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An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts. Visit Palgrave Macmillan and purchase your copy today!

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Wonder at the "Red Lady" skeleton from Gower PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Saturday, 03 June 2006
Jun 3 2006

Professor Stephen Aldhouse-Green
Western Mail

IN 1977 the curator of the geological collections at the University Museum, Oxford, placed the true significance of this ochre-stained skeleton in context.
As the search for your seven definitive wonders of Wales enters the home straight, we profile the latest contender from our shortlist of 30. Today Professor Stephen Aldhouse-Green, Professor of Human Origins at the University of Wales, Newport, asks for your votes for the 26,000-year-old remains of the Red Lady of Paviland

IN 1977 the curator of the geological collections at the University Museum, Oxford, placed the true significance of this ochre-stained skeleton in context.


Responding to a request from our National Museum for the "Red Lady of Paviland" to be repatriated to Wales he wrote, "As to depositing the Paviland Collections permanently at Cardiff, I suggest that this possibility be explored when the British Museum returns the Elgin marbles to Greece and the National Gallery its Titians to Italy, for they are surely in the same category."

That comparison with the Elgin marbles and Titians clearly recognises the global importance of the Red Lady. The remains were found in Paviland or Goat's Hole Cave, Gower, in 1823 by William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford. His discovery, decades before Darwin, was the first instance of the scientific recovery of fossil human remains in the world.

During the dig, Buckland correctly recognised the skeleton as male but, by the time of his publication later in the year, the ochre-stained skeleton had become a "painted lady", thought to have serviced Roman soldiers - a good story in its day.

But in addition to knowing that the "Red Lady" was in fact a man, we now know that both the burial and ivory ornaments placed with it were not Roman but rather Paleolithic in age. This realisation arose as a consequence of the visit of a French scholar, Emile Cartailhac, to the University Museum in Oxford in 1911. The artefacts could not be found and Cartailhac wrote angrily of how the collection had been treated sans honneur (without respect). Goaded, the then-Professor of Geology, William Sollas, re-located the finds, recognised their importance, and set about a new programme of excavation at Paviland in 1912.

Buckland's work 89 years earlier had been conducted at a time when many believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and when it was widely thought human remains could not date back tens of thousands of years. As a result Buckland, a devout Christian, failed to associate three key elements of his finds: the bones of Ice Age animals such as the mammoth and woolly rhino; flint artefacts; and the burial of the "ochred man".


Indeed, by rights the name given to the earliest modern humans in Europe should be "Pavilandians". But we were eventually labelled "Cro- Magnons" following a discovery in 1868, in France.


In 1997, I returned to Goat's Hole to see what remained of the deposits and to re-assess the dating and importance of the site. The layers that had produced the human remains no longer existed. Even so, study of the bones of the "Red Lady" showed that he was certainly a man, 5ft10in, aged 25-30. Radiocarbon dating told us that he died 26,000 years ago. His status as a person of great importance is indicated by his funeral robes stained with red ochre, plus 50 rods made of mammoth ivory, ivory bracelets and perforated sea shells. The interment is now known to be one of a series of ritual burials that reach far across Europe.


This find richly deserves a place among the Wonders of Wales.

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/features/tm_objectid=17170351&method=full&siteid=50082&headline=wonder-at-the--red-lady--skeleton-from-gower-name_page.html
 
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