History

The archaeological site of Werowocomoco, Chief Powhatan’s capital city when the Jamestown colony was founded in 1607, is no longer in danger of development and destruction thanks to a new agreement between the property owners and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. The conservation easement will protect the site from development and keep it open to future archaeological exploration. Examining records and maps left by explorer Captain John Smith, among other primary sources, in 2003 historians identified the 57 acre site overlooking the York River in Tidewater, Virginia, as the likely center of Powhatan’s vast chiefdom. Subsequent archaeological excavations confirmed the identification, but they’ve barely scraped the surface. Only 2% of the site has been explored thus far. Landowners Robert and Lynn Ripley have generously allowed archaeologists to excavate the site for the past decade, and now that the easement agreement has been made, their generosity will extend in perpetuity giving researchers all the time they need to dig wider and deeper. Werowocomoco means “place of chiefs” or “place of power” in the Powhatan language and it was no overstatement. Chief Powhatan — real name Wahunsunacawh — created a confederation of tribes whose territory, called Tsenacommacah meaning “densely-populated land,” stretched from the Eastern Shore of Virginia west to a fall line near I-95. All the tribes had their own chiefs who all paid tribute to Wahunsunacawh. Werowocomoco was the seat of religious and temporal power of the Powhatan paramountcy. Powhatan’s chiefdom covered 30 political divisions and a population of 15,000 to 20,000 people while Jamestown settlers struggled to survive. Excavations have yielded the outline of the largest longhouse ever found in Virginia and a system of ditches that may have separated sacred and secular areas. Randolph Turner, a retired state archaeologist whose hunt for Werewocomoco dates to the 1970s, said Powhatan’s empire was “one of the most complex political entities in all of eastern North America.” The leader “had the power of life and death” and expanded his empire through warfare or the threat of warfare. “He’s one of the most interesting political and military figures that I’ve ever read about,” Turner said. “And we’re just getting hints in the historical records of all he accomplished in his lifetime.” Werowocomoco is an invaluable resource on the life of Powhatan, his chiefdom and culture, all the more so because much of what is commonly known about the great man has been filtered through the perspective of the Jamestown colonists. Notice the title of the article about the easement: “Virginia site of Pocahontas rescue will be preserved.” That’s a reference to the almost certainly apocryphal story that Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas threw herself bodily over John Smith to save him from being executed by her father in 1607. Members of the area’s Pamunkey tribe have been involved in the excavations from the beginning, getting their hands dirty in the dig, working with archaeologists to ensure the site is treated with respect and burial grounds are not disturbed. The preservation and continuing exploration of Werowocomoco will reveal their history without the constant and irritating forced connection to Jamestown and the various associated legends. Ashley Atkins, a Pamunkey member and College of William & Mary doctoral candidate put its neatly: “I want people to understand there was a real civilization, a complex cultural community that existed prior to European colonization. Europeans didn’t bring civilization. They brought a lot of other things, some good, some bad.”

This site catalogues the Presidents and their religious associations. My biggest issue is that the often do several per president, which I get on one level and yet on another, I think they should have picked the one they most identified with. This site also is a combination of good sources and ones I would never use. So it is neat and can provide some interesting information, but definitely use with care!

Sept. 27, 1954. Smithtown, New York. "Smithtown Shopping Center. General view." Meet you at Play Mart in an hour. Photo by Sam Gottscho. View full size.

"Jamie -- Wooddale 10-19-57." Our latest slide from the Linda Kodachromes. Construct your own narrative from the various cues and clues! View full size.

Dec. 5, 1929. Ignition interference from airplane engines on aircraft is largely a myth according to C. Francis Jenkins, Washington, D.C., inventor who has designed a radio receiving set which he says does not pick up noises from a flying power plant. In this photograph is shown Mr. Jenkins (right) and his laboratory assistant. Video pioneer Francis Jenkins, seen here last week, and an anonymous protege who has a telegraph key strapped to his leg. By our reckoning this counts as early mobile texting. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative. View full size.

Sydney’s Nicholson Museum will be exhibiting a Lego reconstruction of the Athenian Acropolis on 6th – 7th July. From: Timeout Sydney Lego Acropolis 06-07 Jul Nicholson Museum’s next monumental (Lego) show Having conquered the Lego Colosseum, the Nicholson Museum have engaged master builder Ryan McNaught (Australia’s only registered Lego builder) to recreate the 5th Century BC Acropolis of Athens, alongside the later Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a large stone amphitheatre built in 161AD. McNaught’s creations will be the centrepiece of this exhibition, which also features ancient Greek archaeological artefacts from the Nicholson Museum’s collection, including sculpture, pottery, and photographs of the Acropolis from the 1890s. There’s also (of course) a designated Lego construction site, for budding builders. Lego Acropolis will open with a weekend of family activities, on July 6-7, during which visitors can handle ancient artefacts, meet an ancient Greek hoplite soldier, and explore Greek mythology, among other things. Lego Acropolis details Nicholson Museum Address The University of Sydney Manning Rd Camperdown 2006 Telephone 02 9351 2274

