Daily Archives: July 30, 2010

archaeologydaily

HMS Investigator, abandoned in the Arctic 155 years ago during a search for Sir John Franklin’s expedition, has been found.

Parks Canada archeologists looking for the ship found it 15 minutes after they started a sonar scan of Bank’s Island’s Mercy Bay in the Northwest Territories, said Marc-André Bernier, chief of Parks Canada’s underwater archeology service.

“When the team arrived [on July 22], the whole bay was covered in ice,” Bernier said. “On July 25, the team had an opening in the ice.& It happened to be where the ship had been abandoned.”

They started a sonar scan of the area identified by British navy accounts as the spot where the ship had been left. They used a torpedo-shaped scanner, towed behind a Zodiac inflatable boat, which sends out sound waves and produces images of the floor of the bay.

“After 15 minutes, they basically had an image of the wreck,” Bernier said.

“It’s in good condition,” he said. “Very good condition, actually – surprising condition.”

The ship is upright in about 11 metres of water, its bottom buried in sediment if it’s still there, and the upper deck under about eight metres of water.

“Apparently, you can see some of it from the surface when the water is clear,” Bernier said.

While the masts are gone and the bulwarks – the sides of the ship that extend above the deck – are mostly gone, likely damaged by ice, there is potential to find smaller artifacts, Bernier said.

“This is very cold water. That helps preservation as well,” he said.

One of the masts appears to be on the deck of the ship, he added. If the masts had still been in place, they would have stuck out of the water.

The archeology crew has no plans to raise the ship. They will do a thorough sonar scan of the area, then send a Remotely Operated Vehicle, similar to the ROVs used to take pictures of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, to take pictures.

They will analyze the condition of the ship, the environmental impacts that could cause further damage, and the potential to find further artifacts – though they will remove nothing at this point.

“The work really starts now for the archeologists,” Bernier said.

The ship hadn’t been found earlier because of the difficulty involved in getting access to the area and surveying the bottom of the bay, which is usually covered with ice, Bernier said. The ship was stuck in the ice for more than two years before it was abandoned, he noted.

The Investigator, captained by Robert McClure, was sent in 1850 to search for Franklin’s crew and their two ships, the Erebus and Terror.

After more than two years trapped in the ice at Mercy Bay, crew members were rescued by a Royal Navy sledge team, who took them to another ship.

In the end, McClure and the Investigator succeeded where Franklin failed – they are credited with finding the Northwest Passage.

“This is the ship that confirmed and nailed the existence of that passage,” Bernier said.

Before leaving the ship, the crew buried much of their cargo on Banks Island. The location of their cache was known and is also being investigated by an archeological crew on land.

The land crew has found three sites of interest, including the gravesites of three crewmembers who died of scurvy in April 1853.

“They’re about 60 metres from the cache site,” Bernier said. “They seem to be in an undisturbed condition.”

A magnetometer has indicated there is metal in the graves, but they will be left undisturbed, he said. The British government has been informed of the find and will be consulted about what will happen at the gravesite.

The other two sites hold the remains of the cache and pieces of a small boat, Bernier said.

Investigator had ‘major impact’ on Inuit

In addition to the British Navy accounts that led the archeologists to the Investigator, Inuit oral tradition tells stories of the ship.

“This is alive in the Inuvialuit memory today,” Bernier said.

The Investigator site “had a major impact” on the Inuit because it was a source of copper and iron, he said. In fact, the pieces of the small boat found on shore should have metal nails in it, but they have all been removed.

“It was a resource site for the Inuit,” Bernier said.

Franklin’s party disappeared while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1848, following their captain’s death partway through the expedition. Their ships haven’t been found, despite numerous searches. Parks Canada is planning another search for the Erebus and Terror in August.

The site is of interest not only because of its importance to marine history and the Inuit, Bernier added, but because it illuminates a fascinating piece of human history.

There were 60 men in the group who were stuck at the site for more than two years, he said.

source archaeologydaily and credit to CBC

smithsonianmag

From the very beginning, archaeologists noticed copious amounts of graffiti on the outsides of buildings throughout the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii.

To better understand ancient Rome, one archaeologist looks at the graffiti, love notes and poetry alike, left behind by Pompeians
Rebecca Benefiel stepped into the tiny dark room on the first floor of the House of Maius Castricius. Mosquitoes whined. Huge moths flapped around her head. And – much higher on the ick meter—her flashlight revealed a desiccated corpse that looked as if it was struggling to rise from the floor. Nonetheless, she moved closer to the walls and searched for aberrations in the stucco. She soon found what she was looking for: a string of names and a cluster of numbers, part of the vibrant graffiti chitchat carried on by the citizens of Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79 and buried their city in a light pumice stone called lapilli.

