history & archaeology

Rescued Victorian rainfall data smashes former records

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From phys.org: Rescued Victorian rainfall data smashes former records.

Record-breaking Victorian weather has been revealed after millions of archived rainfall records dating back nearly 200 years were rescued by thousands of volunteers during the first COVID-19 lockdown.

The Rainfall Rescue project was launched by the University of Reading in March 2020 and offered members of the public a way of distracting themselves from the pandemic by digitally transcribing 130 years’ worth of handwritten rainfall observations from across the UK and Ireland.

Some 16,000 volunteers responded to the challenge, digitising 5.2 million observations in just 16 days. Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the project launch, on Saturday 26 March, these records have now been made publicly available in the official Met Office national record, extending it back 26 years to 1836. [continue]

Rare Pictish symbol stone found near potential site of famous battle

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From phys.org: Rare Pictish symbol stone found near potential site of famous battle.

… the new discovery appears to be intricately carved with evidence of classic abstract Pictish symbols including triple ovals, a comb and mirror, a crescent and V rod and double disks. Unusually the stone appears to show different periods of carving with symbols overlying one another.

Rewriting the history books: why the Vikings left Greenland

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From phys.org: Rewriting the history books: why the Vikings left Greenland.

One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century? The consensus view has long been that colder temperatures, associated with the Little Ice Age, helped make the colonies unsustainable. However, new research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn’t dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought. [continue]

Painstaking race against time to uncover Viking ship’s secrets

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From phys.org: Painstaking race against time to uncover Viking ship’s secrets.

Inch by inch, they gently pick through the soil in search of thousand-year-old relics. Racing against onsetting mould yet painstakingly meticulous, archaeologists in Norway are exhuming a rare Viking ship grave in hopes of uncovering the secrets within.

Who is buried here? Under which ritual? What is left of the burial offerings? And what can they tell us about the society that lived here?

Now reduced to tiny fragments almost indistinguishable from the turf that covers it, the 20-metre (65-foot) wooden longship raises a slew of questions. [continue, see photos]

Place names describe Scandinavia in the Iron and Viking Ages

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This article from Heritage Daily rings all my chimes: Place names describe Scandinavia in the Iron and Viking Ages.

Every now and then, researchers are lucky enough to experience a Eureka moment — when a series of facts suddenly crystallize into a an entirely new pattern.

That’s exactly what happened to Birgit Maixner from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) University Museum when she began looking at artefacts and place names. [continue]

Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter: Norway’s Forgotten Witch

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From Heritage Daily: Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter: Norway’s Forgotten Witch.

The case has been almost completely absent from Norwegian history, despite the fact that it caused an uproar at the time. It was the talk of the town in Trondheim, between the remote villages from the south to the north of Trøndelag, and even all the way to Nordland. The story itself, and the characters that emerge from the court records, could easily be from the pages of a fantastic and macabre novel, she says. The trial against Finn-Kirsten started in the isolated mountain village Støren in 1674, and rumbled on until 1677. After that, it disappeared into the darkness of history. Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter was the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Central Norway, with over thirty people from all levels of society at risk of the same fate throughout the trial. [see full article]

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Ice house found under London street

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From the Guardian: Chilling discovery: ice house found under London street.

For the well to-do residents of Georgian London, serving chilled drinks at a festive party was a more complicated process than today. In the absence of electricity to make ice cubes and keep them frozen, they had to source their ice from elsewhere.

For the most discerning hosts, that meant using blocks of purest frozen Norwegian fjord, which was shipped to London’s docks and then carefully stored until required to be chipped into glasses and clinked.

Archaeologists have now uncovered a link to the capital’s lost ice trade with the rediscovery, under one of London’s most prestigious addresses, of an enormous 18th-century ice store, the existence of which had been almost entirely forgotten. [continue]

Life was good for Stone Age Norwegians along Oslo Fjord

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From ScienceNordic.com: Life was good for Stone Age Norwegians along Oslo Fjord.

Eleven thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, Norway was buried under a thick layer of ice. But it didn’t take long for folks to wander their way north as the ice sheet melted away. The first traces of human habitation in Norway date from roughly 9500 BC.

Steinar Solheim is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History who has worked on numerous excavations of different Stone Age settlements around Oslo Fjord. Now he and colleague Per Perrson have investigated longer-term population trends in the Oslo Fjord region, based on 157 different Stone Age settlements. All were inhabited between 8000 and 2000 BC.

