wall hangs a Picasso, on another a Lowry and, down the corridor, a Giacometti. Together, the masterpieces at the Victoria and Albert Museum would be worth millions . . . if they were genuine.

But everything here is a fake. Each exhibit was created to dupe the experts. Forged art and antiques are so abundant on the international market that police seized enough to mount a V&A exhibition.

The Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries has been curated by the arts and antiques unit of the Metropolitan Police.

From the Times of London; another writeup in the Washington Post.

A fish with bite

A fearsome mega-predator of the ancient seas had the most powerful jaws of any fish that ever lived, according to a new study that makes even the biggest great white shark seem like a slack-jawed weakling. . .

The fish in the new study, Dunkleosteus terrelli, was a toothless killer with bladelike jaws and a huge, armored head. Experts believe it grew up to 30 feet long and weighed as much as 4 tons--bigger than most modern sharks, and about the size of a killer whale.

But the animal's jaws would have set it apart from any latter-day seagoing carnivores.

Using fossil remains to build a computer model of the fish's bones and muscles, the Chicago researchers found that it could tear apart its food with a force of 1,100 pounds per square inch.

The fish needed that strength to pierce the bony armor that many sea creatures of that era possessed. Only alligators and Tyrannosaurus rex have had more powerful jaws, experts believe.

From the Chicago Tribune.

British museums priced out

British museums are being priced out of the market when it comes to acquiring artwork, a survey has suggested.

Research conducted by a UK charity, the Art Fund, found New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art spent £53.5m buying new works in 2004 and 2005.

The city's MoMa gallery spent £20m. The Louvre in Paris allocated £16.8m.

But London's National Gallery only spent £6.3m. . .

The UK's four Tate Galleries spent a combined total of £4.8m in 2004 and 2005, while the British Museum spent £761,000.

From the BBC. The article notes the more liberal tax incentives offered in the USA for donations to museums; it does not mention, however, that the British museums are further hamstrung by their inability to deaccession artworks in order to pay for new acquisitions.