Graffiti was ancient Facebook?

Nobody is going to deny that there was serious networking going on in Roman society. In fact, the whole society was based on patron – client relationships. The Romans were also master propagandists with whole cities standing as monuments for their might and power. They also used written word to propagate and advertise together with images.

Finnish colleagues at Helsinki have been involved in a series of archaeological projects in Pompeii. First they excavated a block there and recently Dr Eeva-Maria Viitanen has been mapping texts with GIS across this ancient town. She was recently presenting her results at the Archaeological Institute of America conference in and hit the international media jackpot for the project. Her results made it first to the LiveScience and they were publicised by the Daily Mail, too, which I must confess was my source of information once again. Unlike many other female archaeologists, I do openly admit my love of gossip, as anybody who has met me in Rome knows. I usually tend to relax with a copy of Diva e Donna or Chi. Nevertheless, the graffiti from Pompeii also made it to the Scientific American.

The external walls of houses in Pompeii have revealed hundreds of political slogans and the houses of the wealthiest voters offered the most lucrative advertising space for candidates. Eeva-Maria and her colleagues have found out that some 40 percent of the ads were on prestigious houses, which is worth noting, since only a third of the houses were rich homes whereas bars, shops and more modest houses and flats were more common. Clearly, candidates were looking for space on the homes of the wealthy. This has led the researchers to conclude that the ads reveal early social networking. Candidates probably needed permission from the homeowner to paint their ads, suggesting the graffiti is something of an endorsement. What caught the journalists' eye was the way Eeva-Maria compared these political messages to the Facebook wall messages we write today. This may not be totally accurate, but social networking in an urban landscape any way.

The graffiti in Pompeii was much more localised, meant for local 'consumption' and not to reach wider audience. Furthermore, it may be that Twitter may have been a better analogy. Even if the 'posting' in the past required the owners permission, the delivery was open and not restricted to the 'friends'. Nevertheless, the network could not cover the whole known Roman world as is the case with modern social networking. At least not in this case.

Richard III probably was buried in Leicester

Last week’s Society for Historical Archaeology conference at Leicester was probably the reason why the last summer’s excavations were in the news again. At least Dan Snow visited Leicester and discussed with the archaeologists involved. Although we have to wait for the definite news until early February, it seems likely that the skeleton found belonged to the king. This was at least strongly suggested by Richard Buckley when Dan Snow interviewed him in The One Show. This type of publicity is like manna from heaven to the universities and the appearance was duly published on the University web site. The skeleton had exactly the type of trauma Richard III is supposed to have had.

The One Show visits the Richard III dig

What really caught my eye again was how beautifully the traditional background work had been done. Before the ground penetrating radar investigation the old maps had been digitized and georeferenced and the position of the Greyfriers was placed on top of the current city map with all modern streets and buildings beneath. In that way the researchers could confirm that the cloister where Richard III was likely to lie was under the car park instead of being bulldozed when the surrounding buildings were erected.

Sadly, the public family-oriented day related loosely to the conference, themed The Past Beneath Your Feet: Archaeology and History in Leicestershire, cannot give a definitive answer, yet. Nevertheless, the event was worth visiting (see my 'review').

Heritage crime unit?

Britain is not unique in allowing trade in antiquities, even when they are recently found portable antiquities. In many European countries, such as Finland and Italy, the heritage and antiquities belong to the state and you cannot legally sell part of this common property that are archaeological finds. Exporting any ancient items is strictly regulated and exceptional, and it is normally restricted to museum objects loaned to other museums. Britain has signed, but not ratified the UNESCO Convention to Tackle Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities, and the antiquities trade is actually quite prestigious, if marginal part of the economy.

The rhino head in the Norwich Castle

Britain has ratified a series of international wildlife treaties, and there has been a dedicated wildlife crime unit. You may have seen occasional news about prosecuted or convicted egg collectors. However, now this unit may be closed. Just when the all-party House of Commons Environment Audit Committee had praised its work related to the rhino-horn thefts and international illegal reptile trade, among other things. Luckily, the final decision has not been made and there is some hope that the 10-person unit that is actually relatively speaking cheap to run with its £136,000 annual budget from the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The sum just has not been signed for the coming tax year, so theoretically, the unit may shut when the current money runs out on March 31.