Federal agents in the USA have siezed artefacts valued at over £100 million over the last two years, from dealer Subhash Kapoor. Kapoor is currently awaiting trial in India & has been described as one of the world’s most prolific antiquity smugglers. From: Los Angeles Times Feds pursue Manhattan art dealer suspected of smuggling Agents seize art from a Madison Avenue gallery owner, saying evidence could unravel the biggest antiquities smuggling network identified since the 1990s. By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times June 11, 2013, 5:30 a.m. Federal agents have seized an estimated $100 million in art over the last two years from a prominent Manhattan antiquities dealer they describe as one of the most prolific antiquities smugglers in the world. Subhash Kapoor, a 64-year-old American citizen, awaits trial in India, where he is accused of being part of an antiquities smuggling ring that American and Indian investigators say spanned continents. U.S. authorities have issued their own arrest warrant for Kapoor, saying they have evidence he supplied stolen art to leading museums around the world. In a series of raids on his Manhattan gallery and storage facilities last year, investigators with Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized dozens of artifacts along with Kapoor’s business records. Among the objects seized were a 2nd century BC pillar sculpture valued at nearly $18 million and a 5-foot tall head of Buddha weighing approximately 1,600 pounds, investigators say. Records show that Kapoor provided clients with false ownership histories indicating the objects he sold or donated had been in private collections for decades. Other evidence — including shipping documents and digital images sent to Kapoor by alleged smugglers — show that many of those objects had been recently imported from India and other countries, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with people familiar with the probes. Since 1974, Kapoor and his Madison Avenue gallery Art of the Past have sold or donated ancient art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toledo Museum in Ohio and others. Abroad, his clients included the Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris; the Museum f¿r Indische Kunst in Berlin; the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto; the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore; and the National Gallery of Australia. To date none of the museums has been accused of possessing stolen art or conspiring with Kapoor. Several have acknowledged having objects from Kapoor but declined to comment on the ongoing investigations. Kapoor’s attorney, Christopher Kane of New York, did not respond to requests for comment. The evidence could unravel the biggest antiquities smuggling network identified since the 1990s, authorities say. “It’s one of our most significant antiquities and artifacts investigations that we’ve conducted,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent in Charge James T. Hayes said in an interview after a raid last year. The National Gallery of Australia is the first museum to publicly grapple with its ties to Kapoor, in part because American and Indian investigators revealed last July that they had traced a costly stolen sculpture of dancing Shiva to the museum. Last month, museum director Ron Radford told a committee of Australia’s senate that he was confident the Shiva and some 20 other objects acquired from Kapoor had not been stolen because the museum had ownership histories dating to before 1970. But detailed records on several objects that Kapoor sold to the National Gallery of Australia show that they were photographed in India and exported from there years after the ownership histories indicated they had left that country — and long after India’s 1972 law prohibited the export of cultural artifacts. In 2005, Indian

Jack Lemmon in The Apartment. 1960. USA. Directed by Billy Wilder These notes accompany screenings of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment on June 19, 20, and 21 in Theater 3. The Apartment won three Oscars for Billy Wilder as producer, director, and co-screenwriter. It is hard to recall a film so honored that is also so cynical (spoiler alert: in spite of its over-the-top romantic ending) or so lacking in visual elegance—both of which are typically valid criticisms of Wilder’s work. The Motion Picture Academy could have recognized the genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that year, or even sprawling epics like Otto Preminger’s Exodus or Elia Kazan’s Wild River, but The Apartment seemed to have touched a contemporary, and possibly raw, nerve. Like the New Wave directors in France at the time, Wilder allows himself a few in-jokes: evoking his earlier Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend; poking fun at Marilyn Monroe (star of his recent The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot), whom he had come to dislike and who is embodied here by a look-alike/impersonator (Joyce Jameson); and mocking television’s destruction of classic movies (Grand Hotel, Stagecoach) with crappy reception and endless commercials. As always, Wilder presents all this with a subversive edginess. Bertrand Tavernier, the French director of The Clockmaker and ‘Round Midnight, succeeded the Godard/Truffaut/Chabrol/Rivette/Rohmer generation at Cahiers du Cinéma. He said recently: “The auteur theory is still working, but it has been caricatured. It was saying that within the best films of a director…you have an author…where he really had a chance of expressing his ideas. But the notion then came that the people working round him are less important. This is a mistake! This is a mistake!” Wilder is a particularly good example for making Tavernier’s point. Romanian-born I. A. L. Diamond began writing (or co-writing) Wilder’s films with Love in the Afternoon, and from that point they collaborated on all of them (with the lone exception of 1957′s Witness for the Prosecution) until the end of their respective careers. Diamond, almost a generation younger than Wilder, shared the director’s cynical subversiveness, and it is hard to find a director/writer duo as compatible in Hollywood history, except possibly for Josef von Sternberg and Jules Furthman—or Charles Chaplin and himself. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. 1960. USA. Directed by Billy Wilder In The Apartment, Fred MacMurray’s unsympathetic character is the head of a gigantic insurance company. Paul Douglas, originally cast in the role, died, and one can’t resist the idea that Wilder thought of MacMurray because he had played a shady insurance man in the director’s excellent melodrama Double Indemnity (1944). Wilder would also use Shirley MacLaine again in Irma La Douce. Jack Lemmon, of course, was a Wilder regular. It can be argued that, with The Apartment, Lemmon’s lightweight comedy persona began a progression into the serious actor of Days of Wine and Roses, Save the Tiger (for which he won an Oscar), and That’s Life. (Of course, he would still be hysterically funny in Blake Edwards’s The Great Race, Gene Saks’s The Odd Couple, and Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie and Avanti!). Some years ago, I contemplated doing a book on directors born (like Wilder) in or near Vienna, of which there were a disproportionate number. Most of them were Jewish, and they lent to the American cinema both genius and a diaspora-based questioning of conventional Anglo-Saxon values and sexual mores. In the silent era, the films of Erich von Stroheim (who would later star in Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo and Sunset Boulevard) not-so-subtly hinted at a kinkiness that the likes of a Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann would have called “anti-American.” In the 1930s, the Viennese-born Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich minced no images. In my monograph on Dietrich, I point out that in The Scarlet Empress, the rout

