The skeleton was found in Edinburgh’s Old Town after archaeologists uncovered the corner of an elaborately decorated sandstone slab bearing markings of a member of the nobility – the carvings of the Calvary Cross and an ornate sword.

An excavation of the immediate area uncovered the adult skeleton, which archaeologists said is likely to have once occupied the nearby grave.

The discovery is being hailed as having the potential to be “one of the most significant and exciting archaeological discoveries in the city for years”.

The find comes just a month after a skeleton unearthed in a car park in Leicester was confirmed as being that of the English king Richard III, who was killed in battle in 1485.

Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants from the monarch’s family.

An elaborately decorated sandstone slab with the telltale markings of a member of the nobility – Credit: Scotsman

The latest skeleton find and grave, as well as the remains of a 13th-century monastery, were unearthed at High School Yards, off South Bridge, as the former car park was being cleared to make way for the construction of the University of Edinburgh’s new Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI).

An analysis of the knight’s skeleton and teeth will be carried out to determine where he was born, what he ate, where he had been living and to work out what caused his death.

The knight’s remains have also revealed the exact location of Blackfriars Monastery, which was founded in 1230 by Alexander II – king of Scotland from 1214 to 1249 – before it was destroyed during the Reformation.

Ross Murray, the archaeologist who found the grave, studied at the university’s former archaeology building, which until 2010 was located at High School Yards, just a few feet from where the knight’s grave was discovered. He said: “We knew the history of the High School Yards site while we were studying here, but I never imagined I would be back here to make such an incredible discovery.

“We used to take breaks between classes just a few feet away in the building’s doorway and at that time the grave was lying under the car park.”

Mr Murray is working as part of a team for Edinburgh-based Headland Archaeology, which is carrying out archaeological services for the project.

The excavation also revealed several more human burials, including children, with the bodies lying in an east-west location, which is typical of Christian burials.

The burial sites will be fully excavated and remains will be removed from the site before being re-interred at an appropriate location.

Richard Lewis, culture convener at Edinburgh City Council, said that the council is aiming to preserve the remains of the monastery and the 16th-century high school in situ due to their potential national significance as excavation would lead to their complete destruction.

“We hope to find out more about the person buried in the tomb once we remove the headstone, but our archaeologists have already dated the gravestone to the 13th century.

“This find has the potential to be one of the most significant and exciting archaeological discoveries in the city for many years, providing us with yet more clues to what life was like in medieval Edinburgh.”

Andy Kerr, director of the ECCI, said: “This knight is an extraordinary and exciting find.”

High School Yards has always been a significant architectural site and as well as the monastery it has housed two further significant buildings – the 16th-century Royal High School and the 18th-century Old High School.

Author: Shan Ross | Source: Scotsman [March 13, 2013]

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot… They “Didn’t Have A Pot To Piss In” and were the lowest of the low. The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature Isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be.

Here are some facts about the 1500s

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, And they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, Then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water!”

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings Could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, “Dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery In the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, It would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

(Getting quite an education, aren’t you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables And did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers In the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old”.

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests And would all sit around and chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous. Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom; “of holding a wake”.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.

Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, “saved by the bell” or was “considered a dead ringer”.

And that’s the truth. Now, whoever said History was boring!!! So get out there and educate someone! ~~~ Share these facts with a friend.

Galen’s texts wouldn’t be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren’t as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red “metal wax” compound that helped preserve the body.

The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe’s anti-scientific “Dark Ages.” In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.

“It’s state-of-the-art,” Charlier told LiveScience. “I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this.”

LiveScience.com/photo courtesy Archives of Medical Science – This anatomical specimen dating to the 1200s is the oldest known in Europe.

Myths of the middle ages
Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn’t end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.

But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That’s because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn’t so ignorant after all.

“There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward,” said James Hannam, an historian and author of “The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution” (Regnery Publishing, 2011).

For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an “intellectual fad,” he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.

Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.

As a result, “there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now,” Hannam said.

Anatomical dark ages?
From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. (“They thought nothing of the sort,” Hannam said.)

Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.

In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that’s why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.

The first example of one of these “holy autopsies” came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess’ heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Other autopsies were entirely secular. In 1286, an Italian physician conducted autopsies in order to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic, according to Charlier and his colleagues.

Some of the belief that the church frowned on autopsies may have come from a misinterpretation of a papal edict from 1299, in which the Pope forbade the boiling of the bones of dead Crusaders. That practice ensured Crusaders’ bones could be shipped back home for burial, but the Pope declared the soldiers should be buried where they fell.

“That was interpreted in the 19th century as actually being a stricture against human dissection, which would have surprised the Pope,” Hannam said.

Well-studied head
While more investigation of the body was going on in the Middle Ages than previously realized, the 1200s remain the “dark ages” in the sense that little is known about human anatomical dissections during this time period, Charlier said. When he and his colleagues began examining the head-and-shoulders specimen, they suspected it would be from the 1400s or 1500s.

“We did not think it was so antique,” Charlier said.

But radiocarbon dating put the specimen firmly in the 1200s, making it the oldest European anatomical preparation known. Most surprisingly, Charlier said, the veins and arteries are filled with a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury. This would have helped preserve the body as well as give the circulatory system some color, as cinnabar mercury has a red tint.

Thus, the man’s body was not simply dissected and tossed away; it was preserved, possibly for continued medical education, Charlier said. The man’s identity, however, is forever lost. He could have been a prisoner, an institutionalized person, or perhaps a pauper whose body was never claimed, the researchers write this month in the journal Archives of Medical Science.

The specimen, which is in private hands, is set to go on display at the Parisian Museum of the History of Medicine, Charlier said.

“This is really interesting from a historical and archaeological point of view,” Charlier said, adding, “We really have a lack of skeletons and anthropological pieces.”

The epic poem The Iliad, set amid the final year of the Trojan War, is attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer and is foundational to Western literature, but scholars have not reached a consensus about whether it was written shortly after the war or centuries later. Archaeological and historical evidence have placed the text’s origins in the 7th or 8th century BCE, but such records are sparse and often have an uncertain validity.

Santa Fe Institute External Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University (UK), and colleagues decided to ask what scholars refer to as “The Homeric Question” using a quantitative approach borrowed from study of evolution.

In determining when species emerged and in gauging their relatedness to others, biologists compare genetic and physical traits along with novel adaptations. Similarly, linguists compare words that share an ancestor (e.g., water in English and wasser in German both come from the proto-Germanic wator), as well as words that supplant earlier terms (the modern English dog, for example, largely replaced the Old English hund), to pinpoint when a lexicon or language was in fashion.

Pagel’s team compared the Greek vocabulary in Homer’s Iliad to modern Greek, relying on a 200-word lexicon found in every language and contrasting the distantly related Hittite as an indicator of divergence.

Achilles sacrificing to Zeus, from the Ambrosian Iliad or Ilia Picta, a 5th century illuminated manuscript thought to have been produced in Constantinople – Credit: Wiki Commons

Their methods date Homer’s language to 762 BCE. The statistical model, says Pagel, “is completely ignorant to history — it doesn’t know who Homer is and doesn’t know Greek.” Accordingly, the potential date ranges from the improbable extremes of 376 BCE to 1157 BCE. But the estimate attaches a robust likelihood to the date, and it ties nicely to Nestor’s Cup, a vase dated to 723 BCE that is thought to carry an inscription from The Iliad.

The study reveals “an astonishing regularity in the way languages evolve,” notes Pagel. “That we can blindly apply rates of language change to Homeric and modern Greek and come up with 762 BCE tells us language is behaving in a regular and predictive way.”

Their study was published in BioEssays online on February 18.

Source: Santa Fe Institute [February 27, 2013]

When the English monarch, nicknamed Richard the Lionheart, died in 1199 his heart was embalmed and buried separately from the rest of his body.

Its condition was too poor to reveal the cause of death, but the team was able to rule out a theory that he had been killed by a poisoned arrow.

