Category Archives: Old World Archaeology

Repatriating the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum

March 17, 2010

I sometimes think that one of the worst jobs in archaeology today would be to work as a curator at the British Museum. Yes, there is the prestige of researching and mounting massive exhibitions that attract international attention. But who would want to be on the receiving end of all the ire of foreign governments who want their treasures back, from Iran demanding the loan of the Cyrus cylinder to Greece pressuring for the return of the Parthenon marbles? And I sure wouldn’t want Zawi Hawass lecturing me on the return of the Rosetta Stone.

Now a new front has opened up in the diplomatic war to pry loose national treasures from the British Museum showcases–and it’s not at all where you might think it would be. Last week, Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil called for a debate in the British House of Commons over the repatriation of the very famous Lewis Chessmen discovered in a sandbank on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides Islands sometime before 1831.

First a very short primer on the Lewis Chessmen, which are my all time favorite artifacts from Medieval Europe. A 12th century artist carved the exquisitely beautiful chess pieces–93 in all–mostly from walrus ivory, which could well have come from the Greenland colonies, or possibly even from the Canadian Arctic. (That’s another story I’ll save for another day.) No one knows for certain, however, where the chessmen were carved, although some scholars lean towards Trondheim in Norway, since similar chess pieces were found there. How these wonderful chessmen–one of the best preserved sets from the medieval world- came to lie in a sand dune near Uig on the Isle of Lewis is unknown.

Shortly after they came to light in 1831, however, the Hebridean finder decided to sell them. A private buyer purchased 11 of the pieces and the rest went to the British Museum, which displays several of these miniature artworks in one of its galleries.

But now people in the Outer Hebrides want their famous chessmen back. Indeed, their MP Angus MacNeil is working hard to repatriate them to the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, the major town of the Outer Hebrides. And what has provoked this protest? It appears that the British Museum has stepped very clumsily on toes and local sensitivities in the Outer Hebrides. Its curators have been working on a major travelling exhibit of the chesspieces to Scotland and according to a recent online article in The Press and Journal, advertising for the forthcoming exhibit attributes the chesspieces to Norwegian craftsmen, completely ignoring the possibility that they were carved in the Outer Hebrides.

Is this just a tempest in a teapot? I don’t think so. The Lewis chesspieces are objects of of immense pride in the Outer Hebrides, and someone at the British Museum should have known this. I am becoming more and more sympathetic all the time to foreign governments and even local museums who want to repatriate their greatest treasures from the vaults and exhibition cases of the British Museum. It think it’s patronizing in the extreme today to think that only the big national museums in developed countries know how to take care of the world’s most important cultural heritage.

Signs of Respect

March 11, 2010

As regular readers will know, I recently fumed here over the poor conservation of a petroglyph-covered boulder at the Vancouver Museum, after reading a troubling post over at Northwest Coast Archaeology. I questioned the wisdom of removing such boulders and slabs from the places where they were created and installing them in museums. I then suggested that the Vancouver Museum repatriate the damaged boulder in question.

Since then, Northwest Coast has posted more on this disturbing state of affairs, and recently I received a great email on these issues from George Nicholas, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University and the director of Intellectual Property issues in Cultural Heritage. George is kindly guest-blogging on this today. -HP

I think the notion that rock art is about more than the images is something that has been largely ignored, certainly by the public, but also by many archaeologists and anthropologists. People often tend to focus on the details of the images, rather than on the context of the rock art. But one doesn’t work without the other.

In his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger notes that before photography, before the age of reproductive technology, one could only see a particular image (such as the Last Supper fresco) in the church in which it was painted. The same obviously holds true for Lascaux and all other rock art.

Taken out of their geographic context, the images are divorced not only from the place itself (which may be imbued with meaning of its own), but also from the emotional landscape and viewscape. I’m sure you’ve been to petroglyph sites where there’s sort of a mystical feel to the place. I find that at the Three Sister’s Rockshelter in British Columbia’s Marble Canyon. The silence of the moss-filled forest that surrounds the blue-grey rock face adds an important dimension to the rock art.

And of course, we approach rock art from the perspective of the western world. Our worldview is based on a set of dichotomies: the distinctions between the natural and supernatural realms; between people and nature; between past, present, and future; between genders, and all the rest. Such distinctions may be absent, however, in many indigenous societies; they may live in a world in which ancestral spirits are part of this existence (owing to lack of separation between past and present; between natural and supernatural realms).

