Burlington House Courtyard Lates

• Royal Society of Chemistry: Why does asparagus make your wee smell? (a short talk repeated throughout the night)
• Royal Academy of Arts: Visit the Summer Exhibition 2016 (this is a ticketed exhibition)

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Roger Tomlin FSA, Editor of Roman Inscriptions of Britain at Wolfson College, Oxford (pictured), was privileged to be the first to read a large haul of Roman stylus writing tablets excavated in London. Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) published a comprehensive monograph on 1 June, detailing 405 Roman tablets or fragments, which add 80 legible texts to the 19 known previously from the entire city. It is, says MOLA, ‘Britain’s largest, earliest and most significant collection of Roman waxed writing tablets.’
 
The tablets were made between the AD 50s and 80s, spanning the destruction of Londinium by Boudica in 60 or 61. Mostly of a business nature, says Tomlin, the documents show that (as Tacitus described) London was a centre of commerce before the revolt, and sprang back rapidly afterwards: a contract made on 21 October AD 62 refers to ‘twenty loads of provisions’ to be brought from Verulamium (St Albans) to London by 13 November.
 
The very first text (8 January AD 57), and hence also the oldest dated hand-written document known from Britain, is financial. London is named (the first known reference, dated to AD 65–80), as are nearly 100 people, from a cooper, brewer and judge, to soldiers, slaves and freedmen. Among them is Julius Classicus, a figure already known as a leader of the Batavian revolt: he is revealed to be the prefect of the Sixth Cohort of Nervians in the first decades of Roman London. One tablet has an alphabet scratched out in capital letters, perhaps, suggests Tomlin, the first evidence for a school in Britain.
 
The tablets were found during pre-construction excavation at the site of Bloomberg LP’s new European headquarters, for which Julian Hill FSA was Post-Excavation Project Manager. Michael Bloomberg writes in the monograph how a communications company is 'thrilled' to have been responsible for discovering the tablets, and Jemma Read of Bloomberg introduces an impressive video about the project.
 
In this Sadie Watson FSA, Bloomberg London Site Director, says they hand-excavated 3,500 tons of soil, knowing from previous discoveries nearby that tablets were likely to be there – but no one had expected so many. The layer of black wax into which messages were written does not survive. Texts can be read only where a stylus marked the wood underneath, and where other marks do not obscure them. Tomlin worked with photographs taken with differently angled light as well as the real things. To read them, he says, ‘You have to have an imagination, but’, with a smile, ‘you must control it very rigidly.’
 
Sadie Watson also features in New Scientist (subscription needed), which considered MOLA’s work shortly before the embargo was lifted on the news of the Roman tablets.
 
• Roman London's First Voices: Writing Tablets from the Bloomberg Excavations, 2010–14, by Roger SO Tomlin.
 

‘Is virtual-reality the future of history?: Project Mosul’ is the title of what The Economist describes as its ‘first VR experience’. Anne McElvoy presents two programmes with level-headed discussions airing digital imaging’s benefits and limitations. The former are clear in Project Mosul, as Lamia Al-Gailani, Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL Institute of Archaeology, emphasises, with the reconstruction from crowdsourced images of a since vandalised museum. Nigel Tallis FSA, Assistant Keeper, Early Mesopotamia Collections, British Museum, talks about a Victorian fashion for casting Assyrian carvings, valuing the meaning of the artefacts above their authenticity. When you create a VR object, he says, you really have to look at it – you become the expert on the piece you have re-created. What we really need, says one speaker, is peace in the Middle East – not loads of scanners being sent out. • In April the Institute for Digital Archaeology displayed a reduced-scale replica Palmyran arch in Trafalgar Square, to signal solidarity with ‘people in the conflict region of the Middle East’.
 