The researchers were also able to find out more about the methods used to preserve his organ.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The medieval king became known as Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a courageous military leader.

He was central to the Third Crusade, fighting against the Muslim leader Saladin.

Although he ruled England, he spent much of his time in France, and was killed there after being hit by a crossbow bolt during a siege on a castle.

Source: BBC [March 1, 2013]

The 1513 proclamation, which called for the arrest of Machiavelli, eventually led to his downfall and death.

“When I saw it I knew exactly what it was and it was pretty exciting,” said Prof Milner.

“When you realise this document marked the fall from grace of one the world’s most influential political writers, it’s quite a feeling.

“The Prince is a seminal work, with a lasting influence on political thought and culture. The term ‘Machiavellian’ and the naming of the Devil as ‘Old Nick’ all derive from this single work, but the circumstances of its composition have often been overlooked.”

When the Medici family returned to power in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in the city’s chancery because of his association with the head of a rival faction.

Drawing of the trumpet used by the town crier, left, was fpund together with the proclamation calling for the arrest of Machiavelli – Photo: University of Manchester

His name was then linked with a conspiracy to overthrow the Medici. They issued the proclamation found by Prof Milner for his arrest.

“On the same day, he was imprisoned, tortured and later released and placed under house arrest outside the city,” said the historian, an authority on Renaissance Italy.

Machiavelli, known as the Prince of Darkness, then wrote The Prince in the hope of regaining the approval of the Medicis.

“But there’s no evidence to suggest they even read it,” said Prof Milner, who is Visiting Professor at the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Machiavelli’s fortunes spiralled downwards and he died in abject poverty 14 years later.

The academic found the document while studying hundreds of town crier proclamations issued between 1470 and 1530.

He also found documents relating to the payment of four horsemen who scoured the streets of the Tuscan city for Machiavelli.

Florence is this year celebrating the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli’s writing of The Prince, a political treatise which argues that the pursuit of power can justify the use of immoral means.

The celebrations include, on February 19, a reconstruction of the events surrounding his arrest and imprisonment.

Author: Nick Squires | Source: Telegraph [February 15, 2013]

The five republican silver denarii were discovered by a metal detector enthusiast on land at Plumbley Hall Farm, near Mosborough.

The find was reported to the authorities before the coins were seized by the British Museum – and on Tuesday assistant deputy coroner David Urpeth ruled they were the property of the Crown.

Mr Urpeth told Sheffield Coroner’s Court that the finder of the coins – Edward Bailey – would receive a cash reward, along with the landowner, Raymond Woolley.

They were unearthed between May 28 and June 3 last year.

Archaeology expert Amy Downes, who examined the find, said the oldest coin dated from 211BC to 120BC.

She said the money was probably hidden or lost from a purse sometime after 74AD.

“It’s quite unusual to find a group of such early silver Roman coins,” she said.

The hoard of Roman coins discovered in Plumbley, near Mosborough, Sheffield. – Credit: Sheffield Telegraph

“It’s great that it’s been reported, there have not been many finds in the area recently. The hoard was probably personal rather than anything deliberately buried.”

Ms Downes said Roman republican coins were ‘known for their longevity’, and went out of circulation in the reign of Hadrian, 117AD to 138AD.

A soldier or unskilled worker living in the first century AD could expect to earn one denarius for a day’s work.

Mr Urpeth said the coins belonged to the Crown under the Treasure Act 1996, and a value for the hoard will be set by the Treasure Valuation Committee.

Roman republican coins are known for their longevity, and it seems that most were lost in Britain during the second half of the 1st century AD.

Source: Sheffield Telegraph [February 11, 2013]

In the type of discovery they have dreamed about for years, Groves and Dan Mann, both researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in summer 2012 found in the thawing bank of a northern river almost the entire skeleton of a steppe bison that died during the last ice age.

