Reply to Twitter feedback

Ben Westwood, Finds Liaison Officer for Durham, Darlington & Teesside, has responded on Twitter to my earlier post about the silver seal from Shropshire. I'm grateful for his willingness to discuss the issue and his points deserve a thoughtful answer but rather than be constrained by the 280-character-per-tweet limit on Twitter I'll answer them here.

"I/we have no problem with debate or discussion, & don't always get things right. i'm very far from 'outraged' as your alternative interpretation, in fact i think it's very interesting." 

Sorry if I misjudged your level of reaction but a series of no less than fourteen tweets which included the boast "Like it or not, we are experts in portable antiquities & artefacts" did give the impression that you were ever so slightly miffed.

It's not an "alternative interpretation"; it's the only sensible interpretation - the interpretation your colleague should have reached.

"My problem, as i made clear was with the tone & offensive language used. describing a colleagues work as vacuous because you disagree with the way he has chosen to engage with current debate is a poor choice of words, especially given the context."

vacuous: showing a lack of thought

It was precisely "the way he has chosen to engage with current debate" that was vacuous. No matter how virtuous the cause, there is little excuse for a professional FLO to weave some wild fantasy around an artefact merely to fit topicality.

It doesn't require a great deal of 'thought' to show a tiny bit of sense and do at least a minimum of basic homework. It's a silver seal. The typical motif on a silver seal is heraldry - so open a book about heraldry. It's not rocket science. What on earth did he think it was? Some sort of weird trophy?

"That was only part of my critique though, & it's telling you've chosen not comment the main issue here. You part-quote me in relation to these two tweets, but seem to miss that i was drawing attention to @PortantIssues [Paul Barford]"

Huh? Please try to stay focused. Paul and I are not joined at the hip. Paul has his blog, I have my blog. I am discussing the post on my blog. Whatever your "main issue" may be, it has no connection to my post on my blog.

"more worryingly, in your defence of @PortantIssues blog [...] you make no reference to the very offensive language used ['negroid'] ..."

See my comment above. That word makes me uneasy and I personally avoid any terminology that may be insensitive but the term is still used by other people. Indeed, before going ballistic on Twitter, you might want to have a word with your own colleagues at the British Museum (e.g. see Curator's Comments: here, here, here).

"However, you seem sadly to have missed the point of my thread. We encourage, welcome, debate & discussion, but hyperbole and polemicism are not helpful, neither is accusing a heritage colleague of 'pseudo-archaeology', which I really think is unwarranted, & below you."

Please point to a genuine example of 'hyperbole' in my post. 'Polemicism'? I'm not sure you quite understand the difference between polemicism and justifiably strong criticism. Perhaps I expect a higher standard from a professional FLO associated with the nation's most prestigious museum than to cobble together a piece of unresearched rubbish and publish it on an academic website that the public would expect to be reliable. My post about it may have revealed a little of my exasperation but it was in fact very restrained (this current post may be somewhat less so!).

My comment about pseudo-archaeology was intended as a plea. Archaeology starts with evidence and then draws tentative conclusions; pseudo-archaeology starts with a conclusion and then selectively misinterprets evidence to suit it. The Reavill article came dangerously close to the latter.

There's no need for "debate". The article is demonstrably crap. It's also very unfair to those of his colleagues who are more knowledgeable. If your friend wants to write about the slave trade, I suggest he does his colleagues (and the public) a favour, engages in some basic homework, and finds an artefact that actually has something to do with it.

PAS: Truth be damned, let's just be topical!

On Friday (7 August) Peter Reavill, a Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) for the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), posted a long article which misinterpreted a silver seal found in Shropshire in 2013 (HESH-0A2407). Apparently in a misguided attempt to be topical, the author gave his article the subtitle "How a single artefact can shed light on the transatlantic slave trade" and tagged it as 'Atlantic Slave Trade, Black Lives Matter, Enslaved Person'. Excited by that theme, the author then went on to make wild assumptions in the text - "... design depicting a Black man – most probably an enslaved person", "the depiction of an enslaved person on this seal" - while desperately trying to link the seal to "the enslavement of African people".

