A nice overview of the project to decipher the Hercalaneum scrolls. No new announcements, but the work continues. Then there's the second project, which I hadn't heard of before :

Enter the RePAIR project – short for Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage. Its mission is to use cutting-edge AI and robotics to digitally reassemble frescoes, including the House of the Painters at Work, before handing the final reconstruction process over to a robot that will physically piece together the fragments.

“Our dream one day is that archaeologists can find a bunch of fragments of artwork while excavating, lock them in a room, and then come back the next day to find them reassembled,” says Prof Marcello Pelillo, a professor of computer science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in Italy, and a key figure in the project.

The fresco pieces have been scanned using hyperspectral imaging, which captures data from a range of wavelengths beyond what the human eye can see. This allows the AI to detect degraded pigments, revealing details lost over time.

Once the digital reconstruction has taken shape, the robot steps in. Using its mechanical arms and hands, it translates the AI’s digital solution onto the real puzzle, physically moving the fragments into place.

Importantly, human experts remain a crucial part of the process. The AI operates within a ‘human-in-the-loop’ system, meaning archaeologists provide feedback and refinements, guiding the algorithm toward a final, accurate solution.

#Archaeology
#History
#AI

sciencefocus.com/future-techno…

On the shifting nature of the werewolf.

In his encyclopedic work Otia Imperialia (Recreation for an Emperor), published in 1211, the statesman and writer Gervase of Tilbury described men transforming into wolves in England in accordance with the phases of the moon.

Gervase presented this as a real occurrence, but there were also accounts of fictional werewolves. Texts circulating in England such as poet Marie de France’s Bisclavret (circa 1160-1175) and the French folk romance, Guillaume de Palerne (William of Palerne), from around 1350, show werewolves being incorporated into courtly storytelling.

These texts told tales of human nobles trapped in wolf form, more victims than monsters. Yet they drew their imaginative power from landscapes in which real wolves could be seen and heard.

In 1590, a pamphlet was printed in London which described the life, trial and brutal execution of Peter Stumpp, a German man accused of being a werewolf. Stumpp, a farmer from Bedburg near Cologne, had allegedly made a pact with the devil and acquired a magical belt that enabled him to assume the form of a wolf. Stump was not presented as a sympathetic human trapped in wolf form, but as a murderous sorcerer who killed people and livestock and committed sexual violence, incest and cannibalism.

With the end of witch hunting, the werewolf largely disappeared from Britain as a serious supernatural possibility. Then in the 19th century, writers and antiquarians began recovering and reinventing werewolf lore as part of a wider fascination with the Middle Ages.

Hollywood later drew on this inheritance, but made the werewolf a sympathetic cursed victim again in The Wolf Man (1941), a figure closer to Bisclavret than to Stumpp. In his upcoming film, Eggers has claimed he has hit the reset button on the werewolf, presenting the story of a cursed man seeking salvation through love, a premise that also echoes the werewolves of medieval courtly literature.

#History
#Folklore

theconversation.com/robert-egg…

Eeee !

Dr. Robert E. Cornish, who’d asphyxiated the rangy white fox terrier with ether and nitrogen, watched the clock. Six minutes after the final heartbeat, the scientist gathered up the dog and strapped him to a teeterboard, a see-saw-like invention whose back-and-forth, up-and-down motion Cornish believed was key to restoring the blood’s circulation.

He pushed a saline solution primed with oxygen, heart-stimulating adrenalin, and the liver extract heparin into a vein in Lazarus’ thigh, then lowered his head over the patient. As his assistant rocked the teeterboard and rubbed the little body vigorously, Cornish exhaled deep breaths into the dog’s mouth and lungs.

Long seconds turned to minutes and then, suddenly, Lazarus gasped and jerked his leg. Slowly, his heart began to beat. Lazarus II had returned from the dead. But while the fox terrier lived for another eight hours and 13 minutes, he did not live well, stuck in a restless zombie state punctuated by the occasional whine, bark, and panting.

