Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Savonarola]

From Smitsonian Magazine

Thanks to Medical Technology, the Black Prince's Tomb Reveals its Secrets
Researchers use x-rays and endoscopy to discover how the effigy of Edward of Woodstock was crafted more than 600 years ago


An overhead view of the armor-clad effigy on the Black Prince's tomb at Canterbury Cathedral in England. Dean and Chapter of Canterbury

Historians have long wondered how the realistic knight's armor on the tomb of the infamous Black Prince, Edward of Woodstock and heir to the English throne who died in 1376, was crafted. Now they think they know.

Using x-rays and other medical imaging equipment, researchers have discovered that the metal armor on the effigy was likely made by an actual armorer, reports Maev Kennedy of the Art Newspaper. A team of historians and scientists from the Courtauld Institute of Art used noninvasive techniques to look inside the effigy on the tomb at Canterbury Cathedral in England.

Their examination of the protective plating on the prostate figure shows an intricate system of bolts and pins holding it all together, demonstrating the designer had a detailed knowledge of medieval armor, according to Jennifer Ouellette of Ars Technica. The effigy armor is very similar to knight's armor actually worn by the Black Prince, which is displayed at the cathedral.

"There is something deeply affecting about the way his armor is depicted on the tomb," team co-leader Jessica Barker, a senior lecturer in Medieval Art at the Courtauld, says in a statement. "This isn't just any armor—it is his armor, the same armor that hangs empty above the tomb, replicated with complete fidelity even down to tiny details like the position of rivets."


The tomb of Edward of Woodstock with armor and artifacts he wore in battle above it. Jessica Barker

It is not known how Edward of Woodstock, son of King Edward III and father of King Richard II, acquired his nickname. Some historians believe it may trace back to the dark armor he wore in battle. Others claim it comes from his savagery as a military commander, states the Art Newspaper. In 1370, the Black Prince ordered the slaughter of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of men, women and children following the Siege of Limoges in France.

Edward of Woodstock died six years later of dysentery at the age of 45. Before his passing, he left detailed instructions on how his tomb should look, the Courtauld team states in its findings published in the Burlington, a monthly magazine covering the fine and decorative arts.

According to researchers, the Black Prince wanted his tomb effigy to be made of metal and "fully armed in plate of war," which was "unprecedented" in England at the time, reports Owen Jarus of Live Science. The likeness on this gravesite is one of just six surviving large cast-metal sculptures from medieval England.


A closeup of the Black Prince's gauntlets folded in prayer on his tomb. Jessica Barker

Originally, historians believed this tomb was constructed shortly after Edward of Woodstock's death in 1376. However, the metal alloys in this effigy are almost identical to those used in another created for the Black Prince's father, Edward III, which was built in 1386, according to the researchers' findings.

The team now suspects both tombs were constructed at about the same time by Richard II, who may have used them as propaganda to support his faltering reign. The king's unpopularity at that time was due to the threat of another war with France and the strain it placed on the nation's finances.

"Until now though, a lack of documents about the Black Prince's tomb and effigy has limited our understanding of their construction, chronology and patronage so our scientific study of them offers a long-overdue opportunity to reassess the effigy as one of the country's most precious medieval sculptures," Barker says in the statement. "By using the latest scientific technology and closely examining the effigy, we have discovered so much more about how it was cast, assembled and finished."


An interior view of the effigy taken with a video probe. Waygate Technologies

Scientific analysis also reveals the effigy was made by a team of medieval artisans with an expert's understanding of battle armor.

"Although the names of the artists are lost to history, by looking very closely at how the sculpture was made, we have reconstructed the artistic processes, background and training of the artists, and even the order in which the sculpture's many pieces were assembled," research co-leader Emily Pegues, a PhD student at the Courtauld and assistant curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., says in the statement.

In addition to x-rays of the effigy, the researchers inserted a video probe through existing openings to look at the interior construction of the tomb's figure, reports the website Medievalists.net. Similar to an endoscopy, the device features a long tube with a light and camera for examining hidden things.

"It was thrilling to be able to see the inside of the sculpture with the endoscope: we found bolts and pins holding the figure together which show it put together like puzzle pieces, revealing evidence of the stages of its making which no one had seen since the 1380s," Pegues says.

[Admiral Yi]

Jared Diamond's "Collapse" has a very good section on Greenland and Vinland for those who have not read it.

[jimmy olsen]

Great excavation of an Assyrian seige ramp

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/11/siege-ramps-and-breached-walls-ancient-warfare-and-the-assyrian-conquest-of-lachish/141969?amp

[Tamas]

From Smitsonian Magazine

Some tyrant has some fancy pageantry created 700 years ago as a PR stunt for his reckless reign as well to create a memory to his mass murderer son, and we are still preserving it as something significant, in a church of all places. 

