Archive sheds light on ancient forgery

Bronze figurine of the god Mithras in the Manchester Museum collection

More time ago now than I really care to remember I wrote something about the Mithras sculptures found in Hulme during the 19th century and showed the small figurine of Mithras from the Manchester Museum collection. At the time I remember thinking there was something rather odd about the figurine and that suspicion was strengthened when Jan Kindberg Jacobsen (Curator, Department of Ancient Art in Copenhagen)  got in touch in January 2013 to say he was aware of two other similar figurines and to ask if ours was a forgery.

There the matter rested until this morning when during one of the curatorial team’s joint working meetings we looked at some archival material that David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Palaeontology, had found in store. We had great fun going through archive correspondence from the 1920s  allocating the paper documents in the folders to different disciplines and recognising names of important donors. In this age of digital media it is salutary to reflect how much important information is lost when email accounts are closed, whilst copy correspondence a hundred or more years old may yield vital information for research.

Investigating the archive at one of our Wednesday curatorial meetings

One of letters we looked at this morning was written by Francis Haverfield (1860-1919), one of the first serious academic students of Roman Britain. He held the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. On 6th May 1903 he wrote:

My dear Sir,

The little bronze of which you have been good enough to send me a photograph, is a forgery. The inscription is a blundered copy of a real inscription on stone, now at Paris. Other forgeries from the same original are known – all very likely, by the same forger, who may have lived in the 17th or 18th century. See F.Cumont, ‘Textes at monuments relatifs au culte de Mithra’ ii pp 398-445. I am,

Yours very faithfully,

F.Haverfield

In the same bundle is a note on a card from a Mr J.S.Hall:-

Dear Mr Hoyle,

Many thanks for your letter. It is disappointing to hear that the figure is a forgery, but it seems to be a forgery of some antiquity and interest. I picked it up for 3/- 6d (42 pence in today’s money!) in a “Marine (?) Store” in Nottingham and I feel sure that the man who sold it me & told me the story was only reflecting what he had been told by the man who sold it him. In any case I do not think he (illegible word?) over-charged me! Very truly yours, J.S.Hall

Haverfield’s letter dated 8th May 1903

 

A letter of 16th May 1903 from a French correspondent says (in translation):

Sir,

Thank you very much for sending the bronze figurine that you recently acquired. But I’m afraid that this is a modern piece. A series of similar figurines  with the inscription DEO INVITO were reported in Germany and Italy and seem to be the work of some Renaissance forger (c.f. Texts and Monuments Relating to the Mithraic Mysteries Vol.II p.445).  Besides you have perhaps already noticed yourself that I am pleased to be able, thanks to you, to add another example to this small collection.

Believe me Sir, most sincerely yours,

 

The signature is difficult to decipher but appears to be Franz Cumont of 75 Rue Montoyer, Brussels, and author of the work referred to earlier.

 

Amazing what you can find in the archives isn’t it?

 

 

 

 

 

Radiocarbon Dating, the Neanderthal Demise, and the Arrival of Modern Humans in Europe

This year’s William Boyd Dawkins lecture will be held at 18:30 in University Place, lecture theatre A, Oxford Road, on December 9^th, and will be given by Professor Tom Higham (University of Oxford), on:-

“Time for the Palaeolithic:Radiocarbon Dating, the Neanderthal Demise, and the Arrival of Modern Humans in Europe”.

Radiocarbon dating by AMS is the key method for understanding the date of the movement of the earliest anatomically modern humans (AMH) into Europe and the concomitant demise of the Neanderthals. Work in Oxford has shown that many previously obtained radiocarbon dates have been severely compromised by contamination that has remained unremoved in many cases. New approaches, using more robust techniques, have resulted in a significant changes to the chronologies of key sites and to a change in our understanding of the timing and pace of cultural changes in the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic. This is the period during which Neanderthals and other Archaic humans were replaced by populations of anatomically modern humans (AMH). Prof. Higham will describe some of the work he has undertaken in the last 10 years, including improved chemical pretreatment methodologies and their application, and describe some of the results. Other important developments in genetics have recently transformed aspects of the field. Finally Prof. Higham will talk about the key issues that need to be tackled if scientists are to further improve our understanding of this key period and the bio-cultural shift that occurred in Eurasia between 50-30,000 years ago.

Dodecahedron Mystery Solved?

