Category: Archaeology

Because Grave Robbing is the Christian Thing to Do

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It looks like everyone favorite arts and crafts themed band of Talibaptist bigots have expanded their activities into dealing in stolen archaeological artifacts:

This is how it’s done. Oligarchs pillage and loot so they can push their own version of history on everyone.

In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom and government mandates. A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq.

These tablets, like the other 40,000 or so ancient artifacts owned by the Green family, were destined for the Museum of the Bible, the giant new museum funded by the Greens, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Both the seizure of the cuneiform tablets and the subsequent federal investigation were confirmed to us by Cary Summers, the president of the Museum of the Bible.

For their part, Hobby Lobby is claiming it’s just screwed-up paperwork. Nothing more than that. Just a customs mix-up that has taken well over 4 years to resolve. Not really.

Here’s hoping that there will be a criminal prosecution, and a very pious Muslim cellmate, in their future.

My Hunch Seems to Have Been Vindicated

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I have always felt that the Black Death in Europe was from something significantly different from the Bubonic Plague as we know it now, if just because the speed of the spread was astonishingly fast (something more than 20 miles a day in Britain).

Well, a study now indicates that it was likely a variant of Yersinia pestis that was genetically predisposed to go pneumonic, meaning that the transmission would have been far faster than the flea borne variants that we see today:

It was already known as perhaps the bleakest episode in British history.

Now, new research suggests the Black Death was even more lethal than was previously thought.

The findings go further to exonerate rats as being responsible for the outbreak, which swept the country in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing vast swathes of the population.

Instead, the study claims the disease was passed directly from human to human and was, in fact, pneumonic plague – a more virulent and infectious form than bubonic plague, which has historically been blamed.

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The same bacteria – which is almost identical to the strain still found on four continents – is responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the experts taking part in the show concluded that the latter, which is spread by the fleas of infected rats, would not have been able to have the devastating impact caused by the Black Death.

Dr Tim Brooks, an expert in infectious diseases from Public Health England who is based at Porton Down – the Wiltshire site used by the government for dealing with biological threats – said: “As an explanation, for the Black Death in its own right, it is simply not good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next, to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”

Instead, he identified what he considers was a mutation from the bubonic plague, borne on rats, to the pneumonic variant, whereby it spread to the lungs of sufferers, who then passed it on to others, by coughing.

This makes sense, though there are alternate ways for it to spread so quickly, such as it being carried by bird borne parasites.

It is almost certain that it was Y. pestis though.

Your Bit of Religious Archeology Geek of the Day

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It appears that archaeologists have found a fabric fragment containing traces of Techelet, the blue dye mentioned in Torah:

In a rare discovery, scientists have confirmed that an almost 2,000-year-old piece of fabric found near the Dead Sea contains remnants of the Biblical blue color known as tekhelet.

It is only the third piece of fabric ever found to contain this precious blue dye derived from snail glands. In accordance with a Torah commandment, tekhelet was used in ancient times to dye the tassels, or tzitzit, attached to the four-cornered garment traditionally worn by men, as well as the clothing worn by the High Priest during the days of the temple.

The finding was revealed on Monday at a special conference held in Jerusalem to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of the doctorate of Rabbi Yitzchak Halevi Herzog, the former chief rabbi of Israel, on the subject of tekhelet. In attendance were many of the former chief rabbi’s grandchildren, including the keynote speaker, Isaac Herzog, the new chairman of the Labor Party.

Announcing the discovery, Dr. Na’ama Sukenik, a curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the tiny piece of fabric had been discovered in the 1950s in a cave at Wadi Murba’at, where Jewish fighters hid during the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Bar Ilan University, Sukenik recently tested the color found in the fabric and was able to determine that it was derived from the Murex trunchular, a mollusk widely believed to be the marine animal known as the khilazon in the Talmud — the source of the rare blue dye.

To this day, scientists and scholars have not reached a consensus on whether tekhelet was a light sky-blue color, as most modern day experts on the subject now believe, or a darker, more purple-hued blue. The shade discovered on the piece of fabric tested by Sukenik was sky blue. The tassels on the fragment were spun in a way that was common in Israel in ancient times, she said, demonstrating that the dye was locally produced.

