2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Site

in Food & Drink, History | July 5th, 2024

Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Found in Speyer, Germany, in 1867, it dates from 350 AD, making it a venerable vintage indeed, but one recently outdone by a bottle first discovered five years ago in Carmona, near Seville, Spain. “At the bottom of a shaft found during construction work,” an excavation team “uncovered a sealed burial chamber from the early first century C.E. — untouched for 2,000 years,” writes Scientific American’s Lars Fischer. Inside was “a glass urn placed in a lead case was filled to the brim with a reddish liquid,” only recently determined to be wine — and therefore wine about three centuries older than the Speyer bottle.

You can read about the relevant research in this new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola and his team. “The wine from the Carmona site was no longer suitable for drinking, and it had never been intended for that purpose,” writes Fischer.

“The experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bottom of the glass vessel. The burial chamber was the final resting place for the remains of the deceased, who were cremated according to Roman custom.” Only through chemical analysis were the researchers finally able to determine that the liquid was, in fact, wine, and thus to put together evidence of the arrangement’s being an elaborate sendoff for a Roman-era oenophile.

Though the funerary ritual “involved two men and two women,” says CBS News, the remains in the wine came from only one of the men. This makes sense, as, “according to the study, women in ancient Rome were prohibited from drinking wine.” What a difference a couple of millennia make: today the cultural image slants somewhat female, especially in the case of white wine, which, despite having “acquired a reddish hue,” the liquid unearthed in Carmona was chemically determined to be. With the summer now getting into full swing, this story might inspire us to beat the heat by putting a bottle of our favorite Chardonnay, Riesling, or Pinot Grigio in the refrigerator — a convenience unimagined by even the wealthiest wine-loving citizens of the Roman Empire.

via Scientific American

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How a Steady Supply of Coffee Helped the Union Win the U.S. Civil War

in Food & Drink, History | July 3rd, 2024

Americans doing “e‑mail jobs” and working in the “laptop class” tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something in common with Civil War soldiers. “Union soldiers were given 36 pounds of coffee a year by the government, and they made their daily brew everywhere and with everything: with water from canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud,” write NPR’s Kitchen Sisters. “The Confederacy, on the other hand, was decidedly less caffeinated. As soon as the war began, the Union blockaded Southern ports and cut off the South’s access to coffee.”

Smithsonian National Museum of American History curator Jon Grinspan tells of how “desperate Confederate soldiers would invent makeshift coffees,” roasting “rye, rice, sweet potatoes or beets until they were dark, chocolaty and caramelized. The resulting brew contained no caffeine, but at least it was something warm and brown and consoling.” (See video at bottom of the post.) The stark caffeination differential that resulted must count as one of many factors that led to the Union’s ultimate victory. Part of what kept their coffee supplies robust was imports from Liberia, the African republic that had been established earlier in the nineteenth century by freed American slaves.

“The Union’s ability to purchase and distribute coffee from Liberia, alongside other sources, was helping the army’s morale,” writes Bronwen Everill at Smithsonian.com. “In December 1862, one soldier wrote that ‘what keeps me alive must be the coffee.’ ” Meanwhile, a northern general famously gave this advice to other generals: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold.” Many harrowing battles later, “at the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Michigan soldier William Smith noted that the Confederate soldiers present were licking their lips hopefully, with ‘a keen relish for a cup of Yankee coffee.’ ” (Johnny Reb had presumably acquired this taste between those battles, when soldiers from both sides would meet and exchange goods.)

The Civil War in Four Minutes video above explains the coffee-drinking Yankee’s habits in more detail. “If there was an early morning march, the first order of business was to boil water and make coffee,” says actor-historian Douglas Ullman Jr. “If there was a halt along the march, the first order of business when the march stopped was to get that hot water going to drink more coffee.” Soldiers would keep their coffee and meager sugar rations in the same bag in order to ensure “the tiniest hint of sugar in every drop. Think about that the next time you order your caramel soy macchiato.” But such beverages were still a long way off after the Civil War, which gave way to the era of what we now call the Wild West — and with it, the heyday of cowboy coffee.

via Smithsonian Magazine

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtub

in History, Photography | July 2nd, 2024

In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing company. Not long thereafter, Miller, who’d been studying at the Art Students League of New York, appeared on the cover of Vogue. It’s tempting to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descriptor fits uneasily with the arc of her seventy years, during the last few decades of which she could never quite recover from having witnessed first-hand the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau — sights she shared with the American public as a war photographer.

