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The artificially barracked cave was built by a small contingent of Austro-Hungarian troops in the summer of 1915. They had taken this vertiginous point on top of Mount Scorluzzo more than 10,000 feet above sea level to wrest control of the strategically essential Stelvio Pass on the border between Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Italy had failed to garrison the pass so Imperial troops took it unopposed in June and quickly set to fortifying their position.
Despite several attempts by Italian forces to retake Mount Scorluzzo during the course of the war, Austria held it until the end. The Mount Scorluzzino cave shelter was part of a network of concrete, stone and wood defenses built by the Austro-Hungarian army. They dug out the cave at right angles to the slope of the mountain and built a trench leading to an observatory over the pass. The shelter had a stove, a dormitory that slept about 20 and a room with a cot and a stool behind a wood panel that served as the commander’s quarters. The shelter was abandoned after the Armistice of Villa Giusti ended the war between Austria-Hungary and the Allied powers on November 3rd, 1918.
The winter snows over the next few years sealed it in, making the cave inaccessible to all but a handful of highly motivated relic hunters. Water penetrated the deepest part of the shelter, freezing and preserving the contents for a century.
Climate change began to melt the surface of the thick glacial ice, and the first wood structures of the barracks of the larger Scorluzzo shelter near the cave were spotted in 2015. The rapidly retreating glacier made it possible for archaeologists to excavate Scorluzzo, and from 2017 to 2019, more than 300 objects — uniforms, munitions, lanterns, documents, personal belongings — were recovered. In 2020, the entire structure was dismantled timber by timber and moved by helicopter to Bormio where it would be reconstructed in a museum.
The Scorluzzino cave shelter, however, has only begun to be thoroughly documented and excavated, and it is shedding new light on the little known details of the White War (the Alpine front during World War I).
We now know that the Austro-Hungarian army, so far from the sea, used straw-filled sacks not with straw but with algae, well-suited for their antiseptic properties. An impressive logistical chain that started in Istria and reached an altitude of 2,995 meters. Even where La Guerra Bianca (The White War, in the Alps) made military presence sparser, Italian propaganda dropped irredentist newspapers in the trenches. The ice has preserved newspaper pages, notes, and correspondence. There are chargers for repeating weapons, standard-issue shovels, nails to hang cartridge pouches, and the pouches themselves. Food tins scraped clean due to hunger, with apricot kernels split to eat the contents, a clear sign of starvation. All this in the 12 meters of depth carved into the rock, three meters wide and about two meters high, entirely lined with carefully crafted Val Venosta wood that still proudly fulfills its function, albeit compromised in some places after years.
This video (in Italian with English subtitles) gives a guided tour of this icy time capsule.
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No other objects were preserved in the three investigated graves. The sword is also the only decommissioned object found in the 49 graves examined so far during the ongoing reconstruction of Lilla Torg. Finding swords in medieval graves is very rare, and the people who were buried with swords belonged to the upper echelons of society. The sword find at Lilla Torg confirms that Sankta Anna’s church was used as a burial place for, among other things, people of noble birth during the 35 years that the Franciscan order operated on the site.
The sword has been removed from the ground and sent to conservation to begin examination and treatment of the find in a protective environment. The first X-ray image of the find shows that the blade is decorated with two inlaid crosses, probably in precious metal. Already when the sword was found, the field archaeologists could guess that the blade was decorated, something that the X-ray image has now confirmed.
Halmstad received its first town charter in 1307 and its current historic center was established in the 1320s. It was part of the Kingdom of Denmark at that time. The Sankta Annas monastery, built between 1494 and 1503 with the aid of a donation of an expensive silver plate from Christina of Saxony, then Queen of Denmark, had a brief life. It was shut down by the city magistrate in 1531 and the property repurposed to various uses including as a hospital and an armory. What was left of the monastery burned down in a 1619 fire that destroyed much of the town.
