On the outskirts of the tile workshop area, the excavation uncovered eight funerary structure. Most of them feature tile architecture (formwork lined with tiles or gable with tile roofs) with stone wedges for support. No bones 
They were discovered by Claus Falsby on his first outing with a metal detector. He contacted museum organization ROMU which manages archaeological responsibilities for central and western Zealand. ROMU archaeologists immediately went to the site and excavated it, discovering additional objects. In total, the cache now consisted of the bronze sword with iron rivets in the handle sinuously bent into a s-curve, two small bronze axes (known as celts), two or three large ankle bangles called vulrings, a fragment of a large fibula and an object of unknown purpose.
Located about 12 miles from the Danish capital, Veksø is on a hill surrounded by peat bogs that archaeologists believe were lakes in the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1750-500 B.C.). Some exceptional archaeological finds from the Early and Middle Bronze Age have been found around Veksø, including an iconic pair of horned helmets dating to around 1000 B.C., but Late Bronze Age artifacts are much more rare.
“This is what I would describe as a very rare find. From the first and middle part of the Bronze Age, we have a great many of these deposit finds, where bronze objects appear in the bogs. But we don’t know that many from the last part of the Bronze Age. The sacrificial tradition, which has been so visible and dominant, and which relates a lot to the society that has existed throughout the Bronze Age, it is in retreat here at the end of the Bronze Age,” says Emil Winther Struve, who is an archaeologist at ROMU and has responsibility for archaeological excavations in Egedal Municipality.
Despite the drastic cultural changes occurring in the transition between the eras, the Egedal find is evidence that the elite continued the traditions that had been so much more popular hundreds of years earlier. They were still able to afford incredibly expensive materials and objects and were still willing to destroy them and sacrifice them for religious purposes.
The objects from the new find have not yet been examined and analyzed. But Emil Winther Struve can conclude something. Among other things, when they have been put in the bog as a sacrifice. The bronze sword with iron rivets, with the two materials in the same object, is almost a physical manifestation of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. It is possible that the sword’s iron rivets constitute the earliest known iron find in Denmark. This means that the objects were laid down around 500 BC, i.e. just over 2,500 years ago. At the same time, the design of the sword suggests that it was not produced in Denmark, but probably imported from the south. Specifically, north of the Alps, where the Hallstatt culture at the end of the Bronze Age grew and became dominant in Europe.
“Their swords are shaped in a completely different way than before, perhaps because they are used differently. Earlier swords were flimsy and were perhaps used for stabbing. But now they become rougher, more solid and have a different weight, so you can use them more violently and to chop with. The Hallstatt culture, which spreads relatively quickly, has a warrior ideal and an aggressive structuring that requires conquest, war and conflict. The sword may have a picture on it,” says Emil Winther Struve.
The objects are now at the National Museum where they are undergoing conservation and analysis.
Blaundos was founded around 280 B.C. as a military colony for Macedonian soldiers in the army of the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Macedonian Hellenistic state formed by Alexander the Great’s general and successors, Seleucus. The rulers of the Seleucid dynasty made a point of seeding their territories with military colonies, spreading Greek culture and ensuring quick access to seasoned soldiers throughout the empire, which at its peak stretched from the Aegean Sea to what is now Pakistan.
Hadrian Olympios was an epithet used in Greek cities after Hadrian completed the Temple of Olympian Zeus (aka the Olympieion) in Athens in 132 A.D. Hadrian was a huge devotee of Greek culture and instituted an official program of Panhellenism (advocating for a united Greece) starting in 125 A.D. He encouraged the creation of the Panhellenion, a regional leagues of Greek cities, and instituted/revived games and sacrifices. The program culminated with the opening of the Olympieion 638 years after construction had begun under the last tyrant of Athens, Hippias.
After Hadrian dedicated the new/old temple, he adopted “Panhellenios” as one of his titles and Athens raised numerous statues of him, including one colossus behind the Olympieion. The remains of more than 90 altars dedicated to Hadrian have been found in Athens alone, and Greek cities everywhere erected their own statues and altars to the philhellenic emperor. The epithet “Olympios” was far more popular than “Panhellenios,” associating the emperor with the king of the gods and mirroring the imperial cult with the traditional Olympian pantheon. In fact, Hadrian Olympios became the most frequently used name for the emperor in the entire Greek world.
A 10th century pommel cap from a Viking sword of the Mammen style discovered in Frisia is the first of its kind found in the Netherlands. It was discovered in May of this year by metal detectorist Sander Visser who found it less than eight inches under the soil of a farm near Witmarsum. He recognized it as a pommel cap and reported it to heritage authorities.
Characterized by double contour lines forming full-bodied animals in profile and foliate elements that interlace with asymmetrical s-shaped tendrils, the Mammen style is named after a highly decorated iron axe head with silver inlay found in a Viking grave in Mammen, Denmark. We know from dendrochronological analysis of the preserved wood in the burial chamber that the Mammen grave dates to the winter of 970-971 A.D. That was the peak of the short-lived decorative style, which arose in the middle of the 10th century and fell out of use in the early 11th century.
The pommel cap is made of copper alloy with traces of gilding still visible on the intricately carved surface. It is decorated with the profiles of wild boar heads on each side. Wild boars were symbols of war and courage in Viking decorative arts. The Norse goddess Freya had a boar named Hildesvini, meaning “Battle Swine,” which she rode like a charger into battle.