Modelling glove made with a dodecahedron

It is quite some time since I was last persuaded to don my Roman arms and armour (for good reason, I’ve still got the chafe marks on my shoulders to prove it) but an opportunity presented itself recently when my office was flash-mobbed by the Curator of Egyptology, Campbell Price, with visiting researcher Regina Degiovanni who proceeded to give me an impromptu demonstration of how to make a pair of Roman gloves using a bronze dodecahedron… I feel I should point out that Manchester Museum has a wonderful knitted Coptic sock in its Egyptology collection, making us a popular port-of-call for experimental archaeologists who seek to puzzle out how people in antiquity rose to the challenges that everyday life threw at them, such as how to knit themselves a pair of socks, or, as in this case, a pair of gloves.

Coptic sock in the Egyptology collection with Regina’s instruction

Except that I suspect the reverse was true: presented with the mystery of what the bronze dodecahedra found in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire were for, the intrepid experimental archaeologists arrived at the ingenious solution that they were used for knitting gloves. Sadly the wonderful archaeology collection at Manchester Museum is not blessed with an actual example of a dodecahedron but Regina had managed to obtain a 3D scan of one. Generations of Romanists, Classical scholars and archaeology students have long debated the purpose of these enigmatic objects. With ten sides, containing circular openings or apertures of different diameters and surmounted by knobs where the planes intersect, the famous dodecahedra have long defeated academic enquiry. The someone hit on the solution that they were used for knitting and Regina showed how it was done and asked me to model the fingers of the gloves (see photo).

Finger gloves and dodecahedron

Regina had been in contact with living history interpreters who dressed as Roman soldiers and they had talked about the need to cushion or insulate their hands against metal arms and armour, which not only chafes but in cold weather can be very uncomfortable to carry or wear. I happened to have a replica Roman spear lying around the office and so it was, literally within a minute, my calm orderly existence talking to Sam our Conservator before going to meet my 2 o’clock appointment was turned upside down and I found myself posing for a photo, pilum and dodecahedron in hand, wearing knitted finger stalls. I don’t suppose many people can say they’ve done that.

The fingers of the glove

One thing is for sure: the gloves certainly helped to take the chill off the metal spear I was holding. Whether this does indeed solve the mystery of the dodecahedra is another question. What we need is some use wear analysis of the surface of the knobs on the outside of actual archaeological examples of dodecahedra using a stereomicroscope or a metallographic microscope to see if indeed there is any evidence of threads having been looped around the knobs consistent with the process of knitting. If this does indeed prove to be the case then activities for public programmes in the Museum for the foreseeable future can expect to be dominated by the experimental knitting of gloves to go with our Coptic sock. Does a new career modelling experimental archaeological knitwear beckon I wonder? Watch this space.

Lithics Collections at Manchester Museum

Manchester Museum on Oxford Road

Manchester Museum has a very large and varied collection of prehistoric lithics collection, including hundred-thousand-year-old Palaeolithic hand-axes from southern England, Mesolithic microliths from the Pennines around Manchester,  neolithic rough-outs from so-called ‘axe-factories‘ in Great Langdale in Cumbria and Craig Llwyd in Wales, Bronze Age stone mauls or mining tools from Alderley Edge in Cheshire, more recent material collected from indigenous peoples in the Americas, and Australia, and stone tools, flint flakes and other objects of all periods from the UK, Europe and other countries around the world.

Danish flint dagger with carefully flaked handle

The richness of the Museum’s lithics collection is due to the first curator, William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929). Though primarily a geologist, Dawkins was an expert on the identification of prehistoric animal remains and wrote what was regarded at the time as the text-book about cave archaeology called Cave Hunting (1876). Dawkins is perhaps best known for work at Creswell Crags, conducted, at least initially, with Revd Magens Mello and Thomas Heath. Star finds include Neanderthal stone choppers and a beautiful Font Robert point dating from around 29,000 BC.The Museum has a very important archive of finds, photographs and other documentation relating both to these Victorian excavations and to later work undertaken by A.Leslie Armstrong (1878-1958).

Work at Creswell Crags

Dawkins’ successor at the Museum was J.Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978). Like Dawkins, Jackson had wide-ranging interests, excavated prehistoric sites and published important regional summaries of lithic discoveries. As a result of the collecting activities of Dawkins and Jackson, the Museum’s archaeology collection contains large quantities of flint and other stone implements, not to mention prehistoric metal, pottery, bone and antler objects. They built up collections of stone objects, including fakes, as reference material and for teaching purposes. One individual by the name of Edward Simpson alias ‘Flint Jack’, ‘Bones’ or ‘Fossil Willy’ was notorious for selling his dodgy flint artefacts to gullible collectors and museum curators, served time in prison and ended his days demonstrating flint-knapping for  gentlemanly antiquarian societies.