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Smintheus has been interpreted to mean “Lord of Mice,” an epithet for Apollo first recorded by Homer in Book I of The Iliad, although the root of the word is not Greek and Homer never explains its meaning. Before the Trojan War even starts, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, sacks the city of Chryse, kidnapping Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo at the city’s sanctuary. When Agamemnon spurns Chryses offer a rich ransom for the return of his daughter and throws in some insults to the god he represents while he’s at it, the priest prays to Apollo, addressing him as “O, Sminthian,” and asks him to send a plague to punish the Greeks for their offenses. Apollo is glad to help.
Excavations have been carried out regularly at the temple site since 1980. This year’s dig season (June 15th-October 1st) uncovered the remains of two tombs and the foundations of several buildings.
Hüseyin Yaman, a member of the excavation team said: “We aim not only to acquire information about the burial traditions of individuals and communities that once existed here but also to contribute to the delineation of the distribution area of sacred structures, or in other words, to determine the boundaries of the sacred area. In line with this goal, in the excavations conducted at three different points, we revealed remnants of two tombs alongside foundational remains of some structures. Based on the artifacts found in the only room that seemed to have survived with intact foundations in the monumental tomb, we estimate its origin to be approximately 2,000 years ago, around the first century A.D.”
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Now, 395 years after it went down the first time, Vasa is sinking again. The steel shoring struts that have been supporting it since 1964 are insufficient to bear the ship’s great weight, and worse than that, the cradle is putting pressure on the fragile timbers, cracking and warping them. Vasa is continuously being monitored and measured to detect any potential conservations issues, and the data show it is sinking downwards and outwards at a very slow, but very steady rate of a millimeter a year. As gradual as the shifting is, if uninterrupted, the ship will starting falling apart.
The Vasa Museum has undertaken a wide-ranging investigation to discover what kind of pressures Vasa‘s wooden structure can stand, teaming with researchers from Uppsala University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and other institutions. They have identified several decomposition processes that are causing the wood to deteriorate much more rapidly than it did in the cold, brackish waters of the Baltic. The current strength of the ship’s timbers is no more than 40% the level of normal oak.
This is an absolutely huge project and unfortunately it cannot be accomplished without making changes to the ship itself. Parts of the interior will have to be removed and placed in storage to make way for the new internal structure. New holes will have to be drilled into the hull. Even the floor underneath it will need to be reinforced.
“It’s a big job,” said [project director Magnus] Olofsson. “We have already been researching for four years to see how we are going to do it, and then we’ve been working on construction drawings for four years and now we are beginning the build, which will also take about four years.”
They have being carrying out test operations on full-scale models to make sure their plan will work. They do not, however, know exactly how much the vessel weighs. They estimate between 900 and 1,000 tonnes.
But the project is coming at a substantial cost, which the self-funded museum is appealing to donors and sponsors to finance. The museum’s director, Jenny Lind, said she was hopeful the Swedish public would come through to raise the funds to embark on the ship’s “biggest challenge” since its salvage and conservation.
“When Vasa was salvaged, the whole of Swedish society came together and made it possible to salvage this ship. It wasn’t just the state, it was private companies, big actors in society that helped out, but also private individuals,” she said. “So that’s why we’re coming out again and saying we need help again.”
Right now the Vasa Museum is not set up for easy online donations, just bank transfers (information here) and contributions via the Swish app (info here).
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An excavation of the Temple of Peace built by Vespasian in the Imperial Forum in Rome has revealed thousands of years of Roman history, without even reaching the imperial era yet.
The Templum Pacis was built by the emperor Vespasian (r. 69-79 A.D.) between 71 and 75 A.D. in celebration of his victories in the First Jewish–Roman War. Vespasian had personally led the Roman legions that crushed the rebellion in Galilee in 67 A.D. and after his elevation to the purple took him to Rome in 69 A.D., he left his son Titus behind to besiege Jerusalem. Jerusalem fell to Rome in the summer of 70 A.D. The loot from the sacking of Jerusalem funded the construction of Vespasian’s new temple to Pax, the goddess of peace.
