tamaranth | [event] The Star-Crossed Stone

Yesterday I went to a Cambridge Science Festival event: The Star-Crossed Stone - the Archaeology, Mythology and Folklore of Fossil Sea Urchins. I like fossil sea-urchins: they're beautiful, distinctive and ancient. I've picked up plenty over the years, and still have one or two.

[I almost didn't go: though free, booking was required, and my initial email request must've got lost. When I phoned the Sedgwick yesterday, they told me the event was fully-booked, 'but come along anyway at 6pm for a drink; oh, and can we take your name and number and let you know about future talks?'. About ten minutes later, Ken McNamara himself left me a voicemail to say that they'd moved the event to a larger venue and he hoped I could make it. Pleased at the personal touch, I did!]

This was a fascinating talk by an engaging speaker. McNamara packed a great deal into an hour, including the hypothesis that humanity's fascination with the five-pointed star -- "such as these," he said, gesturing at the star-shaped USB fairy lights that had been twinkling merrily away -- is rooted in the pentamerous symmetry of the sea-urchin. During his talk he touched on Thor's hammer Mjollnir, da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the Egyptian god Horus, the Emperor Claudius, and Tennyson's Maud -- not the twee 'come into the garden' bit, but the second part, with its plea to "bury me, bury me / Deeper, ever so little deeper".

'Maud' was the name given by English archaeologist Worthington Smith to a female skeleton he unearthed in 1887. Two bodies -- a woman and a young child -- were buried, probably around 2000BC, and the bones were surrounded by over 200 fossil urchins.

It goes back, nearly half a million years. homo heidelbergensis made flint tools shaped so that the fossil urchins in the flint remained intact, and were centred; so did the Neanderthals, and of course homo sapiens. Dr McNamara describes a particular specimen as the world's first curated artifact: carved in hieroglyphics across the base is the date and location where it was found, and the name of the finder (a priest of Horus). (No,

la_marquise_de_, not that Horus.) (Probably.)

It goes forward: during his researches, McNamara visited a church in Hampshire that has a window surrounded by fossil urchins. Whilst chatting to Mr & Mrs Smith, the couple who held the church key, he discovered that they had a bucketful of urchins. Mr Smith had picked them up while working the fields, and knew that you were meant to take them home and put them by the door. "It's lucky, or something." Echoes of houses with sea urchin fossils in the lintels, along the windowsills ... echoes of Romano-British homes at Studland, Dorset, with fossil urchins in the foundations.

Sea urchin fossils are found in graves dating from Paleolithic times to the Anglo-Saxon era. Once 'grave goods' fell out of fashion, fossil sea-urchin spines were used for medicinal purposes: termed 'Jew-stones', they attracted an import tax of a shilling per pound weight in Elizabethan England.

One thing I noticed from the slides, and asked about, was that most of the skeletons buried with sea-urchin fossils were described as female. Is that accurate, I asked; is there a gender connection? Apparently the 'vast majority' of urchin-accompanied skeletons where the gender has been determined are women, often buried with the bones of a child (who usually has a sea-urchin fossil of their own). Any ideas?

I am extremely tempted by the book, though it seems to feature quite a bit of speculation, the kind that reads more like fiction than history. Fair enough, though, if it brings the subject to life and doesn't pretend to be fact. You can read an excerpt via the Google Books link below.

The Star-Crossed Stone on Google Books

Times review