[Maladict]

From Smitsonian Magazine

Some tyrant has some fancy pageantry created 700 years ago as a PR stunt for his reckless reign as well to create a memory to his mass murderer son, and we are still preserving it as something significant, in a church of all places. 

Yes, we have been very fortunate in this case.

[Malthus]

Great excavation of an Assyrian seige ramp

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/11/siege-ramps-and-breached-walls-ancient-warfare-and-the-assyrian-conquest-of-lachish/141969?amp

Interesting. I've actually been to Tel Lachish, years ago. I've also seen the Assyrian reliefs depicting the siege of the place (together with numerous atrocities) which is in the British Museum.

Apparently the city site was abandoned after Alexander the Great moved through. I haven't seen any explanation as to why.

[viper37]

Apparently the city site was abandoned after Alexander the Great moved through. I haven't seen any explanation as to why.

Interesting, Wikipedia has no theory on this.  I guess Alexander plundered the area the citizens had had enough of being on everyone's path?  Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, then Greek, I guess they were fed up with strangers showing up uninvited.

[Malthus]

Apparently the city site was abandoned after Alexander the Great moved through. I haven't seen any explanation as to why.

Interesting, Wikipedia has no theory on this.  I guess Alexander plundered the area the citizens had had enough of being on everyone's path?  Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, then Greek, I guess they were fed up with strangers showing up uninvited.

Heh that would be the whole area though. 😄

It really is a bit odd, apparently at one time Lachish was the second largest city in the region after Jerusalem. It was repopulated after the Assyrians depopulated the place, but was nonetheless eventually abandoned - which is why it is such a good site for archeology.

Tel Dor, the place I was volunteering at, was also abandoned, more or less, much later (the Crusader era) but was a much smaller site. There is a small Israeli radar base built on the ruins of a Crusader watchtower there ...

[Josquius]

Apparently the city site was abandoned after Alexander the Great moved through. I haven't seen any explanation as to why.

Interesting, Wikipedia has no theory on this.  I guess Alexander plundered the area the citizens had had enough of being on everyone's path?  Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, then Greek, I guess they were fed up with strangers showing up uninvited.

The trouble with that reasoning is the transport paths that make it a good place for armies to go also make it a good place for trade.
Kind of like the fertile soil around volcanoes.

A city constantly having armies marching through it is one you'd logically expect to stick around I'd argue. Unless an army consciously makes an effort to wipe it out or trade routes shift (very possible with Alexander rewriting the map of eurasia)

[The Minsky Moment]

Lachish was on the road from Gaza to Jerusalem during the Iron Age, and thus was a link connecting Jerusalem to the Via Maris, the main ancient trade route.  I don't know how those routes may have been reconfigured during the Hellenistic period, but its not like there were elaborate paved roads.

[viper37]

Apparently the city site was abandoned after Alexander the Great moved through. I haven't seen any explanation as to why.

Interesting, Wikipedia has no theory on this.  I guess Alexander plundered the area the citizens had had enough of being on everyone's path?  Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, then Greek, I guess they were fed up with strangers showing up uninvited.

Heh that would be the whole area though. 😄

It really is a bit odd, apparently at one time Lachish was the second largest city in the region after Jerusalem. It was repopulated after the Assyrians depopulated the place, but was nonetheless eventually abandoned - which is why it is such a good site for archeology.

Tel Dor, the place I was volunteering at, was also abandoned, more or less, much later (the Crusader era) but was a much smaller site. There is a small Israeli radar base built on the ruins of a Crusader watchtower there ...

Most of the people were deported by the Babylonians, after the Assyrians, from Wikipedia, it seems there were only a few scattered farms after that.

It's going to be hard to understand why they left, unlike large cities, there's likely not a lot of writing and artefacts left from this time period.

[Sheilbh]

Not sure if this goes into archaeology thread - but amazing:

Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book's binding
Scholars knew the work about Guillaume d'Orange and the bloody siege of his city existed, but until now believed it had been lost completely
Alison Flood
Thu 18 Nov 2021 12.32 GMT

A fragment from a 12th-century French poem previously believed to have been lost forever has been found by an academic in Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books during the 16th century when she came across the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d'Orange in the binding of a book published in 1528. Parchment and paper were expensive at the time, and unwanted manuscripts and books were frequently recycled.