In adventurous work sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management, Mann and Groves have been boating down lonely northern rivers for 15 years looking for scattered bones of ice age mammals, always hoping to find a complete skeleton or mummy of a mammoth, horse, or American lion. In mid-June, on a familiar stretch of river that flows northward on Alaska’s North Slope, they rounded a river bend and saw the skull of a large bison trapped against a willow shrub. Upside-down skull

Groves described the scene: “We were paddling downriver, battling through a nasty squall of hail and wind, thinking about our camping spot about a mile downriver,” she said. “When the hail was just breaking up, we saw the upside-down skull with the lower jaw still attached. The teeth were really white. They stood out.”

The pair landed their inflatable canoe at the base of the 60-foot bluff. Even before they stepped out in their rubber boots, Groves spotted other bones that told her this wasn’t an ordinary site. Though this ever-changing wall had yielded many bones over the years, those were scattered remains of ice-age creatures separated by meandering river action and the crumbling and re-forming of permafrost-cemented bluffs. Mann said their typical discoveries resemble “Pleistocene in a blender.”

“It’s really unusual to find bones that are still articulated (together),” he said. “We’ve never found anything this intact before. I think it’s really exciting when we find single lion bones.”

Groves and Mann spent the next four hours carefully removing soil from the skull. When Mann lifted it out, the spread of the steppe bison’s horns was 43 inches. The record Boone and Crockett modern bison has a horn tip spread of 27 inches. Fairbanks expert on Pleistocene animals Dale Guthrie estimated this bison, which Mann and Groves have nicknamed “Bison Bob,” was a 12-year-old male.

After stowing the skull safely in the front of their canoe, Groves and Mann camped for the night. When they returned to the site, they saw more bones sticking out of frozen bluff sediments. Bones of each leg were still connected by ligaments. Reddish-brown hair clung to some bones.

“When I saw the fur, that’s when I really got excited,” Mann said.

Transporting skull by helicopter
The pair worked the bluff for the next three days, pulling up buckets of river water to thaw the pieces of their rare find. They ended up finding every piece of the animal’s skeleton except for a left shoulder blade.

With a few hundred bison parts attracting blowflies in their camp, Mann and Groves awaited a helicopter they had called to transport the bison to somewhere safer.

Shortly after their find, they used a satellite phone to try and contact archaeologist Mike Kunz, their longtime collaborator at the Bureau of Land Management. Kunz is interested in the ancient Paleoindians that once lived on Alaska’s North Slope and what might have caused both them and bison to disappear about 10,000 years ago. Bad weather kept Kunz pinned down at the archaeological site he was digging several hundred miles away, but a helicopter arrived near Mann and Groves and transported Bison Bob to a North Slope BLM camp. There, someone put the bones in a predator-proof case. Via, Alaskadispatch

The Amphora had been lost for years, but was found again in 1960 before being forgotten once again.

What’s more the experts say it’s still full of wine which they think is in ‘perfect conditions’ because the vessel is hermetically sealed.

The Councillor for Culture and Heritage in Vélez-Málaga, José Antonio Fortes (PP), explain to journalists that the amphora was hermetically ‘sealed with resin and lime, and contains between 25 and 30 litres of a liquid which the municipal technicians think is wine.

Destined to be part of the merchandise going from Hispania to Rome, the Amphora was left forgotten in Vélez-Málaga Town Hall, found in 1960 in the basements of the Beniel Palace, and then forgotten again in the municipal buildings.

The metre-high Amphora will form part of the new museum on Vélez-Málaga History, which will hold Mesopotamian, Greek, Phoenician and Roman items in the old Hospital de San Juan de Dios, which was founded at the end of the 15th century by the Catholic Kings.

The contents are to be analyzed in a few days time, by a specialist laboratory. Seems a bit of a shame, but Cheers!

Source: Typically Spanish [August 15, 2012]

The Montana, built in 1882, was the largest vessel to ever travel the Missouri. It was longer than a football field.

The Montana struck an underwater tree in 1884 and was piloted ashore. The boat has been there ever since for the past 128 years.

The Montana isn’t the only shipwreck visible along the Missouri. But no treasure hunting allowed. All of the shipwrecks on the Missouri belong to the state under federal law.

Source: WLFI [August 15, 2012]