The discovery of this Viking artefact in Friesland underlines the role the area played as a link in the Viking networks. Dr Nelleke IJssennagger-van der Pluijm, director of the Fryske Akademy and an expert on Frisia and the Viking world, says: “This extraordinary find shows that there is still a lot to discover about the Viking Age in Frisia, an area larger than presentday Friesland, about which we have learned a lot through research in recent years. Because this beautiful pommel cap is the first of its kind to be found in the Netherlands, it enriches our understanding of the contacts between Frisia and the Viking world in Scandinavia and the British Isles, and adds a new dimension to our historical knowledge.”
With support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Dr Diana Spiekhout, curator of Middle Ages and Mound Culture at the Fries Museum, has long been researching swords from early medieval Frisia that once included the Dutch coastal region, the area around Utrecht and the German East Frisian coast.
Swords were much more than just weapons during the early medieval period in northern and north-western Europe. People attributed human characteristics to them and they could have important symbolic value. “You could call these ‘epic’ swords,” says Diana Spiekhout. Swords with a formidable reputation were passed down for generations within elite networks, with successive owners sometimes adding ornate decorations or replacing parts. Evidence of this way of treating swords has been found in Frisia, but mainly up to the eighth century. Any decorations added later than this were usually standardised.
The Fryske Akademy and the Fries Museum are collaborating to study the pommel cap, examining it in relation to other Frisian archaeological finds from the era and the networks of trade and cultural exchange that brought the object to the Netherlands. In April of 2025, the pommel cap will make its public debut at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden as part of it Above ground level. Archaeological finds 2000-20 exhibition. It will move permanently to the Fries Museum next fall.
A new study by researchers at the University of Zurich published in the journal Communications Psychology has found that the scream-like sounds of the Aztec skull whistle have a terrifying effect on human listeners today, reflected in their brain activity.
Researchers sought to understand the possible symbolism of the skull whistle by studying its effect of the sounds they produce on human listeners. The study collected sound recordings from skull whistles excavated from temple precincts in Mexico City. They also made high-resolution CT scans of examples from the collection of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin that they then used to create 3D digital reconstructions of the originals as well as accurate, playable replicas. The digital models revealed new details on how the whistles generated sound.
Air was blown into a mouthpiece connected to an airduct that constricted at the far end where it connected to the interior of the skull. The rounded back of the skull was a counterpressure chamber where the air circulated before heading out a collision chamber to the bell and the whistle opening under the “jaw” of the skull.
The models revealed a unique internal construction of two opposing sound chambers that create physical air turbulence as the source of the screeching sound. “The whistles have a very unique construction, and we don’t know of any comparable musical instrument from other pre-Columbian cultures or from other historical and contemporary contexts,” says [University of Zurich neuroscience professor Sascha] Frühholz.
When test subjects heard the sound recordings of the death whistles, they identified them as human screams.
The Aztec death whistle sounds were also played to human listeners while their brains were being recorded. Brain regions belonging to the affective neural system responded strongly to the sound, again confirming its daunting nature. But the team also observed brain activity in regions that associate sounds with symbolic meaning. This suggests a “hybrid” nature of these death whistle sounds, combining a basic psychoaffective influence on listeners with more elaborate mental processes of sound symbolism, signifying the iconographic nature.
Music has always had strong emotional impact on human listeners in both contemporary and ancient cultures, hence its use in ritual religious and mythological contexts. Aztec communities may have specifically capitalized on the frightening and symbolic nature of the death whistle sound to influence the audience in their ritual procedures, based on the knowledge of how the sound affects modern humans. “Unfortunately, we could not perform our psychological and neuroscientific experiments with humans from ancient Aztec cultures. But the basic mechanisms of affective response to scary sounds are common to humans from all historical contexts,” says Frühholz.
Original skull whistle sound clip:
Replica skull whistle played with high air pressure:
Replica skull whistle played with high air pressure
Art historian Roberto Longhi first published the portrait as an autograph work by Caravaggio in 1963. His research found that the painting was in the Barberini family collection from the time it was painted until around 1935 when much of the great collection was dispersed. It has been in a private collection in Florence for decades and has never been loaned to a museum or shown to the public. The owners are so secretive that they literally refused to answer calls or open the door to Caravaggio experts. People who have written books and papers on Caravaggio and have seen everything else he painted a thousand times have never caught so much as a glimpse of this one. Even now that they have at long last agreed to loan it for exhibition, the owners have chosen to remain anonymous.
Caravaggio’s works consist almost entirely of religious and mythological subjects. While he is thought to have made a number of portraits of patrons in the Curia, friends and at least one lover during his time in Rome, only five of them, all of them of clerics, are known to have survived. He painted the Barberini portrait early in his career. It is one of the first three portraits in his catalogue and was an important step in the development of Caravaggio’s signature style. Art historian Giovan Pietro Bellori wrote in 1672 that Caravaggio first began to “intensify the darks” in this portrait, creating the vivid contrast of light and shadow that characterize the “chiaroscuro” technique that define his oeuvre.
The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini depicts the subject seated in an armchair at angle that propels him out of the inky dark background into a beam of light. His misaligned eyes look to the side and points in that direction with his right hand, while he clutches a folded letter in his left. His side-eye and hand gesture suggests he’s engaging with someone to his right, and the intensity in his gaze and hands convey a dynamic naturalism that was unusual in portraiture for the period.
Caravaggio. The Portrait Unveiled exhibition opens at the Sala Paesaggi of Palazzo Barberini today and runs through February 23, 2025. The portrait will be in the same gallery as three other iconic works by Caravaggio which are part of the museum’s permanent collection: Narcissus (1597-1599), Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1599), Saint Francis in Meditation (1606-1607). It’s a unique opportunity for Caravaggio pilgrims to view bucket list masterpieces and one they may well never have another opportunity to see again, although Italian Culture Ministry officials are hoping against hope that now that the owners have given an inch, the state might be able to take a mile and persuade them to sell.
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