Freshen Up With Archaeology Friday (Post X)

Coffin within a coffin found near Richard III site

Archaeologists have unearthed a mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin near the final resting place of Richard III. 

The coffin-in-a-coffin. (Photo from the University of Leicester)

The University of Leicester team lifted the lid of a medieval stone coffin this week -- the final week of their second dig at the Grey Friars site, where the medieval king was discovered in September.

This is the first fully intact stone coffin to be discovered in Leicester in controlled excavations -- and is believed to contain one of the friary's founders or a medieval monk.

Within the stone coffin, they found an inner lead coffin -- and will need to carry out further analysis before they can open the second box.

Archaeologists have taken the inner lead coffin to the University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, and will carry out tests to find the safest way of opening it without damaging the remains within.

It took eight people to carefully remove the stone lid from the outer coffin -- which is 2.12 metres long, 0.6 metres wide at the "head" end, 0.3 metres wide at the "foot" end and 0.3 metres deep.
The inner coffin is likely to contain a high-status burial -- though we don't currently know who it contains.

Full article

Oldest European fort in inland America discovered in the Appalachian mountains:

The uncovered fort (Photo from the University of Michigan)

The remains of the earliest European fort in the interior of what is now the United States have been discovered by a team of archaeologists, providing new insight into the start of the U.S. colonial era and the all-too-human reasons spoiling Spanish dreams of gold and glory. 

Spanish Captain Juan Pardo and his men built Fort San Juan in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in 1567, nearly 20 years before Sir Walter Raleigh's "lost colony" at Roanoke and 40 years before the Jamestown settlement established England's presence in the region. 

"Fort San Juan and six others that together stretched from coastal South Carolina into eastern Tennessee were occupied for less than 18 months before the Native Americans destroyed them, killing all but one of the Spanish soldiers who manned the garrisons," said University of Michigan archaeologist Robin Beck.  Beck, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Anthropology and assistant curator at the U-M Museum of Anthropology, is working with archaeologists Christopher Rodning of Tulane University and David Moore of Warren Wilson College to excavate the site near the city of Morganton in western North Carolina, nearly 300 miles from the Atlantic Coast. 

 The Berry site, named in honor of the stewardship of landowners James and the late Pat Berry, is located along a tributary of the Catawba River and was the location of the Native American town of Joara, part of the mound-building Mississippian culture that flourished in the southeastern U.S. between 800 and about 1500 CE.

In 2004, with support from the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation, Beck and his colleagues began excavating several of the houses occupied by Spanish soldiers at Joara, where Pardo built Fort San Juan. Pardo named this small colony of Spanish houses Cuenca, after his own hometown in Spain. Yet the remains of the fort itself eluded discovery until last month. 

"We have known for more than a decade where the Spanish soldiers were living," Rodning said. "This summer we were trying to learn more about the Mississippian mound at Berry, one that was built by the people of Joara, and instead we discovered part of the fort. For all of us, it was an incredible moment."  

Using a combination of large-scale excavations and geophysical techniques like magnetometry, which provides x-ray-like images of what lies below the surface, the archaeologists have now been able to identify sections of the fort's defensive moat or ditch, a likely corner bastion and a graveled surface that formed an entryway to the garrison.

Excavations in the moat conducted in late June reveal it to have been a large V-shaped feature measuring 5.5 feet deep and 15 feet across. Spanish artifacts recovered this summer include iron nails and tacks, Spanish majolica pottery, and an iron clothing hook of the sort used for fastening doublets and attaching sword scabbards to belts. 

Fort San Juan was the first and largest of the garrisons that Pardo founded as part of an ambitious effort to colonize the American South. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had established the Spanish colonies of St. Augustine and Santa Elena in 1565 and 1566, respectively, spearheaded this effort. Of the six garrisons that Pardo built, Fort San Juan is the only one to have been discovered by archaeologists.

Press release from the University of Michigan.

Today's featured reading:

• The Milk Revolution; How a single genetic mutation first let ancient Europeans drink milk, it set the stage for a continental upheaval.

