Archaeology

I once read a book written by Canadian zoologist and author, Farley Mowatt, who spent some time living in the Arctic with a group of Inuit just after WWII (Farley Mowatt, 1952 “People of the Deer”). At the beginning of chapter VII he described a meal in which his hosts presented boiled meat and gravy in a large communal tray. They ate the meat using fingers and knives, but conveyed the ‘soup’ to their mouths by using their cupped hands. It was apparently a messy procedure as lots of the soup dripped down the front of their clothes. I was much struck by this. It had never occurred to me that any human would attempt to eat soup without a spoon, or some substitute such as a seashell. It just goes to show that you cannot take anything for granted when studying human behaviour.

Most cultures use spoons for sloshy foods. So when did people start using them? There are apparently rare examples of spoons carved from antler and ivory which date back to the later part of the Ice Age, up to 20,000 years ago. They come from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer sites in Russia and France. Were they used for eating or serving or, as happened millennia later (think communion spoons), for religious rituals? Before the invention of pottery, how much food was cooked by boiling in liquid? There are methods of doing so, but were they used? (and how could you detect it if they were?).

There are many finds of spoons from the Neolithic, when farming and pottery were introduced, and people began to boil things in pottery vessels. Wooden spoons have been found in waterlogged sites such as the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, the lake villages of Egolzwil and Niederwil in Switzerland, the French lake village of Charavines, and the Danish bog of Christiansholms Mose near Copenhagen. There are ceramic spoons from Dikili Tash in Greece and bone ones from Barcin Hoyuk in Turkey.

But I think my favourite Neolithic spoons are the small bone spoons from the Balkans and Turkey which have been found to bear the tiny marks of baby’s milk teeth. They are considered to show that during the Neolithic, babies were weaned earlier than before, as their mothers could now boil up cereals to make porridge and feed it to them with a spoon. Cute!

I saw this mosaic pavement every day of my working life for many years, every time I crossed the main gallery of the Verulamium museum. All of the mosaics in the museum are beautiful, but the Dahlia mosaic particularly appealed to me, I don’t know why. It comes from a townhouse in the Roman city of Verulamium, and probably dates from around 175 – 200CE. It would have been on the floor in Roman times, although it is now fixed to the wall of the museum.

It is made of black, red and white tesserae, and has a large central flower in a square with small motifs in each corner of that square. The flower is set within a circle and the whole mosaic is overlaid by a grid of nine squares surrounded by a pattern known as” three-strand guilloche”. There are flowers in the four corner squares of the grid. The excavator, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, referred to the large central flower as a dahlia and the four corner flowers as roses, but to me it looks more like a water lily or lotus, set in a stylised circular pond indicated by the wave pattern of the innermost circle surrounding it.

The mosaic was in one room of a small second-century CE house in Insula IV. The house was L-shaped and surrounded almost all the way round by a veranda. There were five rooms, an extra one projecting from one arm of the L, and two small buildings close by which might have been for cooking. At least two of its rooms had mosaic floors and the veranda had a red tessellated pavement (little brick cubes). The veranda also had painted wall plaster coloured green, white and black. Unfortunately this nice little residence was built over a swallow-hole, not uncommon in chalk areas like St Albans, and partly collapsed before the end of the third century CE. It happens even today. The site was levelled around 300CE when this area of the town was redeveloped.

Wheeler (1936, page 146 (2) considered it to be a “good example of careful pedestrian work.” I think it is very pretty. I would have chosen it for my floor any day.

(1) Image by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

(2) Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No.XI Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic & 2 Roman Cities  p146 Pl XLIVB  REM Wheeler, D.Lit., V.P.S.A. andT.V. Wheeler FSA  1936

This drawing of a fish is based on the decoration of a 9th century CE Chinese bowl. One of the places I enjoyed visiting most on my holiday in Singapore in 2017 was the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the exhibit I enjoyed most was the Tang shipwreck, also known as the Belitung shipwreck.

The stoneware bowl with the fish decoration was found on the wreck of an Arab dhow, discovered by fishermen in 1998 off the shores of Sumatra at Belitung Island. It was dated to the 9^th century CE by radiocarbon dating of star anise preserved on the wreck, and by a bowl inscribed with a date which is equivalent to 826CE. The dhow was on the return journey from Canton in China to the Middle East, carrying luxury goods which included over 60,000 ceramic objects. The majority of the cargo was hand-painted stoneware bowls, made at Changsha in Hunan Province, packed for the journey inside large jars or straw bundles.  

China’s Tang Dynasty is dated between 618-907 CE. It is regarded as having been a golden age, when China was well-governed, prosperous and cosmopolitan, and poetry and art flourished. Foreign trade expanded, with merchants from all over the Near and Far East coming to China, overland by the Silk Road, but also by sea, including the long-distance export of mass-produced ceramics.

The Chinese character for “fish” is a homophone for prosperity or abundance, so fish are considered to be lucky. The arowana or dragon fish is considered to be particularly auspicious. I have been unable to access any detailed information or images on the subject, but perhaps this fish, which has a dragon-like appearance, was painted onto the bowl as a good-luck symbol. I shall continue my researches!

