I was recently doing some research about the Roman Legionary fortress of Inchtuthil in Scotland (Roman Caledonia). This fort was the advance outpost for Roman General Agricola's aborted march to the north of Scotland. (He was later recalled to Rome by the emperor Domitian because of either Domitian's envy or mistrust.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchtuthil Excavation was begun on this site in the 1950s. So far, so good. Then I came onto this statement (from Wikipedia): This last sentence made my inner Roman history aficionado (and ancestral Scotsman) want to weep. I know this is a lot of metal ("weighing a total of ten tonnes" [one tonne is equivalent to 1000 kilograms or 2,204.6 lbs]). Couldn't some of the nails have been sold to collectors? Maybe they were. Or maybe there was no interest (which is hard to believe). Or, maybe there was a bureaucratic slip-up. I am certain, however, that there is more effort to preserve and display mundane, less-than-sensational numismatic hoards today than there was to preserve these "trivial" 2000 year-old archaeological finds at Inchtuthil. Maybe not. g.
Harlan J Berk sells nails from that very hoard https://www.ebay.com/itm/Crucifixio...342098?hash=item5d66e685d2:g:PlwAAOSwYHxWJoRb
Whenever you concentrate too many things in one place, you risk loss to fire, flood or stupidity. I am very sorry about the Brazil museum fire destroying so much history (20 million items). Recycling a hoard of anything that could have been sold in the giftshop shows that fighting private ownership of artifacts is more important to them than anything else. It is why I do not support museums by paying the salaries of such minded professionals.
What a morbid display. Considering the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) who died by that terrible mean, I find it tacky to take any old Roman nail (almost certainly used for construction) and creating a crucifixion display out of it...akin to taking some random 20th century piece of electrical cable and building an electric chair memorial display. Whatever floats your boat though.
That is a horrifying story - recycled! Indeed, I do think collectors and the "collectors' market" can provide a service for preservation. At least we don't melt stuff down.
Here is a parallel story (from the 1920's I think) At the bottom of the page linked next is a photo of a huge lead ingot - (with a lovely Tudor Rose mark - see base of 2nd link) https://www.theguardian.com/culture...-from-dissolution-come-to-light-in-new-museum https://museumcrush.org/eleven-relics-of-medieval-england-at-rievaulx-abbey/ This is one of a number of such ingots that were dug up at Rievaulx. One would guess that the contractors who stripped the abbey roof for Henry VIII stole and hid a few for personal profit, but never retrieved them (I think they weighed half a ton each). Anyhow - when they were dug up, church authorities thought it a good idea to reclaim most of them, and then melt them to use in restoration work. Nobody seems to mention this fact on the web - so I guess I am not alone these days in thinking this was not such a brilliant idea. The bottom line I see - in the nails and these ingots - is that only a small proportion of society genuinely love ancient things and seek to preserve them. This worked out quite well within the traditional world dominated by amateur enthusiasts - since the right sort of people tended to self select. In a world where professionally driven people increasingly take charge - perhaps not so much?
Probably more things need to be in collector's hands for preservation...a sad fate for this interesting archaeological find.
If you're interested in some fascinating context and related Post-War archaeological experiences a great author I'd recommend is Ivor Noel Hume. I came across his book "All The Best Rubbish" at a library sale as a child and his stories were irresistible. He told of construction projects in bombed-out London uncovering basements full of 17th century "sealed" (bearing a glass stamp with the year and/or initials of the commissioner of the bottles) wine bottles that the workers were breaking against a wall for fun (1,000+ each minimum now), rare antiquarian books and irreplaceable written records he saved from being burned for heat, and other tales of his archaeological rescue work (Plenty of great reading regarding Roman sites) amidst a country where so much more was being lost every day due to ignorance or the priorities of survival and reconstruction. I'd imagine that the austerity of post-war life didn't inspire much widespread investment in the research and pursuit of antiques and antiquities, especially relatively mundane items like 10 tons of nails, which the necessarily practical re-builders of the country likely viewed as more useful converted to I-beams than inventory taking up space. It's all terribly unfortunate, but it was more "costly" for the average person to store unpractical items and curiosities back then. In my own experience excavating 100+ year-old garbage dumps, finding nice Indian artifacts suggests that while a person might have picked up the piece and looked it over at home, it was obviously deemed unworthy of storing forever.
Thanks for posting this @Bart9349 ! I commend the recycling effort but it might have been of greater benefit to the Scottish economy to sell them off. Using the Harlan J. Berk model for a guide—750,000 nails divided by 3 (3 packs) equals 250,000. 250,000 x $75 = $18,750,000 or £14,586,281.25
Thank you for the recommendation, sounds great, I went looking for a copy and it was easy to find, but to my happiness, I also found it as a kindle book.
How very depressing. Not the first time I've heard of artifacts being thrown away from particularly rich sites if they didn't have a lot of information potential. Seems foolish not to sell them to raise funds for preservation etc, and I would hope that something like that wouldn't happen today. I would definitely buy one. Recording things into some sort of database like the Portable Antiquities Scheme and then allowing them to be sold if no museum wants them or they are too plentiful seems like a great compromise. Having no documentation at all is pretty sad too.