As for the antiquities, continuous work has been done in the Parliament, by the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group (see their ‘agenda’). Lord Renfrew, the former Disney professor at Cambridge has been prominent in this Committee and he used to oversee the Illegal Antiquities Research Centre that sadly was closed in 2007 as part of the reorganisation of Archaeology at Cambridge after the arrival of the current professor. One of the aspects of the Centre and the APPAG has historically been to get Britain to ratify the UNESCO convention. Britain is still among the 31 countries that have signed but not ratified the convention, together with the United States.

Recently, the former director of the Illegal Antiquities Research Centre was among the research group that got a large grant to study antiquities trade from the view point of criminology. They will gather and analyse the data on the movements and motives of traffickers. The team has already identified a key illegal trading route from Cambodia and Thailand through mainland Europe and on to the two main market destinations of London and New York. They will concentrate on studying and interviewing different parties at all levels along this route, including the middle men and police.

An eample of a heritage crime

Since the convention has not been ratified, the British authorities concentrate on local heritage crime, including preventing unlawful excavations, and metal thefts from church roofs. English Heritage works together with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in order to tackle the problem; all parties have signed a memorandum on the matter. A number of local authorities, among them the Northamptonshire County Council, a party in the recent Castle Farm case, have also signed the document. This Alliance to Reduce Crime Against Heritage (ARCH) is working using a partnership model, but with the cuts biting any Heritage Police is a distant dream. Nevertheless, as the attempted rhino-horn theft from the Norwich Castle shows wildlife and antiquities and their illegal trade cross each other’s paths, and enabling rightful parties to enjoy legal uses of heritage and their profits instead of letting criminals to make money is worth a dedicated police unit, no matter how small.

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Update in 2015: the heritage crime unit is reality and the plans were set up in late 2013. Now you can follow the Historic England Heritage Crime tweets!

ASBOs for illicit coin hunters

This week has brought about a second conviction at a short interval for the crimes against archaeology (for earlier, see Priddy Circles). This time around it was for illegal excavations at a scheduled settlement at Chester Farm, owned by the English Heritage. The culprits from Northamptonshire were metal detectorists who had excavated trenches in order to reveal Roman coins. Interestingly, once again this news was delivered by the Mail Online, which probably not only shows that somebody in their office and in the Daily Mail is seriously interested in archaeology but also reveals my love for gossip for entertainment (as a specialist online newspaper, Mail Online is actually updated more frequently than for example the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph, which is the best for the digital technology news).

The illegal trenches

This time around a quick googling to the world of web showed that this news has been picked up quickly in the blogoshere by the Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues blog, and English Heritage has it prominently in its news as a heritage crime. English emphasizes the fact that the culprits got prison sentences and Anti Social Behaviour Orders that deny them using metal detectoring equipment. Peter Cox and Darren West were sentenced already on December 19 after pleading guilty to stealing artefacts and damaging a scheduled site. They were caught after been seen by two English Heritage employees digging at Chester Farm in July. Their houses were raided and a large amount of Iron Age, Roman and Medieval coins, other metal artifacts, pottery and a series of maps and other material on this scheduled monument were found. They got one year imprisonment, suspended for two years, 150 hours of community service, a curfew, their metal detecting equipment was confiscated and they were sentenced to pay a compensation for damage caused to the scheduled monument.

Police taking the cast (photo from Mail Online)

The extent of the police operation was laudable, since the conviction rested on matching the plaster casts of the tools used at the site to their own digging equipment. This was made easier by the size of their trench (see above), which uncovered a pavement, and seemed to be wider than was strictly needed to reveal the metal objects. This suggests some genuine twisted interest in archaeology and points to the fact that managing Portable Antiquities is difficult when the truly interested and the ones stepping outside the law are the same persons.