Flint Jack’s ‘Flint Jacks’ – forgeries of early Bronze Age barbed-and-tanged arrowheads

Many of these objects are displayed in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds galleries, where, thanks to the range of disciplines represented in the collection it has been possible to show axes with ornate binding and rafia sleeves for comparison from New Guinea and Borneo – where the Stone Age finished as recently and precisely as 10am on 8th March 1933 – from the Living Cultures collection.

Stone axe with interwoven rafia wrapping from Bourneo/New Guinea

The intellectual focus of the Museum displays shifted in the latter part of the 20th century in favour of the Classical world but research on the lithics collection continued. For instance, many of the Museum’s stone axeheads were sampled petrologically during the 1970s and 1980s and the results published in Stone Axe Studies; researchers such as the late Roger Jacobi (1947-2009) carried out detailed work on the Creswell Crags archive, even identifying joins between fragments of the same implement in different museums; and an important landscape study of Alderley Edge was undertaken by Prof John Prag of Manchester Museum. The Museum also subscribed to excavations in the Middle East and received a proportional share of finds including lithic artefacts from sites such as Abu Hureyra in Syria, Jericho on the West Bank, and from the excavations at Mount Carmel in Northern Israel directed by Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968).

With the redevelopment of the new Ancient Worlds archaeology galleries, more of the Museum’s historically important lithic collections was put on show. The recent updating of the National Curriculum so that it includes the Stone Age offers another opportunity to work with teachers and school groups to interpret this material for the younger generation. Meanwhile new digital technology and augmented reality are providing more stimulating ways of engaging with the artefacts.

We will be having a special activity day about flint knapping at the Museum on Wednesday 18th November if you want to see how it’s done and maybe have a go yourself.

 

Some Reading

W.Boyd Dawkins (1876) Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, Macmillan and Co.).

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘The Prehistoric Archaeology of Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 50 (1936), 65-106.

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘Contributions to the Archaeology of the Manchester Region’, The North Western Naturalist 11, 110-119.

T.H.McK Clough and W.A. Cummins (1988) Stone Axe Studies II Research Report no.67, Council for British Archaeology, 218-221.

 

 

 

Making a Good Impression with Roman Inscriptions

Just got back exhausted but exhilarated from a really successful teaching session about Roman inscriptions with a class of children from both Manchester Grammar School and a Blue Coat School studying Latin and/or Classical Civilisation. The session was led by Dr Andrew Fear from University of Manchester Department of Classics. The idea was to engage schoolchildren with Roman material to help them with their studies and to encourage them to maintain an interest in things Classical.

Earlier this afternoon we divided the class into two groups and one half looked at making impressions from Roman inscriptions using the cliche mould or ‘wet squeeze’ method and the other studied some Roman coins that our Numismatist Keith Sugden had got out in advance for them.

sestertius of Trajan (AD 98-117 ) obverse

The cliche mould technique involves placing a sheet of blotting paper over an inscription and using a stiff brush to push the softened paper into the incised surface of the piece of stone. This is a very old way of making accurate copies of Greek, Latin and other inscriptions in the field. The practical aspect of making a cliche mould from an inscription really engaged the students, whereas talking to them about epigraphy  would almost certainly have left them cold. Fortunately no damage was done to a Roman inscription because we used a piece of marble with an inscription that is a fake. That wasn’t a problem because the whole point of the exercise was getting the students involved in doing something practical.

It’s all in the brush work

 

Finished cliche mould of Roman inscription

The other exercise was looking at and understanding Roman coins. We got out a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) and a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). Armed with a crib sheet from their earlier session with Andy and a magnifying glass and an angle-poise lamp, the students studied each coin, transcribed the inscriptions or legends and translated them. In this way they were able to consolidate what they had learnt earlier about the use of abbreviations such as COS – Consul, or AVG – Augustus, or PP – Pater Patriae for ‘father of his country’. We swapped the coins over half way so they could look at different coins.

Looking at Roman coins

The students picked this up remarkably quickly, further evidence, if any were needed, that there really is nothing like the real thing for inspiring and engaging young (and old) minds. The thought of teaching Classics without supporting objects seems to me to do students an injustice, and, of course, we are well-placed at the Museum in being able to draw upon some amazing collections and provide invaluable hands-on  experience. If that doesn’t enhance the learning experience, then nothing will. We hear a great deal about digital interpretation and augmented reality, and new technology certainly has a place but I don’t think anything beats tactile interaction with the real thing. My observations of this afternoon suggest that it was a successful session and that the children enjoyed it and were stimulated by it. It’ll be interesting to see the evaluation sheets from the school.

