Archive for June, 2012

Celebrate Canada Day with colonial-era pictures

Saturday, June 30th, 2012





Panorama of French fishing rooms, Cape Rouge Harbour




Happy Canada Day!


Stolen rare 415-year-old atlas returned to Sweden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

Royal Library map librarian Greger Bergvall holds Wytfliet Atlas at New York press conference WednesdayA rare copy of Cornelius van Wytfliet’s Atlas of the New World stolen from Sweden’s Royal Library a decade ago was officially returned during a news conference in New York City Wednesday.

"Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum sive Occidentis Notitia Brevi commentario illustrata Studio et opera Cornely Wytfliet Louaniensis"Published in 1597, the Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum was the first atlas documenting the geography and natural history of the Americas. Belgian cartographer Wytfliet used the writings of geographers José de Acosta and Giovanni Battista Ramusio, among others, to create 19 exceptionally accurate maps of South America, Central America, North America and the Caribbean, among them the first regional map of California ever printed. The book is one of only nine complete copies known to survive.

"Bayou Sacra, Luisiana," lithograph by Henry LewisIt was stolen by the former head of the library’s manuscript department, Anders Burius, who from the day he was hired in 1995 began to help himself to rare volumes which he would then sell to German auction house Ketterer Kunst. He managed to steal 56 books worth millions of dollars before the thefts were discovered in the spring of 2004. Over time he had gotten careless in his efforts to cover his tracks, so when a Royal Library staffer began searching for a copy of Das Illustrirte Mississippithal, a book of lithographs of the Mississippi River by American artist Henry Lewis published in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1858, she found a single remaining reference proving that the volume had once been in the library even though it had been removed from all the other indices, catalogues and inventories.

Atlantic coast of North America in Wytfliet AtlasRealizing that only an insider could have removed the book and almost all references to it, the library began a quiet but thorough investigation. They found other books were missing, all of them valuable. In November, they determined that only Burius had the physical access and in-depth knowledge to consistently pick the books with the highest current market values. Management confronted him and he admitted to being the thief. He hoped the library would keep things quiet and settle the matter internally, but of course they called the police.

On November 7, 2004, Anders Burius was arrested. While in jail he wrote a detailed list of all the books he had stolen from the Royal Library. A subsequent investigation found that he had stolen dozens of books from other libraries starting as early as 1986. He was no collector; he sold them to support his lifestyle of Armani suits, Cuban cigars and Mercedes Benzes. He would steal the books, remove any references to them in the library records, and erase the library marks from the books with a pencil eraser. Then he would sell them in Germany as Charles Fields from Denmark. (John Charles Fields was the Canadian mathematician who founded the Fields Medal, viz. Good Will Hunting.)

The closest Ketterer Kunst got to due diligence was to check for the library stamps he had removed and to make Burius sign a document attesting to his legal ownership of the books. They didn’t even check to see if there was such a person as Charles Fields in Denmark. They just paid him in cash and everyone went on their merry way.

Burius' Stockholm apartment building after the explosionThree weeks after his arrest, Burius’ wife filed for divorce. On December 3rd, the police released him pending a court date. Early in the morning of December 8th, he dragged a mattress into his kitchen, cut the gas tube leading to his oven, then lay down on his mattress and slit his wrists. A random spark from his refrigerator thermostat ignited the gas, setting off a massive explosion which blew out the walls, injured 11 people and forced the evacuation of 44 of his neighbors.

Burius’ body was found under the rubble of his apartment four days later. The medical examiner was unable to determine if he died in the explosion or from the gas or wrist-slitting. Thankfully, nobody else was killed in his last act of reckless selfishness.

World map in Wytfliet AtlasThe case was huge news in Sweden, but because the investigation was ongoing, the Royal Library didn’t publish the complete list of stolen books; so dealers and auction houses all over the world were still selling the purloined volumes, unaware of their origins. Wytfliet’s Atlas had been on the market for years and passed through several hands before a Royal Library librarian spotted it in 2011 for sale by New York map dealer W. Graham Arader III of Arader Galleries. Arader, a colorful character who in addition to being a highly successful dealer in antique maps and natural history prints has also been instrumental in helping authorities arrest several thieving dealers and collectors, had bought it from Sotheby’s London in 2003.

The Royal Library and Arader determined that it was the stolen copy, so he returned it to Sotheby’s and got his money back. Sotheby’s in turn decided to give the book back to the library. They sent it to New York for the return ceremony where representatives from the Royal Library reclaimed the first of Burius’ stolen treasures. They have now published a complete list of the stolen books (pdf) and registered it with booksellers and Interpol. They are cautiously optimistic that more of the books will be found now.


