http://museum-security.org/
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June 5, 1998
CONTENTS:
- How did all that art end up in museums?
- Stolen rare book by Ptolemy recovered in London
- RBMS Security Guidelines Revision
- Villagers take on art world to reclaim 'stolen' treasure (Times of
London)
- Mercouri exhibit focuses on getting Elgin marbles back
- Moderators message
- Police recover stolen antiques (Columbus Dispatch)
- Closures at the Louvre due to theft
- Historic sites are being destroyed at the rate of one every day
How did all that art end up in museums?
Paintings stolen by Nazis turn up in America (U.S.News & World
Report magazine)
BY JOHN MARKS
When Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg fled Europe in 1940, one step
ahead of the Nazis, he left behind more than 300 works of art, among
them Odalisque, a minor painting by Henri Matisse. After being
confiscated by the Nazis and disappearing for decades, that painting
has now turned up in the Seattle Art Museum, and the heirs of
Rosenberg want it back.
It is an art museum's worst nightmare. All of a sudden, an institution
dedicated to the public good, a forum for culture and refinement,
finds itself tied to the worst atrocities of World War II. "It's the
equivalent of a wife-beating charge," says Richard Armstrong, director
of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which had been accused of
holding a Rembrandt stolen by the Nazis. The museum actually was
relieved to discover last month that its Rembrandt was a fake: better
to be duped than to be complicit in villainy. The canvas that the
Nazis took during the war has been found in Prague.
More than 50 years after the end of World War II, works of art stolen
by Nazis are coming to light in some of the world's great collections,
both here and in Europe, and museum directors, a small group of
professionals normally preoccupied with history's creative triumphs,
are being forced to cope with one of its catastrophes.
Database. This week, American museum directors will gather in
Worcester, Mass., to establish guidelines for dealing with looted art.
A task force headed by Philippe de Montebello, director of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has spent months putting
together proposals to help museums grapple with this crisis. Among its
likely recommendations is the creation of a central database of all
works with a suspicious past, an effort expected to cost about
$400,000.
Disputes over paintings like the ones in Pittsburgh and Seattle have
erupted across the country: A New York judge recently ruled that two
paintings seized by the Manhattan district attorney while they were on
loan to the Museum of Modern Art would have to be returned to Austria.
Both paintings are by the artist Egon Schiele. One of them, Dead City,
is claimed by heirs of Fritz Grunbaum, a Viennese cabaret artist who
perished in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. The other, Portrait
of Wally, is sought by descendants of Lea Bondi Jaray, who fled Vienna
in 1937.
In July, the Italian government will recover Jacopo Zucchi's The Bath
of Bathsheba, which has hung in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford,
Conn., since 1965. And in August, the heirs of Fritz Gutmann, a Dutch
Jewish art collector, will go to trial to try to wrest a Degas
landscape from Daniel Searle, a trustee of the Art Institute of
Chicago, who bought it from a reputable dealer.
These cases all have their roots in World War II. While hounding Jews
out of Europe or murdering them in concentration camps, the Nazis
systematically plundered Jewish property, particularly works of art,
one of Adolf Hitler's obsessions. Other works were sold at
ridiculously low prices by desperate Jews who needed cash to flee. In
the meantime, armies of all stripes raided the national treasures of
their enemies, a time-honored tradition of war. While much of this
booty was tracked down and returned to rightful owners years ago,
thousands of works remain in limbo, art historians say. Most of it is
in Europe, but a small amount ended up in the United States. Hector
Feliciano, author of The Lost Museum, a book about looted art,
believes that hundreds of stolen works have traveled across the
Atlantic.
Never too late. Several new organizations are now pressing for the
return of looted art. The Washington-based Holocaust Art Restitution
Project (HARP) helps survivors and their descendants track down
missing treasures. The Commission for Art Recovery, a lobbying and
data-collecting effort sponsored by the World Jewish Congress and
chaired by businessman Ronald Lauder, hopes to pressure the French and
German governments into returning art from their museums. Yet another
group, the Art and Archive Foundation, headed by Elizabeth Clark,
granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg--the art dealer who owned the Matisse
Odalisque--has begun scholarly research in archives all over Europe.
These efforts, however well intentioned, have resulted in chaos.
