Monthly Archives: January 2010

Off with Their Mummified Heads

January 7, 2010

Why do so many of the world’s major museums hold bizarre collections of mummified body parts from ancient Egypt–a human head here, for example, and a withered hand there? This is not the kind of question that often pops up in casual conversation, even in the circles I run in. But it came to mind this morning after reading Josie Glausiusz’s excellent review in Nature of a very cool new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

The museum’s “Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets,” explores artistic body parts from Ancient Egypt–bits and pieces of worked wood, bronze and obsidian that curator Yekaterina Barbash found tucked away on storage shelves. And Josie Glausiusz, a writer whose work I like a lot, makes several lovely points in the review. She notes, for example, that Egyptian artists were very fond of depicting human perfection. (This is one reason, I suppose, why we see so many young, slender, beautiful people painted on Egyptian tombs.) But some artists were not at all shy about depicting human frailties such as dwarfism or scoliolis, as artifacts in the exhibition demonstrate.

But back to my question about the mummified body parts. While researching my book, The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead, I toured dozens of museums around the world, and was stunned to learn about all the disembodied heads, hands and the like. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for example, owns the head of a woman, and a hand with a scarab ring. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicag0 possesses five mummy heads. The Louvre has two heads and a hand. And on it goes.

So what’s going on? The answer, I’m afraid, relates to an old antiquities trade. During the nineteenth century, wealthy European tourists clamored to buy Egyptian mummies as souvenirs of their Grand Tours. Indeed, few stately homes were complete at the time without a mummy or two propped up in the corridors. In 1835, however, the Egyptian government passed legislation to control the antiquities trade there: it banned exports of its ancient treasures, including mummies.

But enterprising and unscrupulous travelers were not to be denied their souvenirs. They began to smuggle mummies out–something that proved very tricky. It was impossible, after all, to cram a whole mummy into the steamer trunks of the day, and larger shipping containers attracted too much attention. So antiquities dealers developed a whole new trade. They dismembered Egyptian mummies, hewing and chopping off heads, hands, and feet–the very parts that travellers craved as souvenirs. Back at home, many travelers had these mementos mounted in Victorian glass cases, a fashionable addition at the time to many a mantel.

Grotesque, isn’t it? Particularly when the Egyptians deliberately mummified their dead so that their bodies would be preserved whole and intact for eternity. I guess they didn’t count on Victorian souvenir hunters.

The Archaeology of Spray Cans

January 6, 2010

Is the graffiti that blankets our backalleys and freeway ramps an urban blight or a street-wise data set for some future archaeologist? I have to say I was firmly in the former camp until very recently, when I came across Cassidy Curtis’s superb website, Graffiti Archaeology. Curtis is a PDI/Dreamworks animator who has worked on such wonderful films as The Bee Movie, Shrek the Third, and Madagascar. And he clearly loves what he calls “the chameleon skin of the urban landscape.”

Curtis sees tag-covered city walls as a highly ephemeral art form. Grafitti artists, as we all know, are constantly overwriting old images with their spray cans, creating a palimpsest of tags–and this makes these images particularly interesting to the archaeologically minded. How does this uber-urban art change and evolve over time? How often do artists revisit and rewrite graffiti sites? Do the same artists return again and again? Or do different artists add their tags to a site, creating a kind of graffiti dialogue? I think these are all intriguing questions, but to get at them, one clearly needs data.

Curtis offers it up in spades. To document ever-evolving urban graffiti, he began taking photos of urban walls in 15 different locations in 1999, returning regularly–sometimes daily–to update his data bank. Sometimes he caught tag artists in the act with spray cans in hand; other times he caught images of the street life that these walls attracted.

Curtis has posted the results on his website Graffiti Archaeology in a clear and beautiful way, creating a timeline for each wall. Click on the timeline, and you can see what the wall looked like on a specific date and then how it changed over time. The site is really a web masterpiece, and after spending time there, I began to see urban graffiti as an organic, breathing, living urban artifact. If you haven’t visited Curtis’s site, I highly recommend that you check it out.

I’d love to see archaeologists take a serious look at this street-life art. Researchers have been poring over ancient graffiti at sites like Pompeii for years, and it seems to me that future archaeologists could learn something intriguing about street culture from poring over our painted concrete walls.

Liquid Time Capsules

January 5, 2010

I’ve never had the pleasure or good fortune to travel to the quirky resort town of Rehoboth, Delaware. Rehoboth, I hear, has charm, fine beaches, a boardwalk, and something known as the Sea Witch Festival. Washingtonians flock there each summer to escape the city heat. But what interests me most about Rehoboth is a very cool pub there, known as Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats. Its founder and proprietor, 40-year-old Sam Calagione, specializes in brewing ancient types of grog–what he likes to call liquid time capsules.

I first came across a mention of Sam Calagione in a very funny article in the New York Times last September. Calagione and two researchers from the Penn Museum–Patrick McGovern (mentioned in my post yesterday) and Clark Erickson–had decided to brew a batch of the ancient Andean corn beer known as chicha. The kicker was that they decided to make this beer the traditional way, by chewing wad upon wad of milled Peruvian corn, just as women in the Andes once did. Natural enzymes in human saliva break down starches in the corn, and turn them into fermentable sugar. And because the chewing happens before the boiling, the final result can be drunk quite safely (though most chicha makers in South America today use a different and far more sterile method to make their brew).