Washington, D.C., circa 1921. "Miss Anita Pollitzer of South Carolina." Suffragist, photographer, future wife of Pete Seeger's Uncle, artistic matchmaker for O'Keeffe and Stieglitz. National Photo Company Collection glass negative. View full size.

Detective Inspector John Rebus is the star of the excellent detective novels created by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin. Did the inspector ever realise what his surname meant?King’s College Cambridge found books of riddles and word puzzles that were published in the C16th e.g A Little Book of Riddles (1656). Anagrams and acrostics appeared in books and even high-brow literary journals got involved. Famous writers, poets and statesman such as Jonathan Swift, David Garrick, Horatio Walpole and William Cowper created puzzles for their own entertainment and the amusement of their clever contemporaries.Jacob Levernier described visual puns, rebuses and codes in late medieval art where “a good pun was its own reword.” Evidence for patrons’ interest could be found in images that drew on witty and often scholarly word play. Creative homonyms and lively rebuses appeared in sculpture, painting and archit­ecture. But Lever­nier was specifically interested in studies that were applied to sculpture whose imagery and message could be correlated to their architectural space.So what was a rebus? It was a visual pun or allusional device that used pictures to represent words, and especially parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used from the late C15th to denote surnames. The ex­ample that most appealed was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Nor­w­ich, con­sisting of a stag/hart lying down in water. “Hart” and “lying down” together represented Lyhart.Sir Ralph Shelton's rebus in NorfolkSir Ralph Shelton rebuilt the church at Shelton in Norfolk and in his will of 1497, he asked that his personal devices appear on every roof corbel and niche, as well as the nave aisle windows. The rebus used an "R" plus a "shell" plus a "tun/barrel", together representing the patron of the church: R. SheltonThe rebus alluded to the name, profession or personality of the bearer, and said in Latin Non verbis, sed rebus i.e not by words but by objects. Of all professions, rebuses were most popular amongst churchmen. John Goodall gave the example of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (1500-53) whose rebus showed an “eye” with a man “slipping” from a tree. There were many sculpted “owl” rebuses on the walls, ceiling and tomb in the chantry chapel of Bishop Oldham (d1519), in Exeter Cathedral. Some versions had the word “dom” on a scroll hanging from the owl’s mouth, just in case the viewer needed help in being to read the bishop’s surname. Canting arms were heraldic bearings that represented the bear­er's name in a visual pun or rebus eg for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the arms contained images of “bows” and of “lions”. But a family might have a rebus as a personal identification device, entirely separate from the family’s formal armorials. For example in the mid C16th Sir Richard Weston’s arms used: Ermine, on a chief azure five bezants. His rebus, on the other hand, was a “tun” i.e a barrel, used to designate the last syllable of his surname. It was displayed on terracotta plaques on his Surrey mansion.I presume that only the wealthy would require architectural sculpture carved on the front of their homes, and only the very literate would be interested in esoteric word games using three languages – Latin, French and English. The rebus might have been a common literary form of the age but Nils Thomasson published his book in 1661 that set out the rules for creating rebuses. Most importantly, a picture of an object could not be used to represent that word, since that took no intelligence to decipher at allThe V & A Museum has a modern example of a book plate. This C19th rebus, consisting of “trees” and “bees” was a simple rendition of the author's name Ashbee.**In 2007, the author Ian Rankin appeared in an BBC Four series, exploring the origins of his famous character, Inspector John Rebus. Called Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh, Rankin looked at the origins of the character and the events that led to his creation. I would be keen to know if Rankin d