Beautiful Example of Pre-Hispanic Textile from the Inca Empire

This portion of an "Andean tunic, one of several on display currently at the Met (The Andean Tunic, 400 BCE - 1800 CE, through September 18, 2011, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, AAOA Special Exhibition Gallery, 1st Floor) was depicted in an overview of the exhibit in the 2011 Summer Members Catalog. (I scanned the image from the Catalog).  As it was created prior to the Incas' exposure to European invaders, it cannot be said to be a "copy" or "imitation" of a European checkerboard!

I've got a few other examples of South American "checkerboard" patterned textiles from before the Spanish invasion, they are saved on another computer.  I should dig them out of my image archives!

This is one more example of the universality of the checkerboard pattern.  I've seen examples of the checkerboard motif on 8,000 year old pottery from Iran.  The oldest checkerboard pattern I've ever seen is from one of the caves at Lascaux and probably dates to about 17000 BCE.  You can find it in this blog post. 

Did the checkerboard pattern come over with humans when they moved to the New World (therefore dating to, perhaps, the time of the settlement of people at Monte Verde, Chile some 13,500 years ago, or perhaps some 32,000 years ago, if the dating of the rock shelter at Pedra Furada, Brazil is accepted as authentic)?  Or, was it independently invented by textile weavers, perhaps by several textile weavers, scattered all around North, Central and South America, at some later dates?  And if so, when? 

This is a subject that continues to fascinate me.  It can't come soon enough - my retirement!  Then, assuming I'm still alive and kicking, I'll have time to explore subjects like this in depth.  I've a whole list of them...

Staffordshire Hoard Saved for Local Museums by Grant Funds

From the Guardian.co.uk
Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire hoard saved by £1.3m heritage grant
The Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found last year will receive a £1.3m Heritage Memorial Fund grant to allow it to remain in Midlands museums
Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 March 2010 15.45 GMT Article history

A grant of £1,285,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) will keep the glittering treasures of the Staffordshire hoard, the most spectacular heap of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in the region where an amateur metal detector found it last summer after it spent 1,300 years buried in a nondescript field.

The grant goes to Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums, which will share the treasure, having raised the £3.3m necessary to pay Terry Herbert, who found the gold, and farmer Fred Johnson, the owner of the field where it was discovered.

Unusually for the fund, when the trustees met today there was no argument about the extraordinary quality of the hoard, or the merits of making the grant. Dame Jenny Abramsky, chair of the NHMF, said: "The Staffordshire hoard is an extraordinary heritage treasure. It is exactly the sort of thing the National Heritage Memorial Fund was set up to save, stepping in as the 'fund of last resort' when our national heritage is at risk, as a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives in the service of our nation. We're delighted, in our 30th anniversary year, to be able to make sure it stays just where it belongs, providing rare insights into one of the more mysterious periods of our history." Image: A glass chequerboard stud with a gold and garnet surround. Photograph: PR.
"Frankly they'd have been demented not to give the money," David Starkey, the historian who led the £3.3m appeal, said, welcoming the announcement. He has labelled the 1,500 pieces of jewel-studded gold, which appear to have been wrenched violently off their original metal, leather and wooden mounts, "gangland bling".

"This is by far the most important archaeological discovery in Britain since the second world war, and beyond that this is a find – of the most extraordinary beauty, brilliance and technical sophistication – which has really caught the imagination of the public."

The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, said: "Thanks to this grant, these superb items will be able to stay – and be enjoyed – where they belong: in the Midlands where they were discovered."

The British Museum, which would once inevitably have been seen as the natural home for a find of international importance, gave its blessing and practical support to the campaign. The total includes thousands of small donations from members of the public, some sent from as far as Australia, and a £300,000 grant from the Art Fund charity, which launched the appeal. The museums, backed by their local authorities, put in £100,000 each.

Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said: "We have been absolutely bowled over by the enthusiasm and fascination the Staffordshire hoard has sparked amongst the British public, as well as visitors from abroad. It is wonderful news that the NHMF has enabled the target of £3.285m to be reached ahead of schedule, and I hope that this will give the West Midlands a head start with the next stage in fundraising for the conservation, research and display of the treasure."