I particularly loved this perky little fish as an attractive piece of art. But I was also stunned to think that at the time when the 9^th century Saxons were making handmade, low-fired, grass-tempered pottery in Southern England, and the 9^th century Viking occupants of Orkney were mostly not making pottery at all, on the other side of the world people were making wheel-thrown, high-fired stonewares with coloured decoration!

I have already mentioned that moderately famous almost-Tudor, Robert Stewart, earl of Orkney, great-nephew of Henry VIII. Another of Henry’s great-nephews also had a connection with Orkney. Earl Robert’s half-brother, Lord Adam Stewart, is buried in St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.

Adam Stewart was, like Earl Robert, the illegitimate son of James V and a half-sibling of Mary Queen of Scots. He is thought to have been born in 1535 and died in 1575, at the age of around 40. His mother was one of the daughters of Sir John Stewart, 3rd Earl of Lennox and 1st Earl of Atholl, but there is some confusion as to whether it was Lady Helen Stewart or Lady Elizabeth Stewart.

His life is poorly documented and little is known about him. Unlike several of his half-brothers, there is no record of the king having given him the commendatorship of an abbey as a source of income. He seems to have been a monk at the Carthusian Charterhouse in Perth, from which he was allotted a pension in 1561, but he was almost certainly not the prior, although he sometimes claimed to be.

The Charterhouse in Perth, built around 1429, was the only Carthusian foundation in Scotland. Known as “Domus Vallis Virtutis" – House of the Valley of Virtue – it was the burial place of James I of Scotland, who instigated its foundation shortly before his death and contributed financially. His queen Joan Beaufort, and Adam Stewart’s grandmother, Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV and sister of Henry VIII of England, were also buried there.

Carthusian monasteries were small, and usually had only a prior and around twelve monks.  The Carthusian rule was extremely strict, and the life was something like that of a hermit. The monks lived a relatively solitary life of silent meditation, in individual cells, dressed in white habits with uncomfortable hair shirts next to the skin. The cells were small houses with several rooms, individual cloisters for meditation, and walled gardens where the monks could grow food. There was a small hatch beside the entrance door through which their meals were passed. Most of the daily eight offices, including Mass, were celebrated alone in their cells. They only came together for communal prayer, eating and business discussions on Sundays and feast days. The monks worked at various occupations, such as weaving and illuminating manuscripts, in work rooms in their cells. They were supported by lay brothers who handled necessary contact with the outside world and communal activities such as food preparation and cleaning. It seems odd to imagine a son of James V living a life of such austerity, considering the lives of wealth and political involvement led by his half-brothers Earl Robert and Earl James of Moray.

In 1559 the Charterhouse was attacked by Protestant reformers, following a sermon by John Knox in the burgh kirk of St John the Baptist. As well as the Charterhouse, the Perth mob attacked the monasteries of the Greyfriars and Blackfriars and destroyed the altars in St John’s Kirk. Only six monks remained at the Charterhouse afterwards; two of them then fled abroad. Adam is said to have been one of the four monks who remained there. The Charterhouse was suppressed ten years later in 1569 and the king gave the buildings and gardens to the burgh of Perth, although until 1602 commendators held the monastery.

In 1560 after the Scottish Reformation, Adam Stewart, no longer a monk required to be celibate, married Janet Ruthven, daughter of William Ruthven, in Edinburgh. They had least one son and seven daughters. Janet died in 1606 in Perth at the age of 86. Perhaps they lived in Perth, familiar to Lord Adam, during their married life.

In 1572 there is a record that Adam Stewart was in Edinburgh where he witnessed a contract between three of his half-brother Robert’s servants and two of his Edinburgh agents.

In 1575 Adam died and was buried in Orkney, but I can find no information about what he was doing there. There is no record of his wife having been in Orkney; it might be remembered that Earl Robert’s wife never came to Orkney either. One of Adam and Janet’s daughters, Barbara Stewart, had married an Orkney landowner, Henry Halcro, and she dedicated a memorial stone to her father (described by J. Clouston in 1919 in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 53), in the cathedral in Kirkwall, naming him as the son of King James V.

From time to time, many museums create small exhibitions, trails, or blog posts, by asking all their staff to write a short piece about their favourite object. They usually call these “Curator’s Choice”. I have been thinking about some of my own favourite objects from the historical and archaeological world all over the planet. This little statuette of a frog is one of them. You might call this a “Curator's Choice" – look out for more!

I have never seen the actual object myself, and I don’t expect I ever will. Nevertheless, from the three images I have seen, it is one of my favourite pieces of art. It has the complete simplicity I like so much, and makes excellent use of the natural colouring of the stone it is carved from. Also I happen to be fond of frogs.

It is a religious object from around the turn of the 3^rd millennium BCE, i.e. during the Predynastic period in Egypt. The frog was an ancient symbol of fertility, relating to the annual flooding of the Nile which allowed the crops to grow, and which naturally encouraged the breeding of millions of frogs in its mud. It was later known to have been associated with rebirth and life after death, with childbirth and with the fertility goddess Heket or Heqet, who was identified with the goddess Hathor. Heqet was the wife of Khnum, the potter-god who shaped human beings on his wheel. She was sometimes represented as a woman with the head of a frog; sometimes as a frog.

This statuette has no provenance, i.e.no-one knows where it was found. It is made of travertine/alabaster and is 154mm tall. The clever use of the stone’s natural veining was probably intentional, as it was not intended to be painted.

It is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.