When Mr Reavill publicised his article on Twitter, Paul Barford noted the trite narrativisation on his blog and I added a comment underneath to point out the real interpretation of the seal.

I thought no more of it but I now see Ben Westwood, another FLO, is apparently outraged that anyone dared to challenge the nonsense in the PAS article. Let's have a look at his points:

"I’ve thought long & hard over whether to reply to this, but seeing comments describing Peter’s article  as ‘vacuously jumping on the BLM bandwagon['] ..., I think it’s important to respond. Firstly there’s nothing vacuous about what @findsorguk are trying to do in terms of the objects we record ..."

What is 'vacuous' is the warping of what should be a detached and impartial assessment of an artefact into an unlikely fantasy merely to fit topical agenda. Perhaps my standard for drawing a line between fact and wild flights of uninformed imagination is somewhat stricter than that of the PAS.

"[David Knell] argues that rather than Slave Trade, the device is a heraldic 'Moor's head', & of course such debate is welcome."

Any chance of an intelligent "debate" requires the immediate ditching of that "Slave Trade" narrative; it's a false accretion founded on an ignorance of armorial art. Instead of forcefully foisting topicality onto the artefact, we'll start from scratch.

Post-medieval seals could feature a wide range of motifs - ordinary copper-alloy examples tend to be generic (initials, sailing ships, classical busts, anchors, hatching, and so on) - but by far the most typical device on a personal silver seal of this quality was either a monogram or a 'family crest' (either literally the device displayed on a helm above the heraldic achievement, the main device ('charge') displayed on the shield, or the entire achievement). Regardless of whether the 'crest' was properly granted or merely assumed, it was nevertheless heraldic.

It shouldn't need me to point that out. There are more than two dozen examples on the PAS website, including one identified by Mr Westwood (DUR-A53171). Here's just one example (NLM-0D2C6D) that is fairly close to, though not quite as fine as, the one under discussion:

A variety of human heads occur as devices in heraldry: the 'wild man', the 'Saxon', the 'Englishman', the 'Saracen', the 'old man', the 'woman', the 'child', and so on. As I explained in my comment underneath Paul's blog post, the example on the seal is known as a 'Maure' ('Moor's head'). Although the device is by no means as common as a lion rampant, it is not exactly rare either (appearing on the arms of Corsica, Sardinia and Coburg among many others) and it's rather surprising that it threw the PAS team into a shocked wobbly. The use of human heads of any type is not to my taste - they run the risk of being insensitive - but that on the seal is very familiar to anyone with a passing interest in heraldry and, despite Mr Reavill's strenuous effort to make it topical, the device is most unlikely to have even the remotest connection with the "transatlantic slave trade".

As the name implies, the heraldic device of a 'Moor's head' was loosely based on Christian perceptions of the mainly Muslim population of northern Africa (the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa, such as those used as heraldic supporters in the arms of the Royal African Company, were typically depicted wearing headdresses, not as bare-headed 'Moors') and is medieval in origin. Those examples proudly displayed by Corsica and Sardinia, for instance, date back to the 14th and 13th centuries respectively and probably allude to the defeat of Moorish rule during the Middle Ages; that displayed by Coburg honours the town's patron saint (Saint Maurice of Egypt) and was granted in 1493.

Saint Maurice

The 'Moor's head' featured in the arms of Freising wears a crown, since it represents one of the Magi, a saint or simply a king. Closer to home, legend has it that the device of the Moir family stemmed from fighting the Moors in Spain; more likely it is simply a pun on their surname - much like that granted to the Blackmore family and confirmed in 1620.

