Ancient African artifacts seized at Paris airport

French customs officials say they have seized more than 650 ancient artefacts smuggled from Mali in one of the largest such finds at a Paris airport.

Described as an "archaeological treasure", the objects were thought to be on their way to private US buyers.

Experts say most of the items are from the Neolithic period, but some may be up to one million years old.

The artefacts are thought to have been taken from archaeological sites on the edge of the Sahara desert.

The 669 items - 601 stones and 68 bracelets - were confiscated on 19 January at Charles de Gaulle airport and included axe heads, flintstones and stone rings. . .

This type of traffic was unheard of a few years ago, an airport customs official told the AFP news agency. . .

French customs officials made two similarly large finds of archaeological items from Niger in March 2004 and December 2005.

From the BBC.

Stolen Byzantine items from Ankara seized in Moscow

Russia’s state cultural watchdog said Wednesday it had seized precious Byzantine-era items offered to Russian museums by an art dealer on suspicion they may have been stolen from a museum in Turkey more than four decades ago . . .

A silver cross, an ornamented gold bracelet and a silver box for holding a saint’s remains had been offered to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and Moscow’s Kremlin Museums by a U.S. art dealer several weeks ago, said Anatoly Vilkov, a deputy head of the agency Rosokhrankultura.

He said the items came from private collections in Britain and Austria, but refused to name any owners or the dealer.

Full article here.

Lingua latina mortua est?

You know things are bad when Latin is fading away even within the Catholic Church:

One of the world's foremost scholars in Latin has said he believes the language is dying out.

Father Reginald Foster, who was appointed the papal Latinist 38 years ago, says Latin is almost extinct.

He says priests are no longer compelled to study it at seminaries and find it impossible to read important theological texts.

Father Foster has also condemned the loss of Latin teaching in schools across most of Europe.

From the BBC, which adds:

In Italy, most schoolchildren are still taught Latin for at least four hours a week until they are 18.

Magnum cum fraude

It was perhaps the most Californian of crimes. Behind the electronic gates and freshly clipped hedges of an exclusive cul-de-sac, the thieves worked in the dead of night, ignoring watches, laptops and other ho-hum booty to cart away the ultimate prize: 450 bottles of wine, including a rare $11,000 1959 magnum from the Château Pétrus in Bordeaux, France.

Thus began what the police in this Silicon Valley town, one of the country’s most affluent ZIP codes, refer to as “the big wine caper” — a $100,000 theft, still under investigation, whose audacity has inspired Agatha Christie-like fascination among sophisticated oenophiles in the Bay Area.

Better not mention what the plonk-drinking polloi make of it all.

The crime is perhaps understandable given record increases in wine prices at auction, said Thomas Matthews, the editor of Wine Spectator, which recently reported on counterfeiting, in which labels are falsified.

Will the villains stop at nothing?!

Unlike missing art and antiquities, hot wine has no official registry. “Something like an Amber alert would be very useful,” said George Derbalian, the president of Atherton Wine Imports, an importer of Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Amber? I would think red would be the only appropriate color here. From the NY Times.

Honoring Vauban

France has submitted 14 citadels and fortifications built by Marshal Vauban, the 17th-century military engineer, for a place on Unesco’s list of World Heritage sites.

Vauban’s legacy, chosen over about 30 French projects, was put forward alongside the lagoons of New Caledonia for a coveted spot on the heritage list, according to the French delegation to the UN agency.

The French Culture Ministry said that it chose Vauban’s work to mark the tricentenary of his death, which is being celebrated this year with a range of exhibitions across France.

From the Times of London. The Wikipedia entry for Vauban is full of information, including lots of links.

Jamestown satellite found?

U.S. army archaeologists believe they have located a very early English settlement known as "Henrytowne," which they say historical accounts and artifacts suggest was contemporaneous with Jamestown — America’s first permanent English colony.

Full story here.

Excavating lightning

Not exactly, but close:

A glassy stick made by lightning striking Libyan sands has now been used to date the lightning and detect the ancient climate.

It turns out that the root-like glass "fulgurite" structure made of melted and welded sand from the Libyan Desert contains miniscule [sic] bubbles of trapped gases from the time it was made. These gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and nitric oxide (NO) harbor hints of the type of plants that were zapped along with the sandy ground some 15,000 years ago. . .

Careful analysis of those gases and the weights of the carbon atoms in them reveal the plants were probably the sort which used what’s called C4 photosynthesis — best for plants living in hot, arid climates. This, in turn, implies that the semi-arid Sahel region of today reached much further north during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago).

From Discovery News.

52 arrested in Italy for archeological smuggling

Italian police arrested 52 people and recovered several hundred smuggled archeological artifacts as part of their ``tomb raider'' investigation into international art theft.