Fourteen members of the Oxford-based Herculaneum Society and its New York partner the American Friends of Herculaneum, wrote to The Times in March (subscription needed), calling for the urgent ‘completion’ of excavations at the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum. The villa, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, is said to contain the only library to have survived intact from the ancient Greco-Roman world. Scroll fragments from some 800 books found in the 18th century are thought to be a small sample compared to what remains buried, which is, say the letter writers, threatened by future volcanic eruptions.
 
This is not a new cause (‘several of us’, say the Times signatories, wrote to the paper on the subject in 2002), and arguments against excavation have also been well-rehearsed. In May the Art Newspaper assessed the case, as it had 14 years ago. It was told by Giuseppe De Natale, Director of the Osservatorio Vesuviano, that ‘the probability of an impending eruption – within the next weeks or month – is negligible’, but that when it happens, a major eruption would almost certainly cover Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii ‘in deadly pyroclastic flows of molten rock and gas’.
 
Robert Fowler, Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol and lead signatory to the Times letter, writes in the Art Newspaper that the villa was rediscovered and partially excavated in the 1990s. ‘We shall soon have the technology to scan and read the rolls without even touching them,’ he says. ‘They will not lie around neglected and deteriorating, as has sometimes been charged. Posterity will not forgive us if we squander this chance. The excavation must proceed.’
 
For the case against, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill FSA, Director of Research, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University and Scientific Director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, says the risk to the villa lies not in another eruption ( which ‘can scarcely do more damage to what lies buried’) but in exposure. ‘The steep embankment around the trench’, he writes, ‘is not stable: the edges constantly crumble and do damage to the protective shelter. This can be addressed … but simply increasing the size of the excavation only moves the problem on.’
 
‘The gravest risk’, he says, ‘is from water. The consequence of creating a trench 30m below the ground level of the present city is to release a flow of water. This cascades out of the edge of the excavated area, passing through the lower floors of the villa, precisely those which were not explored by Karl Weber [in the 1750s] and have the most potential interest… [U]rgent work to stop the embankment crumbling and the flow of water further damaging the lower floors … might reveal further papyri. It would certainly reveal finds of great interest. But the logic that drives any modern excavation must be preservation, not the pursuit of a dream.’

The illustrated transcribed fragment is taken from the Imaging Papyri Project, a digital library of collections of papyrus images and texts at Oxford University, hosted by the Faculty of Classics.
 

Everything about Madagascar, that great island off the coast of east Africa, says it was settled principally by people from across the Indian Ocean, with only subsequent and less significant immigration from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The evidence for this counter-intuitive story lies in language (Malagasy has more in common with Hawaiian than anything spoken in adjacent Africa), the look of the people, musical instruments, dug-out canoes with outriggers, food and much else, all of which point to Southeast Asia and the Pacific. What actually happened, and when, however, has proved hard to pin down. Excavated early settlements offered little help. The most substantial case had been put by a combination of genetics and linguistics, interpreted to suggest Austronesian colonisation around 2,500 years ago.
 
Now a team which includes three Fellows have introduced new data to a saga that American writer Jared Diamond has called ‘the single most astonishing fact of human geography for the entire world’. Nicole Boivin FSA (University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena), Dorian Fuller FSA (UCL Institute of Archaeology) and Mark Horton FSA (University of Bristol), with ten other colleagues, describe the evidence of early crops, in a paper edited by Matthew Spriggs FSA (Australian National University, Canberra) for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published on 30 May.
 
Madagascan crops, formerly or currently important on the island, include banana, yam, taro, coconut, rice, mung bean and cotton – all Asian staples, and a comparable range of cultivated plants to those that made their way across the Pacific. Boivin and colleagues analysed remains from 18 sites in Madagascar and Africa, some of them from their own excavations (photo shows Horton at work, in orange shirt), some from work by others, dating between around AD 650 and 1200. They identified a total of 2,443 crop remains, with 48 radiocarbon dates, most of them obtained directly on crop seeds.
 