A large and important temple facing what would become the Colosseum, The Temple of Peace is probably best remembered today for something added to it long after Vespasian’s death. It was the home of the Forma Urbis, an incredibly detailed map of Rome 60 feet wide carved on 150 marble slabs that documented the floorplans of every building, monument, bath, street and even staircases in the city to a scale of 1:240. It was hung on an interior wall of the temple by the emperor Septimius Severus in the first decade of the 3rd century. It was damaged in the 410 A.D. sack of Rome by Alaric, and gradually more of more of it was lost. Like much ancient marble, in the Middle Ages it was harvested to make lime. Today only 1,186 pieces of it (10-15% of the original) survive, and they are still being puzzled together.
The excavation of the eastern section of the temple, an area never archaeologically investigated before, began in June 2022 and came to a close just last week.
The discovery of cellars and large kilns, which can be easily imagined to have been the fate of many imperial marbles transformed into lime, reveals to archaeologists the evidence of the great complexity of the area, which had not been subject to archaeological investigations until now. Moreover, with the upcoming excavations, thanks also to the funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), it will probably be possible to reach the imperial phases and, why not, even the earlier ones. The hope is that this relatively small section of the Imperial Forums, not adequately investigated with the currently used methodologies, may bring some new interesting data to the understanding of an area that is only seemingly well-known: written sources, views, nineteenth-century photographs, and old-style digs (not scientific excavations) from the first half of the twentieth century do not represent a sufficient heritage to understand the phases in a city that has been constantly transforming for millennia like Rome.
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As the news slows to a crawl over the holidays, so too shall I. May your day be merry and bright in anticipation of the return of regular programming.
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Occupied between the 1st century B.C. and the 6th century A.D., the ancient city of Alba Helviorum (modern-day Alba-la-Romaine) was the capital of the Celtic Helvii people. It was a large urban center at the foot of a volcanic plateau on the left bank of the Escoutay River. Just to the southwest were the crossroads of several well-travelled agricultural roads. It was at these crossroads that the miniatures were discovered in a 2020 preventative archaeology excavation.
The lead miniatures were found grouped together on the north side of the pit, centered along the wall. One was a pair of sandals attached to a coat hook; another was a set of strigils on a ring. The sandals were placed upright with the hook covered by the strigils. This positioning indicates the miniatures were deposited at the same time in a container that decomposed over time but left them in the positions they had already been placed in.
The sandals are of a simple design: soles with straps connecting the toes to the instep with a buckle at the heel. They were decorated on both sides with beads. The lead miniature appears to have been meticulously rendered to match the construction of actual sandals from this period. Under the heel is a circle crossed out with a cross, which may have been a version of the theta nigrum, symbol of death. Attached to the strap of one of the sandals is a patera, a shallow basin used for libation. It is decorated with a guilloche border and rests on a base of concentric circles. This too is consistent with the design of actual paterae.
The symbolism of these miniatures being included as funerary furnishings in a 1st century Gallo-Roman community goes beyond the reference to bathing and clothes. These were symbols of Roman culture, and their placement in the grave of a wealthy woman in Alba Helviorum is evidence of how the elite adopted the Roman way of life.
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The domus is being excavated to secure the excavation fronts (the boundary areas between unexcavated and excavated sites). On December 11th, archaeologists removing a thick blanket of lapilli (the small pumice stones that pelted Pompeii in the first stage of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.) from a room in the domus uncovered a niche in the north-south wall. Inside the niche were 13 terracotta figurines between 15 and 20 cm high (6-8 inches) cast with bivalve molds (clay forms with the negatives of the front and back of the statuettes). They were painted in bright polychrome colors, traces of which survive.
The sculptures emerged from the pumice at a height of over 2 metres above the floor level. The walls of room that contained them, probably the atrium of the house, were painted and frescoes have emerged on the upper part of the walls.