The two researchers tried to determine whether the population during this time was stable, or if living conditions were better or worse for people who lived here during different periods. [continue]

The gruesome history of eating corpses as medicine

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This tidbit turned up in a blog post at Jason Fung’s site:

A physician’s job has always been to heal the sick and give advice on how to stay healthy. There were medical treatments, to be sure – leeching, purging, and my personal favorite – eating ground up powdered mummies. Yes. You read that correctly. For thousands of years, eating the ground up mummified remains of long-dead embalmed human beings was considered good medicine. That’s what they taught at them ancient medical schools. The demand for powdered mummies was so great that sometimes hucksters would simply grind up dead beggars and plague victims and sell them as mummies.

The history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect. This mummy-eating practice died out in the 16th century was was replaced by other equally useless procedures – such as the lobotomy to cure mental illness. Hey, let me shove this ice pick through your eyeball and mash up parts of your brain like I’m mashing a potato. The inventor of this procedure received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine. This was the cutting edge of medicine circa 1949. Any criticism of this mashed-brain strategy could be legitimately met by “Did YOU win a Nobel Prize, buddy?”

Wow. A search for more information led me to The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine at The Smithsonian. An excerpt:

“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout. [continue]

Oh my.

How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago

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From The Guardian: How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago.

Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens.

In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy.

So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago. [continue]

The age of the bed changed the way we sleep

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When did beds become a thing, and what was sleep like before the modern era? Here’s a JSTOR article with some answers: How the age of the bed changed the way we sleep.

A night without electric lights—not to mention glowing screens—is almost unimaginable for modern residents of wealthy nations. Looking at writings from the British Isles in the early modern era, A. Roger Ekirch reconstructs what it was like, and how the darkness affected people’s sleep patterns. (…)

The environment for sleep itself changed dramatically between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ekirch writes, going from straw pallets on the floor to wooden frames with pillows, sheets, blankets, and mattresses filled with rags and wool. Sixteenth-century clergyman William Harrison recalled people in his childhood sleeping with “a good round log under their heads, instead of a bolster” and wrote that pillows “were thought meet only for women in childebed.”

Still, when beds were introduced people took to them eagerly. Quoting historian Carole Shammas, Ekrich writes that we might think of the early modern era as “The Age of the Bed.” Beds were the first and most valuable piece of furniture families acquired, accounting for a quarter of the value of a modest household. They were also often infested with bugs and shared by several people. [continue]

How the index card cataloged the world

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I use more index cards than anyone I know, and Carl Linnaeus has fascinated me since I first heard of him years ago. So imagine my delight at finding this article: How the index card cataloged the world.

The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all information systems, the index card had unexpected political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such classification.

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In 1767, near the end of his career, Linnaeus began to use “little paper slips of a standard size” to record information about plants and animals. According to the historians Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille, these paper slips offered “an expedient solution to an information-overload crisis” for the Swedish scientist. More than 1,000 of them, measuring five by three inches, are housed at London’s Linnean Society. Each contains notes about plants and material culled from books and other publications. While flimsier than heavy stock and cut by hand, they’re virtually indistinguishable from modern index cards.

The Swedish scientist is more often credited with another invention: binomial nomenclature, the latinized two-part name assigned to every species. Before Linnaeus, rambling descriptions were used to identify plants and animals. A tomato, for example, was a mouthful: Solanum caule inermi herbaceo foliis pinnatis incisis. After Linnaeus, the round fruit became Solanum lycopersicum. Thanks to his landmark study, Systema Naturae, naturalists had a universal language, which organized the natural world into the nested hierarchies still used today—species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom. [continue]

How cool is that?

If you happen to wonder why I use so many index cards, take a look at Introducing the Hipster PDA over at 43folders.com. I came across that page years ago, and adopted a variation of that approach for organizing things. It’s not the only method I use, but it is highly useful and satisfying.

Wealthy Vikings wore blue linen underwear

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From ThorNews: Research: Wealthy Vikings Did Wear Blue Linen Underwear.

It is hard to imagine Eric Bloodaxe and other feared Viking kings and chieftains wearing blue linen underwear. However, if the research carried out at the University of Bergen is correct, we should get used to the idea.

Textile fragments from Viking graves in the counties of Rogaland, Sogn og Fjordane and Hordaland in Western Norway have now been analyzed.

Research carried out by textile conservator Hana Lukešová and professor of nanophysics Bodil Holst at the University of Bergen has produced remarkable results: Vikings did use linen underwear, often dyed blue. [continue]

Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising

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From The Guardian: Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds.

