Newport ship – ten years on

 Secrets of life on Newport’s medieval ship revealed

In the summer of 2002, thousands flocked to the banks of the River Usk in Newport (Casnewydd), to see a piece of history.
In the middle of a building site, the mud had been cleared to reveal the 500-year-old remains of a trading ship.
Built in 1447, it is the world’s best preserved example of a 15th Century vessel. Nearly ten years after it was uncovered, archaeologists are still making new discoveries about life on board.
They hope that in the next decade the ship will be rebuilt and put on display in its own museum.
Charles Ferris, from the Friends of the Newport Ship group, remembers the excitement as news of the discovery spread.
“It was amazing, it was absolutely palpable. I often think the Newport ship floats on a sea of goodwill,” he said.
“The Newport public did us proud and came out to support her in their thousands. People used to queue for two to three hours just to see her.”
The timbers were uncovered during work to build the  Riverfront Theatre and Arts Centre. After a  campaign to ensure it was preserved, the ship was moved timber by timber to an industrial unit nearby.
Around 2,000 oak timbers have been preserved in chemically-treated water tanks.
For almost 10 years, archaeologists have been carefully working through hundreds of boxes of  artefacts that were also salvaged from the mud.
Toby Jones, curator of the Newport medieval ship project, said: “We have literally thousands of things like shoes, coins, animal bones, fish bones, nuts, seeds, pollen.
“It’s all very interesting and can tell you so much about what life was like back in the medieval period.”
But it would be wrong to assume that by now, all of the ship’s secrets have been revealed. As the tenth anniversary of its discovery approaches in 2012, experts are still making new findings.
Mr Jones added: “A piece of rope was found during the excavation. It’s incredibly well preserved.
“It’s so well preserved we can tell its structure, how it’s made and the material it was made from, its overall size and how strong it would’ve been and, therefore, what it was used for in the ship.
“We only dug this out of the mud two weeks ago. This is what routinely shows up. Really nice examples that we didn’t even know we had.”
Items found include  a medieval shoe once considered the height of fashion
The industrial unit is more of a laboratory than a museum and so a study is now being carried out to find a suitable site, or building, to permanently display the ship.
The plan is to rebuild it, timber by timber, but space is an issue. When it was built, it would’ve been the length of three double-decker buses.
“Building the ship is actually going to take two to three years in itself,” said Mr Jones.
“We’re actually going to build the ship in the same order that they built the original ship in the medieval period. We’re going to learn just as much in that phase of the project as we’ve learned so far.
“When you go to see the ship in a museum in five or six years, rebuilt, you’re not going to need any imagination. It’s going to look like a ship and it’s going to blow you away.”

Update

 Newport’s medieval ship goes into the deep freeze
NEWPORT’S historic medieval ship will be preserved for generations to come following the start of a freeze drying process yesterday.
The  ship, believed to date back to the 15th century, will have all of its 2,000 timbers placed in a six tonne, custom-built freeze dryer.
The process, expected to be completed in 2014, will remove excess water and once complete, will leave the timbers dry to the touch meaning they can be handled more easily.
The preserved timbers will then be stored until arrangements are made for them to be placed on display.
The ship’s curator, Toby Jones, said it was a great way to mark the ten year anniversary of its discovery.
He said: “The ship will now be preserved for generations to come to discover and enjoy, and means that work can continue to discover even more about its exciting history.”
The vessel was discovered in the banks of the River Usk in June 2002 during construction of the Riverfront Theatre.
It was excavated piece by piece by a team of archaeologists and is one of the largest and best preserved examples of a ship from this period ever found in the UK.
It is currently stored at an industrial unit in Maesglas but it is hoped it will eventually be housed in its own museum.
The authority recently applied for a £21,000 Welsh Government grant to fund a digital reconstruction of the ship based on archaeological evidence, traditional ship building knowledge and historical research.
It is hoped this could be used to help guide the reassembly of its timbers once they have been preserved.
To celebrate the ten year anniversary of its discovery, a series of videos have been produced detailing the preservation process.

Newport’s medieval ship set to mark decade of discovery

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Silverdale Hoard

Silverdale Viking hoard declared treasure
An exciting discovery which has made history has been declared as treasure. Carnforth man Darren Webster, 39, found a viking hoard while ‘killing an hour or two’ by going metal detecting in Silverdale.
The collection of coins, ingots, jewellery and pieces of silver, included a coin bearing the inscription AIRDECONUT, which is thought to mean the Scandinavian name Harthacnut, a ruler not previously known. It was declared treasure by Lancashire deputy coroner Simon Jones at a hearing today (Friday 16th December 2011).

A preliminary valuation is expected in mid-January, and could be bought by  Lancaster City Museum, if enough funds can be raised.
Mr Webster has agreed to split the money 50-50 with the owner of the land where the treasure was found.

A selection of objects and coins from the Silverdale Hoard will be on display at the British Museum in Room 2, from Thursday 15 December through the New Year.