When the find was announced in September the news went round the world. The gold was found by Terry Herbert, a passionate amateur metal detector whose best previous find was a broken piece of medieval horse harness, on farmer Fred Johnson's land near Lichfield in July. When Herbert had covered his dining room table with gold, and was becoming thoroughly alarmed at the scale of his find, he called in the experts. The archaeologists and forensic scientists who hit the field – under the cover story from the local police that they were investigating a murder – found most of the pieces just below the surface, and some tangled in clumps of grass which had grown up through the delicate filigree gold: eventually they retrieved 2.5kg of silver and 5kg of gold. One gold-and-garnet Anglo-Saxon sword pommel would be regarded as a find of international importance: there were scores in the hoard, along with unique and enigmatic objects still baffling the archaeologists such as the wriggling gold serpents, and a biblical inscription on a strap of gold folded in half like a shirt collar.

Starkey said: "These are pieces from the period which we were brought up to call the dark ages, and they prove that it was no such thing. When the Normans invaded in 1066, they may have been better organised chaps – but it wasn't that they were the civilised ones invading a primitive backwater, they came because they were desperate to get their hands on the wealth of Harold's England."

Local pride and interest in the treasure is intense. The exhibitions at the Birmingham city museum, immediately after the find was announced in September, and at the Potteries museum in Stoke-on-Trent last month when the hoard returned for the first time to Staffordshire, broke records at both museums with crowds queueing for hours to see the treasures.

More than 52,000 people visited the Stoke museum in three weeks, donating more than £152,000 to the appeal, including a single anonymous donation of £50,000 on the eve of the exhibition.
Many of the pieces are still caked in mud, and some still tangled with blades of grass. While careful conservation work continues, scholars will be poring over the treasures for decades to come.

"There could be blood on them as well. These pieces still have a lot to tell us," said Deb Klemperer, the archaeologist and curator at the Potteries, who was reduced to tears at their beauty when she first saw the gold last summer.

Starkey said the gold, and its new homes in Birmingham and the Potteries, will redraw the map of Anglo-Saxon England.

"These pieces change our understanding not just of history but of geography, swinging the axis away from Kent and Wessex and Northumbria, which we are fairly knowledgeable about, to the highly important but very little understood kingdom of Mercia, of which we know so little."

And he added the collection would have a positive impact on the Midlands of today. "They will put new heart and hope into a region which has suffered terribly through de-industrialisation, with the loss of thousands of metal working jobs, and literally the shattering of the Potteries."

In Stoke Hazel Lyth, city council cabinet member for economic development and culture, said they were thrilled at the grant, "a fantastic gesture that will cap a phenomenal fundraising campaign", but warned that the fundraising goes on.

"Acquiring these unparalleled treasures is essential, but it is just the beginning. We still very much need the public's support in helping us to unlock the secrets of this amazing collection. It will cost a further £1.7m to develop a Mercian trail which will take in Lichfield and Tamworth to link up the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom. We need to interpret and research the hoard, so that we can discover where it came from, why it was put in Staffordshire soil, and find the answers to many other questions."

Although the major exhibition has closed, some of the pieces remain on display at Stoke, Birmingham, and at the British Museum in London.

A Checkerboard-Patterned Stud and Gold Serpents

Part of the magnificent and unprecented find called the Staffordshire Hoard.

I have found references in several articles to five "mysterious" small gold serpents that archaeologists cannot figure out - what they mean, what they may have been a part of.  See, for instance, this comment from an Art Daily article:  Gems to be displayed for the first time include a delicate filigree gold horse’s head and gold snakes that have left experts baffled as to what they could have been used for . . .

I wasn't able to locate a photograph online of any of these serpents.  I want to see the five little gold serpents!  Are they game pieces?  Pieces off a horse tackle?  Jewelry?

While searching for images of the serpents, I found this lovely little item from the Hoard, described as a millefiori stud.