Miller took pictures of not just the concentration camps, but also events like the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous picture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer later shot himself in his bunker.

Behind the camera in that instance was Life correspondent David E. Scherman, one of the notable men in Miller’s life. Others included the artist-writer Roland Penrose, the businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and, before all of them, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, each of whom corresponded to a phase of the professional journey that took her from fashion model to fearless photojournalist.

You can see and hear that journey recounted by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video at the top of the post. Just above is a British Pathé newsreel that shows Miller at home with Penrose in 1946, the year between the end of the war and the birth of their son Antony Penrose, who re-discovered and re-publicized his mother’s photography after her death in 1977. However belated her public recognition, it’s still surprising that a life like Miller’s, the events of which stretch even Hollywood plausibility, only became a movie last year. Lee still awaits wide release, but much has been written about the passion of star Kate Winslet that got it made. She’ll undoubtedly impress as Miller — but neither, rumor has it, is Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg’s David E. Scherman a performance to be missed.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum

in History | June 28th, 2024

Even if a student assigned Beowulf is, at first, dismayed by its language, that same student may well be captivated by its setting. While that mythical but somehow both gloriously and dankly realistic realm of kings and dragons, mead halls and bog monsters may feel familiar to fantasy enthusiasts, it’s also strange on a deeper level; this story, any modern reader will feel, is in no sense a product of our own time. In order to concretely envision both the action of that epic and the culture that gave rise to it, it helps to examine artifacts from around the same place and time in history. To find such things, we need look no further than Sutton Hoo.

Beowulf is set in the fifth and sixth centuries; Sutton Hoo is an archaeological site whose contents date from the sixth to seventh centuries. Located “in the eastern part of England, in a county called Suffolk, which at that time was part of the East Anglian kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England,” it consists of “a grave made in the middle of a 27-meter-long ship that was buried beneath a gigantic earth mound, and inside a burial chamber that was placed in the middle of the ship were laid out some amazing treasures drawn from all over the known world at that time.” So says Sue Brunning, curator of the European early medieval collections at the British Museum, in one Curator’s Corner videos that provide close-up views and explanations of a couple of particularly important Sutton Hoo artifacts.

This helmet and sword (with other Anglo-Saxon swords also brought out for comparison) are associated with King Rædwald of East Anglia. Beowulf, you’ll remember, opens with the funeral of the Danish king Scyld Scefing, and takes place entirely in Scandinavia. But the similarity between the elaborate ornamentation on the Sutton Hoo artifacts and that on comparable objects unearthed in eastern Sweden suggests a connection between those regions in that era, and Beowulf itself may have been composed in East Anglia. It takes some imagination to picture this seventeen-century-old helmet and sword intact and in their prime, but however they looked, one surely wouldn’t have turned down the extra confidence they’d have provided in a showdown with Grendel.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the 18th-Century French Media Stoked a Werewolf Panic

in Art, History | June 25th, 2024

If you’ve studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux. Known in English as The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, it casts its players as hunters, thieves, seers, and other types of rural villagers in the distant past. By night, some players also happen to be werewolves, liable to devour the others in their sleep. Though such beings may never actually have existed, they loom fairly large in French popular culture still today — not least, perhaps, because they loomed even larger two and a half centuries ago, such that history now acknowledges a period called the French Werewolf Epidemic.

“In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère),” says the Public Domain Review. “The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as ‘the Beast’; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex.”

In the press, which speculated on this fearsome creature’s preferred methods of attack (decapitation, blood-drinking, etc.), “illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief.”

By the winter of 1764–65, “the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year.” In September of 1756, a lieutenant named François Antoine “shot the enormous ‘Wolf of Chazes,’ which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.” This didn’t stop the killings, but “by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.”

“The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf,” says Dangerous Minds. “They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767.” As to what the animal actually was, theories abound: maybe an unusually large or rabid wolf, maybe a hyena, maybe even a lion. As for the more fantastical theories that captured the public imagination of the time, they may have passed into the realm of myth, but those myths continue to inspire literature, film, television, and games. And as anyone who’s played Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux a few times understands, the werewolf’s luck usually runs out.

via Messy Nessy

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Sci-Fi Writers Isaac Asimov & Robert Heinlein Contributed to the War Effort During World War II

in History, Sci Fi, Science | June 24th, 2024

Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague De Camp at the Navy Yard in 1944

Robert Heinlein was born in 1907, which put him on the mature side by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II. Isaac Asimov, his younger colleague in science fiction, was born in 1920 (or thereabouts), and thus of prime fighting age. But in the event, they made most of their contribution to the war effort in the same place, the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. By 1942, Heinlein had become the preeminent sci-fi writer in America, and the 22-year-old Asimov, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia, had already made a name for himself in the field. It was Heinlein, who’d signed on to run a materials testing laboratory at the Yard, who brought Asimov into the military-research fold.

Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”

Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.

Their time together in Philadephia wasn’t long. “As the war ended, Asimov was drafted into the Army, where he spent nine months before he was able to leave, where he returned to his studies and writing,” according to Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews. “Heinlein contemplated returning to writing full time, as a viable career, rather than as a side exercise.” When he left the Naval Aviation Experimental Station, “he resumed writing and working on placing stories in magazines.” In the decades thereafter, Heinlein’s work took on an increasingly militaristic sensibility, and Asimov’s became more and more concerned with the enterprise of human civilization broadly speaking. But pinning down the influence of their war on their work is an exercise best left to the sci-fi scholars.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Beautiful Purple Dye from Snail Glands

in History | June 20th, 2024

Much has been written about the loss of color in the twenty-first century. Our environments offered practically every color known to man not so very long ago — and in certain eras, granted, it got to be a bit much. But now, everything seems to have retreated to a narrow palette of grays and browns, not to mention stark black and white. We should consider the possibility that this time of “color loss” is a kind of ascetic repentance after a long feast. That analogy holds on more than one level: technology and industrialization made food abundant and thus inexpensive, and it did the very same thing with colors.

There was a time when colors didn’t come cheap. People had plenty of black, reds, and browns in their lives, but producing the pigments for hues not often seen in nature entailed going to the ends of the earth (or in the case of ultramarine blue, the bottom of the sea). We all know that, for a long time starting around the day of Julius Caesar, purple was the color of royalty. The choice wasn’t an accident: Caesar’s “Tyrian purple” of choice was extravagantly expensive, owing to the fact that it could be extracted only from the glands of a particular Mediterranean sea snail. You can learn more about this process from the Business Insider video above.

“Thousands of snails were required to produce a single ounce of purple dye,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, quoting Pliny the Elder. Though well understood for a few decades now, the world of ancient purple-dye production continues to yield scientific discoveries. “Archaeologists were excavating recently in the Bronze Age town of Kolonna, on the Greek island of Aegina, when they discovered two Mycenaean buildings,” Anderson writes. “As the researchers write in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the buildings date to the 16th century B.C.E., and the older one contained pigmented ceramics, grinding tools and heaps of broken mollusk shells: all indicative of a purple dye factory.”

Notably, these well-preserved 3,600-year-old ruins date from a time long before purple acquired its prestige. “There is no indication in the Bronze Age that purple was a symbol of power and that purple-colored textiles were only reserved for the elite or leaders, as in Roman or Byzantine times,” says archaeologist Lydia Berger, co-author of the study. And when the Byzantine Empire fell, the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost with it, only to be recovered early in this century. These days, one does hear occasional rumors of a color comeback, and a rich purple leading the charge would bring with it a certain historical satisfaction. In any case, we all remember one cultural royal in particular who surely would have approved.

via Smithsonian

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Medievalist Professor Answers Medieval Questions From Twitter: Why Is It called the “Middle” Ages?, What Did Medieval English Sound Like?, and More

in History | June 20th, 2024

From Wired comes this: “Professor of English and Medieval Literature Dr. Dorsey Armstrong answers your questions about the Middle Ages from Twitter. Why is it called the “Middle” Ages? [What did medieval English sound like?] What activities did people do for fun? Why were animals tried in court for crimes? Answers to these questions and many more await—it’s Medieval Support.”

The Purdue professor has also created a number of well-reviewed lecture series on The Great Courses. Pro tip: If you are a member of Audible.com, you can get a number of them for free.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Site

How a Steady Supply of Coffee Helped the Union Win the U.S. Civil War

The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtub

A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum

How the 18th-Century French Media Stoked a Werewolf Panic

How Sci-Fi Writers Isaac Asimov & Robert Heinlein Contributed to the War Effort During World War II

How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Beautiful Purple Dye from Snail Glands

Medievalist Professor Answers Medieval Questions From Twitter: Why Is It called the “Middle” Ages?, What Did Medieval English Sound Like?, and More

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