Tanks a lot

For an area that has had no military conflict of any sort since the Black Hawk War of 1832 (and that only lasted a few weeks), Wisconsin seems rather heavily armed.  As I go here and there to my various jobs I see things like this:

outside a VFW in Eau Claire

And this:

Guarding Highway 70 in Spooner

And this:

This one is in Elroy, but I used to know where a similar one was located that was open.  My kids swiveled the turret to aim at passing cars!

These were donated to local Veterans organizations or National Guard units when they became obsolete, and I think have a certain majesty to them....kind of like martial versions of dinosaur skeletons in the natural history museum.  A couple of industrious guys have collected a listing of all such memorials in the state, which you can find here .

I am keeping the list handy, because you never know when you might wake up some morning and find that your neighbors have become, oh, 25% less pleasant:

Yes, a Zombie outbreak could seriously ruin your day.

But not mine.

No sir.  I am going to set out to the nearest tank memorial with a large can of diesel fuel and my Number 2 son, a young man of protean mechanical aptitude.

Give us maybe half an hour and he will have things MacGyvered into operational status, and my family will not only ride out the Inevitable Zombie Inconvenience, we will ride it out in style!

The Glory of a Gloomy Day

The Fourth of July is fast approaching.  This is foreshadowed in mid to late June by the arrival of fireworks tents.  They spring up like patriotic mushrooms of garish hue in parking lots and along roadsides.

The fireworks business has always intrigued me.  There is about it just a whiff of Carny.  It has the sense of transience.  It has a feel of showmanship.  And it cheerfully charges you ridiculous prices with the justification that it is an infrequent, enjoyable splurge.

And also, like the Carny world it has its own rules, or rather a partial immunity from the rules of conventional society.  

Fireworks laws in Wisconsin are a little like tax laws in Italy.  They are on the books but generally winked at-with their very evasion on a colossal scale lending a certain legitimacy to pyrotechnic scofflaws*.  Heck, who wants to discourage expressions of patriotism.

In my younger days I was a bit of a powder monkey but in my more recent working career have begun to see some wisdom in limiting the firepower of explosives placed in the hands of rash youths and their imbibing pater familiae.

In any event, just down the hill from my house I saw this:

Setting up the fireworks tent on a gloomy day.  But what actually caught my eye was the storage container that they were unloading from:

I thought this was a great name for a fireworks company, as it combined so many thematic elements. We appear to have the United States, Old Glory, and perhaps just the gloriousness of fireworks in general.

Alas, alas, for my theory the reality is a bit more prosaic.  Uniglory is a freight forwarding company in Bangladesh.  They are a member in good standing of the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce.  I guess if you want to order your own container load of patriotism you may inquire with a certain Mr. Mohammed Rafiqul Islam.
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*Here's the deal.  In Wisconsin it is legal to light off wimpy stuff like sparklers and smoke bombs.  At these marvelous fireworks tents you can, however, in addition purchase all manner of exciting things that fly and/or explode.  Now, by law you are not allowed to transport these big time fireworks in a vehicle, nor to-God forbid-set them off.  The official assumption seems to be (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) that you will take them in hand and walk to the nearest state boundary, where any property and personal damage that occurs is of no concern to the Badger state.  Hmmmm. What a civics class lesson to young citizens!

Valedictory Sentiments

It was late springtime in Wisconsin, so along rural byways you saw many indications of high school graduations.  Lots of signs announcing "Justin's Party" or some such, usually with school color balloons bobbing precariously in the wind. 

Less commonly you might see a sign congratulating a group of graduates, say, members of a given church.

And every once in a while something more substantial put up by a local business to Well Wish an entire graduating class.

Check out this substantial example

This was on a flat bed outside a plumbing establishment, and yes indeed, its a gigantic septic tank.

At first I thought it was an odd tribute-it is one assumes shortly going to be buried somewhere-but on reflection I am really warming to it.

There was considerable care, and some expense, devoted to the decoration.  It will serve as a highly perplexing time capsule for far future archeologists.  And honestly, when you get right down to it what accomplishments of technological society are actually more crucial than indoor plumbing?

Best of wishes Jacks and Jills.

The Lost Roman Province of Occidentia-Part Three

Having perhaps had a little fun with some of the less plausible evidence of contact between the Americas and the world of Antiquity, it should be noted that there are a few enigmatic clues that suggest that just maybe a few Romans made it to these distant shores.

The most plausible scenario would be storm tossed mariners remarkably surviving an ocean crossing in ships designed to rarely leave sight of land.  It exceeds credulity to imagine any of them being brave enough to try a reverse journey to tell of their experience.

But perhaps they might bring a few things with them, exotic artifacts to the indigenous peoples.  The Round Rock Mound coin could be such an item.  As could this:

This is a small terra cotta figurine sometimes called Calixtlahuaca's head, after the Mexican archeological site where it was found in 1933.  This was a site excavated under appropriate archeological technique, and the head was found under floor surfaces that were definitely pre Contact.