The dye color varies with exposure to sunlight during the dyeing process, so it is unclear what color was actually applied in ancient times.

Kewl.

H/t Failed Messiah.

In His House at R’lyeh, Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming*

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Archeologists have found a massive buried structure beneath Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee):

The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.

It’s thousands of years old — a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

The problem is — it’s at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

“It’s very enigmatic, it’s very interesting, but the bottom line is we don’t know when it’s from, we don’t know what it’s connected to, we don’t know its function,” said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. “We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual.”

A massive ancient structure underneath a body of water full of historical and mystical overtones.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

* Not exactly my line, Molly NYC made an abbreviated version of this in thee comments for the linked article.

Science, Makes Indiana Jones Its Bitch

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Specifically, the crystal skulls have been shown to be a fake:

Humans seem to have a predilection for fake quartz-crystal Aztec skulls. Since the 1860s, dozens of skull sculptures have appeared on the art market purporting to be pre-Columbian artifacts from Mesoamerica, that is, created by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. Three such skulls have graced the collections of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

 ………

 So the team took a closer look at the skulls’ surfaces. As a benchmark, they borrowed a legitimate Mesoamerican crystal goblet from the Museum of Oaxacan Cultures, in Mexico. Then they used scanning electron microscopy to compare these surfaces.

 It turns out that the surface of the authentic goblet has irregular etch marks, a sign that the pieces were carved with hand-held tools. But the surface of the suspect skulls have regular etch marks, evidence that they were made with rotary wheels and hard abrasives, which appeared only after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Walsh says.

 Looking even closer at the British Museum’s skull, the team discovered green, wormlike inclusions in the rock. Raman spectroscopy revealed that the inclusions were an iron-rich chlorite mineral. Although this kind of trace impurity is found in rock crystal from Brazil or Madagascar, it is not found in Mexican crystal, Walsh says.

Note the Difference between the surfaces of thehand carved goblet (r) and the skull

Not surprised.

When you find artifacts that create this kind of “Ancient Astronauts” type hysteria, they are almost always bullsh%$.

This is Cool

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An Ancient Roman mosaic was found beneath a farmer’s field in Turkey:

A giant poolside mosaic featuring intricate geometric patterns has been unearthed in southern Turkey, revealing the far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire at its peak.

 The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home.

I May Have Been an Optimist on eBay

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4 Months ago, I posted a rather waggishly titled, “Ebay Discovered to Have Socially Redeeming Value,” citing an investigation in Archeology magazine that suggested that the explosion in counterfeits was actually driving real (stolen) antiquities from the market, because manufacturing frauds was more profitable.

Well, a collector of such objects, and a frequent purchaser on eBay, one Bill Stelzer, disputes this in the letters section (scroll down to Cheaper by the Millions).

He says that eBay aggressively monitors and vets such sales, and as a result, there is very little, if any fraud in this area.

Personally, I have no clue as to where the truth is, but when someone says that, “The eBay sites that auction antiquities are among the most vetted sites on the Internet,” my bullsh%$ meter spikes to 11.

I have had good luck on eBay, but what I tend to purchase are things like toner cartridges from stores with addresses and phone numbers, and I verify both before purchases.

The output of pot hunters being “vetted” sounds a bit strange, but I am speaking from a position of profound ignorance here, so YMMV.

Ebay Discovered to Have Socially Redeeming Value

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It turns out that stealing artifacts from archeological sites is expensive and time consuming, and eBay allows these folks, who already know a fair amount about the artifacts to to make their money more easily by peddling counterfeits:

A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare–the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts. The black market for antiquities has existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the world’s cultural heritage. But we could at least take some comfort that it was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints of transporting and selling illegal artifacts kept the market relatively small. But the rise of online auction sites promised to drastically alter the landscape. And so it did, just not in the dire way we had anticipated.