During the 18th century the main branch of the latter family (now using the variant spelling Blakemore but still bearing the same arms) was based at Darlaston [1]. Since Darlaston is less than twenty miles from Sheriffhales, it seems quite likely that the seal belonged to that family and was lost during a local visit. At any rate, still not much evidence of a connection to an "enslaved person", let alone to the "transatlantic slave trade".

"Either way, stereotypical African depictions, with the usual artistic tropes, are very problematic & must be acknowledged."

Absolutely agreed, it's long past time that stereotypical caricatures were consigned to oblivion. If the medieval legacy of heraldry is to be preserved, a modern heraldic depiction of any human being should be utterly free from any racist exaggerations or overtones. However, agreeing that I loathe stereotypical caricatures as much as Mr Westwood has nothing to do with a PAS article that favours sensationalist speculation over sound scholarly objectivity.

"The seal was found close to 2 wealthy C18th estates with Slave Trade connections"

That may well be - a disconcerting number of rich 18th-century families had invested in schemes such as the Royal African Company or benefitted in some way from the sugar, cotton or tobacco industries - but neither the company nor the Leveson-Gower family used that device as their emblem. And the Blakemore family made their money through the iron industry.

Or perhaps it is being seriously proposed that rather than following family tradition, a member of the English landed gentry crassly commissioned the seal as a one-off to gloat over the source of their wealth and advertise that they were nouveau riche? Really?

Sadly, I gather the topic is closed and my input counts for nothing:

"This record is published/green flagged, meaning that it has been written by the FLO, examined by the Treasure Registrar, & at least 1 (poss more) specialist British Museum curators. In addition, the article written by Peter has been checked/examined by specialists/experts in advance of publication. Like it or not, we are experts in portable antiquities & artefacts, & see more Treasure than anybody, thus well placed identify archaeological objects."

Well, that's that then. The PAS and the BM have spoken. But as much as I'd love to doff my cap in subservient awe, forgive me if I don't have undiluted faith in a PAS that described a common Syrian artefact as "Romano-British" and a BM that describes a depiction of Dionysus (1913,1021.2) as "a tragic mask of a woman" [2]. We all make mistakes (including in my own books and articles); the trick is to accept a blow to our ego sometimes and correct them.

In the meantime, I dare say the PAS team feel better for pointlessly letting us know they sympathise with the aims of BLM as if everyone somehow thought they were an isolated pack of Neanderthals. It's just a pity that they ignored the aim of their employment, threw any semblance of detached objectivity out the window and thoughtlessly distorted the reality of an artefact to do so. The phrase "context of diversity" normally refers to accepting different kinds of people, not inventing different versions of the truth.

Despite the misleading subtitle of the Reavill article, the artefact has not shed an iota of light on the transatlantic slave trade (hardly surprising since the artefact has nothing to do with it); the article merely illustrates the validity of Paul Barford's warning about narrativisation. It is a reckless reversal of archaeological practice: instead of dispassionately allowing an artefact to speak for itself and learning from it, a largely irrelevant sermon based on misinformed guesswork and irrational assumption has been clumsily piggybacked onto it.

There is already more than enough pseudo-archaeology in the world, please don't add to it.

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By the way, hopefully Peter Reavill already knows the "Royal portraiture similar to that seen on coinage" is Queen Anne but seems unsure of the others. The "armoured male ‘adventurer’ in cuirassed armour [tautology epidemic?]" is Hannibal, the "classical revival imagery" is Hermes or a Greek hero, and the "18th century male gentleman [is there such a thing as a female one?] in a frock coat" is George III.

While Mr Reavill's failure to recognise common 18th-century iconography is understandable (his strength appears to be the Bronze Age), he was clearly far out of his depth in trying to guess that on an 18th-century seal. It is therefore alarming that despite that inexperience and hyped up almost exclusively on a huge diet of irrelevant slave trade literature rather than proper research (see his 'References') he decided to publish an article about it anyway. And it is even more alarming that his deeply flawed article was apparently "checked/examined by specialists/experts in advance of publication".

