Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial discovery ‘a first’

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19 October 2011
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The UK mainland’s first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the north-west Highlands, archaeologists have said.

The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old.

Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.

Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain.

Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: This is a very exciting find.

She has been excavating artefacts in Ardnamurchan for six years — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Body of terminally ill man is mummified for Channel 4 documentary

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17 October 2011
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Channel 4 could find itself at the centre of another taste row after agreeing to broadcast a documentary showing the body of a British man being mummified like an Egyptian Pharoah.

The macabre programme, called Mummifying Alan, will make television history when it airs later this month as a scientific embalming experiment is unprecedented — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Ancient ‘paint factory’ unearthed

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14 October 2011
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The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.

The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste — everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop — via BBC

Gigantic Kraken fingered in prehistoric murder mystery

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13 October 2011
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Staring at a pile of fossilised ichthyosaur bones in the famous Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, paleontologist Mark McMenamin had a sudden insight. It occurred to him that he might have cracked the great mystery of this ancient Triassic site.

He reckoned that the carefully lined-up bones of the ichthyosaurs, of the shonisaur family, were the work of a kraken, an enormous squid bigger and more intelligent than any other invertebrate that has ever lived. That’s what the professor at Mount Holyoke College told the Geological Society of America, anyway, speaking this week at their annual get together — via redwolf.newsvine.com

World’s oldest car sells for $4.6 million

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11 October 2011
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A steam-powered car, billed as the oldest car in the world that still runs, was sold at a Hershey, Pennsylvania auction late Friday for $4.6 million.

The auction company, RM Auctions, had estimated that the car would sell for about half that much. It represents the highest price ever paid for an early automobile at auction. The price includes a 10% <>buyer’s premium which goes to the auction company.

The name of the buyer has not been made public — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Bletchley Park lands £4.6m restoration bonanza

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6 October 2011
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Wartime codebreakers HQ Bletchley Park has won a grant of £4.6m from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The much-needed funds will be used to build a visitor centre at the historic WWII number-crunching centre as well as carrying out restoration work on other buildings at the facility — once matched funding of £1.7m from private-sector donations has been raised.

Bletchley Park has launched an Action This Day campaign to raise the required private funding — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Phone hacking: Watergate reporter ‘struck by parallels’ with Nixon scandal

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30 September 2011
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One of the two journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal has said that he was struck by the parallels between the News of the World phone-hacking affair and the saga that brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Carl Bernstein said on Thursday night that the two events were shattering cultural moments of huge consequence that are going to be with us for generations and that both were about corruption at the highest levels, about the corruption of the process of a free society.

The American reporter, speaking at an event in London organised by the Guardian, specifically likened Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World’s proprietor, to the ousted US president in his relation to criminal acts and alleged criminal acts conducted by their respective employees and subordinates — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Art hoard worth millions in Polish bricklayer’s shed

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29 September 2011
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A collection of 300 paintings worth millions of dollars has been discovered in a Polish outhouse belonging to a 92-year-old former bricklayer.

Police are baffled as to how the paintings came to be mixed up with rubbish in a dirty two-storey concrete building in the bricklayer’s garden near the north-western city of Szczecin.

They said the collection included works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532. They also discovered a lithograph by the Polish artist Jozef Czajkowski, which disappeared from a museum in Katowice during the war.

A local art expert quoted by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said it was impossible to place an exact price on the collection, but he was sure it was worth millions of dollar — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Mass Grave of Children, Llamas Found in Dune

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29 September 2011
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In History
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Seen earlier this month, archaeologist Oscar Gabriel Prieto kneels by the 800-year-old skeleton of a child recently unearthed near a fishing village in Peru. The skeleton was among the bones of 42 children discovered in a shallow grave on a sand dune near the town of Huanchaquito.

Alongside the children were 76 skeletons of camelids—most likely llamas but possibly alpacas—perhaps intended to transport the victims to the afterlife, researchers say.

Prieto’s team suspects the children were killed as part of a religious ceremony by the Chimú culture. Famed for irrigation advances, the Chimú occupied the northern and central coasts of Peru from about A.D. 1100 to 1500, when the culture was conquered by its neighbours, the Inca.

The new-found mass grave is just over a kilometre from the ancient Chimú capital of Chan Chan — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Unmarried mums tied to beds, sedated during birth

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29 September 2011
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A parliamentary inquiry into forced adoptions has heard how unmarried mothers were tied to beds and sedated as they gave birth.

Christine Cole gave birth to a baby girl at Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney in 1969.

She has studied forced adoptions for a PhD and believes many Australians are not aware of the practices the authorities used to carry out.