“There are a few hazards to this work,” laughs Benefiel, a 35-year old classicist from Washington and Lee University who has spent part of the past six summers in Pompeii. “Sometimes the guards forget to let me out of the buildings at the end of the day!”

Regardless, she’s always eager to return.

Vesuvius dumped ashes and lapilli on Pompeii for 36 hours, sealing the entire city up to an average height of 20 feet. Since the 18th century, archaeologists have excavated about two-thirds, including some 109 acres of public buildings, stores and homes. The city’s well-preserved first level has given archaeologists, historians and classicists an unparalleled view of the ancient world, brought to a halt in the middle of an ordinary day.

From the very beginning, archaeologists noticed copious amounts of graffiti on the outsides of buildings. In the late 1800s, scholars began making careful copies of Latin inscriptions throughout the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii, and cataloging them. This effort is a boon to scholars like Benefiel, since more than 90 percent of Pompeii’s recorded graffiti have since been erased by exposure to the elements.

Even though she studies this vast collection of inscriptions, Benefiel prefers to wander the ancient city and examine the remaining graffiti in context. Much of what remains is on protected interior walls, where servants, visitors and others took sharp instruments to the stucco and left their mark. “The graffiti would have been much more visible then than they are now,” she says. “Many of these walls were brightly painted and highly decorated, and the graffiti let the underlying white plaster show through.”

In the ancient Roman world, graffiti was a respected form of writing—often interactive – not the kind of defacement we now see on rocky cliffs and bathroom stalls. Inside elite dwellings like that of Maius Castricius—a four-story home with panoramic windows overlooking the Bay of Naples that was excavated in the 1960s—she’s examined 85 graffito. Some were greetings from friends, carefully incised around the edges of frescoes in the home’s finest room. In a stairwell, people took turns quoting popular poems and adding their own clever twists. In other places, the graffiti include drawings: a boat, a peacock, a leaping deer.

The 19th century effort to document ancient graffiti notwithstanding, scholars have historically ignored the phenomenon. The prevailing attitude was expressed by August Mau in 1899, who wrote, “The people with whom we should most eagerly desire to come into contact, the cultivated men and women of the ancient city, were not accustomed to scratch their names upon stucco or to confide their reflections and experiences to the surface of a wall.” But Benefiel’s observations show the opposite. “Everyone was doing it,” she says.

Contemporary scholars have been drawn to the study of graffiti, interested to hear the voices of the non-elite and marginal groups that earlier scholars spurned and then surprised to learn that the practice of graffiti was widespread among all groups across the ancient world. Today, graffiti is valued for the nuance it adds to our understanding of historical periods.

In the past four years, there have been four international conferences devoted to ancient and historic graffiti. One, at England’s University of Leicester organized by scholars Claire Taylor and Jennifer Baird in 2008, drew so many participants that there wasn’t space for all of them. Taylor and Baird have edited a book that sprang from that conference called Ancient Graffiti in Context, which will be published in September. On the book’s introductory page, an epigram taken from a wall in Pompeii speaks to the multitude of graffiti in the ancient world: “I’m amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers.”

“Graffiti is often produced very spontaneously, with less thought than Virgil or the epic poetry,” says Taylor, a lecturer in Greek history at Trinity College in Dublin. “It gives us a different picture of ancient society.”

Pablo Ozcáriz, a lecturer in ancient history at Madrid’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has found thousands of medieval graffiti in the Cathedral of Pamplona and at the Abbey of La Olivia in Navarre. Taken as a whole, they often offer a more realistic underpinning to official histories. “It’s as if someone asks us to write two diaries,” Ozcáriz explains. “One will be published as a very important book and the other will be just for me. The first may be more beautiful, but the second will be more sincere.”

Benefiel’s study of Pompeii’s graffiti has revealed a number of surprises. Based on the graffiti found on both exterior walls and in kitchens and servant rooms, she surmises that the emperor Nero was much more popular than we tend to think (but not so much after he kicked his pregnant wife). She’s found that declarations of love were every bit as common then as they are today and that it was acceptable for visitors to carve their opinions about the city into its walls. She’s discovered that the people of Pompeii loved displaying their cleverness via graffiti, from poetry contests to playful recombinations of the letters that form Roman numerals.

And she’s found that Pompeians expressed far more goodwill than ill will. “They were much nicer in their graffiti than we are,” she says. “There are lots of pairings with the word ‘felicter,’ which means ‘happily.’ When you pair it with someone’s name, it means you’re hoping things go well for that person. There are lots of graffiti that say ‘Felicter Pompeii,’ wishing the whole town well.”