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An important marble relief depicting the earthquake of 62 A.D. that was stolen from Pompeii in 1975 has been found in affixed to the wall of a stairwell in a home in Herzele, Belgium. The strip of marble depicts the city in the grip of the earthquake, one of its gates capturing in the moment it sheers off the defensive walls and collapses.
The homeowner, 85-year-old Raphaël De Temmerman, bought the relief under circumstances that were almost comically shady during a trip to Italy in 1975. He was visiting Pompeii with his little boy Geert when they were approached by a man carrying something heavy in a burlap bag. He showed them the contents — a marble slab — and asked them money. A quick exchange of cash for goods, and the seller turned tail and ran away as fast as his legs could carry him.
De Temmerman took his “souvenir” home and added it to the new gray marble cladding on the staircase wall, a renovation inspired by Pompeii and ancient Rome. Only when he planned his move to an apartment earlier this year did he have the relief examined for appraisal and authentication. Experts from the Gallo-Roman museum in Tongeren confirmed it was authentic, but refused Temmerman’s offer to sell it to them. The day after, the judicial police came by with a search warrant.
De Temmerman finally learned the background of the piece from the documents left by the police. The marble relief had been stolen on July 14th, 1975, from the house of banker L. Caecilius Iucundus where it originally hung above the atrium altar.
“A fair amount is known about how the item was stolen at the time,” says Bart Demarsin of the Gallo-Roman Museum. He is one of the people who went to see the stone in Herzele and has no doubt that the piece is real: “It closely corresponds to the original piece that we recognise from the photos”.
The marble stone in question features a scene from the Pompeii earthquake in CE 62. “That piece corresponds to a similar piece, which also depicts buildings that collapsed during that earthquake,” Demarsin adds. The pieces originally came from the home of a wealthy Roman banker in the centre of Pompeii.
Both pieces were removed from the residence and had been on display at the site for a long time. Today the first piece is still on display in Pompeii’s museum, the other was stolen in the 1970s, and has now turned up in the house in Herzele.
Naturally Italy wants the relief back. Technically they would have to carry out an investigation to prove the theft and illicit transfer of the artifact to Belgian authorities before they can lodge an official claim, but experts from Pompeii are planning to view the relief to confirm for themselves whether it’s the long-lost original, and it’s likely Belgium will return it at that time.
Meanwhile, the De Temmermans want compensation for the looted object they bought out of a burlap sack on the street from a guy who fled the scene and are considering getting a lawyer to advocate for their interests. Their argument is that at least they kept the looted object safe for five decades after buying it and exporting it in violation of several Italian laws.
“The judicial police told us we might still be able to get compensation, because after all, the piece hung here for 50 years without anything happening to it. It could so easily have been sold on or broken.”
This news video shows the relief embedded in the marble wall of the stairs going down to the basement.
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The Herlaugshaugen mound was surveyed this summer by archaeologists and volunteer metal detectorists at the behest of national and county heritage authorities. The team recovered large iron rivets, some with wood corroded around them, confirming that the mound contained a ship burial.
“This dating is really exciting because it pushes the whole tradition of ship burials quite far back in time,” said Geir Grønnesby, an archaeologist at the NTNU University Museum. […]
The development of shipbuilding has played a key role in the discussion about when and why the Viking Age started. We can’t say that the Viking Age started earlier based on this dating, but Grønnesby says that you don’t build a ship of this size without having a reason for doing so.
“The burial mound itself is also a symbol of power and wealth. A wealth that has not come from farming in Ytre Namdalen. I think people in this area have been engaged in trading goods, perhaps over great distances.”
At 200 feet in diameter, Herlaugshaugen is one of the largest burial mounds in Norway. It was first excavated in the late 18th century. Those early excavations reportedly unearthed a bronze cauldron, animal bones, iron nails and most dramatically of all, a seated skeleton with a sword. The finds were lost, disappearing from view in the 1920s. The skeleton, also missing, was exhibited as the semi-legendary 9th century king Herlaug, after whom the mound was named.