Scholars had believed the poem, which comes from a cycle of chansons de geste – epic narrative poems – about Guillaume d'Orange, existed, but there had previously been no physical evidence that this was true. The fragment only runs to 47 lines, but it proves the existence of a poem thought to have been completely lost.

The poem is set in the ninth century, during the reign of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and heir. Atkin said that while it is believed to have been composed in the late 12th century, the fragment itself is from a copy made in England in the late 13th century.

"Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n'ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin," runs an early section of the fragment, which Philip Bennett, an expert on Guillaume d'Orange from the University of Edinburgh, has translated as: "He asks him, 'How goes it with him?' / 'Badly,' said Count Bertram. / 'Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.'"

The quoted lines come as Bertram begs the king for help relieving the siege of Orange, a city in the Rhône Valley, describing the dire siege conditions. "In later parts of the fragment we hear him berating the queen (at one point he even calls her 'pute russe' or 'red-headed whore'), who has objected to her husband leading a relieving army south," said Atkin.

Atkin also found a parchment fragment from Béroul's Roman de Tristan, telling part of the story of Tristan and Iseult, in the same book. The 12th-century poem is one of the earliest versions of the medieval romance, and until now the only evidence of its existence had been an incomplete 13th-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The fragment found by Atkin differs "significantly" from the manuscript, and shows the poem was circulated more widely than had previously been thought.

"When you find manuscript waste in a 16th-century book, it tends to be in Latin, and it's almost always something theological or philosophical, and from the point of view of modern-day literary scholarship, perhaps not that interesting. But the fragments in this book were different," said Atkin. "They were in French, they were in verse, and in one of the fragments the name Iseult immediately jumped out. I'm not a French scholar, and I realised I was going to need to bring in some collaborators. From there, it's just been really fun and exciting."

She approached academics from the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh and British Columbia to help. "I knew it was something important," said JR Mattison, a French-manuscript specialist from the University of British Columbia who helped to identify the Tristan and Iseult fragment. "This piece of the poem comes from a significant moment when Iseult speaks with her husband King Mark. This fragment expands our knowledge of the poem's audiences and its changing meaning over time and contributes a new perspective on how Tristan legends moved across Europe."

Bennett said there had been "no physical trace" of the Siège d'Orange poem before. "There is much evidence from other chansons de geste that a poem about the siege Guillaume d'Orange suffered in his newly conquered city must have once existed," he said. "The discovery of the fragment we now have fills an important gap in the poetic biography of the epic hero. This is a most exciting addition to the corpus of medieval French epic poetry."

The team will now work to discover more about when and where the fragments were copied, and how they came to be bound in the 1528 book. "That manuscripts were made at all reflects the value once placed on the texts they contain. But manuscripts that were dismembered and reused as waste were no longer valued as texts. Their only value was as a material commodity – parchment – that could be used to reinforce the binding of another book. The manuscripts containing these French poems were probably recycled because the texts were considered old-fashioned and the language outdated," said Atkin.

"It's fantastically exciting to discover something that's been lost all this time, but I do think it is also worth simultaneously holding the thought that actually, the only reason these fragments have survived is because at some point, someone thought the manuscripts in which they appeared were not valuable as anything other than waste. There's a sort of lovely tension in that, I think."

[viper37]

Nice read.  I understood 90% of that old French sentence

However, ble in old French is not corn. 

First of all, in modern French, blé is wheat.
corn in French is officiallt called maïs, but in popular parlance is called blé d'Inde (Indian wheat).

And it was domesticated in Mexico, reached northern US/Southern Canada prior to European colonization, but First Nations taught the white men how to cultivate it.  It couldn't have been known in Europe by the 12the century.

More logically, ble would refer to any kind of cultivated cereal back then, most likely wheat, I guess, but could have been buckwheat too.

[jimmy olsen]

Nice read.  I understood 90% of that old French sentence

However, ble in old French is not corn. 

First of all, in modern French, blé is wheat.
corn in French is officiallt called maïs, but in popular parlance is called blé d'Inde (Indian wheat).

And it was domesticated in Mexico, reached northern US/Southern Canada prior to European colonization, but First Nations taught the white men how to cultivate it.  It couldn't have been known in Europe by the 12the century.

More logically, ble would refer to any kind of cultivated cereal back then, most likely wheat, I guess, but could have been buckwheat too.

Don't the Brits call any kind of cultivated cereal corn? Americans would use grain.

[Sheilbh]

Don't the Brits call any kind of cultivated cereal corn? Americans would use grain.

I don't know about now but I think they did - corn is an Old English word. So when English-speaking settlers encountered maize, they called it corn because it was another grain like wheat, rye, buckwheat or whatever else.

Corn was known it just didn't mean the same thing