So all of this, then, begs several questions. What does rock “art” really represent? How are we supposed to view it? What should we do with it, from a heritage preservation perspective? Indeed, is rock art something that should be preserved?

Most western archaeologists would say yes to the latter question. But in Australia, contemporary Aboriginal persons sometimes paint over ancient images as a way of continually replenishing the world; it is the act of painting that is important (like the creation of Navajo sand paintings used in healing ceremonies, and later destroyed, much to the consternation of western observers).

The Zuni people have a similar tradition. They carve wooden figurines of their war gods, the Ayahu:ta, and place them in outdoor shrines. After a period of time, the figurines are replaced with new ones. Zuni tribal member and archaeologist Edmund Ladd notes in his writings that “When a new image of the Ahayu:ta is installed in a shrine, the ‘old’ one is removed to ‘the pile,’ which is where all the previous gods have been lain. This act of removal specifically does NOT have the same connotations as ‘throwing away’ or ‘discarding.’ The image of the god that has been replaced must remain at the site to which it was removed and be allowed to disintegrate there.” So, from a Zuni perspective, proper stewardship is letting the ahayu:ta decay.

Rock art raises many fundamental issues, as well as conflicting claims that certain items of heritage belong to a specific group or are part of the heritage of human kind. In recent decades, archaeologists have been very much part of this debate.

My own position is that I see merit in both positions, but also that the tension between the two positions is important because it forces us (as archaeologists, as heritage managers, as member of descendant communities, etc) to think about the nature of heritage in new ways.

-George Nicholas

Above: The rock art of Bohuslan, Sweden. Photo by Julius Agrippa. Below: Contemporary Aboriginal artist Mundara Koorang. Photo by Novyaradnum.

Dolphin Hunters and The Cove

March 8, 2010

Like many others who watched the Academy Awards last night, I was very disturbed by the clips I saw from The Cove, the film that won in the Best Documentary category. The Cove portrays the dolphin hunt that takes place each year near the small Japanese fishing village of Taiji. There hunters herd more than a thousand dolphins into a small cove, where they spear them from small boats. The most disturbing clip was an aerial view of the cove after the slaughter: the water was blood red.

Taiji’s inhabitants are apparently up in arms now over the film. According to a CBC report I read today, Taiji’s mayor has now released a statement defending the hunt. “There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world,” he notes. “It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories.”

I will come back in a moment to the ethics of this hunt. But the mayor does make a valid point. Dolphin hunting does indeed have a very long history along the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Archaeological evidence shows that dolphins were a major food source along the coast of California–not far from where the Oscars were handed out last night–as early as 9000 years ago.

Mark Raab, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues excavated a trove of dolphin bones at a site on San Clemente Island, 60 miles off the California coast. As it happened, I was there at Eel Point with the crew when they dug a small portion of the site, and I was amazed as I watched faunal expert Judy Porcasi sort through the recovered bone fragments. Porcasi kept shaking her head as she picked out something familiar in a screen. “Dolphin,” she said. “Dolphin. Dolphin.”

Her later analysis showed that a whopping 38 percent of the identifiable mammal bones from the dig belonged to dolphins. And though the intensity of the hunt varied over time, the people of Eel Point hunted dolphins from 7000 B.C. right up to A.D 1400. And this raises an important question. How did they manage kill so many dolphins? The excavations did not turn up any sign of a harpoon.

In search of clues, Porcasi and Raab began scouring accounts of how traditional cultures elsewhere around the Pacific hunted dolphins. From this they discovered that human hunters had long employed a simple but deadly technique.

In the Solomon Islands, for example, hunters struck stones together underwater: this created a terrible cacophony of sound that essentially “jammed” the animals’ echo-location, a sonarlike system that guides them underwater. With this system down, the animals became so disoriented that hunters easily drove them into shallow water, where they could then be “captured by hand,” says Raab.

Raab now argues that the first migrants to Eel Point likely brought this clever hunting technique with them from Asia. This strikes me as a very plausible argument, and it suggests that humans have been hunting dolphins in places like Japan for more than 11,500 years.

But does this make the practice morally acceptable today? I don’t think it does and here’s why. Japanese villagers do not need dolphin meat to survive, as hunters did in times past. And there is no suggestion that hunting these marine mammals plays an essential part of their culture. Last, but definitely not least, I think we know much more about dolphins today than hunters did in the past, because we are able to observe their underwater behavior in ways that earlier people could not.

