Redating the invasion of Britain

Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55BC could not have occurred on the dates stated in most history books . . .

The traditional view is that Caesar landed in Britain on 26-27 August, but researchers from Texas State University say this cannot be right.

Dr Donald Olson, an expert on tides, says that the English Channel was flowing the wrong way on these dates.

An invasion of the south coast at Deal on August 22-23 is favoured instead.

Read the rest at the BBC -- or better, check out the Sky & Telescope press release, with further links.

Roman shops unearthed in Wales

The shop buildings used by the Romans in ancient Britain were uncovered by archeologists in fields at Monmouthshire, South Wales.

It is now just a country village called Caerwent but then was known as Venta Silurum - one of 15 major towns in Britain at the time. . .

A villa with painted walls and mosaic floors among the other finds also points to the town being home to wealthy Romans in the 3rd Century, when Venta Silurum boomed.

Archeologist Tom Scott described the 44-acre site as "beautifully preserved".

He said: "Discovering the shop buildings and the villa, it seems as if people lived here in some style. . . the site appealed to us as it is one of the best preserved Roman towns in the UK".

From the Telegraph.

Met drops a della Robbia

A glazed terra cotta relief by the Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia came loose overnight from its perch above a doorway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and crashed to the stone floor below, seriously damaging it, museum officials said Tuesday.

The shattered 15th-century sculpture, a 62-by-32-inch blue-and-white lunette depicting St. Michael the Archangel in a traditional pose, holding a sword and the scales of justice, was found early Tuesday morning by a guard on regular rounds.

Luckily it landed on its back, but this is still a real black eye for the Met -- especially after the Tullio Lombardo fiasco. From the NY Times.

Guillotines in orbit?

"France plans revolution in space"

The population bust

Interesting article in this weekend's NY Times Magazine on the possible causes of the developed world's demographic time bomb. It is argued there that one crucial factor is partial modernization: where women have joined the work force, but are still expected to shoulder virtually all the domestic responsibilities.

. . . a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but . . . the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born.

The same factors would appear to apply in Asia, as well. The other big factor, according to the article, is employment security.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: "You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn't very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it's not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted."

Nonetheless, this isn't the whole picture. When surveys indicate that the ideal desired number of children is fairly consistent across a population, but that the actual number produced differs substantially, one can start to seek causes and propose remedies. But what about drastic shifts in the actual desire for children?

Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. . .

A 2002 study found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.) When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered "none." (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.)

Walking over the dead

Tens of thousands of skeletons that lie hidden beneath the streets, houses and offices of London have been revealed for the first time on a map, in a collaboration between the Museum of London and The Times.

The electronic map allows readers to zoom in on streets to see how many bodies they walk over on the way to work. It pinpoints the location of many of the 37,000 skeletons the museum found in the capital. Curators have kept 17,000 of these in storage at the museum's headquarters in Central London, but reinterred the rest.

But note:

The skeletons on the map represent only a fraction of the number of bodies lying beneath the city. They were discovered when buildings were demolished and new foundations dug.

From the Times of London.

The most chilling anecdote in the article:

Archaeologists who unearth the skeletons occasionally take fright when they discover bodies. Mr White said: "At Christchurch in Spitalfields they found someone with smallpox scars in soft tissue. They dropped it and ran away. They sent it to one of the two laboratories in the world that can deal with smallpox." The labs said that smallpox spores were present, but not enough to be a danger.

It is now routine to rebury unbreached lead-lined coffins without opening them in case the disease that killed the occupant is still a threat.

Mercurial monks

The perils of rubrication?

Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red. . .

Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

Misused term here: incunabula refer to printed books predating 1500. The books in question here were almost certainly manuscripts.

While working on the study, the researchers also noted that, due to different carbon signatures, some of the medieval individuals ate a mostly marine, fish-filled diet. Lund Rasmussen suggests that the others may have "preferred beer and meat, rather than fish and water." The Cistercians were, in principal, not allowed to eat meat from any four-footed animals, but the Franciscans do not appear to have always observed this practice.

From Discovery News. If a strong connection could be established between normal scriptorium practice and mercury ingestion, high mercury levels in monastic burials might help in establishing if certain hypothetical monastic scriptoria in fact existed.