Manchester Museum’s Monuments Men

Eric Peet (1882-1934)

In the recent film The Monuments Men (2014) starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray, a task force is assembled to rescue art masterpieces from the Nazis and return them to their owners. Far from being an invention of Hollywood, it transpires there is some basis in history for this story, and staff from Manchester Museum, including Eric Peet and Arthur Randall Jackson, were monuments men during the First World War.

Eric Peet was born in 1882 in Liverpool and was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egyptian Exploration Society). From 1909 to 1913 Peet worked on the dig at Abydos with Swiss Archaeologist Edouard Neville where he was instrumental in pushing for more scientific methodology to be used. From 1913 to 1928 he was a Lecturer and Curator in Egyptology at  Manchester University and the Manchester Museum.

Peet, against the advice of friends and colleagues, made the decision to enlist, which he saw as his patriotic duty. He was commissioned in October 1915 into the 14^th Battalion of the King`s Liverpool Regiment, an infantry regiment from his home town. However, the Egyptian Exploration Fund considered him so important to their work that their controlling body agreed to pay him a retaining fee on top of his army salary to ensure his return to Egyptology after the war!

In 1917 Peet was serving with a unit of the Army Service Corps with the British Expeditionary Force on the Salonica Front. In this mountainous region formally Alexander the Great’s Kingdom of Macedonia and straddling the border between Greece and Bulgaria, a combined British, Serbian, Greek and French force faced Bulgarian, German, Austrian and Turkish troops. The front line consisted of trenches and mountain top strong points. Troops digging in here soon discovered that the area was rich in archaeology!

Edmund Barrett of the 12^th Lancashire Fusiliers noted that “…you could hardly turn a shovel of earth without a piece of old pot coming out…..” At first the soldiers on the ground dumped the objects into sandbags without further thought, although the more enterprising would pocket items they felt of value to sell to local traders or their officers later. A drawing of an almost complete pottery vessel found whilst digging a well at Gallipoli in Manchester Museum collection provides a glimpse of what soldiers were finding during active service.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

It wasn`t long before a number of men and officers with pre-war archaeological experience realised the importance of what was being found and alerted head quarters. In order to protect these potentially valuable finds and as much to mollify a sometimes hostile Greek Government as to further historical knowledge, both the British and the French forces decided to set up specialist archaeology units whose job it was to locate, catalogue and save these artefacts.

The British unit was initially under Lieutenant Commander Ernest Gardner, a leading archaeologist who established ‘B.S.F H.Q Museum’, as the unit became known. Manpower was provided by the Royal Engineers who also ran a Museum to hold finds, while field teams were formed to retrieve and record finds. These were commanded by officers with archaeology backgrounds recruited from units in theatre.

Peet with his huge experience was originally recruited as a field section commander. However, in 1917 Gardner was recalled to London and Peet took over command of the Unit. One of its major finds was a battlefield site found by the 7^th Royal Berkshire Regiment while digging trenches in the “Birdcage Line” when Private Reg Bailey literally put his pick through an ancient oil lamp before turning over ‘…bones with ancient armour and helmets…’. Amongst the finds the field team involved discovered the finest example of a 5^th century BC Greek helmet ever discovered. At the end of the War General Milne the British Commander negotiated with the Greek government for its transfer to the British Museum, where the collection resides to this day, a lasting reminder of Peet and the work of this unique wartime unit.

Peet himself remained a highly patriotic soldier who believed the war must be won but this was not without pangs of sadness for friends lost on both sides. German academics were well-represented in archaeology before the war and many were co-workers at the University and on excavations at sites such as Abydos. Former academic colleagues found themselves on opposite sides in the fighting. A letter home still in procession of his family reveals Peet’s dilemma when the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology recorded the death of a German Egyptologist serving with the German Army. This prompted some anger amongst two officers sharing the trench who thought it wrong to show regret for the death of a German soldier. Peet while understanding this animosity from men who had lost friends and brothers to the Germans could not at the same time bring himself to hate an old colleague. “…Both asked me how my paper could……print obituaries of slain Germans with …..expressions of regret for their deaths. I had no answer.”

Demobbed in 1919 and declining a post with the Egyptian Exploration Fund, Peet returned to the University and in 1920-1 was involved on the Amarna excavations in Egypt. This would be his last major excavation as he began to concentrate on academic research. He became a noted expert and author on Egyptian military campaigns, and in 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford. He died in February 1934 aged 52, leaving a wife and daughter only weeks after taking up his new post. The Queen’s College, Oxford houses the University’s Egyptology library, and it is named the Peet Library in his honour.

