M.J. Rose

“Not only are many of the members of the project in period dress, but there is also a medieval restaurant.”

We are intrigued…

From Atlas Obscura
Treigny, France
Guedelon Castle
Despite centuries of architectural innovation, this French castle is being built like it’s the 13th century

“In a remote forest clearing in Burgundy, France, a 13th-century castle is slowly being constructed using only the tools, techniques, and materials that would have been available to the builders of the day. It’s archaeology in reverse.

The Guédelon project was started in 1997 at this location, which was chosen because it was near an abandoned stone quarry, a pond for water, and in a forest that could provide wood. The whole exercise is an experimental archaeology endeavor that seeks to discover what it would have been like to create a castle centuries ago, not by making guesses from artifacts from the past, but by experiencing it in real time. Knotted rope is used to make measurements, stone is imperfectly cut to denote the station of the castle’s owner, and rock is chiseled by hand.”

For the rest, and pictures, click here.

This is a wonderful treasure trove and project.

“You can browse through the Library’s complete database of silent films, which details the 11,000 films made between 1912 and 1929, including the 3,300 that are known to exist”

Silent film star Dorothy Kelly pictured in the Day Book, 1916. Library of Congress

The Forgotten Stars of Silent Film

(The Atlantic)

The Library of Congress wants film buffs to shout out who—and what—they know during a series of special screenings.

“The majority of silent films are long gone.

Some 70 percent of the movies made in the United States between 1912 and 1929—nearly 8,000 titles—are lost to history, according to a study last year by the Library of Congress. Even many of the existing films from the pre-talkie era are mysteries to today’s scholars.

Once-famous starlets are no longer widely recognizable. Films that wowed audiences a century ago have been all but erased from collective memory. And so, for the third year, the Library of Congress is calling on film buffs, historians, and members of the public to help search for clues in old reels. The smallest fragment of a detail—like the furniture used in a film’s set design—may be the key to unraveling a forgotten work’s origins.

Over the course of a weekend-long series of screenings at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, next month, attendees will be asked to shout out potentially meaningful details in film as the watch—names of actors, locations, car models, and other clues that might help reveal a film’s origins. Film conservationists already know this approach works. After 204 such screenings so far, more than 100 films have been identified….”

For the complete piece, click here.

News of the very, very old. This time, it’s about incredibly ancient art.

So far the team has unearthed three engraved fragments – and they hope to find more

Ice Age engravings found at Jersey archaeological site
By Jonathan Webb (BBC News)

“A dig in Jersey has yielded a stash of hunter-gatherer artefacts from the end of the last Ice Age, including stone pieces criss-crossed by carved lines.

They are similar to engravings found from the same period in continental Europe, but are the first of their kind in the British Isles.

Archaeologists are in the early stages of analysing the finds, but estimate them to be at least 14,000 years old.

This places the camp among the earliest in northern Europe after the freeze.

It would also mean that the markings pre-date the earliest known art in the UK, which was found carved into stone walls and bones at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire in 2003.

However, the team wants to study the engravings more closely and hopefully find more of them, before making any grand claims.

Dr Chantal Conneller is co-director of the Ice Age Island project, which for five years has been working on the Les Varines site in the south east area of Jersey. She told the BBC: “We’re feeling reasonably confident at the moment that what we’ve got fits into this broader idea of non-representational Magdalenian art…”

For the rest, click here.