On the strength of these observations, we now know how very intelligent dolphins are. They have recognizable personalities, can think about the future, are capable of working together cooperatively, and are excellent problem-solvers. In other words, dolphins are a lot like us, and so some scientists have recently proposed they should be treated as “non-human persons.”

I do not support the dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan. I hope that the international community can now pressure the Japanese government to bring this terrible slaughter to an end.

A Second Life for Çatalhöyük

March 4, 2010

I have often wanted to climb inside the minds of archaeologists as they wander the sites they know extremely well. After long years of digging, mapping, and poring over artifacts, they see a ruined temple, ragged stone walls, a hunter’s campsite in a way that the rest of us can never hope to do. They can see in their mind’s eye a site as it may once have been. The rest of us are chained to the present– a dim shadow of what a place once was.

All this will explain why I am so captivated by a new experimental project undertaken by University of California Berkeley archaeologist Ruth Tringham, Ph.D. student Colleen Morgan and their students. The team is using Second Life, a three-D virtual online world to construct several scenes set at the famous Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. As some of you will know, Çatalhöyük has been the subject of decades of archaeological research, most recently under the direction of Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder.

Over the years, I have read a great deal about Çatalhöyük, including a fine site “biography” by science writer Michael Balter. But I confess that I never really had a feeling for what the site might have looked like until I saw the Second Life version of Çatalhöyük that Tringham, Morgan and their students laboriously pieced together.

The students based their reconstruction on research papers they read, but it is by no means an accurate representation of the famous Neolithic site. Rather it resembles a gaming version–a carefully thought out and fun one. I think this is a very cool step in exactly the right direction for presenting archaeology to a larger, and much younger audience. Kudos to Tringham and Morgan and their student team.

Here is a YouTube video of their reconstruction to check out:

You can also go to Second Life directly and check out their reconstruction. Colleen Morgan also has a terrific blog post on this.

ER, Ancient Egypt Style

March 3, 2010

I’ve spent many hours over the past week on a cardiac ward in a large urban hospital, visiting my father who is suffering from heart trouble. Over the last few days, as he and I have taken to strolling the corridors–he leaning on his walker, and I beside him–I have begun to notice all the many gifts and tributes that grateful heart patients and their families have left behind for nurses and doctors on the ward.

I’ve never seen so many tokens of gratitude–large engraved plaques; framed homemade quilts; original etchings and paintings; an inscribed and signed moose antler; and a framed eagle feather. All are intended as permanent testaments, and seem to bear the same phrase, “with heartfelt thanks,” a mantra, it seems, from those who have survived a near-death experience and whose hearts have been healed.

As I walk these corridors, my thoughts occasionally wander and I am reminded of similar places in the ancient world. In the Nile Valley, ancient Egyptians searched for relief from their ailments in sanatoriums in two major temples. The first of these was in Dendera. There, according to Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind’s wonderful book, Medicine in the Days of the Pharoahs, the ill took medicinal waters in a temple dedicated to Hathor, bathing in a series of stone tanks in hopes of a cure–an approach favored even today by those visiting traditional spas.

And if the waters at Dendera offered little relief, Egyptian patients had a second recourse. They could journey to the great temple in Deir el-Bahri, dedicated to Imhotep and Amenhotep. There priests conducted the sick into a dark chapel: as they waited hopefully, a god-like voice suddenly boomed, reassuring them that they would be cured. In other chambers, priests induced dream states in their patients, allowing them to talk directly to the gods and plead their cases.

Did any of this succeed in curing the hopefuls? Well, the ancient Egyptians, too, left permanent tokens of their gratitude. Along the walls of one shrine, Egyptologists have found inscribed testimonials. One reads: “Andromachus, a Macedonian, a laborer, came to the good god Amenhotep; he was sick and the god cured him the same day.”

The nurses and doctors on Ward 2a, where my father now is, would recognize the sentiment immediately.

Today’s photo shows the Hathor capitals in the First Hypostyle Hall of Dendera temple. The photo was taken by Jaakko Anttila in January 2005.