North in Naumudal were two brothers, kings,—Herlaug and Hrollaug; and they had been for three summers raising a mound or tomb of stone and lime and of wood. Just as the work was finished, the brothers got the news that King Harald was coming upon them with his army. Then King Herlaug had a great quantity of meat and drink brought into the mound, and went into it himself, with eleven companions, and ordered the mound to be covered up. King Hrollaug, on the contrary, went upon the summit of the mound, on which the kings were wont to sit, and made a throne to be erected, upon which he seated himself. Then he ordered feather-beds to be laid upon the bench below, on which the earls were wont to be seated, and threw himself down from his high seat or throne into the earl’s seat, giving himself the title of earl. Now Hrollaug went to meet King Harald, gave up to him his whole kingdom, offered to enter into his service, and told him his whole proceeding. Then took King Harald a sword, fastened it to Hrollaug’s belt, bound a shield to his neck, and made him thereupon an earl, and led him to his earl’s seat; and therewith gave him the district Naumudal, and set him as earl over it.
The newly-discovered date means the skeleton found within was not in fact Herlaug, but rather an elite individual who died close to two centuries before the king of lore sealed himself into his own tomb in a final act of defiance.
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Archaeologists plan to raise the mosaics to prevent further destruction and to preserve them for eventual exhibition in a museum.
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The diploma was discovered in 1958 near the town of Poggio Rotigli outside Grosseto. The two bronze tablets were brought to the surface during ploughing work. Despite their encounter with heavy machinery, the tablets were in excellent condition, and all four sides of them were inscribed with the inscriptions fully legible. They were immediately recognized as a highly significant epigraphic record of a member of the Praetorian Guard who was likely from the Maremma region of Italy.
Roman soldiers were issued diplomas at the end of 25 years of military service as attestations of their legal discharge from the army and the rights conferred to them, namely Roman citizenship, the right to marry, the legitimization of any children they may have fathered before being legally married, and the conferring of citizenship on said children.
It consists of two rectangular tablets, one larger and thicker than t
The long inscription includes the names and many, many titles of emperors Flavius Valerius Constantius (Constantius Chlorus, r. 305-306, father of Constantine the Graet) and Galerius Valerius Maximianus (Galerius, r. 305-311), their predecessors Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Maximian (r. 286-305) and the Caesars Flavius Severus (Caesar from 305-306) and Maximinus Daza (Caesar from 305-310).
The new museum exhibition will be an immersive experience for visitors.
The diploma, which at the end of the exhibition will be permanently included in the collection of our museum, will be visible until January 21, 2024 in an evocative setup where, thanks to the videomapping technique, some significant passages of the text will be projected onto the walls of the immersive room while a narrator will tell the story and life of the praetorian Valerius Clement.
Finally, in the multimedia room, it will be possible to listen to a video interview with the direct testimony of those who, back in 1958, made the discovery of the precious document.
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The subjects are Jan Willemsz van der Pluym, a wealthy slater and plumber in Leiden, and his wife Jaapgen Caerlsdr. They were 69 and 70 years old respectively in 1635 when the 29-year-old Rembrandt painted them. He was the top portraitist in Amsterdam at that time. Wealthy burghers paid huge sums to be immortalized by the most sought-after artist in the city. The wedding portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, now co-owned by France and the Netherlands, were the only life-sized, full-length portraits Rembrandt ever painted. The 19.9cm-by-16.5cm oval portraits of Jan and Jaapgen are the smallest portraits he ever painted.
Experts believe he may have painted them as a favor because Jan and Jaapgen were family friends and relatives by marriage. They were visiting Amsterdam for a baptism at that time and Jonathan Bikker, the Rijksmuseum’s curator of 17th-century Dutch painting, believes he may have asked Rembrandt to scare up a couple of portraits right quick which he would then make large copies of later.