A study by archaeologists has revealed certain people in medieval Yorkshire were so afraid of the dead they chopped, smashed and burned their skeletons to make sure they stayed in their graves.

The research published by Historic England and the University of Southampton may represent the first scientific evidence in England of attempts to prevent the dead from walking and harming the living – still common in folklore in many parts of the world.

The archaeologists who studied a collection of human bones – including the remains of adults, teenagers and children excavated more than half a century ago, and dated back to the period between the 11th and 14th century – rejected gruesome possibilities including cannibalism in times of famine, or the massacre of outsiders. The cut marks were in the wrong place for butchery, and isotope analysis of the teeth showed that the people came from the same area as the villagers of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire – a once flourishing village which had been completely deserted by the early 16th century. [continue]

How Norwegians made sure criminals went to hell

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From Science Nordic: How Norwegians made sure criminals went to hell.

Skulls buried in a half-circle, facing southeast. A decapitated skeleton, with its head buried between its thighs and the feet cut off. Skeletons where the skulls have been removed and heads buried separately, upside down.

These might sound like the ingredients of a Hollywood horror movie, or perhaps a pagan ritual, but they are not. Instead, they are all examples of ways that Norwegian society from 500 years ago tried to guarantee that criminals and other bad people got the punishment they deserved, not only on Earth but also in the eternal afterlife.

All of these examples have been excavated over the last 20 years in Norway from an area southwest of Oslo, in a town called Skien. Archaeologists recognize an area in the town as one of first Christian burial grounds. Later, the same area was a place where criminals were executed. [continue]

Heiltsuk First Nation village among oldest in North America

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Wow. Not much cooler than this! From The Province: Heiltsuk First Nation village among oldest in North America: Archeologists.

A Heiltsuk village site on B.C.’s mid-coast is three times as old as the Great Pyramid at Giza and among the oldest human settlements in North America, according to researchers at the Hakai Institute.

The excavation on Triquet Island has already produced extremely rare artifacts, including a wooden projectile-launching device called an atlatl, compound fish hooks and a hand drill used for lighting fires, said Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student at the University of Victoria.

The village has been in use for about 14,000 years, based on analysis of charcoal recovered from a hearth about 2.5 metres below the surface, making it one of the oldest First Nations settlements yet uncovered. Dates from the most recent tests range from 13,613 to 14,086 years ago.

“We were so happy to find something we could date,” she said. What started as a one-metre-by-one-metre “keyhole” into the past, expanded last summer into a three-metre trench with evidence of fire related in age to a nearby cache of stone tools.

“It appears we had people sitting in one area making stone tools beside evidence of a fire pit, what we are calling a bean-shaped hearth,” she said. “The material that we have recovered from that trench has really helped us weave a narrative for the occupation of this site.” [continue]

Ancient mice teeth show settled villages made ecological impact long before agriculture

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From phys.org: Ancient mice teeth show settled villages made ecological impact long before agriculture.

Long before the advent of agriculture, hunter-gatherers began putting down roots in the Middle East, building more permanent homes and altering the ecological balance in ways that allowed the common house mouse to flourish, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates.

“The research provides the first evidence that, as early as 15,000 years ago, humans were living in one place long enough to impact local animal communities—resulting in the dominant presence of house mice,” said Fiona Marshall, study co-author and a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s clear that the permanent occupation of these settlements had far-reaching consequences for local ecologies, animal domestication and human societies.” [continue]

Who killed the Iceman? Clues emerge in a very cold case

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From the New York Times: Who Killed the Iceman? Clues Emerge in a Very Cold Case.

BOLZANO, Italy — When the head of a small Italian museum called Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police, she asked him if he investigated cold cases.

“Yes I do,” Inspector Horn said, recalling their conversation.

“Well, I have the coldest case of all for you,” said Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy.

The unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi, has literally been in cold storage in her museum for a quarter-century. Often called the Iceman, he is the world’s most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age fellow who had been frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian border with Austria until warming global temperatures melted the ice and two hikers discovered him in 1991.

The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of the mummy pointed to foul play in the form of a flint arrowhead embedded in his back, just under his shoulder. But now, armed with a wealth of new scientific information that researchers have compiled, Inspector Horn has managed to piece together a remarkably detailed picture of what befell the Iceman on that fateful day around 3300 B.C., near [continue]

Aratea: Making pictures with words in the 9th century

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If illustrations from a 9th-century manuscript sound like something you’d like to see, this will ring your chimes. From the Public Domain Review: Making pictures with words in the 9th century.