Phoenicians and a Very Big Thirst for Adventure

March 2, 2010

I confess I have a great soft spot for the half-mad adventurers who build painstaking replicas of ancient seacraft and then trust their fates to them on long ocean voyages. Their published narratives speckle my bookshelves–from Thor Heyerdahl’s account of his balsa-wood-raft voyage from South America to the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia, to lesser known tomes recounting near-death experiences aboard ox-hide Celtic coracles in the storm-tossed North Atlantic and Viking knarrs navigating iceberg-littered waters off the Newfoundland coast. The courage of these modern mariners is truly impressive.

The latest in this band of nautical brothers is the crew now sailing around Africa aboard a replica of a 2500-year-old Phoenician ship. The team, led by former Royal Navy officer Philip Beale, is attempting to recreate what is thought to be the first circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenician sailors around 600 B.C.

The great classical Greek historian Herodotus briefly described this epic three-year-long voyage in The Histories. According to Herodotus, the Egyptian pharoah Nekho II commanded a small fleet of Phoenician ships–the master mariners of the day–to explore the African coast from East to West. After rounding the horn of Africa, they sailed southward, stopping only to plant and reap grain for ship’s supplies, then passed through the dreaded Pillars of Heracles. From there, they returned along the coast of western Africa to Egypt.

Beale and his companions have built what they believe to be a faithful replica of a Phoenician ship of the era, right down to 8000 olive-wood pins to hold everything together. Two days ago they docked in the South African port of East London, and the crew is now preparing to head off to Capetown. The toughest part of the voyage lies ahead, as they round the tip of Africa. If you’re interested in following their voyage, I’d suggest checking out their info-packed website. It has a wealth of information on Phoenician history and seafaring.

I certainly wish them kind winds and a safe journey.

Herman Wirth and the Origins of Writing

February 23, 2010

Did our early human ancestors develop a written “code” some 30,000 years ago or more, inscribing and painting cave walls with its enigmatic symbols? This is the question posed by new research from Genevieve von Petzinger, a recently graduated master’s student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the subject of a fascinating new article in New Scientist. What no one has mentioned so far, however, is that the idea of such an ancient script dates back to the nineteenth century and has a dark link to Nazi Germany.

First, however, let me summarize my understanding of von Petzinger’s very cool new research. Struck by the profusion of little circles, triangles, lines and other marks on rock-art-covered cave walls dating to Paleolithic times, von Petzinger created a massive database of all such recorded marks at 146 sites in France. (No one else had apparently been willing to undertake this seemingly thankless task, so full marks to von Petzinger.) The sites ranged in age from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In analyzing this new database with her thesis advisor April Nowell, von Petzinger noticed that cave artists had repeated 26 different signs–including circles and triangles–over and over again. The artists had also used a kind of visual shorthand–inscribing just mammoth tusks instead of a whole mammoth, for example–which is common in pictographic languages. Moreover, in some caves, von Petzinger discovered pairs of signs, a type of grouping that characterizes early pictorial language.

This all sounds exceedingly interesting, though I am waiting to see the paper that the pair has just submitted to Antiquity. But I feel obliged to point out that the idea of a very early system of written symbols was strongly championed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s by Herman Wirth, one of the most controversial prehistorians in Europe and the first president of the Nazi research institute founded by SS head Heinrich Himmler. (This institute was the subject of my last book, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust. In it, I wrote two full chapters on Wirth and his research. )

Wirth, who had a Ph.D in philology, was a man of great personal charm and many bizarre ideas. He became convinced that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic race had evolved in the Arctic, where it developed a sophisticated civilization complete with the world’s first writing system. Furthermore, he proposed that Plato’s description of Atlantis and its demise was in fact an accurate account of the catastrophe that befell the Nordic civilization on an Arctic island.

According to Wirth, the Nordic refugees from this disaster escaped to northern Europe, bringing with them their ancient writing system, an invention that later diffused to cultures around the world. So Wirth spent years poring over ancient European rock art, searching for evidence of this system and recording examples of circles, disks and wheels that he believed were ancient Nordic ideograms symbolizing the sun, the annual cycle of life, and so on.

I found Wirth’s ideas about an ancient master race and an Arctic Atlantis preposterous. Indeed, they would have been laughable had it not been for the fact that Himmler, the architect of the Final Solution, used Wirth’s published works to lend credence to the official Nazi line on the Aryan master race, and that Wirth, who died in 1981, still has many avid followers in Germany and Austria today. Indeed, I interviewed one of his ardent supporters.