More than 300 carabinieri of the finance police and paramilitary art squad searched suspects' homes in eight Italian provinces early today and found smuggled goods of ``considerable worth,'' Italy's Culture Ministry said in an e-mail.

Three years of investigations into a group of Sicilian ``tomb raiders'' led to the searches, arrests and uncovering of a wider international network, with contacts in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the U.K. and U.S., the statement said.

From Bloomberg.

I missed an anniversary

Luckily, not mine.
But last week marked the 25th anniversary of the computer virus. I just stumbled across this Wired article about it today.

Economic illiteracy

Why isn't there a basic economics requirement in high school -- let alone college? If the concept behind "social studies" is to give students a handle on how the world works, shouldn't there be an economics component? This prompted by ongoing local debate over matters ranging from "living wage" proposals to the newly-opened WalMart, in which too many well-educated people have shown themselves completely unacquainted with how market economies actually work.

</soapbox>

PS Eugene Volokh has prompted an amusing thread on non-HTML HTML tags here .

Stolen Civil War battle flag recovered

News from Indiana:

A Civil War battle flag stolen more than 20 years ago was returned to the Indiana World War Memorial on Monday, thanks to the keen eye of an auctioneer and a group of FBI agents who track down stolen relics.

Give thanks to the FBI if they manage to track down whoever stole the flag in the first place. Credit for the identification and return is the auctioneer's alone.

The flag of the Evansville-based 25th Indiana Volunteer Regiment disappeared from the memorial about 1985 and had hung in a bank lobby in Fremont, Ind., since 2000. It was rediscovered in September after the bank went out of business. . .

At the time of the flag's theft, in the 1980s, security at the Indiana World War Memorial was lax, Goodwin said, and someone was able to walk off with it. At least two other Indiana battle flags remain missing.

One of Ohio's missing Civil War battle flags was recovered a few months back -- another case of lax custodianship, to the extent that the flag's absence wasn't noted until the man who had bought it brought it to the Ohio Historical Society's attention.

Flocking to ancient Rome

Premodern cities depended upon a constant influx of migrants to keep up their populations. Quantification of this migration pattern for ancient cities isn't easy, but Dienekes' Anthropology Blog links to what appears to be a pathbreaking study for the town of Portus Romae:

This is the first quantitative assessment of population mobility in Classical antiquity. This study demonstrates that migration was not limited to predominantly single adult males, as suggested by historical sources, but rather a complex phenomenon involving families. We hypothesize that migrants most likely came from higher elevations to the East and North of Rome. One individual with a higher delta(18)O value may have come (as a child) from an area isotopically similar to North Africa.

Stonehenge news

Archaeologists say they have found a huge ancient settlement used by the people who built Stonehenge.

Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses.

People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies. In ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain.

From the BBC.

Rockfall damage at Mesa Verde

An ongoing problem (or process, depending on how you look at it). I remember visiting another Anasazi site years ago; our guide was bereft to see there had been a similar but much smaller fall, damaging the ruins just since her last visit:

Something looked different at the popular Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park when research archaeologist Julie Bell took visitors by the most photographed site at the park recently.

There was rubble where rubble should not be.

A 4.5-ton slab fell on the picturesque ruin sometime last month, smashing a storage room, rupturing the wall of a kiva and coming to rest inside a two-story room at the far end of the site.

“It pierced the kiva like a knife,” Bell said. “Fortunately, it didn’t get the tower.”

Interesting note at the end of the article:

There is one theory that the Ancestral Puebloans would also watch the rocks closely for signs one was about to give way. Archaeologist have found prayer sticks in the cracks. Some speculate that the prayer stick had a similar function to Fisher’s crack monitors. They would stick prayer sticks into cracks in the cliff’s ceilings and if the sticks fell it was time to get out of the dwelling.

Viking ship find in Ireland?

Might not be Viking-era, but it is old and interesting:

An ancient boat discovered in a riverbed north of Dublin may be the first Viking longship found in the country, Environment and Heritage Minister Dick Roche said . . .

The vessel, nine metres (30 feet) wide by 16 metres long, was discovered accidentally during dredging operations last November but the find was not made public until now.

"It is described as clinker built, a shipbuilding technology dating from the Viking era but also still in use centuries later," Roche said.

Full story here.

Another Japanese politician says the unthinkable

JAPAN'S health minister . . . Hakuo Yanagisawa, 71, embarrassed the Government of Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister, in a speech delivered on Saturday, which was immediately attacked by women and opposition politicians.

"The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed," he told the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the city of Matsue.

"Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask is for them to do their best per head."