• Archaeologists and modern day witch doctors, by Phillip Segadika, Chief Curator at the Botswana National Museum.

The History of Ice cream

Perhaps one of the most iconic cold snacks of all times, popularized in the 20th century due to the availability of refrigerators. The ice cream has been a sign of a simple way to have a cheap but ever-so-sweet snack during the blistering heat. But the history of ice cream goes back millenniums! In this post, we shall examine and find out who invented (or rather, discovered) the ice cream, when did it go mainstream and stuff.

When Did It First Appear:

Records show that the Persian Empire is credited to have invented the ice cream. According to historians, sometime prior to 400 BC, people would pour concentrated grape juice over snow and eat it whenever the weather used to be hot (apparently, underground chambers were used to storage rooms for this treat).Cities such as Hamedan had seen this occur.

During later periods, modifications and additions were made to the ice cream, such as adding rose water and herbs. By around 200 BC, ice cream appeared in ancient China which was in the form of frozen milk and rice! The Romans soon followed, using snow covered with fruit toppings.

Perhaps the first real mainstream version of ice cream was created by the Arabs in the 10th century, who (for the first time ever) used milk as a main ingredient (heavily sweetened with sugar) instead of the traditional fruit juices.
By this time, it had been widespread throughout the Arab World.

During the 1500s and 1600s, Ice-cream finally appeared in Europe, it was so tasty that legends say that :

Charles I of England was supposedly so impressed by the "frozen snow", that he offered his own ice cream maker a lifetime pension in return for keeping the formula secret, so that ice cream could be a royal prerogative.

Though, it is fair to say that it was largely restricted to aristocrats and the upper class.

Real Ice cream:

Real Ice cream, otherwise known as the ice cream we consume today, was thought to have been invented in 18th England and America. It even appeared in a cookbook [Mrs. Mary Eales's Receipts]:

To ice cream.

Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close; to six Pots you must allow eighteen or twenty Pound of Ice, breaking the Ice very small; there will be some great Pieces, which lay at the Bottom and Top: You must have a Pail, and lay some Straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in amongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your Pots of Cream, and 93 lay Ice and Salt between every Pot, that they may not touch; but the Ice must lie round them on every Side; lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, it will be froze in four Hours, but it may stand longer; then take it out just as you use it; hold it in your Hand and it will slip out. When you wou’d freeze any Sort of Fruit, either Cherries, Rasberries, Currants, or Strawberries, fill your Tin-Pots with the Fruit, but as hollow as you can; put to them Lemmonade, made with Spring-Water and Lemmon-Juice sweeten’d; put enough in the Pots to make the Fruit hang together, and put them in Ice as you do Cream.

In 1744, the word Ice-cream appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Ice cream was brought to America via Quaker colonists, and it was thought to have been a favourite treat to the likes of Ben Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Also, in 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia was issued the first U.S. patent for a small-scale handcranked ice cream freezer. The Ice-cream cones, sunday and Banana splits became famous around the turn of the century.

Vanilla flavoured ice cream! You know you want it

Though in the UK, it was still expensive to buy ice-cream and hence, Britain relied on imports of snow from Norway and America.

It was only during the second half of the 20th Century did ice-creams become cheap, due to the widespread availability of refrigerators. During this time, companies such as Baskin Robbins were established with mottos like "31 flavors for each day of the month".

An important feature during this time was the invention of 'Soft Ice-Cream'.It was invented in Britain by a chemistry team (of which, future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a part of). Companies such as Dairy Queen pioneered the age of soft ice-cream.

But today, Ice-cream is widely available and is relatively nothing in price, when compared to previous years. Ice-cream is now available in more than a thousand different flavours , modified with every country and culture it meets and it continues to be one of the most iconic symbols of the human diet.

Black Death caused by Rats ? Not Exactly..

More Archaeology news this week!
A fairly remarkable and interesting read this week was the Guardian revealing a study that shows that rats were not the main carriers of the dreaded Black Death (believed to have been the Bubonic Plague), but in fact, it was their human counterparts!