Capt. A.Randall Jackson (1877-1944)

The second of Manchester Museum’s ‘monuments men’ was Dr Arthur Randall Jackson, sometimes known as the “Father of British Arachnology”. Born in Southport in 1877 he studied Medicine and Zoology at Liverpool before setting up a practise originally in Hexham but moving to Chester in 1905. As a GP he was noted for his accuracy in diagnosis. He described himself as a ‘…cyclist, spider hunter and bird watcher.’  He was a distinguished amateur scientist and became an acknowledged expert on British spiders, discovering 47 new species. He wrote a number of papers and books on the subject and won the Charles Kingsley Medal for his work.

On the outbreak of the Great War Jackson enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was appointed a Captain and the Medical Officer of the 9^th Seaforth Highlanders with whom he served in France and Flanders from March 1916 until the end of the war. He was noted by his men for his jokes and stories as well as what some of them considered his eccentric habit of collecting natural history samples in the front line. In this Jackson was like Francis Buckley who collected Palaeolithic artefacts from the Red Trenches at Coigneux in northern France during the First World War. In late 1917 Jackson was awarded the Military Cross for ‘… conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty….in his efforts to get in casualties, repeatedly going forward through enemy barrages…’ (Edinburgh Gazette March 11^th 1918).

His links to the Museum came through his membership of the Cheshire and Lancashire Natural History Society and a long standing friendship with the Museum Director Walter Tattersall. Jackson seems to have been donating samples to the Museum from long before the War and is fleetingly mentioned in the 1915 Museum year book. He sent samples from the trenches back to Manchester Museum and kept up a lively correspondence with the Museum`s temporary wartime Director Thomas Coward. These letters reveal his passion for collecting and study even in the midst of war. Some of his personal feelings are revealed in an excerpt from a letter to the Museum dated September 1918:-.

“Imagine Tattersall hasn’t been over yet! I am awfully tired of it, but there is no escape, nor home service for the likes of me. Whether I shall have any Natural History work when I return I don`t know. My practice at Chester has vanished and possibly I may have to move elsewhere or even emigrate. Anyhow all my old habits have been broken up and retired and physically and mentally I`m not what I was three years ago.”  (Manchester Museum Collection)

(Tattersall was the Director of Manchester Museum, then serving in the Royal Garrison Artillery.)

After the War however Jackson didn`t emigrate but re-built his practice and became a keen gardener and a collector of art and antiques. On his death in 1944 he donated his personal collection to the Atkinson Museum, Southport, in memory of his son who was killed with the RAF in World War 2. The items he sent back to Manchester Museum from the trenches are still extant and form part of the Natural History Collection alongside some of his wartime letters.

This blog post is a slightly shortened version of an article sent me by Michael Whitworth, Head of Commercial Operations at Manchester Museum, which has drawn upon information kindly provided by Clare Lewis at UCL, as well as  excerpts from letters in the possession of the Peet family. Deepest thanks to both for sharing this for Ancient Worlds.

Bibliography

Clare Lewis (2014) Peet,The JEA And The First World War – Journal of Egyptian Exploration Society
Alan Wakefield (2013) Archaeology Behind The Lines – “Mosquito” The Journal Of The Salonica Campaign Society
Manchester Museum Annual Report 1915

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.

Guest blog: Mice in Antiquity by Greg M.

Roman mouse lamp in Manchester Museum collection (accession number 40647)

Regular readers of this Blog will no doubt recall that mice have sometimes featured in the posts. It is a great pleasure to host a guest contribution by student Greg M. who recently studied a Roman lamp with a depiction of a mouse in Manchester Museum’s collection. He kindly agreed to write this up as a  post for the Ancient Worlds Blog:-

I was given the opportunity by my Sixth form College to undertake an Extended Project, or EPQ, on any topic I liked. Naturally I turned to the Manchester Museum for inspiration.
Having contacted the Museum’s Curator of Archaeology, Bryan Sitch, I was pointed towards a small, intriguing object. Nestled within the museum’s vast array of ancient artefacts, lies an ancient oil lamp with a small mouse design appearing on its surface. This lamp entered the Museum in the early 1900s, having been collected by a Victorian architect and antiquarian named William Sharp Ogden (1844-1926). The lamp arrived with little associated information card, offering little precise evidence of its history, provenance or age.

