Stonehenge © Richard Misrach

The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless.

In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth’s edge the coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

From Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy.

The Sylene stenophylla in bloom: Image credit Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Though somewhat outside the remit of The Heritage Trust, we thought the Sky News’ report yesterday that, “…fruit and seeds hidden in an Ice Age squirrel’s burrow in Siberian permafrost have been resurrected into a flower by Russian scientists” worthy of a mention.

Using a pioneering experiment, the Sylene stenophylla has become the oldest plant ever to be regrown and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The seeds date back 30,000 to 32,000 years and raise hopes that iconic Ice Age mammals like the woolly mammoth could also eventually be resurrected.

The researchers, who published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, said the results prove that permafrost serves a natural depository for ancient life forms. “We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” the scientists said in the article. Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia. The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. They were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible – creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface. The burrows were located 125ft (38m) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

“The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. “It’s a natural cryobank. If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” said Mr Gubin. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.”

Article here.

National Archives Conservation Lab in Washington. Image credit Hill/NARA

A team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been working for the National Archives in Washington, USA to design and build a state-of-the-art encasement and transport cart to protect the Archive’s prized copy of the 1297 Magna Carta. Their work – and the freshly conserved Magna Carta – were on display at a special “behind-the-scenes” showing at the National Archives Conservation Lab. The enclosure is designed to visually enhance the parchment document while maintaining the interior environment so it does not degrade the document.

The owner of this rare copy of the Magna Carta (one of only four surviving charters), David M. Rubinstein, loaned the document to the National Archives and paid for its restoration and encasement.

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The Diamond Sutra from The International Dunhuang Project Newsletter Issue 38

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) The Silk Road Online, is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang (敦煌) and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

Boddhisattva, Guide of Souls. Tang Dynasty, late 9th century
©
The British Museum

Background

Little was known of the remarkable heritage of the Silk Road until explorers and archaeologists of the early twentieth century uncovered the ruins of ancient cities in the desert sands, revealing astonishing sculptures, murals and manuscripts. One of the most notable discoveries was the Buddhist cave library near the oasis town of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi desert in western China. The cave had been sealed and hidden at the end of the first millennium AD and only re-discovered in 1900. Forty thousand manuscripts, paintings and printed documents on paper and silk were found in the cave itself. Tens of thousands more items were excavated from other Silk Road archaeological sites. These unique items have fascinating stories to tell of life on this great trade route from 100 BC to AD 1400. Yet most were dispersed to institutions worldwide in the early 1900s, making access difficult.

國際敦煌項目：絲綢之路在綫

IDP是一個開創性的國際性協作項目，目標是使敦煌及絲綢之路東段其他考古遺址出土的寫本、繪畫、紡織品以及藝術品的信息與圖像能在互聯網上自由地獲取，並通過教育與研究項目鼓勵使用者利用這些資源。

Suggested reading:

Inoue, Jasushi, Tun-huang: A Novel. Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd, 1978.
Mirsky, Jeannette, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Whitfield, Roderick, The Art of Central Asia: The Stein Collection in the British Museum. Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd, 1982-5.

Felling The Ancient Oaks by John Martin Robinson

Writing in The Blackpool Gazette, Pam Norfolk reviews the new book by historian John Martin Robinson, Felling The Ancient Oaks, How England Lost Its Great Country Estates -

For some of England’s most historic estates, the current imperative to preserve our past has come far too late. Felling the Ancient Oaks offers a stunning and heartbreaking visual record of our most spectacular and scenic country estates which have been broken up for sale and lost forever, often to be replaced with an endless sprawl of light industry and soulless suburbia. [It] reminds us of how our landscape looked before death duties, mining subsidence and sometimes the recklessness and incompetence of the black sheep in the family took their toll and forced the break-up of so many historic landed estates.

Highclere Castle. Source Wikimedia Commons. Image credit JBUK_Planet

One stately house that has survived is Highclere Castle, a country house in the Jacobean style, with a park designed by Capability Brown and the country seat of the Earl of Carnarvon. It is estimated however that a third of England’s historic estates, with their stately homes, parks, farms and churches have been lost.