Dating techniques are not specific enough to help much, but stylistically this indeed appears to be of Roman origin.  The beard alone makes a Meso American manufacture seem implausible.

Calixtlahuaca's head has generated a bit of controversy.  A fair summary of same can be found Here

As to its site of manufacture there seems little doubt; scoffers point to the possibility of an archeological prank gone awry, or to chaotic artifact storage allowing for a mix up.  Probably there will be no satisfactory resolution to this debate.

If this was a Roman artifact somehow making it halfway around the world, where would it have arrived?  Although there are a few who suggest trans Pacific contact, the likely route would have been trans Atlantic.  And just maybe a potential land fall was at Guranbara Bay, near Rio de Janeiro.  Supposedly in the 1970s fishermen kept snagging their nets on an underwater wreck.  They eventually hauled up some heavy earthenware jars that they broke up, feeling they might be "macumba jars" used in voodoo ceremonies.  Later scuba divers recovered a few more jars and sold several to tourists.  The Brazilian police intervened, and confiscated two jars which are said to be of Roman origin.  See this somewhat rambling discussion for more details Romans do Rio.

Interestingly when researching possible points of origin for a wrecked Roman trading ship I looked at the suggested Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa and found zero evidence of Roman contact.  The closest confirmed jumping off point would have been the Canary islands where there was at least a modest degree of Roman presence/trading.   One red flag popped up right away when reading about Roman pottery in the Canaries

"In 1964 a Roman amphora was discovered in waters off Lanzarote, and since then a number of others have been found underwater. All, however, lacked proper context and could not be dated precisely; that they were truly Roman was also questioned because many were similar to amphorae used by the Spanish in the sixteenth century for trade with the Americas. The finds from El Bebedero show that Romans did trade with the Canaries, though there is no evidence of their ever settling there. "

So....it sounds as if there were still some amphora like vessels being used in the early days of Spanish trade with the Americas.  And since the Guranbara wreck has mysteriously been declared off limits for unknown reasons we are left with a few pottery shards and little more.

So with current archeological information we can at best entertain the notion of a few hungry and bedraggled Roman mariners washing up on the shores of a New World.  But they obviously did not spark a Renaissance that opened the riches of the West through a mythical Province of Occidentia. 

No, the poor fellows found themselves permanently marooned in a land where the grape was unknown, and where syphillis existed in a virulent form that would wreak havoc in Europe when contact was eventually made by Columbus.

Denied the pleasures of both Bacchus and Venus their lives would have been Hobbesian indeed..."solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short".

The Lost Roman Province of Occidentia-Part two

Lets talk about coins turning up in odd places.  It is a common occurrence.  The best survey on the subject was by Epstein who looked at 40 accounts of Pre-Columbian coinage in North and South America.  He noted a few early examples, but a remarkable increase in the post World War II era....corresponding to a time of dramatic increase in American visitors to places where Roman coins could be purchased cheaply.  He felt that all such Pre-Columbian Greek and Roman coins were either lost by collectors, or in a few cases were examples of fraud.

Roman coins have turned up in pig pens.  And in the ruins of a Louisiana bus station.  And in a Los Angeles parking meter!

A couple of cases warrant specific discussion.

The earliest account of a Roman coin in the New World comes from Panama in 1533.  Unfortunately this story of a gold coin of Augustus turning up has no further mention in history, and is to be found only in a rather fanciful work that recounts various miraculous events occurring around the birth of King Ferdinand.

Another South American find was said to be a hoard of several hundred coins ranging from Augustus to 350 AD, a range far too broad to be anything other that the lost collection of an early aficionado.

This report Panama find comes from the New York Times.  (you will have to scroll down a ways to see it).  As it again reports the extraordinary circumstance of a hoard it might be a re-telling of the earlier hoard from, apparently, Venezuela.  One assumes that the Times, even today viewed as widely truthful unless discussing Republican politicians, might also have been snookered by an unscrupulous correspondent.

This is a coin from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans.  Several have turned up in Kentucky.  Alas, they are late 19th century forgeries for the tourist trade, perhaps given out as curios in a Bible Belt state.

We can only smile about the apparent coin of Maximus that turned up in the Seip Mound in Ohio.  On careful cleaning it proved instead to be a "portrayal of Father Time which appeared on an Elgin Watch Company token commemorating the Chicago Exposition of 1874".

The Bar Kokhba coin and these specimens from Kentucky and Ohio:

Appear on a site created by J. Huston McColloch who kindly allows their use.  He has collected other Archaeological Outliers here.

So most of the common Roman coins that are found in the Americas have mundane explanations.  They were modern imports that were lost or much less often used as hoaxes.  A similar situation exists in Britain with Alexandrian coinage.  These local issues are never excavated at Roman sites, but turn up in parks and gardens with some regularity, reflecting nothing more profound than the frequency of travel to Egypt.