The Curator, Bryan Sitch, suggested I research both the lamp itself, so as to contribute to the Museum’s records, and also the cultural significance of mice in antiquity. While I anticipated the occasional source of mouse-related information, I found myself increasingly confronted by a complex and fascinating cultural assemblage, including Egyptian comics, satirical literature and Roman Republican anti-decadence legislation!

I sought to learn more about the role of oil lamps in the ancient world, when and where the lamp was made and the role of mice in ancient culture.

For thousands of years, oil lamps provided a key source of light for those who wished to extend the hours of daylight. Oil lamps provided a compact, portable and customisable light source that was to be found in homes, tombs and businesses across the ancient world. With the arrival of mould production in 3/4^th Century BC Greece, factories around the Mediterranean began to churn out a massive range of lamp designs. The cost of using these lamps, however, limited their use. According to Diocletian’s Edict of 301 AD, an anti-inflationary fixing of prices, a litre of oil was the equivalent of 20 pence, compared to 14 pence for a teacher’s monthly wage. Therefore lamps were a luxurious, but widespread part of Ancient life.

Having ordered the hefty Royal Ontario Catalogue of Ancient Lamps through the public library system, I discovered that the Manchester lamp closely resembles those produced in Northern Africa. The Manchester lamp’s form closely mirrors those produced at ancient Tunisian lamp manufacturing sites. Furthermore, the chronological development of lamp design, with the emergence and development of the ‘fat type’, suggests the Manchester lamp dates from the 3^rd Century AD.

Detail of mouse on lamp. The curl behind the mouse is the handle of the lamp.

While many lamps are often designed with standard ancient images, such as a posing Hercules, I found that flexible production created a huge variety of designs. The small mouse, pictured drinking oil, on the Manchester lamp initially seemed a strange choice of image for decoration. However, I found mice to be a key part of ancient culture.

The 2^nd Century AD Roman ‘Messy floor mosaic’, now held by the Vatican, contains an extensive scene of gluttony, with scattered food and a mouse nibbling the remains. This image suggests the Manchester lamp may be a similar satirical reflection on Roman voracity, or perhaps it’s just to be regarded as a cute image, or an ironic prediction of might happen to the oil in the lamp.

Messy floor mosaic in the Vatican

In addition to consuming food, mice could be food themselves. While Mary Beard’s ‘dormouse test’ suggests that the longer you wait for edible dormouse to appear in a banquet re-enactment, the greater its accuracy, they were certainly part of the elite diet. Greedy Roman nobles would fatten up prized specimens in a ‘Glirarium’, before serving them glazed with honey. The aristocratic taste for dormice led to Imperial censors banning their consumption in 117 AD.

Vessel for raising doormice

When you think of Ancient Greek epics, Homer’s noble and fearsome warriors spring to mind. In the 3^rd Century BC epic, the ‘Batrachomyomachia’, however, the warriors are mice attacking a hoard of frogs. In this parody, ‘Crumb snatcher’ is killed by ‘puff jaw’ and war ensues. This epic, which was apparently painted on tavern walls, strikes at a surprisingly common theme in literature, mice warriors. On an Egyptian papyrus from 1150 BC, an army of mice launch an offensive against a citadel of cats. This suggests that the parodying of generally austere war imagery enabled a cultural exploration of war, and it also suggests that mice were a seen in a sympathetic light. Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egyptology at Manchester Museum, commented that this image was a fairly common ‘inversion’ of the real world that is sometimes shown on playful or Satirical ostraca, on which the powerful cat is made to be subservient to the mouse.

Mice storming the city of the cats on an Egyptian papyrus

In the story of the ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, Horace extends one of Aesop’s fables, exploring the relative merits of rural and urban living. Again mice are used as a harmless and charming tool to make a point, with the traditional rugged values of the countryside triumphing over urban sophistication.

By exploring, at great depth, such a seemingly small but highly specific object, I have gained an enormous amount. In addition to my understanding of the Manchester lamp’s cultural and historical role, my eyes have been opened to the possibilities of ancient history. By scratching the surface of this tiny strand of inquiry, I uncovered a host of possible questions and answers and had a lot of fun in the process.

Thanks to Greg for writing about this charming object in the archaeology collection.