The pair sentenced had to pay the legal costs, £750. Coincidently, their compensation was of the same size, £750, as their legal costs. Considering that the metal coins do have monetary value in Britain where the trade in antiquities – found outside scheduled monuments with the permission of the landowner – is legal, one wonders, if £750 is a sufficient deterrent. The British Museum has not yet officially valued their illegal loot, but one assumes its value should have had an effect on the size of the compensation demanded, keeping in mind that they were caught mainly because they dug during the daylight and were easy to spot on the English Heritage land. After all, they destroyed archaeological contexts apart from stealing artefacts, which should have resulted in a compensation multiplying the monetary value of their activities, don’t you think?

Mayan apocalypse?

As we all can see and feel, the world did not come into an end on Winter Solstice. I find this fascination with the end of the world very interesting – not the least because there is an instance of declared apocalypse in my family history. Or not really MY family history, but in the history of my family’s home village, a religiously lively place near Jyväskylä in Finland.

Our village got into the world news in the 1930s when a woman who preached in her sleep declared that the world was nigh and the end was here. Although it wasn’t – even if the predicted event reached allegedly the New York Times. The frenzy of the wait resulted with people selling their worldly possessions and the disappointment of the righteous not being pulled to the heavens. This was aggravated by the in-fighting in the village in the aftermath due to the half of the village losing their property and the other half gaining real bargains. These scenes have been relived many times in different communities across the world when panic and hysteria spreads in the wake of the end – that does not come.

December 21 Tikal celebrations in Guatemala (photo by Herald Sun)

This Mayan Apocalypse was interesting, because it was made an event. Some people truly believed in the end of the world – such is the character of a true belief. However, Mexican Tourist Board did brisk business with the official event at Chichen Itza and tourists pouring in. The ethnic Mayans knew that their ancestors had not predicted an end of the world but just a beginning of a new cycle in a cyclical calendar. They were not anxious, but happy to get a full audience at Tikal for a tourist extravaganza.

Apparently there is only one fragment that tells about the end of the 13th Bak'tun period. The close of each Bak'tun period occurs once in 5125 years. The last time a Bak'tun period ended was at the beginning of the current Maya era on August 11 in 3114 BC and the end of the 13th period coincided with December 21, 2012. Callaway and Stuart, two Mayan experts quoted by adjunct professor Shankar Chaudhuri in the Guardian, refer to Tortuguero Monument 6, discovered in Tabasco, Mexico. This is the only text from the whole Mayan period (250AD-900AD) that refers to December 21, 2012, as the end of the Bak'tun thirteen or any kind of important date.

The Tortuguero Monument (photo collage by P. Johnson)

For obvious religious reasons, the western culture is prone to the predictions of the doomsday. After all, the Bible discusses at length the end of Times. The Revelations tell the sequence of the things as it is supposed to happen from the Christian point of view. However, all kinds of religious figures and writers have made predictions – none of them accurate so far. Nevertheless, some sections in the world have contributed to the efforts of facilitating such an end by inventing an atomic bomb and neglecting the upkeep of the nuclear power stations. I myself was drenched in the rain in the days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and now just wonder how much I radiate...

There is a continuous interest in the writings of Nostradamus, whose shot to the end of the world in 1999 – or at least his poems were seen in that light in our time. His Centuries, published in 1555, included encrypted references into the events in the future, interpreted to include such moments in the modern history as the rise of the Nazism and the 9/11 attacks. All intelligence can be lost in such interpretative pursuits, but he was taken up as one of the ‘authorities’ on December 2012 ‘non-event’. The twilight sources are drawn to support different preposterous arguments.

Wine landscapes

The origins of different agricultural products and evidence of the oldest use of resources are popular research topics – especially now when different scientific methods allow studying DNA and chemical composition of different matters. Considering it is the holiday season different alcoholic beverages are always popular news items and the evidence of oldest beer or wine production normally has worldwide exposure.

Beer seems to be less studied subject but wine studies crop up in the newspapers and Internet every now and then. This is partly due to the fact that wild wine plant is indigenous in many of the modern wine production areas where the companies have funded some of the research. Wine also has religious meaning being shared in the most important communal ritual in Christianity. It was also consumed by the great civilisations in the Mediterranean.

