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Hiding in plain sight
Look carefully at Renaissance paintings and you will see all sorts of fascinating cultural details, from the most obvious – the clothing that was fashionable at the time the painting was made, the jewellery, the hairstyles, and the headgear – to less obvious props, such as Chinese and Japanese imported porcelain, Iznik ware from Turkey, ancient Islamic lustreware, or handmade rugs from central Asia that are often portrayed in Flemish art as table coverings or in Venetian paintings as a backcloth to pictures of the Virgin, Child, and Saints. What nobody had spotted until now, though, was the prehistoric handaxe that appears in the Melun Diptych, a painting of c.1455 by the French artist Jean (or Jehan) Fouquet (c.1420-1481).
The right-hand panel of this diptych (now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp) is relatively well known because it is thought to depict Agnès Sorel (1422-1450), the famous mistress of Charles VII, known as the Dame de Beauté (‘Lady of Beauty’), in the guise of the Virgin. Surrounded by red angels that appear to be made of wax, the Madonna has one breast fully exposed and a complexion that can only be described as resembling glazed white porcelain.
The portrait captures your attention because of its sheer oddity. Perhaps that is why the left-hand panel has escaped close scrutiny. The two panels were separated in 1773, and the left-hand one is now displayed in the Gemäldegalerie of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany, but they are usually shown together in catalogues and art-history books.
The Berlin panel shows Étienne Chevalier, Treasurer to Charles VII, kneeling at prayer in an expensive, crimson tunic. Standing behind him, with his arm round Étienne, is his namesake and patron St Stephen, with tonsured hair, wearing a blue monastic cope. Stephen was stoned to death for his faith, and he holds the symbol of his martyrdom in the form of a large, faceted flint resting on top of a book representing the New Testament. Even in recent art-history works, the instrument of the standing saint’s martyrdom has simply been described as ‘a stone’, a ‘sharp-edged stone’, a ‘large sharp stone’, and a ‘jagged stone’.
Writing in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774323000252), scholars from the Department of Art History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA, and the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, say that it is not just any old rock. The painting depicts the earliest known artistic representation of an Acheulean handaxe, demonstrating one of the first documented examples of antiquarian awareness.
To prove their point, members of the research team carried out an Elliptical Fourier Analysis, which compared the size, shape, and facets of the painted object with 20 French Acheulean handaxes: they found a 95% match. The colour of the axe in the paintings was also similar to that of other handaxes, and the 33 flake scars on the surface of the painted stone object were consistent with the average identified on 30 other handaxes randomly selected from French assemblages.
The authors conclude that Fouquet’s rendering of the object of St Stephen’s martyrdom is very unusual: ‘in most cases the stones that killed him are unremarkably painted, with no great definition or artistic distinction’. They wonder whether the stone had special significance for the artist: ‘it is plausible that the artist reproduced an Acheulean handaxe discovered locally in Tours,’ they write, ‘possibly by himself or someone in his immediate social sphere’.
Pre-Clovis American settlement
Fourteen projectile points from the Cooper’s Ferry site beside the Salmon River in the US state of Idaho have been carbon-dated to c.15,700 years ago, making them 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same site, and c.3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points that were once cited as the first evidence for the human settlement of North America.
The objects are similar to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating from 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, adding more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the Ice Age peoples of North America and North-east Asia.
These slender and finely crafted projectile points came from newly discovered pits at the Cooper’s Ferry site where Loren Davis, anthropology professor at Oregon State University, has been working with colleagues since the 1990s. The full results are published in Science Advances (https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ade1248). Previously, the same team has found hearths and pits whose contents have been dated by radiocarbon sampling and optically stimulated luminescence analyses to 14,660 years ago, along with more than 65,000 artefacts, including cut-marked animal bones and numerous flakes from worked stone.
Many claims have been made for much older migrations into the Americas. CWA has previously reported on the fossilised footprints discovered in 2009 in the White Sands National Park in New Mexico, dating from between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Claims have been made, too, for flaked stones dating from 30,000 years ago at the Chiquihuite Cave site in Mexico, bones with cut marks in layers dating to 34,000 years ago in Uruguay, flaked stones in layers dating to 50,000 years ago in Brazil, and deliberately broken mastodon bones dating to 130,000 years ago in California. Most of these dates have been disputed, but the Cooper’s Ferry projectile points are securely dated, and they are the first objects that can be tied stylistically to a specific group considered to be ancestral to the First Americans.
Cosmic dust
Much publicity has surrounded the extraordinary feat of sending the OSIRIS-REx probe on a seven-year mission to the Bennu asteroid to collect rocks and dust that might hold clues to the origins of life on earth, but some scientists have been able to collect particles from asteroids and comets much closer to home: from the rooftops of cathedrals in southern England.
Many space particles burn up as they enter the earth’s atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, but some survive to form distinctive spheres of around 0.3mm across. More than 100 million such ‘micrometeorites’ land on earth every year, averaging about six micrometeorites per metre squared of the earth’s surface.
Despite such numbers, the miniature pellets are difficult to find on soil or road surfaces. But the roofs of Canterbury and Rochester cathedrals have proved to be perfect surfaces for Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz and Dr Matthias van Ginneken of the University of Kent to gather their samples, offering an opportunity, they say, ‘to collect dust that has not been disturbed or had people trampling all over it’. Another advantage of cathedral roofs is that good records are kept of construction work, so the ages of different sections of roof – and how long they have been gathering dust – are well documented.
As with the dust from the OSIRIS-REx probe, the goal of such studies is to find out more about how water and organic life arrived on the planet, perhaps from other solar systems.
These boots are not for burning
An entirely different and less welcome form of dust is blighting the area around the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. Pilgrims who have completed the Camino de Santiago, the medieval route from France to the shrine of St James at Compostela, have taken to continuing on to Finisterre (‘World’s End’) to shed their clothing and worn-out footwear, encouraged by guidebooks claiming that this symbolic act of spiritual and bodily cleansing dates from the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice was unknown until two decades ago.
José Marcote, the local mayor, told El País: ‘it is causing us a serious problem… they make bonfires everywhere and the area around the Cape Finisterre lighthouse is full of black mounds and toxic waste from half-burnt synthetic materials,’ he said. Locals complain that the practice is giving an area of natural beauty the appearance of a landfill site. Firefighters have had to be called out frequently to put out uncontrolled blazes from fires that have set the surrounding heather alight.
The boot-burners, says Marcote, take no notice of signs appealing to their common sense and warning of the prohibition against lighting fires. As a last effort to kill this mythological tradition, a container has now been provided alongside the lighthouse for used shoes, with the promise that they will be shredded and recycled.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