The van der Pluyms had a close bond with Rembrandt’s family, which began in 1624 when Jan and Jaapgen’s son Dominicus wed Rembrandt’s cousin Cornelia Cornelisdr van Suytbroek. Suspicions that the portraits were by Rembrandt’s hand were confirmed after extensive technical research conducted by the Rijksmuseum using X-radiography, infrared photography, infrared reflectography, macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), stereomicroscopy and paint sample analysis. When taken together the various research results amount to compelling evidence. First of all, the bold and vigorous style used to render these portraits corresponds with Rembrandt’s rapid execution of other portraits and tronies from 1634 onwards. Similarly, the manner in which changes were made during the painting process is also consistent with other paintings by the artist. These alterations are visible in both collars and Jaapgen’s cap. Examination with a stereomicroscope revealed that the portraits were built up in a similar manner to other portraits painted by Rembrandt in this period. Moreover, the pigments match those frequently used by Rembrandt, including lead white, lead-tin yellow, bone- or ivory black, various earth pigments, vermilion and red lake. The same brown, iron-containing paint was used for both inscriptions, along with the signature and date on the portrait of Jan. The portraits also bear striking similarities regarding the buildup and composition of the paint compared to other portraits painted by Rembrandt in 1634 and 1635 – especially in the construction of the facial features and the loose brushwork.
The portraits remained in Jan and Jaapgen’s family until they were sold after the death of their great-great grandson Martenten Hove in 1760. They passed through a few titled hands after that, eventually being sold by James Murray, 1st Baron Glenlyon, at a Christie’s auction in 1824. The portraits entered a private UK collection after that sale and were unknown to scholars until a descendant decided to sell them.
The Rijksmuseum has the largest and most representative collection of Rembrandt paintings in the world. Given my close relationship with the museum and the fact that the team of experts has been conducting research into these portraits over a period of years, I feel that these works belong in the museum.
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A lead curse tablet invoking Satan and two other devils has been discovered in a 15th century latrine Rostock on the north coast of Germany. This is the first curse tablet from the Middle Ages found in Germany.
Curses, known as defixiones in Latin, inscribed on lead were widespread in ancient Greece and Rome well into the Christian era. They invoked demonic or divine powers to destroy rival businesses, rival sports teams, rival in love, opponents in lawsuits, people who had done them a wide variety of wrongs. They were also love/sex spells, intended to compel a target’s love or passion, or compel a wrong to be righted.
The curse was scratched on a small sheet of soft lead, rolled or folded up with the text on the inside and placed in an area considered to be a gateway to the chthonic powers like a grave, a well or a temple, places where the targets could not find them and the gods of the underworld could. There are about 1,500 ancient curse tablets known on the archaeological record, with new ones cropping up regularly, sometimes by the dozens as certain locations were popular curse receptacles for centuries.
The era of the lead curse tablet came to an end in the early 7th century. While curses have been found from later eras, they were in different formats. Apparently the ancient tradition was still in practice in medieval Rostock at least once.
The tablet was discovered during an excavation preliminary to the expansion of Rostock’s town hall. At first it seemed like just a random rolled up piece of metal, but when it was unrolled the inscription “sathanas taleke belzebuk hinrik berith” was found inside. Written in Gothic minuscule script, the inscription is a list of names. Satan, Beelzebub and Berith (aka Baʿal Berith, a Canaanite deity which in the Rabbinic tradition is equated with Beelzebub) are the invoked devils. Taleke and Hinrik are the apparent targets of the curse. Was this perhaps a spurned lover sicking devils on a couple to break them up? That would certainly be in keeping with the ancient approach to curse tablets.
So is the location where the curse was stashed. A latrine is even closer to the underworld than a well, and there was no way the targets of the curse could happen upon it down in the depths of human waste collection.
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