But a very few cases raise doubts.  After all, a rather minimal Norse presence did leave behind one accepted coin in an Indian mound in Maine. Genuine Pre Columbian! So just maybe...

In 1964 a Native American site at Round Rock Texas was excavated with some speed due to an impending freeway project.  Three feet down in a mound a follis of Constantine the Great was unearthed.  Minted in London in 314 it was certainly out of place surrounded by stone implements. 

You could envision a storm tossed Roman ship washing up in the Gulf of Mexico.  It is more or less the same course Columbus ended up taking, albeit with better ships.

Unfortunately the excavation of the site seems to have been hurried, done by a mixture of amateur treasure hunters and a quick survey by professionals.  The observations of the latter were that the stone artifacts were above the reported find site of the Round Rock follis, and were substantially older.

This suggests disturbed stratigraphy.  Advocates of the authenticity of the find are vocal, and point to the hard rocky nature of the site making disturbance by vegetation unlikely. 

The site was effectively destroyed by the construction of I-35, so as you drive past at 65 miles an hour you do not have much time to ponder the mystery.

The Lost Roman Province of Occidentia-Part One

Jeff, one of my fellow excavators, noted the other day that the numbers of Americans and Canadians coming over to work at Vindolanda were really not surprising “because you have no archeology of your own”.

He of course did not mean we had “no” archeology, there is quite a lot of Pre-Columbian history, and even the study of more recent times is a wide topic.

No, Jeff meant we had no Roman archeology.

And in this my erudite friend was most atypically, incorrect.

We have a fair amount of Roman archeology here in North (and South) America.  It just does not make much if any sense.

Let me be clear.  What I am going to undertake is a quick survey of Roman artifacts “found” in the New World.  This will of necessity be a superficial look, if for no other reason than the scattered and often non scientific nature of the find data.

In trying to make some sense of this jumble I divide the data into three groups.

1. The explainable
2. The dubious
3. The enigmatic

Let’s start out with a few Roman artifacts that make sense.

There are numerous accounts of Roman coins being found on the harbor floors of New World ports.  This is undoubtedly a result of ships traveling “in ballast”.  As this land lubber understands it:

Sailing ships need a certain amount of weight to be seaworthy.  They need it to maintain that proverbial “even keel”.  This is not a problem for a fully laden vessel.  But suppose you are a skipper put into the Port of London, and are not fortunate enough to contract for a full cargo?  Well, you just load up with extra rock and gravel from the nearest available source, which would be the Thames foreshore.  Chock a block with artifacts from the prehistoric era right up to last week.

Off you go to, say, Boston.  There a full cargo awaits, so you simply dump the extra ballast on the spot. 

Perhaps on a future voyage you will travel “in ballast” from the West Indies to London, where your offloaded ballast includes the bit of fossilized coral I mentioned finding in my post on Mud larking.

Specifics are a little sketchy on these finds-I did find a fairly complete account from Long Island Sound-probably because these artifacts being correctly regarded as totally out of context get little attention.  In general they tend to be the sort of Constantinian era small issues that one would expect to have been lost or discarded throughout the Empire.

Of a similar nature are the few shards of Samian ware found amongst the ballast stones of the 1621 wreck of the British supply ship Warwick in Castle Harbor, Bermuda.  (Although the actual origin of the ballast proper has been proven to not be London, and remains a mystery).

For a more impressive artifact-and one with impeccable context-behold!

 Roman Lamp in Virginia

This is a genuine Roman oil lamp, excavated with perfect archeological technique.

The only problem is that the context is early 1600s!

Yep, this was found at Jamestown, where it likely was a “curiosity” carried over by one of the Gentleman Adventurers.  It perhaps tells us a little about the character of those early and somewhat impractical settlers.

Certainly the troubled history of  Jamestown could have been much improved upon by simply importing a sufficiency of sturdy yeoman farmers rather than Gentlemen who hoped to grow rich picking gold nuggets up off the ground, or perhaps by trading worthless trinkets to the natives.

At least this unknown savant did not further complicate the archeological record by trading this artifact to some passing native for a haunch of venison.  In our next section-the Dubious-we will encounter a few such problems.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program

On Monday I noticed that my usual blog audience went up a bit.  From, oh, 30 or 40 bemused eccentrics to over 6000 readers.

This of course is a true sign not of the Apocalypse, but of the Instalanche.  http://www.instapundit.com/ is one of the more widely read blogs in this quadrant of the galaxy, and if Professor Reynolds takes a shine to you and lays down a link, well, you get a lot of people wondering what the fuss was all about.

Why Reynolds, aka The Blogfather, found Mordor slugs worthy of recognition is difficult to say.

Well, when thousands of unexpected house guests turn up you quickly run to the cupboards and lay out a few bowls of potato chips for them.  Hence a little extra posting this week.

But next week back to Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

Special treat next week if you like dubious archeology.....three posts on "The Lost Roman Province of Occidentia", the peculiar tale of Roman artifacts "found" in the Americas.

Cheers, and belated greetings to the Instapundit Legion.

T