Of course we have to declare an interest. Fewer and fewer students study this type of material. This is hardly surprising given that it used to be government policy to  marginalise Classics. Charles Clarke, back in 2003, said he was little concerned were the study of classics ‘to go the way of all flesh’. The number of pupils taking Latin GCSE in the state sector plummeted from about 8500 in 1988 to less than 3500 in 2004. Yet the benefits of teaching Classics have long been known. An Indianapolis survey on the effects of teaching Latin to 6^th grade children (1973) showed that after 5 months of Latin, the children had advanced 7 months in maths, 8 months in word knowledge, 9 months in problem solving, one year in reading, AND 13 months in language.

denarius of Hadrian (AD 117-138)

The session was supported by the University’s Widening Participation Department. Thanks to to Cat Lumb, Andy Fear and Irit Narkiss for organising and running the session.

First World War Archaeology

Session for the Youth Board at Manchester Museum

Thanks to the kindness of Andrea Winn, Curator of Community Outreach  here at Manchester Museum, I can show an image of the recent session about the First World War with the Youth Board  and creative consultants. Whilst the Museum does not collect social history, some objects in the collection were acquired during the First World War. I got out some objects donated by Francis Buckley (1881-1949) when he was serving in northern France during  the First World War. The circumstances were rather unusual. 2nd Lieutenant Buckley was charged with preparing a line of trenches known as the Red Line at the village of Coigneux in 1918. This was in response to a German offensive. Buckley was there from April until the middle of August and had plenty of time to inspect the upcast soil from the excavations to create the trenches. Reginald A.Smith of the British Museum had asked Buckley to look at disturbed ground in case archaeological material was revealed.

Red Line Trenches Coigneux

The drawings above show Francis Buckley’s painstaking care in recording the stratigraphy of the trenches which had yielded flint implements of Mousterian or Neanderthal date, so going back potentially going back several hundred thousand years. The Neanderthal stone tools were found along the tops of the parapets. Buckley knew that the material on top of the parapet was likely to be from the soil from the very bottom of the trenches when they were deepened because of the German threat. Buckley noted ruefully that had it been possible to excavate the parapets  he would have found more implements. ‘But for military reasons this was quite out of the question’ he wrote in his article about the Coigneux discoveries published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (1920-1), pp.1-9.

Francis Buckley was clearly someone to have around in an emergency and he was mentioned in dispatches (‘His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered’) on 9th April 1917. Even so you wonder what Lieutenant Buckley’s commanding officer made of the close observation of the trenches for archaeological material…

This kind of behaviour is not unusual in warfare and quite coincidentally I came across the image below earlier this week in one of our archive boxes. It shows a rather charming little painting of a pot decorated with a white wavy line on its shoulder. Two views are shown.  It’s only when you read the pencil inscription underneath that you realise what this represents. ‘Found whilst deepening a well in Gallipoli – about 3 feet of mud on top of it. The well contained water and was near Cape Hellas about 2 miles from Knithia (?)’. Someone has added in ink  ‘Said at S.Kensington to be modern Turkish, possibly 200 years old’. In other words this pot was found during the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign in which so many soldiers were killed or wounded, and yet someone still took the trouble to make a record of a pot they had found. There is no name attached to the painting but one likely candidate is Lieutenant Thomas Eric Peet B.A, of the Kings (Liverpool) Regiment, Army Service Corps who worked in the Egyptology Department of Manchester Museum. In 1917 Thomas Peet commanded an Army unit dedicated to excavating and preserving antiquities discovered on the classically rich battlefields of the Salonica Front. Perhaps his promotion was the result of the beautiful records he had made of chance discoveries like the Turkish pot.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

When I was talking to the Youth Board I said that soldiers weren’t fighting all of the time and often found time to practice some of the skills they had developed in civilian life. Perhaps the detailed recording of flints from the trenches at Coigneux or of a Turkish pot Gallipoli are evidence of soldiers finding ways to express their humanity in an inhumane situation.

Afterwards I showed the Youth Board some Roman material to explore how soldiers 2000 years ago introduced new styles of jewellery and pottery into Britain that the native British would not have been familiar with. New introductions such Continental brooches and mortaria or mixing bowls were adopted by the soldiers’ families and by civilians, making the soldiers important agents of Romanisation in newly-conquered provinces. Roman soldiers as advocates of Mediterranean culinary expertise in their spare time is a far cry from recording archaeology disturbed by the trenches or the fighting at Gallipoli. It seemed somehow glib in comparison.

Thanks to Andrea Winn and Michael Whitworth for information and images used in this blog.

Easter Island Exhibition at Manchester Museum

Moai Hava and Sam in the World Museum in Liverpool

Since returning from the Ke EMu conference in Washington on Saturday I’ve been thinking about Manchester Museum’s next temporary exhibition which will be about the stone statues or moai of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. We are in the fortunate position of being able to borrow a statue called moai Hava from the British Museum, and a selection of supporting objects from the BM and other museums. The exhibition will draw upon the results of fieldwork on Easter Island undertaken by Professor Colin Richards of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. Our ‘Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues of Easter Island’  exhibition will open in early April 2015 and run for six months in the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.

