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ARCHAEOLOGY

Monster figurehead returns home – after five centuries

A figurehead from a Danish ship that sank in the 1490s has made it home to Copenhagen after it was hauled from a Swedish sea bed last summer.

Published: 18 March 2016 13:56 CET
Monster figurehead returns home – after five centuries
Divers retrieve the figurehead from the sea off Ronneby. Photo: Ingemar Lundgren

Experts at the National Museum in the Danish capital will now begin work to restore the massive ornament to its former glory – a process that’s expected to take almost three years.

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Marcus Sandekjaer, the head of Blekinge Museum in Sweden, made the trip to Denmark with the figurehead, one of the world's oldest preserved wooden carvings of its kind.

“It felt like closing a circle: the figurehead returned to Copenhagen 521 years after it left the harbour there,” he told The Local.

The carving went on display at his museum after it was dragged up to the surface in August last year. 

The wooden face, which resembles a monster or a large grinning dog, had been lying on a seabed off the southern Swedish town of Ronneby for more than five centuries. It holds in its jaws a (wooden) human head. 

“A few of us have spent a lot of time with this really ugly figurehead,” said Sandekjaer said with a laugh. 

“We’re going to miss this guy.”

It is thought to have broken off from the Gribhunden ship, commissioned by King Hans, who ruled Denmark from 1481 to 1513. 


The monster. Photo: Blekinge Museum

The Gribhunden set sail from Copenhagen in 1495. A fire broke out when it was anchored off Ronneby, causing the vessel to explode and sink. 

It is not known if the fire was an accident or sabotage, or how many of the 150 people on board survived. 

Blekinge museum preserved the figurehead in a bath of sweet water for the past few months, designed to remove the salt it had absorbed from the sea. 

The Danish team will now begin a new three-step process to conserve the creepy figurehead, which weighs 300 kilograms and was discovered by divers in June.

“First they will try to find traces of paint. We still don’t know if it was painted or not,” said Sandekjaer. 

“Then it will be put in a chemical liquid for two years to stabilize the wood – otherwise the cell walls would collapse.”

“After that it will be freeze dried in a huge chamber for another six months.”

Sandekjaer believes the figurehead to be the only one of its kind remaining in the world from a 15th century ship.

The plan is for it to be returned to Blekinge and reunited with the rest of the ship once the conservation process is complete. 

The find has sparked interest worldwide as the Gribhunden was a contemporary of the Santa Maria, sailed by Christopher Columbus, and Vasco da Gama’s São Gabriel.

“The ship was constructed in continental Europe using oakwood from trees felled in north-eastern France in 1482-83,” said Sandekjaer. 

The wreck of King Hans' flagship still lies ten metres under the sea near Ronneby. Numerous artefacts have been discovered and brought to the surface since the ship was found by recreational divers in the 1970s. 

A new exhibition on the ship is set to open at Blekinge Museum on March 23rd.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

Published: 3 August 2021 09:13 CEST
Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals
Photo: Joao Zilhao/ICREA/AFP

The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales (Malaga province) to our extinct “cousin” species.

The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.

But the finding was contentious, and “a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing,” a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d’Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.

A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes — instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.

(Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

What’s more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.

More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.This “supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments,” said d’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.

It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal “art” to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old.

But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be.

The cave-paintings found in three caves in Spain, one of them in Ardales, are throught to have been created between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago, 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. (Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

The team wrote that the pigments are not “art” in the narrow sense of the word “but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.”

The cave formations “played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities,” though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.

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