While popularised by Guillaume Apollinaire’s wonderful Calligrammes from 1918, the art of making images through the novel arrangement of words upon the page can be traced back many centuries. Some of the earliest examples of these “calligrams” are to be found in a marvellous 9th-century manuscript known as the Aratea.

Each page of the Aratea has a poem on the bottom half — written by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Aratus and translated into Latin by a young Cicero — describing an astronomical constellation. This constellation is then beautifully drawn above the poetry; the drawings however are themselves made up of words taken from Hyginus’ Astronomica. The passages used to form the images describe the constellation which they create on the page, and in this way they become tied to one another: neither the words or images would make full sense without the other there to complete the scene. Also, note the red dots on each picture: these show where the stars appear in the sky. [continue, see illustrations]

Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story

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From the Washington Post: Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.

What the scientists found surprised them. While the Roman and Hunnic elites were at war, regular people living on the margins of these two empires were able to coexist, even cooperate. Bones buried in the same cemetery carried signatures of dramatically different lifestyles — some bore evidence that their owners were farmers, others had traits of nomads. Some bones suggested that the individual was born into a roaming tribe but later settled down; others indicated the opposite lifestyle change. [continue]

Crusader shipwreck tells a golden knights’ tale

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From history.com: Crusader Shipwreck Tells a Golden Knights’ Tale.

In the 13th century A.D., the city of Acre on Israel’s northern coast was a key stronghold for embattled European Crusaders defending Christianity in the Holy Land. But in 1291, a vast Egyptian army of some 100,000 soldiers led by the new Mamluk sultan overran the Crusader garrison there and razed the city. Now, marine archaeologists have discovered a long-lost ship that met its watery end in the crescent-shaped bay off the city’s harbor. Carbon dating of the ship, and the cache of gold coins found inside, suggests the wreck dates to the siege of Acre, as Christians made a desperate attempt to flee the city and their knights made their doomed last stand. [continue]

Radical shakeup of dinosaur family tree points to unexpected Scottish origins

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From the Guardian: Radical shakeup of dinosaur family tree points to unexpected Scottish origins.

The most radical shakeup of the dinosaur family tree in a century has led scientists to propose an unlikely origin for the prehistoric beasts: an obscure cat-sized creature found in Scotland.

The analysis, which has already sparked controversy in the academic world, suggests that the two basic groups into which dinosaurs have been classified for more than a century need a fundamental rethink. If proved correct, the revised version of the family tree would overthrow some of the most basic assumptions about this chapter of evolutionary history, including what the common ancestor of all dinosaurs looked like and where it came from. [continue]

Saltopus, kids. saltopus. There was a creature called a saltopus!

Thanks to Khurram Wadee for posting this article on Diaspora, which is where I found it.

The face of a man who die 700 years ago is revealing how the poor lived in medieval England

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From good.is: The Face Of A Man Who Died 700 Years Ago Is Revealing How The Poor Lived In Medieval England.

As a collective civilization, we’ve made some strides in how we care for the poor and frail but, even in the 21st century, the indigent are often relegated to both anonymous lives and anonymous deaths. So when scientists were able to re-create the life of a man who lived 700 years ago from his remains, it offered a tremendous insight, not just into his life, but into the lives of the countless impoverished citizens of medieval England.

This face—and the man—are known by the clinical and cold moniker Context 958, one of several hundred buried corpses exhumed from graves behind the Old Divinity School of St. John’s College in Cambridge, England, around 2010. The subject was presumed to have been a ward of the hospital or church, likely poor and/or ill, at the time of his death in the 13th century. [continue, see photos]

Risk insurance in the eighteenth century

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From Wonders and Marvels: Risk Insurance in the Eighteenth Century.

Travelers to distant lands have always known that risk is an inevitable part of the adventure. And from ancient times they invented ways to mitigate that risk. Medieval English guilds established funds to provide for their members in the event of accident when they were abroad. Fifteenth-century pilgrims would ensure themselves against captivity. For a certain payment, the insurer would agree to ransom the traveler should he be captured by pirates or Arabs.

As travel expanded, individual traveler’s insurance took on the form of a bet on their own survival – a broker would take a specific amount and agree to pay it back with substantial interest if the traveler returned. The risks of travel were so high that it was usually assumed impossible to purchase insurance that would pay out to someone else if the traveler did not come home. [continue]