It is incredibly exciting to work with material from Easter Island, which must rank as some of the highest profile archaeology in the world. When Europeans encountered the island for the first time early in the 18th century they were astonished to see the statues. They found it difficult to reconcile the scale of the statues with the apparent poverty of the islanders, or RapaNui as they call themselves, and the absence of sources of materials such as timber with which to move and erect the stones. The theory that at some point prior to the European visits the great civilisation responsible for the stone statues had collapsed is present in the earliest historical accounts and much ink has flowed since then to try and explain the disaster which befell the inhabitants. During the 1970s palaeobotanist  John Flenley sampled the peat in the volcanic craters to study the history of the island’s vegetation and by studying the pollen in the cores showed that palm trees had originally covered the island. The felling of the palm trees for farmland and for timber with which to move the statues is thought to have brought about an environmental disaster leading to the  collapse of the islanders’ way of life. The large numbers of obsidian tools such as those featured in an earlier post on the Ancient Worlds blog  were thought to be evidence of the islanders’ nightmarish descent into violence, anarchy and  civil war.

Obsidian mataa from Easter Island in Manchester Museum

The various theories to account for Easter Island’s decline have been hotly debated. More recently some archaeologists and anthropologists have blamed contact with Europeans for the collapse of Easter Island’s traditional culture rather than an environmental catastrophe. The spread of diseases against which the islanders had no immunity and the notorious ‘black-birding’ raids to pressgang labourers to work in Peru’s guano mines in the 1860s reduced the native Rapanui population to little more than a hundred people. What the population had been before then is anybody’s guess but at the time of the first European visits it thought to have been about 3000, and a figure as high as 20,000 has been suggested for the earlier period.

Puna Pau where a quarry face has been excavated. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

The Manchester Museum exhibition will focus on the statues. Professor Colin Richards and his colleagues have recently excavated a stone quarry at Puna Pau where headdress stones or topknots for the stone statues were carved. We propose as part of the exhibition to supplement the original material with reconstructions of an ahu or ceremonial platform on which some of the moai or stone statues once stood, a pukau or topknot that would have sat on top of the head of one of the moai, and the quarry face at Puna Pau to show visitors the nature of the stone working on the island.

Stone statue with repositioned pukao headress and inlaid eyes. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

As part of the exhibition we will also explore the  part  the statues have played in stimulating sculptors such as Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). This influence can also be seen in popular culture. Easter Island statues frequently feature in comics and graphic novels for example. When I was in Washington last week I somewhat furtively visited a comics store to try and obtain copies of the Adventures of Batman, The Mighty Thor and Uncle Scrooge. Had museum colleagues seen me in there I’d have protested it was only to gather materials for the Easter Island exhibition. In The Mighty Thor (1982), for instance, the superhero battles giant stone statues from Saturn which are clearly inspired by the moai. If any readers have copies and might be willing to lend them for our exhibition please let me know.

Moai from Easter Island in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington

Another treat during the Ke EMu conference in Washington was visiting the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) and seeing another Easter Island statue or moai from Ahu O’Pepe. An image on the label shows an Easter Island head with its eye re-inserted. We intend to recreate one of the eyes as part of the exhibition using coral and obsidian. So there’s lots to look forward to in this exhibition and there’s great excitement at the Museum as the project gets under way.

Easter Island head with inlaid eye (Smithsonian label)

Roman Finds Group Meeting at Manchester Museum 8th October 2014

Roman military diploma

The last week has been rather busy, not least because of the Roman Finds Group meeting that was held at Manchester Museum on 8th October, which I helped to organize. The group is aimed at people, museum curators, archaeologists and those who share an interest in Roman archaeology. First up was Paul Holder, who works at the University’s library and who is leading authority on Roman military diplomas. It was Paul who published Manchester Museum’s incomplete military diploma from Ravenglass, arguably awarded to a man perhaps from Heliopolis in the Lebanon who was recruited into a regiment from the Roman Army of Britain when an expeditionary force went out to help suppress the serious Judaean revolt during the reign of Hadrian in the 130s AD.

