Year: 2009

Walk down the streets of Pompeii right now

Ancient, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Google Maps has added Pompeii to its street view function!1 That means you can wander its ancient streets as soon as you stop reading this without spending a dime.

Just go to Google Maps, type in Pompeii Italy, then drag the little yellow man icon from the zoom controls onto the street. The ones that are included in street view will turn blue.

I had to hunt around a little to find the ancient city as opposed to the (relatively) modern town. Just look for “Pompeii Scavi” (Pompeii digs) and drag the little man there.

Here’s a shortcut.

And here’s an embed:


View Siti archeologici di Torre Annunziata, Pompei e Boscoreale (NA in a larger map

Isn’t she beeyootiful? Happy visiting!

A burst of Neolithic cannibalism?

Ancient

Burial bit with dismembered bones, left, partial skulls, rightA large number of Neolithic bones found in a mass grave in what is now Herxheim, Germany, show signs of having been butchered and eaten over the course of several decades. It might have been part of a sacrificial ceremony or ritual reburial.

Artifacts found with the bones date to the Linear Pottery Culture, a western and central European culture from 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

Ongoing work at Herxheim has found signs of cannibalism on the bones of hundreds of other individuals, with only a few exceptions, he adds

The cannibalism is not confirmed, but it’s definitely the top hypothesis right now. It stands out. Before the Herxheim bones, only one previous find in France suggested Neolithic cannibalism, but it was on a far smaller scale. The remains of 6 people looked gnawed upon, not hundreds.

On the other hand, all the lower jaws and skull bases are missing, and that suggests reburial where specific bones were removed ritual purposes. The skin might have been removed and bodies dismembered as a part of the ritual without making a dinner of it.

University of Bordeaux anthropologist Bruno Boulestin thinks there was a major political crisis in European society 7,000 years ago, evidenced by mass murders at three central European sites around that time and abandoned settlements. Herxheim itself was abandoned, in fact.

Chemical analysis will show whether the victims were local or imports. You can tell from the elements in the bones what kind of food people grew up eating. If they were brought to the site, that would support both the cannibalism and the reburial hypotheses, so we not ever know for sure what exactly happened 7,000 years ago.

Shakespearian shoes on show

Museums, Renaissance

The Museum of London is putting some Shakespeare-themed shoes on display in its Docklands branch. Punningly named “Treading the Bards“, the exhibit features centuries of footwear donned by actors and written about by Shakespeare.

One pair of Elizabethan slip-on shoes were found on the site of the Rose Theater. Another was once worn by famous actor and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula Sir Henry Irving.

The earliest shoe was preserved in the damp mud of Southwark and is still decorated with pinked zig-zagged patterning – an embellishment common enough that in The Taming of the Shrew it is remarked upon when a servant’s “pumps were all unpink’d i’ the heel.” The pressures on actors at the time are highlighted by the hole at the toe end – deliberately cut to accommodate a painful bunion.

The later shoes were worn by a triumvirate of actors; each considered the greatest thespian of their day. Edmund Kean’s tasselled boots accompanied fiery performances as Richard III in England and America in the early 19th century. Samuel Phelps’ bright red silk boots costumed Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, his final stage performance, in 1878. And Sir Henry Irving’s exquisitely decorative Elizabethan-styled shoes were worn as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in 1882.

Oh hey Shakespeare called shoes “pumps”. I did not know that. Although it would appear he wasn’t talking about the standard closed-toe slip-on heel that I refer to with the word.

Anyway, the museum’s Fashion and Decorative Arts Curator Hilary Davidson (cool damn job, sister) points out that these long-gone actors imbued the shoes with their physical presence. Between the bunion cut-outs and the tread patterns, you can envision how they moved, their walks, limps, drags, not to mention their overall dimensions.

Besides, shoes! Pretty! Okay maybe not so much the mudlark one, but the rest are still beautiful in design and fabric.

Curator Hilary Davidson and the shoes on display

Ooh! An aurochs skull!