Chaplin’s notes for Nijinsky film found in Bologna

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Recently discovered picture of Chaplin and Keaton on the Limelight setResearchers at the Cineteca di Bologna have discovered a previously unknown manuscript in Charlie Chaplin’s own hand outlining a film about legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The film was never made, but elements of it were included in Limelight, one of Chaplin’s last films, which featured his only on-screen appearance with that other great luminary of silent picture comedy, Buster Keaton. Four unpublished pictures of Keaton and Chaplin working together on the Limelight set were also discovered.

The Cineteca di Bologna is the custodian of the Charlie Chaplin Archive, an immense collection of Chaplin’s personal and professional documents. For years they’ve been cataloging and digitizing the paper documents and restoring the films in accordance with the wishes of Chaplin’s heirs. They found the manuscript while researching Limelight, appropriately enough, and will announce the find today at their Cinema Ritrovato (Rediscovered Film) festival in Bologna.

You can see the entire manuscript, complete with Chaplin’s strike-throughs and margin notes, in pdf form here. Click here to read the pdf transcript.

Chaplin manuscript, page oneChaplin manuscript, page twoChaplin manuscript, page threeChaplin manuscript, page four

Nijinsky met Charlie Chaplin in 1917 during the Ballets Russes dance company’s second and last tour of the United States. Nijinsky hadn’t participated in the first tour in 1916 because company director Sergei Diaghilev had fired him in 1913, furious that Nijinsky, his sometime lover, had married Hungarian countess, groupie and wannabe dancer Romola de Pulszky while on tour in South America, far from Diaghilev’s controlling oversight.

When war broke out in August 1914, Nijinsky, the missus and their newborn daughter were staying in Pulszky’s mother’s house in Budapest. There they stayed for the next two years, under house arrest as enemy noncombatants due to Nijinsky’s Russian citizenship. He was only released because the American promoter of the Ballets Russes’ second US tour stipulated that Nijinsky had to be part of the company, so Diaghilev pulled some strings, enlisting the intervention of Spanish King Alfonso XIII to secure permission for Nijinsky to leave Hungary for New York in September of 1916.

Nijinsky was by all accounts in poor form during the tour. He was out of practice from two years of house arrest and showing early signs of the schizophrenia that would end his career in 1919. He was convinced that the other dancers had it in for him, that they would leave a trap door open on stage for him to fall through. The tour was a financial and artistic disaster. The Ballets Russes never toured the US again.

In the middle of this turbulence, the company visited Chaplin on the set of Easy Street, a classic two-reel film co-starring Edna Purveyance from Chaplin’s productive and lucrative time under contract with Mutual Film. In 1916, Chaplin and Mutual had agreed to a yearly salary of $670,000, making him the highest paid entertainer in the world. They built him a studio of his own and gave him complete artistic freedom. Chaplin was at the peak of his powers when he met the great dancer at the nadir of his.

Twenty years later, Chaplin would write a treatment for a movie about Nijinsky, “the great genious of the Russian ballet,” whose insecurities make him come across as something of a brute, but who is a kind, generous spirit who in secret financially supports the drunken old dancer who almost injured him on stage. From the newly-discovered manuscript:

The theme of the play is that a career is not the fulfillment of man’s desires, but only a road leading to his destiny. Naginsky was inarticulate, sensitive and shy with a funny passion and an imagination that launched his soul, because he had only one means of expressing himself. [...]

Characters: Naginsky, His Wife, Degaloff, an Old Friend, Dresser, Old Dancer
Action and the Intention Ballet to show the genius as a dancer. To show his relationship with the members of the company. To show how he intercedes with Degaloff on behalf of one of the members of the cast. To show his sense of justice. To show his loyalty to an old member of the cast who has been drinking because he is too old to dance. To show the old member making a mistake while the ballet is performing. This mistake almost causes N to injure himself and he heaps a tirade of abuses at the old man until he discovers that the old chap is suffering from rheumatism. Then he suggests that the old man should take a rest. The old man is afraid to because he cannot afford the expense of a hospital or the chance of losing his job. When D refuses to pay the old man’s expenses for a two weeks’ rest, N tells him that he will pay it and that he D can deduct the money from his salary. Naginsky But for heaven’s sake, do not tell the old fellow that I am paying the bills. The fool will be too proud to accept it.

Limelight posterIt’s the character of the old washed-up alcoholic performer whom Chaplin would reuse in Limelight, which was filmed in 1952, 15 years after Chaplin wrote the Nijinsky treatment. At the time, Chaplin insisted it would be his last film (it wasn’t; he made two more after that), so that young actor in his prime who had met Nijinsky in his decline was now in the waning days of his own stellar career.