BBC News: In pictures

Udal sand dune multiperiod evidence

 New study of Western Isles’ sand dune-buried artefacts

New research is being carried out on artefacts recovered from a site where evidence was found for every age from the Neolithic to the 20th Century.
Archaeology at Udal provides an “unbroken timeline” of occupation from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Viking, Medieval through to the 1900s.
Some of the evidence at the site on North Uist was preserved by wind-blown sand dunes.
Archaeologist Ian Crawford excavated Udal between 1963 and 1995.
The earliest Neolithic layers he revealed consisted of a line of stones with a large upright stone nicknamed the great auk stone because of its resemblance to the extinct seabird.We are one step closer to understanding what was discovered beneath the sand dunes”
Deborah Anderson Regional archaeologist
A deep shaft containing quartz pebbles which had been covered over with a whale’s vertebrae was also uncovered.
From the Bronze Age, finds included a skeleton and from the Iron Age evidence of metal work.
Also from the Iron Age were the remains of homes dubbed Jelly Baby houses because the shape of them looked like the sweets.
Evidence of a Viking longhouse and later occupation during the 1600s through to the 18th and 19th centuries were also found.
From the early 20th Century was a saw pit for cutting up wrecked boats.
Crawford’s collection is in the care of Western Isles local authority, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.
The comhairle believes the site on the Grenitote peninsula to be one of the most important of its kind in the world.
It said the preservation of relics by being buried under sand was rare outside of the Middle East.
The comhairle has received £85,000 from the Museum Association’s Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund to carry out the most complete post-excavation research to be done so far on the site and its finds.
Historic Scotland is assisting with the study.
Money from the grant will also be used to investigate the potential for an archaeological resource centre on  North Uist.
Evidence of Viking occupation included a longhouse
Councillor Archie Campbell said the £85,000 grant would help islanders and the comhairle achieve a vision.
He said: “The local community has been waiting nearly 50 years to learn about what was discovered beneath the sand dunes and to see the finds for themselves.
“Long before the material was released by Ian Crawford the community made it clear that their wish was for the collections to be returned to the islands on a permanent basis.
“This grant will go towards achieving that vision by funding a feasibility study into the potential of the Udal collections as the basis for an archaeological resource centre and the impact it would have on the islands’ economy.”
Deborah Anderson, regional archaeologist with the comhairle, welcomed the funding towards better understanding the collection.
She said: “This is an assemblage which is not just important to the Outer Hebrides but which is essential to help date other collections from the west coast of Scotland and Ireland.
“The local community will no doubt be thrilled that we have received this grant, and we are one step closer to understanding what was discovered beneath the sand dunes.”

Jane Austen ‘lost portrait’

 Jane Austen biographer discovers ‘lost portrait’

Jane Austen scholar  Dr Paula Byrne claims to have discovered a lost portrait of the author which, far from depicting a grumpy spinster, shows a writer at the height of her powers and a woman comfortable in her own skin.
The only accepted portraits of Austen to date are  her sister Cassandra’s 1810 sketch, in which she looks cross,

and an 1870 adaptation of that picture. But when Byrne, biographer of Evelyn Waugh and Mary “Perdita” Robinson and with an Austen biography due out in 2013, was given a portrait of a female author acquired by her husband, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, at auction, she was immediately struck by the possibility that it could be a lost drawing of Austen.
The portrait drawing, in graphite on vellum, had been in a private collection for years, and was being auctioned as an “imaginary portrait” of Austen, with “Miss Jane Austin” written on the back. “When my husband bought it he thought it was a reasonable portrait of a nice lady writer, but I instantly had a visceral reaction to it. I thought it looks like her family. I recognised the Austen nose, to be honest, I thought it was so striking, so familiar,” Byrne told the Guardian. “The idea that it was an imaginary portrait – that seemed to me to be a crazy theory. That genre doesn’t exist, and this looks too specific, too like the rest of her family, to have been drawn from imagination.”
Byrne pointed out that Austen did not become famous until 1870, 50 years after her death, and the portrait has been dated to the early 19th century, around 1815, on the basis of the subject’s clothes. “Why would someone have wanted to draw her from their imagination, when she was not popular at that time?” she asked.
She approached the BBC, and together they put together a documentary on the portrait, working with various experts including art historians, fashion experts and forensic analysts on the picture’s background. “We approached it with an open mind,” said Byrne. “We tried to cover all leads, and in the end we put our findings to three top Jane Austen scholars, and two out of three thought it was her.” The scholars were Professor Kathryn Sutherland from Oxford University, Professor Claudia Johnson from Princeton and Austen expert  Deirdre Le Faye. Sutherland and Johnson both agreed the picture was Austen; Le Faye did not. “She thinks it is an imaginary portrait. I did try so hard to find one single example of an imaginary portrait, but nobody could find one – they just don’t exist,” said Byrne. “But it’s great to have the debate – it opens up a very interesting question about who Jane Austen was and who we want her to be.”
If, as Byrne believes it is, the portrait is indeed Austen, then it shows a “very, very different” version of the writer than she has been seen as in the past, she said.
“The previous portrait is a very sentimentalised Victorian view of ‘Aunt Jane’, someone who played spillikins, who just lurked in the shadows with her scribbling. But it seems to me that it’s very clear from her letters that Jane Austen took great pride in her writing, that she was desperate to be taken seriously,” said Byrne. “This new picture first roots her in a London setting – by Westminster Abbey. And second, it presents her as a professional woman writer; there are pens on the table, a sheaf of paper. She seems to be a woman very confident in her own skin, very happy to be presented as a professional woman writer and a novelist, which does fly in the face of the cutesy, heritage spinster view.”
The documentary, Jane Austen: The Unseen Portrait?, is due to air on BBC2 on Boxing Day.

Forensic artist Melissa Little created this likeness of Jane Austen using contemporary descriptive accounts from Jane’s brothers, nephews and nieces. Melissa learned these techniques whilst working for police authorities in the UK and USA.

The Lewis Chessmen* – the debate continues….

….with a Norwegian counter argument to the Icelandic claim – by Morten Lilleøren: The Lewis Chessmen on a Fantasy Iceland.

*They are a collection of chess pieces, handcrafted in the 12th century from walrus tusks and whale teeth and discovered on the Isle of Lewis. The little figures were also the inspiration for Noggin the Nog.