Archaeology Magazine — March-April 2018

12 ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2018

FROM THE TRENCHES

A

recently rediscovered fragment of an abbot’s grave slab

from North Wales may offer an unusual glimpse of a

medieval personality. University of Chester archaeologist

Howard Williams analyzed the two-foot-long stone piece and

found that it once lay atop the tomb of an abbot named Howel

who led an important Welsh abbey around 1300. Williams notes

that the slab depicts Howel in realistic fashion—rare for the

period—and wearing a broad smile. “It’s eerie,” says Williams.

“The vast majority of these medieval funerary monuments show

somber-looking characters who are focused on prayer, not grin-

ning as if for a graduation portrait.” Williams notes that Howel

was abbot during the English conquest of Wales in 1283 , which

left his abbey severely damaged. Records suggest Howel was a

power broker during the period and might have been seen as

an important source of stability in the community. Williams

speculates that the monks who fashioned the slab may have been

trying to capture Abbot Howel’s reassuring character. “That smile

might have communicated that sense of ‘keep calm and carry on,’”

says Williams. In troubled times, perhaps the fond memory of a

smiling abbot offered some comfort to the monks he left behind.

—Eric A. PowEll

HE’S NO

STONE FACE

F

or thousands of years, Afghani-

stan has provided a passage for

conquerors and commerce alike.

It has also very often been a place of con-

flict. For decades, the U.S. Departments

of Defense and State have had spy satel-

lites collecting images over the country,

some of which they are now sharing

with researchers from the University

of Chicago’s Afghan Heritage Map-

ping Project (AHMP). “The imagery is

absolutely phenomenal,” says AHMP’s

Kathryn Franklin. “Every single day in

the lab someone says, ‘Do you see what

I’m seeing?’ There’s something a little

bit magic in it.”

Working with their Afghan col-

leagues, the AHMP’s goal is to record

all of Afghanistan’s cultural features.

One of the most recent stunning suc-

cesses has been the identification of 160

large early modern caravanserais where

travelers and traders would stop for the

night as they and their camels made

their way along the Silk Road carrying

gems, spices, sugar, textiles, ceramics,

paper, money, and slaves. Apart from

their size and frequency, what makes

the caravanserais so amazing, explains

Franklin, is that the idea has persisted

that as soon as people could use boats,

they did so exclusively. “But now we

have this overwhelming evidence,” she

explains, “that these important routes

were preserved and maintained by the

Persian and Mughal Empires because

trade and travel were important not just

economically, but to their ideas of how

to be a rich and powerful state.”

—Jarrett a. LobeLL

SATELLITES ON THE SILK ROAD

Grave slab, North Wales

Qala-I Mir ’Alam

Khushkava