A fine day: Italic inscriptions and databases workshop

The web link works! (photo: R. Hedlund)

After two successful TAG sessions in a year – one in the Bournemouth TAG and one in the Stockholm Nordic TAG – I just haven’t managed to get rid of that painful memory of the awkward Lampeter TAG session in 2003. Not only had the organisers moved the session from afternoon to morning AFTER the printing the programme, but this change was only communicated on a handwritten A4 placed above the information desk among the other colourful notes. I apparently should have been shouting the change on the rooftops myself. Instead, I went to the basic Finnish communication mode and concentrated in getting through with it. Result: the only listener was the computer helper on behalf of the organisers – who luckily was quite interested in the philosophy of archaeology. The key speaker informed me on the day he could not come, a few papers were read by me or other participants and as the result the discussion was dismal. After the sessions some friends came to tell me over lunch how much they waited for my session and I had to tell them that it was all over already. For this, I had left fieldwork in India early, only for the small crew to stumble into an unusual find and I should really have been there to record it properly. That memory lingers.

I and Kristian Göransson opening the workshop (photo: R. Hedlund)

This time it was bigger with a grant from the Riksbankens Jubileumfond and people flying from the Nordic countries, but I should not have been worried, since it was all lovely and high quality. Naturally, there were the customarily cancellations and quirks. The Director from Berlin just couldn’t leave his workplace and was replaced by a junior researcher from Rome. One presenter had fallen quite unpleasantly ill, but Harri Kiiskinen read her paper very well indeed. One Mac did not talk to the video projector, one speaker came in late and I had to run out of the room when the evening restaurant called just during a Very Important Paper. As a result, the timetable was thrown out of the window with me explaining the owner of the restaurant that I had already confirmed all the previous week with somebody over phone after talking to her. However, otherwise it went so nicely.

Karin presents (photo: R. Hedlund)

I should not talk about the content too much, since one of the participants has promised to write a piece to the AIAC Newsletter and I am still wondering, if we should do a series of project presentations to the Archeologia e calcolatori. Thus, I do not mention everybody and their contribution. However, I can tell Karin Westin Tikkanen gave a wonderful presentation on the languages in pre-Roman Italy and showed that we have a lot of common interests in the light of potential future projects (I am waiting for all sorts of decisions later this year). Professor Silvia Orlandi from La Sapienza explain the latest, same day news of the EAGLE project and answered enquiries about the project and the future portal to an audience composed mainly of Nordic archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers and historians, but also participants from Italy and Germany. The workshop brought together the researchers from the Finnish and Swedish Pompeii projects to compare their work with the political graffiti in Pompeii and their digital presentations. These people had not really met and discussed their work before. The Skype video link to Florida worked and we got an interesting contribution of using old squeezes digitally.

Professor Orlandi presents (photo: R. Hedlund)

I was very fortunate that Kristian Göransson, the director of the Swedish Institute in Rome, was enthusiastic from the start, gave opening words and was present a considerable part of his working day. We also had a surprise visitor, since I had not quite thought Christopher Smith, the Director of the British School at Rome, would have time to come for a [free] lunch, even if we have common interests and he gave me advice on a failed money application. Having a director from the G8 of the international institutes in Rome (not a term coined by me) gave new kudos to the workshop and kept alive a contact that will be needed for the most important of the scenarios I have for future research. This is what it was basically all about: getting people together, presenting and discussing and starting little by little building a collaborative framework for the research of Italic and pre-Roman identities in Italy. And if nothing that grand comes out of this, I will have to create a research database and place it or parts of it in open access – one day.

Discussion (photo: R. Hedlund)

Landscape Archaeology Conference 2014 Part 1

The initial irritation of the fact that the organisers had mistakenly told us that we have a poster – only for me to find our names in the list of oral presenters AFTER the poster was sent to the printers - disappeared with the sympathetic conference in Rome. This was organised initially remotely from Amsterdam, so you can understand that all came into the place when all people where in the same place. After all, the international institutes in Rome have a long experience in organising multi-institute conferences during the conference season. The organisation was probably not helped by the fact that the conference was very near EAA in Istanbul where 3000 archaeologists met. In Rome we were 300 and some flew directly from Istanbul.

I had to pass Istanbul for time and money issues, but those who had been in Istanbul lauded the quality and pleasantness of LAC2014. Yes, some Italian colleagues did the sending a title in English and then speaking regardless in Italian, but it was nice to see the practitioners of the Italian topographic tradition taking their natural place within the landscape archaeology. There are slight differences in emphases and methods, but in principle, the lines are so similar at least the topographers do not see the difference. This is good, since it is just richness to have plentiful traditions.