Back in the pre-eBay days, the cost of acquiring and selling an antiquity was high. The actual looter was usually paid little, but various middlemen down the line added huge costs. During my 25 years of working in the Andes, I have often seen this dynamic at work. In years past, transporting an object was a big expense, even for portable artifacts, and the potential for arrest added to the total cost of doing business. In addition, the expense of authentication, conservation, and occasional restoration of the pieces, made buying and selling quality antiquities a wealthy person’s vice.

Our greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking and lead to widespread looting. This seemed a logical outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin, with everything from potsherds to pieces of the Great Wall on the auction block for a few dollars. But a very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade.

How is it possible? The short answer is that many of the primary “producers” of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities. I’ve been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and from what I can tell, this shift began around 2000, about five years after eBay was established. It is true that fakes have been around for centuries. In 1886, the celebrated Smithsonian archaeologist W. H. Holmes described countless bogus antiquities in Mexico. A few decades later, Egyptologist T. G. Wakeling noted that many ancient Egyptian artifacts were, in fact, fakes. In the 19th century, American and European museums purchased large numbers of “Etruscan” ceramic vessels and sarcophagi that came straight from the kilns of rural Italian farmers. But these were usually the really good fakes, labor-intensive pieces that required lots of work and skill. Today, every grade and kind of antiquity is being mass-produced and sold in quantities too large to imagine.

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The interaction between technology and society is indeed weird.

Oops!! We Bruied ROMANS with Full Military Honors????

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I’m of the opinion that anything which is single sourced by Josephus should be taken with a grain of salt.

There was clearly a siege, but the mass suicide mirrors Josephus’ account of his own surrender to the Romans.

New theory questions Masada account

Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 22, 2007

An Israeli anthropologist is using modern forensics and an obscure Biblical passage to challenge the accepted wisdom about mysterious human remains found at Masada, the desert fortress famous as the scene of a mass suicide nearly 2,000 years ago.

A new research paper published Friday takes another look at the remains of three people found in a bathhouse at the site – two male skeletons and a full head of women’s hair, including two braids. They were long thought to have belonged to a family of Zealots, the fanatic Jewish rebels said to have killed themselves rather than fall into Roman slavery in the spring of 73 CE, a story that became an important part of Israel’s national mythology.

Along with other bodies found at Masada, the three were recognized as Jewish heroes by Israel’s government in 1969 and given a state burial, complete with Israeli soldiers carrying flag-draped coffins.

But Israel might have mistakenly bestowed that posthumous honor on three Romans, according to a paper in the June issue of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology by anthropologist Joe Zias and forensics expert Azriel Gorski.

The remains of the three became a key part of the site’s story when Masada was excavated in the 1960s. Yigael Yadin, the renowned Israeli archeologist in charge of the dig, thought they illustrated the historical account of Zealot men killing their wives and children and then themselves before the Roman legionnaires breached Masada’s defenses.

Upon finding the remains, the crew “relived the final and most tragic moments of the drama at Masada,” Yadin wrote in his book documenting the dig, mentioning that the woman’s “dark hair, beautifully plaited, looked as if it had just been freshly coiffeured.”

“There could be no doubt,” Yadin wrote, “that what our eyes beheld were the remains of some of the defenders of Masada.”

The new paper focuses on the hair, noting the odd absence of a skeleton to go with it. The researchers’ new forensic analysis showed an even stranger fact – the hair had been cut off the woman’s head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive.

The new findings could not be reconciled with the original identification of the remains.

The new findings could not be reconciled with the original identification of the remains.

Zias’ attempt to explain the discrepancy led him to the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy, where a passage requires that foreign women captured in battle by Jews cut off all their hair, apparently an attempt to make them less attractive to their captors.

Zias concluded that the hair belonged not to a Jewish woman but to a foreign woman who fell captive in the hands of Jewish fighters.

In his scenario, the woman was attached to the Roman garrison stationed at Masada in 66 CE, when the Zealots took over the fortress and killed the Roman soldiers. Jewish fighters in Masada’s northern palace threw two Roman bodies into the bathhouse, which Zias thinks the Zealots used as a garbage dump because of other debris found inside. They took the woman captive and treated her according to Jewish law, cutting off her hair, which they threw in along with the bodies.

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