 It’s a pleasure to report that Greg has now published an article about his research on Roman mice in an archaeology magazine released in time for New Year 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Young Archaeologists Club Meeting: Rapa Nui

Young Archaeologists’ models of the statues from Rapa Nui or Easter Island

The subject of April’s meeting of the Young Archaeologists Club at Manchester Museum was the latest temporary exhibition Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues from Easter Island. After showing the children around the exhibition we set up a creative session. The children made models of the moai or Easter Island statues using grey self-drying clay for the volcanic tuff of the heads and bodies and red for the scoria of the pukao or hats. The line-up in the photograph above shows how engaged the children were, and, for adults, it provided a then topical satyrical side-swipe at the line-up of candidates involved in the debates leading up to the General Election…

Making moai

Forming the heads and bodies out of the grey self-drying clay was challenging but the pukao were easier because they could be rolled out and then cut to size. They always remind me of the coconut sweet in the Liquorice All-Sorts packets (the cylindrical one with liquorice down the centre). The children used pieces of plastic drinking straw to attach the heads to the bodies to hold them in position until they dried (otherwise the heads sag). The children captured the long ears and noses of the statues and some even made separate eyes to insert in their statues, using the red clay for the irises.

Making moai

As leaders we always find that the best sessions are those that have a practical activity of some sort. The children are more interested and engaged than if we spoke to them as part of a presentation. At the end we lined up the various models to copy the moai that can be seen on the ahu or ceremonial platforms on Rapa Nui or Easter Island.

Making moai at Manchester Museum

The Young Archaeologists Club meets at Manchester Museum on the second Saturday of the month but children have to registered with us in advance before they can attend for insurance reasons and each session has to be booked separately beforehand because we have more members than we can accommodate all at once.

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.

‘In the Footsteps of Alexander’ with Michael Wood at Manchester Museum

Michael Wood speaking about in the footsteps of Alexander at Manchester Museum

Last night Michael Wood, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, gave a public lecture entitled ‘In the footsteps of Alexander: a fresh look at an epic journey’. This drew on the popular 1998 TV series in which Prof Wood re-traced the epic journey of Alexander the Great. In his talk Professor Wood updated the story with new material from the currently beleaguered areas of Syria and Northern Iraq, and illustrated his talk with stunning pictures of the regions Alexander visited and showed clips from his documentary series.

Objects on display

As part of the welcome in the Museum foyer I was asked to show some objects from about the time of Alexander and it was a great pleasure to bring out a tray of ancient Greek coins and some Achaemenid Persian pottery from the site of Yanik Tepe in northern Iran.

Ancient Greek and Persian coins

The coins included a gold stater and a series of what our numismatist, Keith Sugden, describes as ‘monotonous’ tetradrachms of Alexander and some of his Successors. In the photo above the profile of Alexander wearing a lion skin headdress can be seen. The reverse of the coins shows Zeus seated. The only difference between the issues is often only the mintmark, denoting where the coin was struck. Such coins were produced right across the vast empire that Alexander created, replacing the numerous smaller, local and regional currencies that numismatists like Keith find more interesting. A gold stater (on the far left) has on the reverse a depiction of Victory, or Nike, who as we all know, was the ancient Greek goddess of trainers…

Gold coin showing Nike or Victory

Of particular interest to me personally was second from the right a silver coin of Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals who founded a dynasty that ruled much of Asia until the 2nd and 1st centuries BC when the Seleucid empire fought unsuccessful wars with the Roman Republic. Seleucus commanded a portion of the Macedonian phalanx.

The Macedonian phalanx. Which one was Seleucus?

With the help of Ptolemy, Seleucus established himself in Babylon, expanded eastwards into India, and later swapped several eastern territories for a large herd of elephants, which were deployed to great effect against his rivals. In the Ipsus campaign Seleucus brought his war elephants from Mesopotamia to Turkey. Does that make him greater than Hannibal?  In 281 BC, with Macedonia and mainland Greece almost within his grasp, and after a lifetime’s hard fighting, the old general was assassinated.

Looking at ancient Greek coins

The other material of interest on this table was a group of Achaemenid pottery from Yanik Tepe in northern Iran. It was excavated by Charles Burney of the University’s Archaeology Department who still has sharp memories of driving out there in a jeep in 1960, working with a team of student archaeologists (he still rembmers all their names!) and driving the material back to the UK. The site was on a large mound made of the accumulated debris  of not just hundreds but thousands of  year of habitation from the Neolithic onwards. In one of its most ‘recent’ phases of occupation there seems to have been an Achaemenid Persian  garrison based in a citadel on top of the mound in the late 6th/early 5th centuries BC. The pottery from this phase included a large pitcher for pouring liquids, wheel-made bowls and a pottery lamp. Some of the pottery is decorated with red cross-hatching.