Mothers were being tied to beds or drugged or had pillows or sheets held in front of their face so they couldn’t see the baby at the birth — that was kept from the public, she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Treasure ship packed with silver found in Atlantic

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27 September 2011
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The wreck of a World War II cargo ship containing more than $200 million worth of silver has been discovered deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

The British-flagged merchant ship SS Gairsoppa was sunk by a German U-boat as it headed for the Irish port of Galway in 1941.

The wreck has now been discovered, 4.7 kilometres down on the Atlantic sea floor about 500 kilometres from the Irish coast.

Search crews from American exploration firm Odyssey Marine say the wreck contains about 200 tonnes of silver worth $236 million.

It is the largest haul of precious metal ever found at sea — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Arthur Conan Doyle’s first novel hits shops

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26 September 2011
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The previously unpublished first novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will finally be available to buy from Monday.

Entitled The Narrative of John Smith, the novel — written between 1883 and 1884 — comprises the reflections of a man confined to his room by gout.

Conan Doyle sent it to a publisher but it was lost in the post. The book was then reconstructed from memory.

The British Library is now releasing the novel, alongside an audiobook read by actor Robert Lindsay.

The four notebooks that comprise the manuscript form part of an exhibition that runs at the Library until 5 January — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Saving Yiddish from Hebrew

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19 September 2011
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Mr Cahan grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium. Although Yiddish — a mix of German dialects, Hebrew, and other influences written in the Hebrew alphabet — was once the lingua franca of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the Holocaust nearly eradicated their communities and their common tongue. The founders of Israel preferred to speak Hebrew — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Selection bias and bombers

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17 September 2011
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In Design, History
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During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armour to their bombers. After analysing the records, he recommended adding more armour to the places where there was no damage!

This seems backward at first, but Wald realised his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyse the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.

Wald assumed that the bullets were fired randomly, that no one could accurately aim for a particular part of the bomber. Instead they aimed in the general direction of the plane and sometimes got lucky. So, for example, if Wald saw that more bombers in his sample had bullet holes in the middle of the wings, he did not conclude that Nazis liked to aim for the middle of wings. He assumed that there must have been about as many bombers with bullet holes in every other part of the plane but that those with holes elsewhere were not part of his sample because they had been shot down — via The Endeavour

Smithsonian conservators develop new technique to determine age of silk artifacts

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14 September 2011
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Conservation scientists have developed a new technique to authenticate and determine the age of silk artefacts held in museums and collections, the Smithsonian Institution announced Monday.

Carbon dating is too destructive for most silk items, scientists said. The new method uses the natural deterioration of silk’s amino acids to determine its age by calculating that change over time — a process known as racemisation. Archaeologists and forensic anthropologists have used this process for years to date bones, shells and teeth — via redwolf.newsvine.com

$30m of gems that were Elizabeth Taylor’s lasting love go up for auction

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8 September 2011
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There was jewellery for the eight wedding days, the numerous film premieres, the table tennis victories and of course Tuesdays. Who among us does not get an it’s Tuesday and I love you gift?

The woman who certainly did was Elizabeth Taylor and it helped her build up one of the most remarkable and dazzling private collections of jewellery ever created.

Following her death in March aged 79, Christie’s announced on Wednesday it is to sell nearly 300 of the star’s jewels over two sessions in New York. There will be diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies and sapphires; rings, earrings, necklaces, brooches, tiaras and more in a sale expected to make over $30m (£19m).

The chairman and president of Christie’s America, Marc Porter, said the sale promised to captivate the auction world. He added: This is without a doubt the greatest private collection of jewellery assembled in one place. — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nazis, needlework and my dad

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8 September 2011
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After six months held by the Nazis in a prisoner of war camp, Major Alexis Casdagli was handed a piece of canvas by a fellow inmate. Pinching red and blue thread from a disintegrating pullover belonging to an elderly Cretan general, Casdagli passed the long hours in captivity by painstakingly creating a sampler in cross-stitch. Around decorative swastikas and a banal inscription saying he completed his work in December 1941, the British officer stitched a border of irregular dots and dashes. Over the next four years his work was displayed at the four camps in Germany where he was imprisoned, and his Nazi captors never once deciphered the messages threaded in Morse code: God Save the King and Fuck Hitler.

This subversive needling of the Nazis was a form of defiance that Casdagli, who was not freed from prison until 1945, believed was the duty of every PoW. It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing their rounds, says his son, Tony, of his father’s rebellious stitching. It also stopped him going mad. He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity, says Tony. If you sit down and stitch you can forget about other things, and it’s very calming.

Tony should know. The 79-year-old picked up his father’s stitching habit after a lifetime at sea serving in the Royal Navy, and from 6 September two of his pieces will feature in a new exhibition opening at the Victoria and Albert Museum called Power of Making. Tony is thrilled, but the relationship between father, son, needlework and suffering is complex and occasionally ambiguous — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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