Is this the sloppy standard of academic rigour (or indeed copy editing) we should expect from a team of professional "experts in portable antiquities & artefacts"?

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Date:

By their very nature, seals have a traditional character and their designs often tend to be deliberately conservative. Thus, they can be difficult to date precisely. I noticed that many PAS entries refer to previous entries of similar items as a means of determining the date but there is a danger of simply perpetuating an error if the previous entry was itself based on unsound attribution. The dates given in a few entries strike me as somewhat earlier than is likely.

I'm not entirely convinced that the PAS date of "late 17th or very early 18th century (pre-1713)", though conveniently classifying the seal as Treasure when found in 2013, is correct for the item in question. The octagonal shape with beaded border is a common Neoclassical theme which, together with the artistic style of the head, might suggest a later date, perhaps around 1750-1800.

It would be useful to test the standard of the silver. The Britannia standard (95.8%) was in use between 1697 and 1720, after which the Sterling standard (92.5%) was revived. It is not a completely reliable method of dating since there are many exceptions (small items did not always adhere to the law and the Britannia standard has continued alongside Sterling in some cases up to the present day) but it might provide a reasonable clue.

The letter B stamped on the seal is likely to be one of the maker's initials, not a date letter, but tracking him down would be difficult.

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[1] Burke, Sir Bernard, Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry, London 1852, pp.106-7.

[2] see Green, J.R., 'Roman bronze lamps with masks', HEROM 2012, p.32.

Reinventing the wheel (or hook)

Back in November 2019, I noticed a somewhat awkward description of a Roman object on the PAS database (SOM-EFC2F3). Although the object was correctly identified as a 'lamp hook', there seemed to be some doubt and some sort of medical implement was offered as an alternative.

"The finder has suggested that the artefact may instead have been a medical implement. The small diameter of the hooks, their position, with one curving up and one down, and the small suspension loop, all suggest it would be hard to securely suspend a lamp calling in to doubt the existing interpretation."

I used the 'Report a mistake' button at the bottom of the PAS page. I pointed out that the object was indeed undoubtedly a lamp hook and that the confusion may have been due to the fact that the hook was depicted upside down.

It's not a fish hook - designed to dangle in a river. It's a suspension hook - much like that on a coat hanger - designed to hang something from a peg or whatever. The object is much easier to understand when it's the right way up.

The object was not hung from the "suspension loop" (the hole is at the bottom of the object, not "at its top"); it was hung from the large hook near the top and a lamp would have been attached by chains to the hole at the bottom. An example on my website explains their use in more detail.

And as proof of their use, there are many lamps where the hook is still attached. Here are two museum examples.

I received a cordial reply from the FLO. She thanked me and stated she would amend the PAS record. That was back in November but I imagine both the backlog of other work and the disruption of COVID-19 have since delayed that intention.

In the meantime, I have posted this as a reminder to anyone else who is puzzled by such objects. There's no need to reinvent the wheel; the research has already been done long ago and the hooks get a chapter all to themselves in D.M. Bailey, A Catalogue of Lamps in the British Museum, Vol. IV, 1996.

Latest find at Vindolanda

Loving this latest find announced yesterday (15 July 2019) by the Vindolanda Trust. The artefact was merely described as a "beautiful little oil lamp that was uncovered from the Antonine excavation" but I'll flesh that out a bit with my own analysis. The object is a Firmalampe (factory lamp), a late form of Loeschcke Type X, and was made in the Rhineland during the 2nd century AD. Although Trier was the prime production centre, the style and fabric here suggest it was possibly made in Cologne. Many examples bear a maker's mark in raised letters on the base, sometimes of an Italian maker with a branch workshop(?) in the Rhineland, but the marks are less common on this later style.