Also, Buster Keaton was in dire straits himself when Chaplin hired him for Limelight. He had been financially devastated by a divorce and hadn’t been getting much work. The part was a small one, too small, Chaplin originally thought, for an actor of Keaton’s caliber. When he heard that Keaton had fallen on hard times, he insisted on casting the legend and gave him free rein to create his own routine in their shared scene, something that Chaplin never did.

So the unfilmed Nijinsky manuscript turns out to have several parallels with Chaplin’s later life and work. Chaplin plays the old drunk now, only he’s the one giving a down-on-his-luck colleague a hand in a respectful way. It’s a wheel-has-come-full-circle moment.


Confirmed:Capitoline Wolf is Medieval, not Etruscan

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012









Huge Celtic coin hoard found on Jersey after 30 years

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012




















Anglo-Saxon woman found buried with cow

Monday, June 25th, 2012

Anglo-Saxon lady and her cow, late 5th centuryAn Anglo-Saxon woman was found buried with a cow in a late 5th century cemetery in Oakington, outside of Cambridge. Anglo-Saxon warriors have been known to be buried with their horses, but this is the first time a woman has been found buried with a domestic animal. In fact, when the animal bones were first excavated, archaeologists assumed it was a horse because they’d already unearthed two other graves in the cemetery of men buried with their horses. They were excited to find a horse buried with a woman because all 31 of the horse burials discovered in Britain are of men. When they realized the animal bones belonged to a cow, their excitement hit the roof. It’s the first cow burial ever found in Europe.

Cows were of enormous value to a community. They were a precious source of meat and dairy which cost a great deal to feed and keep healthy. One cow could make the difference between a community surviving or dying of starvation. Burying the cow would have been an enormous loss for the community to suffer. The woman buried with the cow, therefore, must have been an extremely important person to warrant such a valuable gravemate, especially this early in Anglo-Saxon society.

Copper broaches, beads found buried with high-status woman (and cow)Her high status is confirmed by the rich adornments found on her body. Grave goods include copper alloy brooches, three necklaces and hundreds of amber and glass beads.

“She also had a complete chatelaine [keychain] set, which is an iron girdle and a symbol of her high status,” [University of Central Lancashire's Dr. Duncan] Sayer said.

“It indicates she had access to the community’s wealth.


A team of archaeologists from Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Central Lancashire, Oxford Archaeology East and some undergraduate history students from MMU are excavating the Oakington site. It was one of the MMU students — Kate Smith, 19 — who first discovered the woman’s grave. The team has thus far discovered 100 graves, and they estimate there are another 50-60 graves in the cemetery. The dig will continue for another three weeks, but even if they stopped today it would still be one of the most important Anglo-Saxon sites in the country.

For more about the excavation and to keep abreast of anything else they discover, see the Oakington dig Facebook page or follow them on Twitter @oakingtondig.


A tale of Etruscan loot from Italy to Ohio and back

Sunday, June 24th, 2012



















Roman jewelry found in ancient Japanese tomb

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012


Roman glass jewel found in 5th century tomb in Nagaoka, Japan Roman glass jewel found in 5th century tomb in Nagaoka, Japan





We don’t know when the beads got to Japan. They could have been recent purchases, or heirlooms handed down from parent to child for centuries before their burial, or they could have come to Japan along with the many Chinese and Korean immigrants who became naturalized Japanese and held important positions at the Yamato court during the Kofun period (250-538 A.D.). (Kofun, incidentally, is the word for the burial mounds of royalty and aristocracy that characterize the period, like the one in which the Roman jewels were found.)

It’s also eminently possible that they made it to 5th century Nagaoka via standard trade routes between China, Korea and Japan. It was an established stop, thanks to its convenient proximity to navigable rivers. In fact, two centuries later the ancient city of Nagaoka-kyō, part of the modern city of Nagaoka, would be made the capital of Japan (from 784 to 794) because Emperor Kammu thought the new location would make trade to and from the capital easier. That theoretical advantage turned out to be a major disadvantage in practice. Constant flooding of those rivers drove the Emperor to move the capital again, to Kyoto this time.


Mammoth field found in Serbian coal mine

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

Archaeologists excavate Drmno coal mine pitWorkers digging at the Drmno coal strip mine in Kostolac, eastern Serbia on Monday, June 11th encountered the remains of a large woolly mammoth about 20 yards underground. They stopped work — the digging machines had already damaged the remains — and contacted archaeologists at the nearby Roman site of Viminacium asking them to come take over. A torrential downpour Monday afternoon delayed the archaeologists’ visit, but when they arrived on Tuesday morning, they found that the rain had revealed the remains of four other mammoths.