The conference was organised in the Dutch and Swedish Institutes with the Belgian Institute and University of Rome “La Sapienza” adding to the spaces where different sessions and key note speeches took place. The conference celebrated the 400 years of official diplomatic relations between the two countries, Sweden and Holland. The institutes are side by side in Valle Giulia and the gardens were joined for the conference dinner and reception.

This blog is about the conference in general. I will next week return to the topics of the conference, slightly depending on how my own workshop on Tuesday will go. If it will be fabulous, I will probably write about it and leave the many details in LAC 2014 for a quieter week. Although the conference was otherwise marvellous, there were two sources of wonder: Why a small portion of posters were place around the corner in the Dutch institute when there was a lot of space in front of the Institute where most of the posters were? You can guess where ours was... And why it took so long for the Belgian and Dutch Institute to put the air condition of their lecture halls on? It was sauna all around.

The funniest moment of the conference was when the Dutch organisers and helpers of the conference found me and my three Swedish colleagues waiting to get in before the final reception. I had had both the two-hour poster session and our joint presentation during the final afternoon and all I needed after that was cold beer. Colleagues could provide a summary of the keynote speech on the novelties of landscape archaeology whereas we had a good discussion on the work practices at the Riksantivarieämbetet on the terrace while rehydrating.

No more Whitechapel speculation?

The recent days have brought about the amazing news that the mystery of Jack the Ripper has finally been solved using the latest forensic DNA technologies. And as the Finnish newspapers have noted, the analyses were all done by a Finn, Dr Jari Louhelainen, a senior lecturer in molecular biology at the Liverpool John Moores University. This work was apparently partly funded – or at least publicized as a world exclusive by that every archaeologist’s favourite read, The Daily Mail. At least there is a book out available on the matter.

Map of Whitechapel (from whitechapeljack.com)

Elsewhere in the Independent the naysayers were suggesting that this is all unreliable and there is no guarantee that there was no cross contamination when these new analyses were carried out. The story is quite amazing. A man called Russell Edwards had seen Johnny Depp movie ‘From the Hell’ and started his ‘extensive’ research into the matter. I assume this research was more thorough than mine that happened when ‘Ripper Street’ TV series by the BBC started some years ago and I spent one night reading the Wikipedia on the Whitechapel murders. He made his way to the National Archives and has read original documents in Kew.

However, Russell made an even more far reaching additional step: he bought in an auction in 2007 an old tatty, bloody shawl in Bury St. Edmunds (as you do) that had already featured in a Channel 5 documentary. This had allegedly been taken from a murder scene of Catherine Eddowes by a police man called Amos Simpson and had never been washed by the lucky wife of the police man who had got it as a present. Unwashed and dirty – soaked in what turned out to be blood and semen in the analyses. It was tucked away and a descendant of this policeman, one David Melville-Hayes, wrote a letter and gave his word that this was true and the shawl had been taken with a permission from policeman’s superiors. Melville-Hayes had even given the shawl to the Crime Museum, which had put it into the storage, since the provenance could not have been proven. The shawl was more expensive than an assumed alcoholic prostitute could afford and one had to believe that Jack the Ripper came with a shawl that he did not take with him afterwards. Thus, Melville-Hayes returned and reclaimed his gift back and sold it instead.

Russell managed to find Dr Louhelainen and some descendants of both Catherine Eddowes and the main suspect of all times, Aaron Kosminski, who had been sent to an asylum about the same time as the gruel murders came to an abrupt end. Amazingly, Dr Louhelainen could find DNA of the ancestors of both Eddowes and Kosminski – or their descendants. This is the dubious provenience and provenance that raises the eyebrows together with the quality of the analyses and descendant DNA. The quality of the latter seems to be fine with Eddowes’s three times great-grantdaughter and a female relative of Kosminski’s sister. It seems plausible that the mystery has been solved.

These new breakthroughs of forensic science do have something of a letdown in them. Even if it is exciting that Richard III has been found in a Leicester car park and was not chucked into the river and that Aaron Kosminski was the lunatic who hated women and slashed them, the mystery is disappearing. Undoubtedly, there will be a series of new mysteries and unsolved dilemmas, but nothing seems better than an unsolved murder mystery with out-of-this-world details. Now the endless line of TV series (Ripper Street, Whitechapel etc. etc.) and the cottage industry of home-made sleuths may come to an end. Luckily, something stays: the mental image of a murder landscape along the narrow lanes of Whitechapel. More research is also carried out about the women murdered and it is clear that they may not have been prostitutes, but have had more complicated stories.

As an interesting note, one can see that the Wikipedia entry of the Jack the Ripper has been locked until September 10, 2014 due to an 'editorial dispute'. Russell's book is out on September 9, 2014. It seems some Ripperlogists are not happy... Pseudo-academic publication disputes!