Oil lamps never really caught on to a large extent in Britain. British-made examples tend to be relatively crude and typically mica-dusted. A large proportion of the oil lamps found in Britain were imported, normally from Gaul, Germany or Italy. They are found mainly in urban or military contexts, and are very rarely found in any context at all after the 2nd or 3rd century.

The likely reasons for their comparative rarity in Britain are the cost of importing olive oil and their unfamiliarity outside urban or military environments. The preferred lighting in most of Britain consisted of open lamps (e.g. Loeschcke Type XI) burning animal fat, or possibly tallow candles.

Dispatches and the Missing Evidence

Having been approached by a member of the production team for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme for my input last year, I watched the final outcome with interest on Monday night ("ISIS and the Missing Treasures", Radio Times, 18 April 2016). For those who missed the first showing there are repeats and a streaming video. And Channel 4 has issued a summary.

The amount of preparation for a TV documentary is impressive and the team must find it painful that the project ultimately has to be ruthlessly edited to cram it into only 30 minutes. Although such programmes may draw on scholarly research, it is of course inevitable that their paramount objective is to attract as large an audience as possible within that short span. Thus, they tend to focus on 'popular', 'topical' and 'compelling' - sometimes even favouring the pull of being 'sensational' at the risk of overlooking a mainstay of true scholarship: impartial objectivity.

The catchy title - ISIS and the Missing Treasures - had an Indiana Jones ring to it. The programme did indeed promise to be sensational. However, I am not entirely convinced that the two main "treasures" featured had much, if any, connection to ISIS (also known as ISIL, IS or whatever other acronym is used to denote an organisation currently calling itself the Islamic State).

A carved stone lintel being offered by a minor dealer in Grays Market, a London antiques arcade, was discovered to have been documented as having formed part of a ruined Jewish building at Nawa in Syria in 1988. The lintel had no provenance and it is almost certain that it was stolen and smuggled - but the question is when and by whom.

The programme's title - plus strategic footage of Islamist forces - inferred the culprits were ISIS. But Nawa was captured by al-Nusra Front and other rebel factions, most recently in November 2014, and al-Nusra Front had already split from ISIS by the end of 2013. So, were the real culprits al-Nusra Front?

It is certainly true that civil strife fosters conditions that encourage and often facilitate looting but pinning the blame on any specific group can be difficult. In the absence of more information, all we can safely say is that the lintel was removed from Syria sometime after 1988 and it is quite possible that those responsible were simply part of one of the looting and smuggling networks that have existed in that part of the world for many decades.

The second "treasure" was a Quran advertised on eBay by a seller using the username 'london_oriental'. A team met up with the seller to examine the book in Copenhagen. A fragment torn from the top of an endpaper suggested that a previous owner's seal or inscription had been removed to hide the fact that the book had been stolen. Although the book was advertised as "Persian", an expert identified it as 19th/20th century and "suspect[ed] it was originally taken from a Syrian library". The freshness of the tear on the endpaper caused another expert to speculate that it had been "probably removed quite recently" (though in fact paper tears can remain fresh-looking for decades).

The book may well have been stolen from a Syrian library - but again the question is when and by whom. Objects stolen from various places have been filtering onto the black market for centuries.

The programme's caption on the Channel 4 website - "A battle to stop the Isis cashing in on looted antiquities is being waged in the UK" - expresses a noble aim but, even leaving aside the notion that a modern Quran is an "antiquity" in the first place, the documentary failed to track down a single object in the UK that had definitely been looted from Syria or Iraq since civil unrest began in 2011, let alone one that had definitely helped to fund ISIS.

The Channel 4 Dispatches programme was quite right to emphasise that buyers must insist on a provenance when considering the purchase of any object they even vaguely suspect may have been stolen, and it made attempts to give a balanced view of the situation. However, we are still left wondering why the media is fixated only on ISIS (it is far from being the sole reason for Syria's appalling loss of its heritage both before and during the crisis) and, despite wild claims, just how much money that organisation is really making from the sale of antiquities. And how many of those antiquities are really reaching the UK.