From the Guardian:

Black Death study lets rats off the hook

Plague of 1348-49 spread so fast in London the carriers had to be humans not black rats, says archaeologist

Bubonic plague victims of 14th century London, uncovered in the 1980s in an excavation at the Old Royal Mint. Photograph: Rex Features

Rats weren't the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 and 1349, has exonerated the most famous animal villains in history.

"The evidence just isn't there to support it," said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. "We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren't there. And all the evidence I've looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn't time for the rats to be spreading it."

He added: "It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague."

Sloane, who was previously a field archaeologist with the Museum of London, working on many medieval sites, is now attached to English Heritage. He has concluded that the spread of the 1348-49 plague, the worst to hit the capital, was far faster, with an impact far worse than had been estimated previously.

While some suggest that half the city's population of 60,000 died, he believes it could have been as high as two-thirds. Years later, in 1357, merchants were trying to get their tax bill cut on the grounds that a third of all property in the city was lying empty.
Sloane spent nearly 10 years researching his book, poring over records and excavation reports. Many records have gone missing, while there was also a documentation shortfall as disaster overwhelmed the city. Names of those buried in three emergency cemeteries seem not to have been recorded.

However, Sloane found a valuable resource in records from the Court of Hustings, of wills made and then enacted during the plague years. As the disease gripped – in October 1348 rather than the late summer others suggested, reaching its height in April 1349 – the numbers of wills soared as panic-striken wealthy citizens realised their deaths were probably imminent.

On 5 February 1349 Johanna Ely, her husband already dead, arranged provision for her children, Richard and Johanna. She left them property, spelled out which beds and even pots and pans each was to receive, and placed them in the guardianship of her own mother. She was dead within 72 hours.

It appeared to the citizens that everyone in the world might die. Richard de Shordych left goods and money to his son Benedict when he died in early March: his son outlived him by a fortnight.

Money, youth, and formerly robust good health were no protection. Edward III's own daughter, Joan, sailed for Spain with her trousseau, her dowry and her bridesmaids, to marry Pedro, heir to the throne of Castile. She would never see her wedding day as she died of the plague within 10 days of landing.

John of Reading, a monk in Westminster, left one of the few witness accounts. He described deaths happening so fast there was "death without sorrow, marriage without affection, self-imposed penance, want without poverty, and flight without escape".

In Rochester, William of Dene wrote that nobody could be found to bury the dead, "but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard".

Sloane estimates that people living near the cemetery at Aldersgate, which is now buried under Charterhouse Square, in Smithfield, would have seen a corpse carried past every five minutes at the height of the plague.

As many wills were being made in a week as in a normal year. Usually these would only be activated months or years later: in the worst weeks of the plague there was barely time to get them written down. Many, like Johanna Ely, probably made their wills when they felt the first dreaded sweats and cramps of the disease. Others left property and the care of their children to people who then barely outlived them.

The archaeology of the plague also reveals that most people, however, were buried with touching care, neatly laid out in rows, heads facing west, with far more bodies put in coffins than in most medieval cemeteries – but possibly through fear of infection.

Only a few jumbled skeletons hint at burials carried out some time after death and decomposition; those cases probably arose because bodies were found later on in buildings where every member of the household had died.

Sloane believes there was little difference in mortality rates between rich and poor, because they lived so closely packed together. The plague, he is convinced, spread from person to person in the crowded city.
Mortality continued to rise throughout the bitterly cold winter, when fleas could not have survived, and there is no evidence of enough rats.
Black rat skeletons have been found at 14th-century sites, but not in high enough numbers to make them the plague carriers, he said.

In sites beside the Thames, where most of the city's rubbish was dumped and rats should have swarmed, and where the sodden ground preserves organic remains excellently, few black rats have been found.

Sloane wants to dig up Charterhouse, where he believes 20,000 bodies lie under the ancient alms houses and modern buildings, including the Art Deco block where the fictional character Hercule Poirot lives in the television series. And, if anyone finds a mass medieval rat grave, he would very much like to know.

 This seems to be going against what was traditionally taught in school, someone ought to tell them the current history lessons are (even for History lessons) obsolete and too old.

This is yet another example of (to copy the phrase) lies my History teacher told me.