Before working on dogs, Cornish began his reanimating work on people. A 62-year-old printer who died of cardiac arrest was the first to receive Cornish’s reanimation treatment. Four-and-a-half hours after his death, Cornish arrived at the hospital to strap the man’s heating pad-swaddled body to a teeterboard. After see-sawing the patient up and down for 90 minutes, Cornish failed to revive the subject—although Cornish noted a point at which the printer’s “face seemed to warm up suddenly, sparkle returned to the eyes, and soft pulsations were observed in the soft tissue between windpipe and sternum,” according to science journalist Frank Swain.

Cornish never had the opportunity to prove that his teeterboard worked, despite appealing to the governors of Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado for permission to revive criminals executed by the gas chamber shortly after completing his Lazarus experiments.

#History
#Science

popsci.com/science/reviving-de…

Staying power

Archaeologists are investigating a mysterious and remote Spanish cave - an extraordinary site which is now fast emerging as one of the most culturally significant places on earth. Intermittently and repeatedly, the cave - which has its own subterranean lake - has been ritually or religiously important for at least 24,000 years, thus making it (along with an ancient Australian Aboriginal site with a 25,000 year-old ritual tradition) one of the longest-used sacred sites in the world.

Back then (and again approximately 16000 years ago) it was used by Stone Age people to produce ritual cave art. Then, between 7500 and 3500 years ago, it was used for unknown purposes by Neolithic and Bronze Age people, while in parts of the Iron Age (especially in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC) evidence from the site (especially the discovery of 200 ceramic chalices) suggests that it was used for religious purposes.

By Roman times (around 2000 years ago) - or possibly much earlier - it seems to have been used for rituals and activities specifically associated with women - potentially to ensure human female reproductive health and success. By at least the 18th century and almost certainly much earlier - research has revealed that local people were actually calling the cavern 'Cova de les Dones' - the Women’s Cave - and, up until the early 20th century, it appears to have been used as a ritualised setting in which marriages were consummated.

The fact that the cave (located high up in the rugged limestone cliffs of a remote canyon, some 40 miles southwest of Valencia) was ritually associated with women by Roman times (and probably even by the preceding Iron Age) as well as in more modern times, strongly suggests that the tradition must have continued throughout the post-Roman, medieval and early modern eras.

#History
#Archaeology

independent.co.uk/news/science…

Maybe events like this would be more well-known if people stopped writing endless dramas about Henry VIII.

With Edward III and most of his nobles in France, Philip reassured David that England was a “defenceless void”. The opportunity was too good to miss. David duly invaded England with a force of around 12,000 men on October 7.

The English were not, however, caught unawares. Contrary to Philip’s assurances, Edward had not left his northern border undefended. A force of 6,000 men was raised by the northern lords, Henry Percy, Ralph Neville and the Archbishop of York.

The Anonimalle Chronicle, an anonymous 14th-century account written at St Mary’s Abbey, reported that David arose from his bed irritated and angrily said: “O man, that cannot be, because in England there are no men left but monks and canons, brothers and priests, swineherds and shepherds, cobblers and skinners; but all the knights are with their king overseas.

The two armies proceeded to stare at each other across the moor for the next five hours. Then the English longbowmen opened fire on the Scots at 2pm, and the battle began in earnest. By 5pm, the Scots were routed and fled the field. It was a decisive and devastating result. The Scottish force lost up to 2,000 men, while the prior of Durham wrote that “few of us in the said battle were killed”.

The battle of Neville’s Cross was most significant because it stopped a series of potential might-have-beens. A Scottish victory would have put pressure on Edward III to lift his siege of Calais and return to England. Instead, the resounding English victory secured Edward’s northern border for the rest of his long reign. This enabled him to raise 30,000 men for the Calais siege; the largest English force assembled during the hundred years war (1337-1453).

Why, then, is the battle not more famous? Unlike Agincourt, it was not immortalised by Shakespeare. Unlike Bannockburn, national identities have not coalesced around it. The battle has not featured in a major cinematic portrayal. It has faded from popular memory in the long and bloody history of Anglo-Scottish warfare.

#History

theconversation.com/the-little…