Achaemenid Persian pottery

Of course, all this was really just a warm-up act for the main attraction which was Michael Wood’s talk, which proved to be an extremely popular evening event at the Museum. It was great getting a range of objects out of store that visitors don’t get to see that often. And how refreshing  to show representative material from a civilization that isn’t ancient Egyptian, Greek or Roman (not that they aren’t deeply fascinating).

 

My deepest thanks to Keith for getting out the ancient Greek coins, to Sajia who kindly helped on the objects table and to Sarah in Conservation who took some of the photos.

Worsley Man Anniversary

Talking to staff about Worsley Man at Manchester Museum

It was my turn to lead this morning’s gallery tour and by a particular piece of serendipity it turned out that the anniversary of the subject I selected last year actually falls today. The head of  Worsley Man was found  on 18th August 1958.  The remains were found by John Connelly as he was walling peat blocks in an isolated spot just inside the Worsley boundary, about two miles from Astley Green village. Worsley Moss is part of the Chat Moss pet bog complex in Salford.

As with the better preserved body of Lindow Man (also discovered in the month of August  – the 30th anniversary of the discovery has just passed), the head was thought to be that of a relatively recent murder victim and police spent five days searching the surrounding 252 acres (100 ha) of the moss but without finding any further remains. Incidentally we’d be very interested to talk to any retired police officers who took part in the search of Worsley Moss. There was a Coroner’s Inquest but when tests revealed that the head was not recent the rather grisly discovery was transferred to the University of Manchester. The remains were displayed in a perspex box at the Museum of the Pathology Department at the Manchester Medical School.

It was only after the discovery of Lindow Man in August 1984, that the head of Worsley Man attracted archaeological interest. Worsley Man was 20-30 years old and showed signs of having died violently: there was a wound behind the right ear, a fracture on top of the skull, a garotte around his neck and one of the vertebrae had been sliced when he was decapitated. Radiocarbon-dating placed Worsley Man around 100-200 AD.

CT scan of Worsley Man (courtesy of Manchester Hospitals Judith Adams)

A couple years ago a group of researchers from Universities of Manchester and Leicester began looking at Worsley Man again, and with the help of Prof Judith Adams of Manchester Hospitals were able to carry out a CT scan of the head. This showed that  there was a previously unknown third vertebra in the flesh underneath the skull.

Last autumn Worsley Man was scanned again at the Materials Science Department to investigate the injuries in more detail. This work was the subject of a documentary that was broadcast earlier in the year.  The members of the Worsley Man team who took part had to sign a non-disclosure agreement until the programme had been shown on TV. It is unfortunate that we were unable to study the scans and consult other members of the team before having to make a comment on camera about the scans.

Scan showing the three remaining vertebrae of Worsley Man

Worsley Man: vertebrae and styloid process (in light blue on right hand side of scan)

A piece of bone deep in the flesh of Worsley Man looked like the point of a bone tipped spear, similar to examples found in Iron Age cemeteries in East Yorkshire but in retrospect this is much more likely to be the styloid process of the skull. However, it was till worthwhile doing the scans because they revealed details such as there are two planes where the third vertebra had been chopped. These and a previously unseen nick on the mandible and the fractures on top of the skull show that Worsley Man died violently.

If the rest of the body had been found, there might be further evidence of  injuries. Although the police searched Worsley moss for five days in 1958 they didn’t find any more remains. However, this does not mean that there were no remains to be found. It was an extensive search area, the people involved weren’t archaeologists, and seeing remains in these circumstances is by no means an easy task, as the account of the finding of Lindow Man’s remains by Rick Turner in 1984 shows.

Scan of skull showing tooth and staples from 1950s autopsy

No further detail of the ligature was seen on the scans because the material out of which the ligature was made and the tissue of the neck are so similar  that we cannot differentiate between them. In fact it may possibly be the case that the ligature is part of the neck tissue.

One further piece of work to be done is isotopic analysis of tooth enamel to determine if possible where Worsley man came from. This might tell us whether Worsley Man was a local or an in-comer. If the radiocarbon date is correct in placing Worsley man in the 2nd century AD, he can hardly be a prisoner-of-war unless this happened during one of the periodic rebellions against Roman rule that took place in northern Britain. However, if (and it is a big if) we follow Rene Girard’s sacrificial theory, the scapegoating of victims during a time of crisis only ‘works’ if the victim is a member of the community caught up in the ‘sacrificial crisis’, so we ought to expect isotopic analysis to show he was a local not an outsider.