Ancient, Treasures

Aurochs skull and red deer antlersThe skull of an aurochs, the huge wild cattle which once roamed the forests of Europe, has been found in Northumberland, England. The aurochs went extinct on the island about 4,000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating puts this skull between 5670-5520 B.C., so 3,500 years before the last aurochs kicked England’s dirt of its hooves. Two red deer antlers from the same period were found along with the skull.

The bones were preserved in a peat pocket, against all odds in the middle of a working wet quarry. Fragments would have been far more likely a find instead of this pristine complete skull and horns.

The startling discovery was made at Thompsons of Prudhoe’s Haughton Strother quarry near Humshaugh.

‘If the excavator bucket had been 10 centimetres either side it would have smashed the skull,’ said Robin Taylor-Wilson, director of Durham-based Pre-Construct Archaeology, who advise Thompson’s of Prudhoe.

‘It is very rare to find a complete auroch skull, but it came out hanging off the bucket from a wet area as if it was meant to be.

‘The find is of an animal which lived thousands of years before that, and one which would have been a prize capture for dinner for the hunter gatherers of the time.’

Given that aurochs were 6 feet tall at the shoulders and grumpy as hell, I can well believe it. They also had wicked horns that pointed forward instead of upwards, the better to gore you with, my dear.

Drinking horn made from the last aurochs, ca. 1627Aurochs have played a quasi-mythic role in human iconography. They were painted by our Paleolithic ancestors on the Lascaux Cave walls, they decorated Babylon’s Ishtar Gate along with dragons and lions, Julius Caesar wrote about their fierceness and prized horns made into drinking vessels in Chapter 6, para 28 of his Gallic War. Even Nabokov gave them top billing ahead of angels in the last sentence of Lolita.

The last European aurochs died in Poland in 1627. Her skull was taken as war booty by the Swedes 30 years later and is now on display in the Royal Armoury in Stockholm.

Tripping Stone Age temple acoustics

Ancient, Modern(ish)

The Hal Saflieni HypogeumMegalithic temples on the islands of Malta and Gonzo are providing researchers will a wealth of new information about the role acoustics might have played in ancient sacred mysteries.

For example, Malta’s Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, a multi-level ritual complex of caves and man-made structures, has a small niche called the Oracle Chamber. When a man with a deep voice speaks into it, his voice echoes throughout the entire complex. One researcher describes it as feeling like you’re standing inside a bell.

Imagine the effect that must have had on worshipers inside the complex: like you’re feeling the word of God inside your very bones.

A consortium called The PEAR Proposition: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research are pioneers in the field of archaeo-acoustics, merging archaeology and sound science. Directed by Physicist Dr. Robert Jahn, the PEAR group set out in 1994 to test acoustic behavior in megalithic sites such as Newgrange and Wayland‘s Smithy in the UK. They found that the ancient chambers all sustained a strong resonance at a sound frequency between 95 and 120 hertz: well within the range of a low male voice.

In subsequent OTSF testing, stone rooms in ancient temples in Malta were found to match the same pattern of resonance, registering at the frequency of 110 or 111 hz. This turns out to be a significant level for the human brain. Whether it was deliberate or not, the people who spent time in such an environment were exposing themselves to vibrations that impacted their minds.

Sound scientist, Prof. Daniel Talma of the University of Malta explains: “At certain frequencies you have standing waves that emphasize each and other waves that de-emphasize each other. The idea that it was used thousands of years ago to create a certain trance — that’s what fascinates me.”

Studies of brain activity exposed to different resonance frequencies have found that at 110 hz the prefrontal cortex suddenly shifts, deactivating the language center and turning on the part of the brain that controls mood, empathy and social behavior.

Not that Maltans 6000 years ago knew the acoustics could cause these kinds of effects, but it makes sense that populations that once worshiped in caves would seek to recreate and enhance that vibe once they started building huge stone structures instead of just using the ones they found.