I think that von Petzinger’s new research on Paleolithic symbols sounds immensely intriguing. It certainly fits with our growing awareness of the abilities of our human ancestors. Moreover, I want to state clearly that the Canadian researcher did not for a moment come under the influence of Herman Wirth and his ideas. Indeed, she proposes that the ancient sign language may have originated in Africa and arrived in Europe with modern humans–a proposal that would have horrified Wirth.

Nevertheless, I think it’s important to point out the troubled history of the idea of an ancient European script recorded in rock art. We cannot afford to forget in any way the Nazi past.

Today’s photo shows a plaster cast that Wirth made in the late 1930s of Bronze-Age rock art in Sweden. I photographed this cast in 2002 as it hung in a museum in a small Austrian town, Spital am Pyhrn. At the time, Wirth’s casts were clandestine Nazi memorials.

Exhuming Ancient Celebrities

February 17, 2010

I wasn’t planning to post today on Tutankhamun. Over the past twenty-four hours, journalists have spilled a cargo tanker’s worth of ink on news that the famous young king suffered from a host of serious ailments. I thought I would leave the story to the newspapers until I began browsing the coverage. Some reporters derided the Egyptian king as “malarial and inbred,” while others took lower aim. One online rag, for example, informed readers that “King Tut was a wreck, but his penis was ‘well-developed’.”

If you ask me, these exhumations and studies of ancient kings and other celebrities are becoming media circuses. All the high-tech poking and prodding quickly strips away the dignity and grandeur of great men and women, baring their physical frailties and secrets for all to see. In recent years, we’ve been subjected to several of these tawdry sideshows and I suspect there are more to come. I posted recently on the proposal to exhume Leonardo da Vinci. And two weeks ago, I spotted an article on a Danish team who will soon exhume a famous 17th century astronomer, Tycho Brahe.

None of the subjects, I might add, has given consent for such scientific study. And I sometimes wonder about the motives of the researchers. The scientists who propose to exhume Tycho Brahe, for example, want to determine whether the famous astonomer was murdered or whether he died of natural cause. This hardly seems reason enough to rifle through a tomb and disturb the sleep of the astonomer.

In future, I’d like to see researchers and reporters alike treat the ancient dead in the same way we treat the recently deceased–with respect and decorum. Few of us would consider prying open a recent grave and poring over newly buried remains just to satisfy a point of idle curiosity. So why is it ok to do that to a 17th century astronomer?

When I was writing my book, The Mummy Congress, I was really struck by the highly professional way that serious mummy researchers treated the ancient dead. They never made jokes at the expense of the dead or talked lightly or unfeelingly about their ailments. Indeed, during the examinations of the bodies, they often spoke as if the mummies themselves could hear exactly what was said.

Poor Tutankhamun. I’m glad he couldn’t hear what people were saying today.

Pirouetting in the Street over Bronze-Age Wreck

February 16, 2010

Every once in a while, an archaeological discovery comes along that makes me feel as if I should leap out of my chair, cartwheel across the room, and turn pirouettes in the street. I had one of those days yesterday, when I read the British newspaper accounts of an absolutely stunning underwater discovery off the coast of South Devon. The South West Maritime Archaeological Group has discovered the debris field of a Bronze-Age trading vessel, dating back to 1300 B.C.

This is one of the oldest known shipwrecks in the world. And what makes me so very, very happy about it is that this immensely important find is in the hands of serious archaeologists whose sole objective is to advance scientific knowledge –not corporate treasure hunters driven by the bottom line. Hallelujah!

I have long worried about ancient underwater sites such as this in British waters. The British government, I am sorry to report, has failed miserably to step up to the plate when it comes to protecting shipwreckl sites. Although the Britannia long ruled the waves as a great maritime power, the British government has so far refused to sign the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, a vital piece of international law protecting prehistoric and historic wrecks from the clutches of treasure hunters. Thirty-one other nations, however, have taken the much-needed plunge.

So the discovery of the South Devon site and its astonishing cargo of gold bracelets, rapiers, sling shots, tin ingots and the like by devoted avocational underwater archaeologists is cause for real rejoicing. Ben Roberts, an archaeometallurgist and curator at the British Museum, couldn’t be happier. “The Salcombe site,” he notes, “is now one of the most important Bronze Age sites currently being investigated in Britain.”

Those interested in learning more about this amazing discovery can read about the work up until 2006 here, and can then follow the story to the present here.