On the African mainland or on islands close to the coast, they found a mix of, overwhelmingly, African (millets, pulses and fruits), and much more rarely, Asian crops (rice, mung bean, cotton). In more distant islands, including the Comoros and Madagascar, they found almost exclusively Asian crops. Rice and mung beans, they note, were not popular in the Middle East in historical times (there are no recipes for using mungs in medieval Islamic cookbooks). They are, however, common in India and Sri Lanka from at least 500 BC, and have been found at an early date in Bali and Thailand.
 
Asian foods on the Comoros was an unexpected discovery, as the islands are traditionally thought to have been settled by Africans, not Asians. On this point, Boivin said: ‘When we started looking more closely into research that has been carried out on Comorian languages, we were able to find numerous esteemed linguists who had argued for the exact thing we seemed to seeing in the Comorian archaeological record: a settlement by people from Southeast Asia. So we’ve been able to not only to show for the first time an archaeological signature of Austronesians, we’ve also shown that it seems to extend beyond Madagascar. This is really exciting, and highlights how much we still have to learn about this fascinating migration.’
 
‘Our findings’, the scientists conclude, ‘open the way to new avenues of research for linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists and provide crucial insight into early processes of biological exchange across the Indian Ocean.’

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Stephen Greep FSA and David Neave FSA report:
 
‘Saturday 14 May saw 20 York Fellows and their guests treated to a guided tour of Beverley by three local Fellows Barbara English, David Neave and John Wilton-Ely. Amongst the places visited was St Mary’s Church. In the “Priests’ Rooms”, above the 14th century St Michael's Chapel, Fellows were able to examine the memorial to one of the Society’s earliest Fellows, Francis Drake FSA, elected to the Society in 1736. The memorial is said to have been in the churchyard of St Mary’s until it was moved to its current location in 1981.
 
‘Francis Drake (1696–1771) was born in Pontefract, the son of the vicar. Following apprenticeship he became a surgeon and in 1727, aged 31, he became the city surgeon of York. He was the author of the first substantial history of York, Eboracum: The History and Antiquities of the City of York, from its Original to the Present Time; together with the History of the Cathedral Church and the Lives of the Archbishops, published in 1736. When he died he was living with his son, Revd Francis Drake, Vicar of St Mary’s, Beverley 1767–91.
 
‘The memorial is inscribed in Latin. The following translation is by David Smith (from W.C.B. Smith, St Mary’s Church, Beverley, pp.114–15):
 
‘Sacred to the Memory of Francis Drake, Esquire, Fellow of the Royal Society and also of the Society of Antiquaries. How much he progressed by his learning and application his History of York and also his Parliamentary History clearly bear witness. Whether seen as a friend, a fellow-citizen, or a colleague, in whatever circumstances he was in, he attracted the gratitude and love
of everyone to an astonishing degree. So kind, so generous, so courteous, he was not to be surpassed. Francis Drake, S.T.P., his eldest son and Vicar of this church, so well aware of the merits of his father, wished this monument to be made. He died in the Year of Our Lord 1771
aged 76.’
 

In the last Salon Roland Smith FSA asked if bookmaking had anything to do with the historic environment, before starting an interesting excursion into racecourse landscapes. Geoffrey Dannell FSA writes with news of a more direct link to the Fellowship:
 
‘Following on from Roland Smith's contribution on horse-racing, it might be timely to remind Fellows that Edmund Tyrrell Artis FSA was secretary to the Doncaster Race Club, which organised the St Leger Meetings, between 1827 and 1847. As owner and maître d'hôtel of the Club he gave renowned banquets during the Race Week, entertaining such notables as The Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and Lord George Bentinck. The Race Club was situated on Hallgate, which Artis as the author of The Durobrivae of Antoninus (1828), would have been very satisfied to know was once a Roman road.’
 
‘Sorry to miss Alexandra Palace in the list of closed racecourses,’ writes Alan Johnston FSA. ‘It prompts me to ask in pretty total ignorance whether its, plus Palace’s, history is being worked on?’
 
The photo of Alexandra Park Racecourse in 1947 is from Harringay online.