The University of Siena has been involved in studying the wild wines and the derivates in central Italy in Tuscany and northern Lazio. Ethnological work has also been carried out in Campania. Archaeologists have been involved in the projects in Tuscany and neighbouring areas. The scientists have compared the DNA make up of the plants at different locations to the existence of different archaeological sites in the area. ArcheoVino project has plotted the distributions in the Albegna river valley (Zifferero 2010), whereas Vinum project has managed to spot a difference in the characteristics of the plants near the Etruscan sites in comparison with the plants lying ‘in the wild’ (Giannace 2010). The autochthonous grapevine varieties helps to understand the past wine production and perhaps make people curious about the local grape varieties so that the rarer wines produced from the grapes nearer the original exploited wild versions do not vanish.

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Ulla Rajala offered the 'In vino veritas: the history and archaeology of wine' course in Madingley Hall, Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge the last weekend of January, January 25-27. More details from the ICE web site.

Space Archaeologist and Nephew of Jon do Roman Empire

Sometimes even if you know many of the people involved in a television programme it leaves you wanting. No matter how much you would like to like their offering you feel a little short-changed when the programme has ended. It is not the lack of interesting topic, historic events, archaeological monuments or first class research behind the programme that fails Rome’s Lost Empire, but the dumbed down way of speech and the lack of intellectually delivered narrative. The need to be shown to be impressive was probably more important than the real historical narrative and the archaeological results drawn by different teams.

First of all, one wondered, if the team from the University of Southampton digging at Portus, the harbour of Rome, and specialized not only in Roman archaeology but also in archaeological computing with the results reaching Second Life and beyond, really did not spend any time studying air photographs before Sarah Parcak started to look at her satellite images for this programme. She was unfamiliar with the geology and land use and was looking slightly lost somewhere in the flat hinterland of Fiumicino. Her work with the satellite recognition of Egyptian sites is truly amazing but here she was out of her comfort zone.

The Lidar study in Romania, ancient Dacia, gave exciting results showing the extent of one Roman fort there. Nevertheless, with clearly visible earthworks, it was likely to have been known from the start. My guess is that the programme helped the local archaeologists by revealing the exact perimeter of the fort – mapping such a large feature in the slopes of a wooded hill is a big task. The fact that this was a novel method to Sarah, made me suspect that somebody else did the data processing in order to filter the return signal from the trees.

The sections in Jordan and Tunisia presented some touristic images with the presenters riding camels to Petra and having a meal at a Bedouin tent with David Mattingly. In both cases Sarah and her iPad revealed a series of forts, apparently from Google Maps, highly visible in arid landscape if one knows what to look for and which geometric forms the ramparts of a fort take. Naturally, with large projects with huge amounts of field work, research and reporting, it just may be that different projects did not have time to scan the Google or Bing coverage for their study areas. In that case they are grateful that somebody else pays this work and gives them publicity and results.

The programme seemed to be a licence to travel across the Mediterranean and meet impressive archaeologists, so I am not surprised Sarah took this opportunity. After all, it was a Beeb documentary and presented a possibility to co-present an archaeological programme in the prime time. In addition, worthy projects got plenty of air time. However, there are several extremely good examples of engaging programmes, such as Raminez’s Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons or Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk. Nothing is worse for an archaeologist than a historian rolling his eyes and wondering aloud how archaeologists could say anything about sherds of pottery. The scripted scenes of finding possibly previously known features – but admittedly using a method giving results easier, quicker and more extensively – with simple story lines is unfulfilling. Is it such a shame to show one’s scholarly knowledge and speak to the audience like they are intellectual human beings, not slobs?

Nevertheless, there was a truly hilarious and impressive moment when the wiz kids from Southampton (or Beeb?) made the lighthouse of Portus, the symbol of the might of the empire, to rise among the detritus of disposed cars at a local end of the life scrappage centre or junk yard with Sarah, Dan and professor Simon Keay, the current assistant director of the British School at Rome, watching from a distance. The flair of ‘Five Go Exploring’ was there as it was throughout the programme, but the gimmick made a point.

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PS. On the BBC web site the ‘If you liked this, you might also like’ suggestion was Homes under Hammer... That probably summed up the expectations from the Broadcasting Company’s side.