Conflicts have flared among various groups--in particular between
HARP, which has been aggressive on behalf of victims, and the museum
directors, who have had to defend themselves against imputations of
negligence or even dishonesty. At a congressional hearing in February,
HARP Director Ori Soltis suggested that American museums were
reluctant to research their collections thoroughly because the effort
would be too expensive, a charge that outraged the Metropolitan's de
Montebello. "Mr. Soltis's presentation was disingenuous and
outrageous," de Montebello says. "I would like you to cite me one
single art museum in America that has ever put [cost] forward [as an
excuse]. This is a pure invention to dramatize his case, and it's
reprehensible."
On one hand, museums have found themselves tarnished by a complex
chain of transactions and thefts; their integrity is at stake. On the
other, Holocaust survivors and their children see this art not only as
a commodity but also as one of their last links to a vanished past.
For them, memory and identity are on the line. The heart of the
matter, the place where all this fear and loss come together, is
provenance--which, in the language of the art world, means the history
of the ownership of a particular piece of art.
In their lifetimes, which can be a few years or many centuries, works
of art can pass through hundreds of hands--and often, those hands
cannot be documented. Sometimes, the records have been lost, or wars
and other disasters confuse the trail. Even when records exist, they
are not foolproof. The business of art is secretive. Dealers prefer to
keep the identities of their buyers private, because they do not want
other dealers poaching on their turf. Buyers usually like it that way;
security is their mania.
A review of the provenance of a single, well-documented, 100-year-old
painting shows how complex a search can be. In her new book, Portrait
of Dr. Gachet, Cynthia Saltzman tracks a single, celebrated canvas by
Vincent van Gogh from the artist's studio near Paris in May 1890 to
the collection of Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito, who paid $82.5
million for it in 1990. In that stretch of time, a short one relative
to the history of art, the painting had 12 owners besides Saito: "two
affluent avant-garde artists, three dealers, a German collector, a
museum director, a member of the Nazi elite, an Amsterdam banker, and
a Jewish exile," as Saltzman recounts.
For museums at the end of the 20th century, the problem years are 1930
through 1950, what one historian calls the Bermuda Triangle of art.
When Hitler came to power, Portrait of Doctor Gachet hung on the wall
of a gallery in Frankfurt. In 1937, it was confiscated as "degenerate
art" by the Propaganda Ministry. A year later, Nazi leader Hermann
Goering had his hands on it but quickly sold it to buy other looted
treasures. While the van Gogh never completely disappeared from sight,
many comparable objects did, and 50 years later, they are extremely
difficult to trace.
Disclosure. Judging whether a piece of art was stolen often comes down
to "a smell test," says Stephen Lash of Christie's auction house. But
the historical haze has served as a comfortable excuse for some
European museums that quietly admit they are holding stolen
masterpieces and have made little effort to find the legitimate
owners. That seems to be the case with Fernand Léger's Woman in Red
and Green at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In the Pompidou's
classification system, the Léger is listed as an R2P, meaning it was
seized by the Nazis, returned to France after the war, and now hangs
provisionally until its rightful owner comes forward. Russia's
Hermitage and Pushkin museums have been even more duplicitous: They
kept secret storerooms full of war booty until the mid-1990s. Russia's
parliament has passed a law against returning these artworks.
In America, the discovery of looted works has often been blind luck.
In Seattle, the daughter of the art collector who donated the
Odalisque to the museum later stumbled across the Matisse in a book
about missing works and raised the alarm. In the case of Hartford's
The Bath of Bathsheba, the Wadsworth Atheneum had suspected for three
decades that it was loot, thanks to the visit of an unidentified
Italian who remembered that he had seen the same painting in the 1920s
in a Berlin museum. At that time, the visitor recalled, the painting
was on loan from the Italian Embassy. After a lengthy inquiry, the
museum determined that Bathsheba was indeed stolen property of the
Italian government. The Soviets had confiscated the picture at the end
of World War II. Eventually it turned up in Paris, where it was sold
to the museum in the 1960s.
If all suspect provenances resulted in the discovery of a looted work,
the situation of museums would be simple. As soon as a question mark
and a claimant arose, the institutions could just hand over the
painting. But often enough, the spotty provenance conceals a
legitimate, though unrecorded, transaction. Until February, one of the
great modernist treasures at the Met in New York, van Gogh's Wheat
Field with Cypresses, hung under a legal shadow. The years between
1939 and 1951 were missing. In 1993, the Met had bought the work for
$57 million from the son of a Swiss industrialist known to have
purchased loot from the Nazis. Because of the gap in time, no one knew
exactly how the industrialist had acquired it until a New York Times
reporter discovered a grandchild of the original owner, a Jewish art
collector named Franz von Mendelssohn. Strapped for cash, this
grandchild had sold Wheat Field to the industrialist in 1951. The Met
could rest easy.