Norman Redhead talking about the recent work at Castleshaw Roman forts

Norman Redhead, County Archaeologist and Director of Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit talked about recent work at Castleshaw Roman forts. This was not the first time the site had been excavated and Norman described the various interventions at this fascinating early Roman military frontier site, which lies between Slack, near Huddersfield, and Manchester. In the 18th century the antiquary Percival sketched two forts here and the people’s poet Ammon Wrigley did some work, but the first serious archaeological work was directed by Francis Bruton over two seasons in 1907-8. Rosser and later Thompson during the late ’50s and early ’60s carried out further work for the University of Manchester, helping to clarify the relationship between the earlier and larger fort for an auxiliary cohort, and the smaller, later fortlet for a garrison for as few as 50 men. There was a community programme excavation on the site during the mid 1980s.

The earlier fort was occupied between about AD 79 and the mid-90s AD and the fortlet between 105 and the early 120s AD. This tight chronological framework means that finds from the site can be closely dated. Unfortunately the soil conditions were prejudicial to the survival of many materials. One coin of Vespasian could only be documented because its imprint had been preserved in the soil, and even samian was very abraded. Glass objects survived very well, however.  Other finds included a lava quernstone, melon beads of glass and faience, rusticated ware greyware sherds, an onyx intaglio depicting Minerva, and a little Black Burnished ware, which must have entered the North of England shortly before the fortlet was decommissioned in the 120s AD. The finds from the most recent work will go to the Saddleworth Museum. Manchester Museum has the finds from the university-led excavations.

Handsome trumpet brooch from the Knutsford hoard

Vanessa Oakden, Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme spoke about the Knutsford Hoard which was found by a metal-detectorist and included 103 coins, three trumpet brooches, finger rings and vessel fragments. Unfortunately the point of deposition had been ploughed out and the hoard dispersed but there was still a dense concentration of metalwork over some 20 x 10 metres. Some of the coins were still stuck together from their time in the container. The coins included denarii struck for Mark Anthony’s legions, and issues of Vitellius, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and those struck for imperial ladies such as Sabina, Lucilla and Faustina II. Vanessa compared the hoard contents with another Roman hoard found at Church Minshull, which had 58 denarii and trumpet brooches. The trumpet brooches were similar to the beautiful Carmarthen brooch. The more complete brooches helped explain the rosette mount found loose in the Knutsford hoard. It looks as though the Knutsford hoard was deposited in the 190s AD. It may represent the private wealth of a soldier, landowner or merchant, and is perhaps indicative of the importance of the salt trade in the economy of the area. For further details  look this up on the Portable Antiquities database (LVPL -B44185/2012 T406).

A visit to the Manchester Museum store

The last session before lunch was presented by yours truly and I showed some of the Roman treasures from Manchester Museum’s archaeology collection, such as the Manchester word-square and talked about a couple of breakthroughs that had enabled us to provenance a previously unattributed sizeable collection of Romano-British pottery excavated by Prof.Donald Atkinson at Gayton Thorpe in Norfolk during the 1920s and a Romano-British pot from Longendale, purchased from some young lads who had found it hidden amongst some rocks. When first encountered in the store the latter shared its storage box with two unannotated small format black and white photographs showing the place of discovery and a cryptic note saying it was to be collected ‘by a gentleman’. A discussion of this acquisition turned up in an issue of Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society and the mysterious gentleman turned out to be Christopher Hawkes. This presentation was followed by a visit to the Museum archaeology store where I’d got out a selection of interesting material, including small finds from Castleshaw excavations, late iron Age metalwork from Bigbury, a complete set of decorative zoomorphic feet for a box or casket and an interesting but undoubtedly fake Mithras figurine. In this I was ably assisted and supported by Irit Narkiss, a member of the Museum’s conservation team, to whom thanks are due.

Wooden combs from Vindolanda

After lunch we were treated to a wonderful talk by Barbara Birley who presented the preliminary findings of her study of wooden combs from Vindolanda. The anaerobic soil conditions preserved a range of objects made of organic materials, including textiles, leather shoes, writing tablets and the combs. Vindolanda has yielded some 140 combs and this turns out to be the largest site collection to date (Roman London has only yielded 40). Most date from c.AD 85 to the 160s. Some of the combs were marked with graffiti or stamped with a maker’s mark. Some may have been used by professional hairdressers. Some were decorated with fretting and some had a copper alloy plate. The carefully-recorded excavations allowed the combs to be plotted spatially. One particularly interesting example came with its own leather carrying pouch or case.

Gaming counters from Chester

Our next speaker, Gill Dunn, talked about recent finds from the Chester amphitheatre site. There were two phases of building and the dep0sits contained a fragment from the hilt of a sword and remains of fast food consumed by the crowds, such as swans, geese, duck, and chicken, and fish bones from salmon, eels and carp. In fact there are few sites with such a range of domestic fowl. There were pieces of ceramic portable ovens that were probably made at Holt. The glass included pieces of facet cut vessels and are indicative of relatively high status table ware. A large collection of gaming counters (above) – of particular interest to me because of the set found outside Manchester Roman fort – appear to have been redeposited from elsewhere. Metal finds included mail links, hob nails, tools, and iron finger rings.