But Calagione and his two companions gamely attempted to chew their way through 20 pounds of purple Peruvian corn. Here’s what happened, according to New York Times reporter Joyce Wadler:

“As befitting a bold craftsman, Mr. Calagione took the first chomp, grabbing a small handful of corn and plopping it into his mouth. A small puff of flour escaped his lips. Mr. Calagione choked, concentrated and then chewed. After a few minutes, he removed a gravelly, purple lump from his mouth and put it on the tray. It resembled something a cat owner might be familiar with, if kitty litter came in purple.”

What the team learned was that it was hard, dry work to make chicha this way: after hours of dessicated chewing the men worked their way through just seven pounds of corn.

The pub offers a range of ancient ales–from Midas Touch, which it describes as an ancient Turkish recipe using the original ingredients from a 2700-yea- old drinking vessels discovered in the tomb of King Midas, to Sah’tea, a modern update on a 9th century Finnish proto-beer. Dogfish Head is a favorite watering hole of archaeologists, and it’s high on my list of places to visit.

I personally can’t wait to taste authentic chicha.

If you’d like to see Calagione make this beer, please check out the video below.

Beer, The Ancient Health Drink

January 4, 2010

One of the coolest experiences I ever had as an archaeological journalist was wandering through the vast collections area of the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago. I confess that I’ve always loved museum storage areas: you never know what strange artifacts and oddities you will spy on the shelves. And the Oriental Institute did not disappoint. Although I was there to look at Mesopotamian silver for a Discover Magazine story on the origins of money, what really caught my eye was a collection of what appeared to be slender three-foot-long bronze sticks. When I asked assistant curator Emily Teeter what these strange objects were, she promptly informed me that Mesopotamia’s ancient inhabitants had used them as beer-drinking straws.

Teeter and I then had an extended conversation about beer, a favorite subject among archaeologists. The urban dwellers of Mesopotamia had discovered that drinking fermented beer was much safer than downing the local water: the alcohol in the brew made short work of the bacteria that flourished in their contaminated water supplies. But the early beers were less than perfect: they were laden with bitter residues. So the Mesopotamians invented drinking straws. One end of the straw was sealed and perforated with tiny holes, turning it into a long extended filter. Early beer drinkers pored their brew into a large jar and then congregrated companionably around it, each sipping from a long straw.

I was reminded of all this yesterday, when I read a terrific article by Trey Popp in the January/February issue of the Penn Gazette on biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern, the world’s leading authority on ancient alcohol. Popp’s article is well worth reading–as is Patrick McGovern’s new book, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages–but I found one part particularly intriguing.

In the 1980s, Popp writes, two researchers at the Penn museum posed an fascinating question: was making a better beer a greater incentive for early botanical improvement of cereal grains than making a better bread? In other words, which did early civilizations value most: bread or alcohol? After much study, the two researchers, Solomon Katz and Mary Voigt, concluded that beer was very probably the driving force for all this ancient agricultural experimentation. Beer, of course, produced a very pleasant high. But more importantly, it produced notable health benefits and no side effects (which can be very harmful in terms of health and legal side even, e.g. http://sideeffectsofxarelto.org/xarelto-lawsuits/). The process of fermentation yields lysine, an essential building block for all protein in the body, and an abundance of B vitamins, which great assist the functioning of the immune and nervous systems. And the alcohol content kills bacteria in tainted water, as I mentioned earlier.

Thus, argued Katz and Voigt, beer drinkers had an “selective advantage” over teetotalers, enjoying better health and giving birth to more children. Who would have thought it–beer, the health drink and one of the foundations of human civilization?

Confiscating the Dead Sea Scrolls?

January 1, 2010

As I was recovering from last night’s revelry with a large mug of very black coffee, I noticed in this morning’s Globe & Mail that Jordan is officially asking Canada to seize the Dead Sea Scrolls. Eight of the 2000-year-old scrolls, including fragments containing “The Song of Moses” from Deuteronomy, are on exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto until Sunday, January 3rd.

The exhibit in question, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” was a major coup for the Royal Ontario Museum. The Dead Sea scrolls are extremely fragile, so the Israel Antiquities Authority has been reluctant to allow them to travel. As a result, the government of Jordan has had to wait patiently for this opportunity to press its claims to the scrolls in a big way on the international stage.

The history of these scrolls is complicated. The first were discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin herder, Mohammed Ed Dhib, while searching for a stray goat in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea. Seven of these scrolls came to the Israeli government. But over the following seven years, Jordanian scholars supervised additional recovery operations on land that Jordan occupied west of the Jordan River. These excavations produced thousands of other fragments of the scrolls, which were sent to the Palestinian museum in east Jerusalem.

Now here’s the nub of Jordan’s request to Canadian authorities. During the Six Day War in 1967, the Israeli government took the scrolls from the Palestinian Museum, and occupied East Jerusalem. Jordan is now asking Canada to abide by the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. As a signatory to this important international convention, Canada is obliged to “take into its custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory.” In other words, Jordan is asking Canada to honor its international obligation, and confiscate the scrolls until the ownership issue can be resolved.

Canada, however, is very reluctant to get embroiled in this difficult situation. Yesterday a government spokesperson stated that “it would not be appropriate for Canada to intervene as a third party.”

I am personally sympathetic to Jordan’s claim. I recognize that the scrolls constitute an important part of Jewish heritage, but it looks to me as if Jordan was the victim of cultural looting. The Israeli government should not have taken the scrolls from the Palestinian museum in east Jerusalem after the Six Day War. This kind of “spoils of war” thinking is inherently wrongheaded and unethical. No curator or scholar should indulge in it.

Moreover, I find Canada’s position in this very disappointing. What’s the point of signing an international convention if you don’t honor it when the chips are down?