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A recently discovered mysterious “winged” structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.
Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room.
“Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms,” said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.
The winged shape of the building appears to be unique in the Roman Empire, with no other example known. “It’s very unusual to find a building like this where you have no known parallels for it,” Bowden told LiveScience. “What they were trying to achieve by using this design is really very difficult to say.”
The many proposed recreations of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas
On 26 February 2001, the leader of the Taliban ruling party, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued an edict calling for the destruction of “all statues of non- Islamic shrines located in the different parts of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”. Within five days the Taliban said it had destroyed two-thirds of the country’s statues, including the Bamiyan Valley’s colossal Buddhas. To mark the tenth anniversary of the razing of the ancient Buddhas, Unesco will host a forum, “Towards Reconcil iation”, on 2 March to sum up its efforts to safeguard the site over the past ten years, and “open a new chapter” in its activities in Afghanistan.
Unesco has worked in conjunction with the Afghan government, the provincial authorities of Bamiyan and international heritage organisations to preserve the site since 2003 when Bamiyan was added simultaneously to Unesco’s World Heritage List and List in Danger. Phases I and II of the conservation measures, completed in 2004 and 2008 respectively, included stabilising and consolidating the cliffs and the two Buddhas’ niches, conserving and documenting the Buddhas’ fragments, safeguarding the remains of Buddhist mural paintings along the cliff, developing a cultural master plan, guarding the site from looters and providing management and conservation training for Afghans.
Emily Sharpe
The Art Newspaper
A view of the wall protecting the nearby House of the Moralist that collapsed in the ancient archaeological site. Photo: Roberto Salomone/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Less than a month after Pompeii’s so-called House of Gladiators collapsed into rubble, portions of a garden wall at the nearby House of the Moralist fell down on Tuesday, prompting new calls to better safeguard the city buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Antonio Varone, Pompeii’s director of excavations, said the house – which actually consists of two adjacent abodes that belonged to two families – was in no danger.
The wall, which bordered an unexcavated area and was shored up earlier this year, had been completely rebuilt after the United States bombing of the Naples area in World War II, according to the culture ministry. Mr. Varone told the news agency ANSA that the wall had most likely succumbed to the “incredible, incessant torrential rains” that have washed over central Italy in recent days.
Elisabetta Povoledo
New York Times
Detail from The Siege of Breda by Jacques Callot. Photograph: The British Library
Red arteries spread like roots over the paper – is this an anatomical sketch? A vision of vessels branching from the heart? Yet the page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel notebook in the Treasures gallery of the British Library is not – or not directly – a study of human anatomy. It is a map: a geographical plan, a piece of the world reduced to a flat depiction. It shows the riverbed of the Arno near Florence and was made in about 1504 for a practical purpose. Florence, at war with its neighbour Pisa, had hatched a plan to divert the Arno and so deprive the enemy city of its lifeblood. Leonardo was surveying the river to work out how it could be turned from its course.
And yet, if it is practical in purpose, and scrupulous in method – Leonardo has walked the riverbed, surveyed it – this little sketch map is cosmic in scope. It is a vision of the world, touched into life in a few strokes of red chalk. It expresses, magically, an entire philosophy. For it is no coincidence, still less a poetic flourish, that all the bloody strands of the riverbed make you think of anatomy. Leonardo and his contemporaries conceived the earth as a living creature, a macrocosmic mirror of our own inner life. As he put it:
Man has been called by the ancients a little world, and certainly the name is well given, for if a man is made of earth, water, air and fire, so is this body of the earth; if man has in him a lake of blood, where the lungs increase and decrease in breathing, the body of the earth has its ocean which similarly rises and falls . . .
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Jonathan Jones
Guardian
A fired clay Cucuteni figurine, from 4050-3900 B.C. (Photo: Marius Amarie)
Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.
For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.
The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.
New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.
The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.
John Noble Wilford
New York Times
Slow Painting 