It seems that each new analysis raises further questions. Oh well, see you in the gallery same time next year!

Sam and Tristan looking at the results

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Killer Bees

Ancient Greek pot showing swarm of bees stinging some men

Much hilarity earlier in the week when Sally in the Collection Study Centre asked if I had any bee-related objects in the collection. We have some replicas of Myceanaean gold discs which appear to depict bees but I was reminded of a visit to the bee museum on the island of Rhodes a couple of years ago.  Rhodes is one of the sunniest islands in the eastern Mediterranean and Rhodes honey is a popular product.

Poster advertising honey on Rhodes

As part of their displays telling the story of bee-keeping on the island there are some replicas of ancient Greek archaeological material including the famous bee earring from Malia on Crete.

Earring from Malia on Crete

Perhaps the most eye-catching, or perhaps I should say eye-watering, exhibit is a replica of an ancient Greek pot now in the Museum at Basle showing men being attacked by a swarm of bees and being stung in rather painful places.

When bees attack….

I sent copies of the images back to Sally but added a warning about ‘Contains Adult Content’. I think she’s going to use them in her presentation about bee-keeping as part of the Collections Bites programme which should raise a chuckle. I think Campbell’s visiting the museum in question so this may not be the last word from the Killer Bees.

Honeycomb at the Rhodes bee museum

The Rhodes bee-keeping  museum is on the road to the airport and makes a good stopping off place when exploring the island by car.

Roman Ammunition and the Tse Tse Fly

ballista ammunition from Chester

As some readers are probably aware I’ve recently been putting together a list of Roman objects that students in Classics can use to write what are known as ‘object biographies’ as part of their studies at the University of Manchester. I needed an additional object to complete the list and thought of the round piece of stone – potentially a piece of ammunition from a ballista or stone thrower – on a shelf in the store. Sadly this does not have an accession number but it is labelled: ‘Professor Robert Newstead of Chester Roman ballista ball’. Its diameter is 10.5cm and it weighs 1.1 kg. You can see distinct chisel marks on the stone where it has been shaped. The label written on the surface of the stone reads: ‘W.SIDE SOUTH EAST ANGLE TOWER OCT 1937 R.N.’ which appears to be an impeccable Roman provenance. The association with a tower that is part of the Roman defences of Chester (Deva)  is very interesting because many towns added defences during the unsettled times of the late 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Towers appear to have been added to the defences in order to accommodate artillery, ballisteria or stone-throwers.

Label of stone ammunition for a ballista or stone-thrower

The Romans adopted artillery from the ancient Greeks. The energy needed to throw stones, arrows and other missiles came from twisted pieces or bundles of  cord or rope made from sinew or hair. This was sufficiently elastic to store latent energy. The arms of the stone-throwers were embedded in the bundles of sinew and once the tension was released the arm sprang forward giving propellant force to the missile.

Robert Newstead was the first curator of the Grosvenor Museum and held the post for 19 years from 1886.  Newstead became increasingly  involved with the  archaeologyof Chester. He was also a lecturer in Entymology and Parasitology at the Liverpool University School of Tropical Medicine. In particular he excavated the South East Angle Tower in Chester during the 1930s (the label written on the stone ball above reads October 1937). I am grateful to Elizabeth Royles and the Grosvenor Museum for permission to quote from Elizabeth’s wonderfully illustrated presentation about Newstead (© Cheshire West Museums). Some of Newstead’s  discoveries shown in her presentation are ballista balls. A plan seems to show most of the tower being excavated in 1930 and a residual piece being excavated in 1938. The site can still be seen at Chester today. Courses of sandstone blocks stillsurvive. The tower would have been about 16-20 ft high.

Chester South East Angle Tower

Professor Newstead died in 1947 aged of 87, further proof if any were needed of the longevity bestowed by antiquarian pursuits!  Professor Newstead had given nearly 60,000 natural history specimens and more than 4000 archaeological objects to the collections of the Grosvenor Museum.

Professor Newstead was made an FSA for his work on the Tse Tse fly. The Numismatic collection at Manchester Museum includes a trial piece for this medal. Must be the first time ever Roman stone throwers have shared a blog post with the tse tse fly! Conjures up images of an over-the-top approach to the suppression of insects by the Roman authorities.

Trial design for Tse Tse fly medal (Manchester Museum Numismatics Collection)