It’s the first discovery of its kind in Serbia. Individual mammoths have been found before, including one in 2009 at the same site. That one was a southern mammoth, a much older furless relative of the woollies. The southern mammoth, a female that researchers named Vika, is up to a million years old and is thought to have drowned on the banks of the Pannonian Sea, a shallow sea that dried up in the Pleistocene about 600,000-200,000 years ago.

Mammoth bones discovered at DrmnoBy the time the woolly mammoths roamed the area (they died out around 10,000 years ago), it was the delta of the prehistoric Great Morava River. The five mammoths discovered this month were located more than 30 feet above Vika’s find spot. They may have all died at once in the same place, killed by a natural catastrophe like a flash flood, they may have died at different times in the same place, or they may have been carried to the spot by torrential waters.

It will be at least six months before all the bones are excavated, and archaeologists believe there may be more to be discovered. Once they’re out of the ground, it will be many years before all the research is published that will tell us exactly how old they are and how they died. There was some excited speculation when the find was first announced that this might be the first mammoth graveyard ever discovered, a place to which mammoths traveled long distances just to die there as modern elephants do, but at this point there is no evidence whatsoever for this idea.

It’s an important and rare find even without the mammoth graveyard glamour. Studying the remains of the mammoths and the field could provide new information about the flora and fauna of the Balkan ice age. The owners of the strip mine, Serbia’s national power company EPS, have stopped all operations at the Drmno mine to allow archaeologists to work unimpeded.

Mammoth bones in the Drmno coal strip mine


Polish Museum of America gets stolen artifacts back

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

Thaddeus Kosciuszko letterThe FBI announced Wednesday that they have returned more than 120 important historical artifacts and documents that were stolen decades ago from the Polish Museum of America (PMA). The artifacts, including letters going as far back as 1646, correspondence to and from Polish kings, documents with massive royal seals still attached, letters written by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, rare artworks, Polish military medals and Nazi World War II propaganda, have an estimated market value of $5 million. Their value to the museum and to the historical record is of course incalculable.

Stolen medals returned to PMAThe Chicago museum, one of the oldest ethnic museums in the country, has an extensive permanent collection of artifacts relating to Polish history and the history of Poles in the United States. At some point during the 1970s or 1980s, important objects began to disappear. It was done sneakily enough and the collection is large enough that nobody even guessed they were gone until years later. None of the museum employees who worked in there in the 80s are still there, so there was nothing definite to go on, just a lot of rumors and speculation.

Harlan Berk with FBI agent Michael KosanovichThe case busted wide open thanks to a Chicago coin and antiquities dealer named Harlan Berk. In late summer of 2011, unnamed youths came to his store bearing documents filled with Polish names and the signatures of Founding Fathers. They claimed they had found the items in the basement of the house they were renting and that they had many more items to sell. Berk purchased the letters and the sellers came back several times with more impressive artifacts.

Polish Museum president Maria CieslaIn a break from the see-no-evil way so many antiquities dealers operate, Berk did his own research to figure out what these documents were and where they came from. When he discovered that at some point they had been in the PMA collection, he called museum president Maria Ciesla and told her he had something of theirs.

Ciesla was ecstatic.

“I couldn’t catch my breath because this was a phone call we had dreamed about getting,” Ciesla said. “This was the first tangible proof that this was not a rumor, that these were out there, that these documents and artifacts were out there.”


Polish royal sealsShe called the FBI Art Crime Team and they opened an investigation. She also arranged with Berk that he would continue buying anything the sellers brought in to the store, and then he’d turn them over to the museum which would reimburse him the purchase cost. In October of 2011, the sellers got greedy. The papers with the royal seals looked so fancy that they thought they could make a killing selling them at auction rather than just settling for Berk’s price. Fearing that the objects might get dispersed, the FBI stepped in.

The sellers promptly agreed to hand over everything they had left. The FBI discovered that the house they were renting was owned by the mother of a former curator at the PMA. The identities of the curator and his or her mother have not been released. It would certainly explain how so many precious artifacts could just walk away without anyone realizing it if the museum curator was the thief. It reminds me of the exploits of presidential inauguration expert, liar and thief Barry Landau, who used his exalted reputation as a cover for years of stealing.

No criminal charges will be filed. Museum officials can’t say for sure when the objects were stolen, but it was certainly more than five years ago which means the statute of limitations on the original theft has expired. The renters who stumbled on this treasure in the basement won’t be charged with transportation, sale or possession of stolen goods, probably because they’re just young and stupid rather than malicious.

Ciesla says the next step is to fully catalogue the returned artifacts. When that’s done, they will all go on exhibit together, probably within the next two years. Meanwhile the museum is asking that everyone keep their eyes open for any other Polish-intensive artifacts. There’s no telling what other gems might have been sold before the leftovers were stashed in the basement.