Even only one object is one object too many and we must be utterly vigilant but this programme did nothing to dispel the suspicion that the involvement of the UK market in ISIS loot may be greatly exaggerated. If it is not exaggerated, that omission is counterproductive. If it is, we are largely left tilting at windmills for the sake of sensationalism.

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Images are screenshots from a named TV programme used for the purpose of review.

British tabloid reveals the truth about detecting?

An article in a British tabloid ("Is there a fortune buried in your back garden? As metal detector sales soar, we join Britain's treasure-hunting boom", Daily Mail, 22 December 2015) - brazenly in the "Money" section - has elicited an enthusiastically approving response from an American coin dealer that the world of metal detecting is "not what Barfy would have us think it is" (presumably referring to criticisms of some of the more thoughtless aspects of the hobby by Paul Barford).

Indeed, I'm sure the dealer is quite right ... because Ruth Lythe, a writer for the Daily Mail, knows far more about archaeology than archaeologists. The best way to discover our past is for tens of thousands of people to dig up as many metal bits out of the ground as fast as they can in the hope of finding treasure and making a fortune. How could any archaeologist or historian possibly object to that?

(For those unfamiliar with British humour, I'll provide a hint that there may be a degree of sarcasm hidden in my post.)

Yugoslavia anyone? A future for Syria and Iraq ...

Hmm, so the West (Britain and France) created two huge artificial political "nations" named Syria and Iraq by simplistically drawing lines on a map during and after World War I - largely based on competing imperialist claims to oil but almost completely ignoring the ancient tribal/cultural differences of the regions within those artificial "nations" they created. And now, surprised at the lack of homogeneity and the inherent violent internal rivalry caused or inflamed by their short-sighted creation and exacerbated even further by their bungled attempts to "fix" what was already wrong to begin with, the West's proposed solution is to simply bomb one of the most bitter factions into submission.

Yeah right, like that's gonna work ... because a sure way to stop people being bitter about perceived inequality and injustice - so bitter in fact that their desperate situation provides a fertile breeding ground for extremists to gain power - is to make them even more bitter. 

'Islamic State' is a symptom of the frustration of that wider faction, not the cause. A lasting solution to the crisis in Syria and Iraq can only be achieved by addressing some of the basic causes of the bitterness and hostility rather than merely snipping at the symptoms. One of those causes was compounded by the political insensitivity of the West in the early 20th century.

Nations that have formed and evolved naturally over the ages tend to have done so because the overwhelming majority of its population throughout its territory broadly shares a common culture. But a "nation" created artificially by outside powers may have no such natural unity. The fabrication of arbitrary political boundaries that ignore substantial internal populations of opposing cultures can so easily be a recipe for injustice, violent friction and even genocide. Where the government of that "nation" is a dictatorship, the result can be humanitarian disaster and even where it is ostensibly a democracy, the result can be the subjugation of a very sizeable minority to the overall will of a hostile majority and widespread abuse. 

There may come a time when Syria and Iraq can overcome the difficulties of fairly and peacefully accommodating a diverse population but, in the meantime, it may be worth considering proposals to divide the territory at least temporarily into districts that more sensitively reflect the current gulfs. 

But I guess bombing people is so much easier than the West admitting the borders were totally mucked up in the first place, helping to renegotiate them properly and sensibly to reflect the reality of people rather than just oil this time around, and redrawing the stupid map.

Yugoslavia anyone? Maps - and the practice of lumping inherently incompatible cultures all together into the artificial "nations" created by them - are NOT immutable. When the old cartographic divisions so obviously ain't working and instead are causing human suffering on a massive scale, change them!

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My apologies for veering from the primary topic of this blog but I am somewhat irritated by the reluctance of the West to fully acknowledge its part in contributing to this situation and to take responsibility for helping to resolve it in a sensible manner.