Other museums have not been so lucky, and for them, the last act in
the drama of a looted piece--its restitution--is painful. If and when
the Seattle Art Museum returns the Matisse Odalisque to the Rosenberg
family, it will get nothing in exchange. As a result, the museum is
considering a lawsuit against the dealer who sold it the painting.
Even where no fault is involved, reputations may be damaged, as the
controversy surrounding the Degas owned by a trustee of the Art
Institute of Chicago makes clear. If it goes to trial in August, the
case may put the museum, which had hoped to inherit the Degas, in an
unflattering position, even though legally it would seem to have
nothing to do with the matter.
Now and then, people who have little or no documentation step forward
with claims. In February, Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democratic congressman
from Queens, N.Y., appealed to de Montebello to help a constituent
whose father, a Dutch Jewish art dealer who survived the war in
Switzerland, allegedly lost more than 30 Rembrandts through forced
sale or confiscation by the Nazis. For proof, however, the dealer's
daughter had only her memories and a list indicating the number of
paintings in the collection; she lacked the names or any other
identification of the works. And that, says de Montebello, made her
case practically hopeless. "A vague distant memory is not
justification enough for me to despoil the public, which [has an
interest] in the millions of works on the wall," de Montebello
explains. "I might be very sympathetic to the plight of an individual,
but if that is the only thing they bring to the table, my hands are
tied."
Museums across the country are now combing through their collections.
Almost everyone involved in the restitution effort wants to avoid
court battles, which are costly for both the museums and the
claimants. But not all restitutions end bitterly. The Wadsworth
Atheneum, for example, cut an extraordinary deal with the Italian
government. In exchange for the return of the prodigal Bathsheba, the
museum has received an exhibition called "Caravaggio and his Italian
Followers," which runs through the end of July. The museum originally
paid $35,000 for the painting. The estimated cost of the exhibition
would have been $350,000.
Stolen rare book by Ptolemy recovered in London
PARIS, May 29 (Reuters) - One of the earliest printed atlases,
Ptolemy's Cosmographia, has been recovered in London a year after it
was stolen from France's National Library, French police said on
Friday.
They said the book, printed in Bologna, Italy, in 1477, was recovered
after the French authorities discovered it had been listed for sale at
a London auction planned by Christie's this month.
The police put its value at about five million francs ($836,000).
The individual who offered it to Christie's, a Frenchman with homes
in Algeria and Paris had false ownership papers and will be taken
before a French judge on June 19, the police said.
The work by the Greek astronomer and mathematician had disappeared
from the French library's shelves in August 1997. But its absence went
undetected for three months.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited
(ExLibris)
From: ewilkie@ix.netcom.com (Everett Wilkie)
Subject: RBMS Security Guidelines Revision
The RBMS Security Committee has basically finished work on the draft
of its proposed revisions to the ACRL/RBMS "Guidelines for the
Security of Rare Book, Manuscript, and Other Special Collections."
The proposed document may be viewed on the RBMS home page:
http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/rbms.html
Once you arrive at the page, go down a couple of screens until you
see the Draft link. Follow that link.
The Security Committee will hold a seminar on these Guidelines at the
RBMS Preconference on Friday, June 26, from 9:00-10:30 a.m. We hope
that Preconference attendees will let us benefit from their reactions
to the proposed document. If you cannot attend the Preconference, I
would be very happy to receive your comments by email and can assure
you they will be considered.
After the Preconference, the Committee will probably spend the bulk
of its annual meeting in DC doing final revisions to the document,
based on comments we have received at the seminar session and other
comments we have received.
Everett C. Wilkie, Jr.
Chair, RBMS Security Committee
Villagers take on art world to reclaim 'stolen' treasure (Times of
London)
BY RICHARD OWEN
THE mayor of a Sicilian village yesterday said villagers were close to
victory in legal proceedings to regain a superb ancient Greek
ceremonial gold plate valued at £1.5 million and now owned by an
American multimillionaire.