Ancient Coin Collector's Guild (here) has been successfully (here) fighting for your rights to own all manner of artifacts. Even considering the tons of nails in this thread, coins are still the most common artifact of most societies. But all artifacts are worthy of study and "money" comes in the form of clay tablets, stamp seals, and other media. I also have oil lamps and toga pins. A friend of mine is a retired professor of art history who specialized in the ancient Middle East. She thought to seek out the oldest ceramics. She expected to find a lot bowls and plates. What she found was tokens. And they were unidentified or misidentified in boxes in the storage rooms of museums. ... like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Tell you what, go to any ANA convention and look at the Exhibits. Then go back to any museum and read the paltry little note cards next to the displays. We put far more effort into educating the public in one corner of a show hall than most museums do in all of their galleries combined (some exceptions). Moreover, when it comes to coins, museums often display fakes. They make casts and electrotypes rather than putting the actual coins out. Well, OK, maybe it is a security feature. But do they make prints of their Picassos, Renoirs, and Raphaels and put those in frames instead of the real thing? Most museums have little regard for numismatics. They do not understand money as semata. My first clue was when I started in numismatics about 1993. Interested in ancients, I was researching the town of Cyrene. I found a big book of excavation reports from the University of Michigan. Very nice. Except that one of the photographs showed the hands of a guy cleaning a coin with a pocketknife. "Hey, that Degas is looking a little dusty, get some Comet and scrub it down!" (I kid you not: Read about how the British Museum used an acid wash on the Elgin Marbles.)
By coincidence I was just looking at this very matter. I presume all the great old museums were set up by collectors, who had a keen appreciation of how objects informed and encouraged a genuine understanding of the past. But the fact is, at least in some important cases, they are now directed by trustees who are political appointments, and whose interests, inevitably in the course of things, tend more towards contemporary political influence. You mention fakes just as I happened to be reading some work on museum philosophy by a Professor Sandis. (see his academia page: Constantine Sandis) Actually I had already pulled out and earmarked a few more contentious comments: Sandis > I maintain the basic holistic view that the meaning and value of any given object is dependent on the context in which it is displayed. Sandis > It is simply an empirical falsehood that replicas fail to excite or inspire Sandis > Indeed, we must re-evaluate our very ideal of authenticity. Am not sure who exactly this "we" is - but - count me out! Rob T
Hmmm! Strange. I went to the link you gave and the sentence you quote about recycling does not appear. In its place is this: How do we account for the difference in the story?
Not difficult to answer - the wiki page was changed on 11th October - just go to the "view history" tab. The citation supposedly supporting the change seems to be a dead link. Curious........ Rob T
Perhaps I am alone in finding this matter troubling? All I know about it is what is on Wiki. And that seems to show that some anonymous person re-wrote the history of this matter - making it less contentious - rather soon after this very thread started in September last year. Maybe a co-incidence? But whoever it was justified the act with reference to a web page that - already - does not exist. Added to that "Colville's (Iron and Steel refiners)" seems an odd place to choose to "store and sort" archaeological artefacts. My point here is not so much about the particulars of the nails themselves, on that, I have no hard facts to go on. My point is rather - I feel there is something inherently rather sinister about what Wiki has turned into. I judge it is now not at all what was hoped for, when it started out. In specific areas I do know about, I fear it is doing more harm than good. Rob T
A citation for the nail hoard was preserved by the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/2014110...cotland.org.uk/pages/narratives/nailhoard.asp The owners of romanscotland.org.uk let their site lapse. The archived article has no byline. There is an entire chapter on the hoard in David Sim’s The Roman Iron Industry in Britain https://www.amazon.com/dp/0752468650 but the search tool does not mention the steel works so it likely doesn’t include the story from the web site. I found a 2011 article by Jonathan Geddes, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/steel-boost-for-apprentices-2564295 , suggesting that the Dalzell company is Tata Steel and that an article in The Rutherglen Reformer claimed “… the company intended to find a suitable home for Roman nails that had been in their possession, with the proceeds going to charity.” The Reformer newspaper was bought by a chain and no longer has a web site.
Fascinating stuff Ed! The most probable conclusion, on the nails, seems to me to be that the excavator - Richmond - indeed carted most of the nails round to a local steel works for use as scrap iron, but the folk at the steel works itself had a higher regard for Roman artefacts than he did, and did not melt them – as your link apparently indicates the works was still holding a substantial amount of them as late as 2011. (Maybe that’s where Harlan J Berk’s are coming from?) Regarding the Wiki page, the pre-11th October page seems to be an innocent error – correctly describing what Richmond intended. The 11th October Wiki page changes were made anonymously. Impossible to say whether or not they were triggered by the September comments on Coin Talk, but on the evidence you present they seem to be both false, and worse, to have been given a false substantiation. Is that how you read the situation? In the normal course of things all these matters should be clarified from the excavation report on the site – but Richmond never produced one – all Canmore shows in the archive are some notebooks and a card index written by his assistant: J. K. S. St. Joseph . https://canmore.org.uk/site/28592/inchtuthil However, in a rather well know kind of “rescue archaeology”, around 1985, Dr Lynn-F.-Pitts was sent in to help St Joseph (by that time retired and in his 70’s) to excavate the bottom of his filing cabinets - and try and reconstruct what had actually been done more than 20 years earlier by Richmond and himself. There is a copy of the published result of that here if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lynn-F.-Pitts/e/B001KIMEMS It appears Dr Pitts is still active: http://www.romansociety.org/about/governance/officers.html Rob T PS Richmond was an Oxford pupil of the archaeologist R G Collingwood. Collingwood held astonishingly elitist opinions. I will not quote them - people would probably not believe me if I did.