Enamelled Romano-British metalwork

The next speaker, Justine Bayley, talked about enamelled Roman objects. Enamel is glass fused to a metal sub-strate. Enamelling occurs on small decorative objects such as brooches, belt plates, seal boxes, studs, fittings and fasteners and votive stands, and occasionally is found on larger vessels, such as the Staffordshire Moorlands pan. Sometimes larger objects were made in separate pieces and soldered together. Some were clearly made a souvenirs for people to take away with them after a posting in the province. Reconstructions of enamelled metalwork showed just how gaudy the enamelled material was originally.

Matt Ponting talking about Roman coin analysis

Our next speaker, Matt Ponting of University of Liverpool, presented results of a programme of sampling of silver Roman coins. Earlier work in this area had sampled the surface of the coins but this gave variable and misleading results because the Romans treated the coin blanks to brighten the surface. This project showed that the Julio-Claudian emperors had a fine silver coinage until Nero reduced the fineness from 93% to 80% silver. The results of the recent sampling were more consistent than earlier readings. This brought the  denarius into line with the coinage of the Greek East and resolved problems with tax collection. The speaker also showed how studying isotopes from the samples might indicate the sources of the silver that was used. Some issues can now be characterized as using Spanish silver, some Gallic. It may be possible to identify a fingerprint for recycled metal. Matt acknowledged the institutions that had allowed sampling of coins in their collections, which include the Manchester Museum.

Scan of a coin showing differences in the metal.

Our last speaker, Rob Philpott, from Liverpool Museum discussed finds from the Roman port of Meolls. In the mid 19th century Abraham Hume reported large numbers of mostly metal discoveries on the foreshore when that stretch of coastline was undergoing rapid erosion by the river.  Activity seems to have started during the later Iron Age  and there are Roman finds even before the region was absorbed into the Roman province. Meolls was an important trading centre on the edge of the tribal territory of the Cornovii, close to that of the Brigantes. The exploitation of salt in the North West may lay behind  the economic transactions that we can detect in the coins and other metalwork found at Meolls. Sadly many of Liverpool’s finds were lost during bombing in World War II but more material has been recorded from the vicinity since then, including tantalizing objects from a later period such as a St Menas flask and a small hoard of Byzantine coins. Such discoveries are often explained away as redeposited souvenirs collected by British servicemen during the first and second World Wars but in some cases the original contextual information appears impeccable. A 6th century AD context for such finds in such a location, easily accessible by water, cannot be lightly dismissed.

St Means flask

Meolls reminded me strongly of a Roman port at Faxfleet, near Brough on the Humber Estuary in East Yorkshire, where large quantities of Roman pottery dating from the later 1st and early 2nd centuries AD was found. Its location close to the confluence of  a number of tributaries flowing into the Humber would have made it a useful location for trade. Unlike Meolls, most of the material found was ceramic. Another site further along the estuary at Redcliff, like Meolls, shows evidence of Roman trade some decades before the Romans came to northern Britain.

There was a great mix of papers at this meeting and my thanks to all those who presented or helped with the day.

Abu Hureyra

Prof. Andrew Moore with the Abu Hureyra material

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Prof Andrew Moore and his wife who visited Manchester Museum to deposit objects from Abu Hureyra in Syria. The objects, mostly lithic small finds, were excavated during the early 1970s. The excavation was funded, as so often was the case in the past, by different institutions which subscribed to the costs of the project, and in return they received a share of the finds.

This is why Manchester Museum has such a brilliant Egyptology collection: Manchester textile magnate, Jesse Haworth, subscribed to William Flinders Petrie’s projects in Egypt and gave the material he received to the Museum. Manchester Museum received most of its share of the Abu Hureyra material many years ago but Professor Moore and his wife were dropping off the last of the objects, now that final publication work had been completed.

The 45 objects include flint arrowheads, a delicate piece of obsidian, various palettes, grinders and other objects.The Abu Hureyra material dates from some time around 9000 BC when hunter gatherers were experimenting with farming.

One of the flint arrowheads from Abu Hureyra

It was sobering to reflect that the excavation work would no longer be possible today. Abu Hureyra was flooded as part of a dam building project, and the recent fighting has put the discoveries that remained in the care of the Syrian Antiquities in great danger. Manchester Museum received all the objects from a particular context which makes the recent acquisitions very important.