The villagers, whose campaign is backed by the Italian Government,
claim the gold plate was stolen and then exported illegally.
The court battle over the treasure - which has taken 16 years to
track down - has alarmed high-powered American museums and art
dealers since it throws the spotlight on the highly lucrative illegal
trade in antiquities, much of it controlled by the Mafia.
The beautifully worked decorated ceremonial plate, or dish,
disappeared in 1980 shortly after it was unearthed during excavations
at Montereparato, near the village of Caltavuturo, in the mountains
between Palermo and Cefalù. Archaeologists said the plate, or "phial",
which originally meant a shallow flat container rather than a medicine
bottle, had almost certainly been used for libations in honour of
Greek gods in a sanctuary or temple.
Scholars say it may have been made to celebrate the exploits of
Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (319BC-272BC). The plate is in the collection
of Michael Steinhardt, an American collector, who says he bought it in
good faith from a Swiss dealer in Zurich for $1.2 million (£736,000)
after having it authenticated by experts from the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York.
Italian police who tracked the plate's path from Sicily to New York
said it had been initially sold to a Sicilian dealer for £10,000 and
then to a Zurich dealer for £40,000 before being resold to Mr
Steinhardt.
"This is a tale of David and Goliath" said Il Messaggero, noting that
although stolen Italian artefacts often ended up in the hands of
collectors or museums, it was rare for them to be recovered. "An
obscure village has taken on the mighty."
Domenico Giannopolo, Mayor of Caltavuturo, said villagers had been
outraged to learn that the plate had ended up "in the glass display
case of a multimillionaire in his Fifth Avenue penthouse".
Mercouri exhibit focuses on getting Elgin marbles back
ATHENS, June 2 (Reuters) - The foundation pursuing Greece's quest to
get the Elgin marbles back from Britain is hosting an exhibition to
pay tribute to the main champion of their cause, the late actress and
culture minister Melina Mercouri.
An exhibition, which opened to the public on Tuesday, tracks
Mercouri's life from her early acting career to the fight to convince
the British Museum to return the ancient marble sculptures taken from
the Parthenon in Athens by a British aristocrat from the Parthenon
more than 180 years ago.
``We needed to put together this exhibition because Melina is so well
known all over the world but few people knew her works and visions,''
said Spyros Mercouris, her brother and member of the board of the
Melina Mercouri Foundation.
Set in a renovated neo-classical mansion in the Plaka district just
below the Acropolis, the permanent exhibition features pictures,
videos, films and press clippings as well as a model of the new museum
that will be built to house the marbles.
Mercouri, who was socialist culture minister from 1981 to her death
in 1994, fought to get back the sculptures removed by the Earl of
Elgin, who sold them to the British Museum in 1816.
Despite her passionate pleas, the British government said it has no
intention of returning them.
``I hope to see the marbles back home before I die, but if they come
later I shall be reborn,'' an inscription on the exhibition wall
quotes her as saying.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Moderators Message:
Dear MSN Subscribers,
A couple of weeks ago I sent a message to the list explaining that it
is about time to try and get some financial support. This far, most
unfortunately, in vain. Those of you who really care: do not worry
the MSN will keep on going with or without financial support. The
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam does pay for both internet service
providers (in Europe and in the USA) and I love this endeavor too
much not to be willing to take care of all other expenses (equipment,
telephone bill). Besides, so many of you have been sending me nice
compliments that it really is impossible to stop. I want all of you
to know that Steve Keller really put up a fight to try and find a
sponsor. Steve has shown to be a real friend and a great guy to deal
with. There is something else: june 11 I will reach the impressive
age of fifty and my wife and I will celebrate this in Tuscany, Italy.
So, from that day on the MSN will be closed for a little less than
three weeks, but: I WILL BE BACK!!.........
Do take care (of your personal life and of cultural property)
Ton Cremers
Police recover stolen antiques (Columbus Dispatch)
Suspect convicted of earlier thefts
By Joe Blundo
Dispatch Staff Reporter
Among the items was a 179-year-old sampler, embroidered by Huldah
Bull.
Police have recovered an embroidered sampler from 1819, a clock from
1840, a statue and other items reported stolen from a museum and two
churches in Worthington.
The man suspected in the thefts served about 10 months in prison in
the theft of two paintings from a Downtown church last year,
Worthington police said.