Before his speech was over, Mr Yanagisawa seemed to realise that he caused offence. "I'm sorry to call them machines," he said afterwards.

From the Australian. Past gaffes (many much worse) previously noted here.

Shill bidding on eBay

Nothing really new in this Sunday Times piece, except catching out a big UK seller of antiquities on tape:

CUSTOMERS of the internet auction site eBay are being defrauded by unscrupulous dealers who secretly bid up the price of items on sale to boost profits.

An investigation by The Sunday Times has indicated that the practice of artificially driving up prices — known as shill bidding — is widespread across the site.

Frankly, I'm not as upset over shill bids as I am over more serious forms of fraud. eBay could do a lot more to protect buyers from being scammed outright, and as long as items are routinely and grossly misrepresented, it may be misplaced concern to focus on transactions where the buyer gets what he wants at a price that he deems acceptable -- even if he could have paid less, minus the shilling.

Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders’ identity — making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots.

It made good sense to remove the ability to search out what other individuals are bidding on; the hiding of bidder IDs, however, would appear to be misconceived. If eBay isn't going to police shill bidding aggressively itself, it should at least give its customers the ability to detect it on their own.

One of the beneficiaries of the boom is Eftis Paraskevaides, a former gynaecologist, from Cambridgeshire. He has become a “Titanium PowerSeller” — one of eBay’s handful of top earners — selling more than £1.4m worth of antiquities a year on the site.

Back in 2000, the BBC reported that Paraskevaides was suspended from practice "after fears were raised about his work". He subsequently resigned, thus evading an independent inquiry into his work. Now that he has reinvented himself as an antiquities dealer, a Google search suggests that shill bidding is the least of the man's offenses -- though the only one that the Times concerned itself with:

In a conversation with an undercover reporter last week, Paraskevaides claimed shill bidding was commonplace on eBay.

When the reporter asked whether he arranged for associates to bid on his own items, he replied: “Well, if I put something really expensive (up for sale) and I was concerned that it was going for nothing, I would phone a friend of mine, even a client of mine who buys from me, and say: For Christ’s sake, I sell you 100 quids’ worth of items a week . . . just put two grand on it, will you?” The reporter was posing as a seller of valuable antiquities. He inquired whether Paraskevaides could sell them on eBay and guarantee a minimum price.

This sort of bidding is probably the least worrisome, as well as the most difficult to catch. The online chatter suggests, however, that Paraskevaides' shill bidding is much more systematic, not restricted to the occasional "unofficial reserve", and -- most likely -- done with multiple accounts under his direct control. I've seen many other sellers with such an MO, where items are routinely "sold" for very high prices, almost always reappearing for sale again some months later. This also might call into question the £1.4m annual sales figure cited above: how much that was "sold" on eBay was actually sold?

He claimed eBay would never follow up a complaint against him for shill bidding because he generated about £15,000 a month in commission for the company. “Are they going to ban somebody who’s making them the best part of 15 grand a month? No,” he said.

"No" is right, unfortunately -- but a writeup of this sort in the Times is another matter:

A spokesman for eBay said he expected that the company would now launch an investigation into Paraskevaides.

Incidentally, the Times did not provide Paraskevaides' eBay seller names, which at last report were bidancient and eftis -- neither of which presently have any items listed (it may be supposed that he is being booted, but the accounts are still listed as registered). A list of eBay sellers of fake ancient coins may be found here; the Yahoo! Coin Forgery Discussion List is another useful resource. They are also a useful corrective to all of eBay's spin: the fact remains, there are many other large-scale vendors of fakes that eBay has no interest in confronting. Caveat emptor.

PS Note that eBay feedback on bidancient is currently 4213, with 99.5% positive -- and now finally listed as "No longer a registered user". Only 23 negatives in over six and a half years, which just goes to show you the rather sharp limits of eBay's feedback system. Bad sellers who give refunds don't get bad feedback.

Mystery burial in Gaul

A macabre 1,700-year-old mass grave of people and horses, discovered in Normandy, poses perplexing new questions about the Roman conquest of France. Was there a small part of ancient Gaul which refused, Asterix-like, to surrender for 300 years?

The grave site, from the 3rd century, which was discovered by French state archaeologists at Evreux, appears to contain ritual arrangements of human and horse remains. In one, a human skull is clasped between two horse's skulls, like the two halves of a giant shell.

In Gaullish times, 300 years earlier, graves containing both horses and people were common. No such grave has ever been found from the Roman period, and even in the previous era, the remains were kept carefully apart.

In the recently discovered grave, about 50 miles west of Paris, the bones appear to have been intentionally mixed. The skeletons of 40 people and 100 horses have been found so far.

From the Independent.