Millefiori (literally "thousand flowers"), dates back to Roman times.  I wonder if the archaeologists will be able to pinpoint the date this lovely piece was created?  There is ongoing discussion about when the Hoard was put into the ground; and, of course, even if a date can be agreed upon for that event, individual items that make up the Hoard may be much older than 650-750 CE.

What a beautiful piece! And fascinating. For instance, notice the markings around the large inner border marked out in gold - not all of the lines are straight, and there is a distinct pattern in these lines, set at 90 degrees to each other, dividing the circle into four equal parts. 

The inner-most pattern of the black/gold/white millefiori checkerboard pattern consists of a 3x3 square with curved edges to fit into the circular pattern; the outside frame increases the size of the "square" to 4x4.  I was reminded of the oldest magic square known in history - from ancient China, the Lo Shu magic square that sums to 15 in all directions. 

The center of the Lo Shu is the number 5, and we are reminded of that number (the number of the sacred spiral seen repeatedly in nature) by the five black rectangles that make up center of the millefiori design; the number 5, which in Chinese lore is considered "masculine," is complemented by four white rectangles, four being an even number and therefore considered "feminine" by the Chinese.  Ultimately, though, the black/white checkerboard pattern is balanced to at - 8 white and 8 black, a perfect reflection of the ancient Taoist principle of yin/yang. 

The overall design of the Staffordshire Hoard stud reminds me of an ancient Chinese boardgame - liubo.  I know it sounds crazy -but look at all of the elements of the millefiore stud and compare it to this standard liubo board configuration from Wikipedia commons.  The "V"s in the four corners, facing outward; the "L"s on the center of each of the four sides; and four "T"s centered around the perimeter of the innermost space.  This inner center space could well be the ancestor of the "palace" in the later game of xiang qi, and in some versions of the ancient liubo, was a pool where fish cavorted - a sacred pool, perhaps? It is not known what role the "fish" played in liubo, only that they were sometimes "caught."

A c. 400 BCE serpent-overlaid liubo board.  You'll notice that the "V"s and the "L"s are there in their traditional places - but it's very hard to see any "T"s  amid the inner markings, although suggested by the twisting bodies of the numerous serpents and three horizontally-laid out grid marks.  Interesting.  A variation on a theme...

Just what are those markings on the inner border around the black and white checkered millefiore stud?  Could those possibly be representations of "L"s from a liubo board?

How One Museum Pitches for Funds

I seem to be on a museum news kick at the moment (see posts from earlier today). This article made me go Whoa! I'm so naive! Here I thought that museums mostly acquired their art and artifacts from bequests by wealthy collectors and donations by equally wealth patrons. But at least in this case, it's all about Marketing, baby, marketing! (Methinks Mr. Don would appreciate these graphics of African textiles, from the article. The first looks like an abstract Tree of Life pattern to me, but also has something of a Celtic cross pattern look to it; the second has checkerboard-like patterns that appear to harken back to extremely ancient motifs. What looks like a "magic square" (3x3) checkerboard motif, for instance, appears in one of the caves as Lascaux in France, dated to circa 17,000 BCE.) From The New York Times: Art My Dream Is for Sale; Buy It for Me By JORI FINKEL Published: May 8, 2009 LOS ANGELES - AS any gallery owner knows, art does not exactly sell itself. Even in a bullish economy the way a work is displayed and discussed can make all the difference between igniting a collector’s abiding interest and letting the ember go cold. This is also true in the museum world, where curators must lobby for proposed acquisitions and exhibitions, both with museum directors who sign off on projects and trustees who sign the checks. And nowhere is the sales prowess of museum curators exhibited more theatrically than in the annual Collectors Committee weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While most curatorial sales pitches tend to take place in boardrooms behind closed doors, this event makes a rather public sport of it; this year one curator was spotted literally falling on his hands and knees before a trustee at a gala dinner, playfully yet seriously begging for acquisition funds. The concept is simple: after curators argue for their proposed acquisitions, collectors, who have ponied up money to participate in the event, vote on what to buy with the pooled funds. Rest of article.