Christopher M. Skeen, 41, of 662 Hilltonia Ave. was arrested last
week on a charge of receiving stolen property. He was released from
the Franklin County jail after the charge was dismissed, but police
said information on the thefts will be presented to a grand jury.
Detective Michael Holton said a witness called police after seeing a
man place something wrapped in a blanket under a bush outside All
Saints Lutheran Church, 6770 N. High St., last Tuesday.
Police found a statue of Noah, valued at $5,000, wrapped in the
blanket. It had been taken from the church, Holton said. Skeen was
arrested while waiting at a nearby bus stop.
Police interviews with Skeen led to the recovery of the other items
at three antique shops in Columbus. Holton declined to identify the
shops but said the owners were not aware that the items had been
stolen.
Among the items was a 179- year-old sampler, embroidered by Huldah
Bull, a 12-year-old girl who signed and dated the work. The sampler,
reported stolen May 1 from the Old Rectory, a Worthington Historical
Society museum, was the subject of a column in the Accent section of
The Dispatch last Saturday.
The sampler was valued at $1,450 in 1986 but since has soared in
value, said Jennifer Maier, director of the Worthington Historical
Society.
Also recovered were:
Two ceramic figurines of horses and riders from 1865 and a cast- iron
rendering of a horse team from the 1880s, all stolen from the
historical society in the last 11/2 years. They were worth a total of
about $1,800.
A clock from 1840, missing from Worthington United Methodist Church,
600 High St., in the last two weeks. It was valued at about $500.
Skeen last year pleaded guilty to a charge of receiving stolen
property in the theft of two paintings from Trinity Episcopal Church,
125 E. Broad St. The paintings, worth more than $5,000, were found a
few days later in an antiques store.
Police also recovered two quilts after questioning Skeen but are
unsure about their ownership, Holton said. Anyone with information
about missing quilts can contact the police at 885-4463.
Skeen could not be reached for comment.
Closures at the Louvre due to theft
By Susannah Herbert in Paris
THE Louvre has decided to close many of the 500 rooms in its
Parisian palace, claiming that public access must be sacrificed to
security after recent art thefts. Many foreign visitors hoping to
see a specific artwork risk disappointment.
The decision is an important change of direction for the museum,
which recently completed a 15-year expansion and redesign, costing
£600 million. The project's aim was to ensure that "all the museum
rooms will be accessible". Instead, rooms and galleries will be
closed in turn, allowing the management to concentrate staff in the
spaces left open.
The room containing Italian primitives, for example, has been shut
for two weeks, as has the epigraphy gallery, from which an ancient
Greek stele was stolen in January. The redesign, which on completion
was called a triumph of French cultural policy, now seems a classic
case of misplaced priorities and short-sighted grandiosity. Despite
spending millions on re-building and opening endless splendid new
galleries, the French government penny-pinched on the dull task of
ensuring the safety of the Louvre's 30,000 works of art.
Since 1994, when the State-run French Museums Department abolished
its security unit, there have been seven thefts from the Louvre,
including four in the last six months. The most brazen, the daylight
removal of a valuable Corot landscape last month, turned into a
public humiliation when it was disclosed that the painting, like
innumerable others in the museum, was not protected by either
electronic or human surveillance.
A Louvre official said that the expansion project had not been
designed to cope with "the imaginative methods used by thieves today.
No one ever thought people would dare to do the things they've done."
Historic sites are being destroyed at the rate of one every day
,
writes Norman Hammond
Man and nature threaten ancient monuments
Ancient sites at risk, protected or lost for ever
ANCIENT monuments in England are falling prey to urban expansion,
industrial and agricultural development and the forces of nature at
the rate of one a day.
More than 22,000 sites have vanished since 1945, a comprehensive
survey of archaeological sites has disclosed. Among recent casualties
have been Neolithic burial mounds, Iron Age farmsteads, Roman villas
and medieval monasteries.
Nearly a million archaeological sites have been documented in
England, one of the highest densities in Europe. Only some 17,000,
ranging in date from half a million years ago to the present century,
are on the government schedule, introduced a century ago, of
monuments that cannot be destroyed without formal consent. Many are
noted sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury, but others are visible
only from the air.
At Knowlton, Dorset, where the unseen foundations of a series of
timber circles larger than Stonehenge were detected recently by
geophysical prospecting, the visible earthworks of the Neolithic henge
are surrounded by cropmarks of vanished structures that have been
destroyed by ploughing. The site is now protected.