Full review of the book here. See also a selection of photographs showing some of England’s lost stately houses here.

Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer

In this morning’s BBC Radio 4 The Life Scientific series Jim Al-Khalili meets leading paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer to find who our ancestors were.

As a post graduate Chris went on a road trip with a difference, driving round Europe in an old Morris Minor measuring Neanderthal skulls. After being thrown out of several countries, the results of his analysis led to a controversial theory which ran counter to what many people thought at the time. Chris suggested that our most recent relative originated in Africa. He also reveals how genetics has transformed his work and talks about his own unconventional origins.

That there were cannibals in Somerset is one of the more surprising findings of Chris’ work on early man in Britain and Jim discovers what it’s like to work on an archaeological dig.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Cave paintings in Malaga, Spain, could be the oldest yet found – and the first to have been created by Neanderthals.

Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have “no parallel in Palaeolithic art”, he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain’s Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old. That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art. The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an “academic bombshell”, says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.

Dating of the Nerja seal paintings’ pigments will not take place until after 2013. Further excavations in the extensive cave system – discovered by a group of boys hunting bats in 1959 – is ongoing.

Full article here. See also the comments in the earlier Daily Mail feature which cast some doubt on the authenticity of the paintings.

Over 440,000 items from the city museum and other locations were swallowed by the tsunami waves. Following the magnitude-9.0 earthquake in March 2011, Kumagai fled from his workplace in the city to the roof of the city hall, located about two kilometers away. However, most of the city’s employees who were knowledgeable about the museum’s cultural properties, including the head of the city museum, died in the tsunami.

Work to collect the scattered articles began in April. Researchers and museum workers from around the country, as well as Self-Defense Forces helped to uncover them. By mid-June they had recovered around 310,000 items. However, Kumagai says that what is more important is how many can be restored to good condition. The quality of articles soiled by seawater and mud degrades over time, so speed is needed for the restoration work. Workers must be thorough, sterilizing, drying, and cataloging the items.

Full article here.

陸前高田の博物館：標本守れ、復元急ぐ…生存の学芸員奮闘

東日本大震災で甚大な被害を受けた岩手県陸前高田市では、市立博物館などに収められていた標本や文献など４４万点以上が大津波にのみ込まれた。震災から１１カ月、生き残ったスタッフが「古里の財産を失わせない」と収蔵品の復元に取り組み、将来の博物館の再生を目指している。縄文時代の土器、サンゴの化石、三陸の動植物の標本、三陸海岸で使われてきた漁具、古い家電、掛け軸、マンガ－－。同市郊外の旧生出（おいで）小（１１年３月閉校）の体育館と教室に保管している津波被害にあった収蔵品だ。「これは震災後、博物館で保管してほしいと寄贈されました」。同市でただ一人生き残った学芸員、熊谷賢さん（４５）が指さす先には、針が２時４６分で止まった古い柱時計があった。

Credit Father Time stonehenge animation from Jac-Y-Do on Vimeo

What is Stonehenge?
It is the roofless past;
Man’s ruinous myth; his uninterred adoring
Of the unknown in sunrise cold and red;
His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.
And what is Time but shadows that were cast
By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled?
The stones remain; their stillness can outlast
The skies of history hurrying overhead.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

 

The Standing Stones of Stenness by Godfrey Higgins. Circa 1829

Orkneyjar is a privately-run, non-profit website, created and maintained by Sigurd Towrie. It is not affiliated in any way to official Orkney bodies, such as the Orkney Tourist Board or Orkney Islands Council. The Orkneyjar website began in 1997, initially as an experiment in HTML and to provide a platform to “publish” the numerous articles on Orcadian history and heritage I had written over the years. From its humble beginnings, the site has grown steadily and now attracts thousands of visitors each month. Hopefully Orkneyjar will continue to grow over the years, as I find the time to re-evaluate existing material and add more content. The website is generally updated at least one a month, but again this is dependent on time.

Sigurd Towrie