It shows the wisdom of distributing the discoveries amongst a number of institutions and not putting all the fragile archaeological ‘eggs’ in one basket. Heaven only knows when the terrible fighting will end and the region return to something like peaceful conditions so that the condition of the archaeological sites and the antiquities in museum collections can be assessed. Perhaps not for a generation. At least some of the discoveries from this now inaccessible site can be seen in Manchester Museum. Below is a fragment of a gypsum plaster vessel that was created by smearing the plaster over some woven basketry and allowing it to dry before peeling it off.

Part of a gypsum plaster vessel

Ancient Worlds on Holiday III – Crete September 2014

Archaeological Museum Irakleion, Crete

If it’s been quiet for a while on the blog, it’s because I’ve been taking some annual leave on the island of Crete. Christine and I stayed in a small resort called Gournes to the east of the island’s capital Irakleion. Though it only has a few tavernas, it has the advantage of not being as built up as nearby Gouves, and some of the finest ancient Greek archaeological sites and museums are just a 25 minutes bus-ride away (single ticket 1.8 euro). You can take a bus to the station and ten minutes later be sitting on a bus en route to Knossos. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Knossos room with bull

We found that unlike on an earlier visit some 16 years ago, parts of the site are now closed off, presumably because of the wear and tear of having hundreds of thousands of visitors walk over the site every year. However, it was still possible to see the beautiful, though contested, reconstructions of the rooms of this type-site for Minoan Crete. Though you have to queue to see the Throne Room when its busy there are quiet little corners where few visitors go where you can see a stunning evocation of a Minoan room.

One of the newly laid-out galleries in the Archaeological Museum in Irakleion, Crete.

There is a joint ticket to visit the Archaeological Museum in nearby Irakleion. The Museum has just been redeveloped and new galleries have been added. Do go because the galleries are beautiful, airy and well-lit, the exhibits breath-taking and there’s just the right amount of text for the objects. Treasures here include the Phaistos disc, a boar’s tusk helmet as described in the Iliad, and a realistic model bull’s head.

Votive and the real thing: Rhinoceros beetles from Piskokephalo in Crete.

In my humble opinion some of the most fascinating exhibits are the less obvious, smaller pieces such as the votive models of Rhinoceros beetles from a Cretan sanctuary site at Piskokephalo near Sitia. They date 1650-1500 BC. There is quite a useful little introduction by Liliane Bodson in the Classical Outlook for Oct/Nov 1983. Or check out M.Davies and J.Kathirithamby (1986) Greek Insects Duckworth, London, where there is a passing reference to representations of insects in Cretan sanctuaries but the models are not figured. Why were they making votive offerings of the beetles in this particular sanctuary? What’s the story? I suspect there is more information about this somewhere.

I’ll ask colleague Dmitri Logunov, Curator of Entomology at Manchester Museum. He’ll be sure to know. We have covered bees in an earlier post on the Ancient Worlds Blog. We should get a thread going on ancient insects. A few years ago we were very interested in doing an exhibition centred on Pliny the Elder and Roman Natural History. Manchester Museum’s wide-ranging collections clearly allow us to look at many subjects, and in a multi-disciplinary way, which I suspect may be more be engaging to visitors – but is there any research on this to substantiate this suspicion?

Rhinoceros beetle votives from Piskokephalo in the Archaeological Museum

The only inconvenience is the large guided tour groups who can completely monopolise star exhibits for 10 minutes or so. If you’re prepared to be flexible and move where the guided tours are not, or visit later in the day, this is an absolute treat. There is a separate gallery for each of the major periods and the exhibits are spectacular. The cafe is another improvement at the Archaeological Museum and in fact it’s well-worth going there for a sandwich or for coffee and cake. I particularly recommend the ‘cream pie’. A single slice is sufficient for two people – but don’t go near this if you’re worried about atherosclerosis.

Cretan bull in the Archaeological Museum

Whilst staying near Irakleion we also visited the Natural History Museum. It features some rather basic animatronic dinosaurs. Sadly we could not see a temporary exhibition about historic food plants  nor the mammoth mentioned in a Rough Guide but the room that simulated an earthquake was rather queasy fun and there was a great temporary exhibition about light, trompe l’oeil and holograms, which ironically included a hologram of Lindow Man! One of the more useful displays was a table top case showing the sources of pigments in antiquity. With a temporary exhibition of our own about the Colour of Sculpture in preparation this was very helpful.

Sources of pigmetns in antiquity in the Natural History Museum in Irakleion, Crete

We also visited the Crete Historical Museum which has some great Byzantine mosaics and religious sculptural fragments and tells the story of the later history of Crete. This was far less busy than the Archaeological Museum and was good for an hour or two if you fancy a rest from the beach.

Byzantine mosaic in the Historical Museum in Irakleion, Crete