Natural and human agencies are attacking thousands of other sites.
Because of coastal erosion, the gun-emplacements of Ringborough
Battery on Humberside have moved from clifftop to beach, and an
important Second World War defensive site is already vanishing.
Ancient landscapes are also falling victim to roadbuilding: the
upgrading of the A1 in the East Midlands has revealed prehistoric
settlements and burials only to sweep them away.
"We will not be able to save every scheduled monument at risk," said
Sir Jocelyn Stevens, chairman of English Heritage, publishing the
Monuments at Risk Survey yesterday. "If we save half, we will have
done very well."
He was speaking at the Rose, the Elizabethan theatre in Southwark
uncovered in 1989 by the construction work that has now placed it in
the basement of an office block, its future still to be determined.
Among damage highlighted in the document is that to Legbourne Priory,
Lincolnshire, where the remains of a 12th-century Cistercian nunnery
have been mutilated by earthmoving. One of the fishponds used by the
nuns to provide Friday meals has been destroyed. The Iron Age
settlement of Buzbury Rings in Dorset has been damaged by golf-course
development.
"It's something of a horror story," said Timothy Darvill, who
directed the research for the survey at Bournemouth University.
"We are losing the equivalent area of ten football pitches every
day."
The survey shows that the rate of destruction has been greatest in
the South East, with nearly a quarter of recorded monuments
destroyed, against a national average of 16 per cent. More than 4,000
monuments are currently at high risk of serious damage or
destruction, and a further 64,000 at medium risk, with the highest
concentrations in the West Midlands, the North East and in Yorkshire.
Forty-four per cent of land known to hold archaeological remains had
been destroyed by 1995, 9 per cent by wholesale destruction of
monuments, and the remaining 35 per cent by piecemeal losses. Only 5
per cent of monuments surveyed had suffered no recent damage.
Urbanisation, demolition and development accounted for almost half of
the wholesale destruction, agriculture for a third of the piecemeal
loss.
Vandalism, tourism, military damage, forestry and natural processes
accounted for a further 40 per cent of what Professor Darvill called
"nibbling away at the past". Road-building, in spite of the vocal
protests against it, accounts for only a minor amount of site
destruction, and much of that is ameliorated by well-planned rescue
excavations before construction.
Sir Jocelyn said: "This is a national picture, to develop strategic
policies: the evidence lies beneath our feet."
Professor Darvill added: "We are not yet in the business of naming
and shaming those who are putting momunemts at risk." Geoffrey
Wainwright, English Heritage's chief archaeologist, said that a lot
could be achieved towards preservation by better liaison between
national and local government and the private sector. The survey had
"given us a platform on which we can proceed", he said.
Ancient sites at risk, protected or lost for ever
1. Knowlton, Dorset: "a fine example of a late Neolithic to early
Bronze Age henge monument with raised earth banks," English Heritage
says. "Other enclosures and several burial mounds have been ploughed
flat and can be seen as cropmarks." The complex is a scheduled ancient
monument and afforded statutory protection: otherwise the remaining
structures, including the ruins of a medieval church in the centre of
the henge circle, would still be endangered.
2. Eclipse Track, Somerset Levels: a well-preserved pathway of wooden
hurdles built around 2000 BC. The track was uncovered during
peat-cutting. Waterlogging had preserved it, and other prehistoric
trackways, including the Sweet Track, the oldest purpose-built route
in the world dating to 6,000 years ago. Such evidence is threatened by
peatworking and subsequent drying-out of the landscape.
3. Westhampnett Bypass, West Sussex: the road runs through an area of
dense ancient habitation near Chichester. The home of Boxgrove Man, at
half a million years old "the earliest Englishman", lay near by with
many other Ice Age sites. Along the path of the road, prehistoric,
Roman and Saxon sites were excavated as a planned part of the
development.
4. Castle Donington, Leicestershire: the Hemington gravel quarry
revealed the surprising and well-preserved remains of several medieval
timber bridges. Those shown here date to the period shortly after the
Norman Conquest. "Since few 11th-century timber buildings survive
above ground, these structures provide answers to questions about the
development of building techniques in this period which are otherwise
unobtainable," English Heritage says. The timbers were lifted for
eventual museum display before the site was destroyed in the course of
quarrying.
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