Oldest Winery Found in Armenia

What is with Armenia? In 2010, archaeologists in Areni-1 announced the discovery of the oldest known leather shoe. Remarkably well preserved (it was leather, after all), the shoe took place alongside other oldest known artifacts in the pantheon of archaeology. And now, that same archaeological site is home to another oldest known, this one a bit more exciting to the alcohol-drinking segment of the world. The National Geographic Society has announced the discovery of the oldest known winery.

Granted, archaeologists didn't find an instruction manual or a full set of wine glasses or even a cave painting or two showing people stomping on grapes. But what they did find has convinced some of them that they have indeed found a winery.

First of all, they found fermentation jars. Now that is a big clue. They also found a cup and a drinking bowl — again, these things could have myriad purposes. No, what has convinced the dedicated diggers of the importance of their find is not only all of those jars, cup and bowl, but also a big underground vat, into which drained a shallow basin about three feet across.

It probably hasn't hurt that the dig has turned up huge signpost-size clues that it's a winery such as grape seeds, some pressed-grape remains, and a dried vine or two. OK, so that's the real irrefutable evidence. (Maybe the shoe belonged a grape-smasher?)

The key is how old all of this stuff is.

Remember that wooden shoe? It was abandoned about 5,500 years ago. The winery is even older, dating to about 6,000 years ago. (Yes, I was thinking the same: Those are some remarkably well preserved seeds and vines.) And those seeds? They're the same type used in winemaking today (Vitis vinifera vinifera, for those who really want to know).

The winery is in the middle of a group of graves, and archaeologists have theorized that the wine that came resulted from all of that grape-smashing was used in ceremonial contexts, such as at funeral feasts (not much help for the living, but those left behind would have really given the deceased a proper toast and sendoff).

Shipwreck Find Suggests a Fascinating What If

Ah, the what if. It's tantalizing to the student of history, the possibility of rewinding the clocks and changing one or more details to see if the outcome would be different. Given the current understanding of the laws of the universe, we must be satisfied with the laws of speculation, which state simply that the sky's the limit.

One recent archaeological announcement qualifies for what if. Divers say that they have discovered the wreck of a U.S. Navy ship from 1811, the Revenge, captained by none other than Oliver Hazard Perry, the "hero of Lake Erie." Perry, you'll remember, was the American commander who famously defeated a British force on Lake Erie during the War of 1812, announcing his victory with the modest succinctness of "We have met the enemy and they are ours." That naval victory, the first American victory over British warships, took a lot of pressure off the American forces in the west, in particular making it much more difficult for the British Army and Navy to do simple things like communicate and swap supplies. The outcome of the war in the south and east was still in doubt, but Perry's victory sealed the west for the Americans.

As for the wreck, well, it's not entirely certain that the divers have found that specific ship. They say that they have enough evidence to prove their assertion, including a bunch of cannons, canister shots, and an anchor. The cannons seem to be the clincher, since no other ship carrying cannons is known to sunk in the area.

Seems Perry was aboard that the Revenge when it ran aground off Rhode Island in 1811. As a result, the U.S. Navy sent Perry to Lake Erie, not on a more high-profile assignment overseas, as he would have expected because of his long years of service. So there Perry was when the Battle of Lake Erie took place, and there Perry was not giving up the ship (to paraphrase his famous slogan), his steely resolve seeing the Americans through a difficult, hard-fought naval battle. What might have been indeed.

Pardon Billy the Kid? As If!

Poor Billy the Kid? Perhaps.

The suddenly popular outlaw had a chance of being pardoned more than a century after his death, but the outgoing governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, couldn't find it in his heart — or, most likely, his jurisdiction — to do it, despite the pardon papers having been drawn up.

The story is that William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, made a deal with Lew Wallace, the territorial governor of New Mexico at the time, to testify in court about killings he witnessed, presumably to help convict other outlaws. The operative word there is story, since no papers proving this agreement have ever been found.

The recent exposure of what has been a long-dead issue is thanks in part to the diligence of an attorney, Randi McGinn, who has no doubt made a name for herself arguing on behalf of someone long dead and unable to provide evidence in his own behalf.

What is a fact is that Bonney was a killer. He was in jail awaiting hanging for the killing of a sheriff when escaped, killing two deputies along the way. New Mexico government officials say that Bonney killed at least nine people. Popular lore puts the figure at more than 20. The final killing belonged to Sheriff Pat Garrett, who killed Bonney himself in 1881.

The issue has caught on with a small segment of the world population. The governor's office set up a website asking for public comment and received 809 emails from all round the world. The final tally was 430 in favor of a pardon and 379 against.

So who has the last word? Apparently, it's Richardson, because the incoming governor, Susana Martinez, has gone on record as saying that the State of New Mexico has more pressing matters to attend to in these tough economic times.

Enough said.

Message Decoded 147 Years Too Late

They found out the hard way, turns out, possibly without ever receiving the message.

They in this case would be the Confederate forces at Vicksburg, the famed one of the one-two punch, along with Gettysburg, that finally set the Union on course to ultimate victory. With the victory at Gettysburg, the advance of the Army of Northern Virginia was stopped, never to return. With the victory Vicksburg, the Confederacy was split in two and, possibly more importantly, the vital waterway the Mississippi River was firmly in the hands of David Farragut and the Union Navy.

But Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton had no way of knowing all that as he hunkered down behind his defenses, trying desperately to hold out until reinforcements arrived to raise the siege of the Confederate positions at Vicksburg. All Pemberton knew was that he was running out of everything — food, medicine, men, munitions, and time. Ringing his position with a smug sort of aplomb was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who would later end the war by accepting the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Pemberton was waiting, in particular, for word from one of his fellow commanders who was stationed just to the west of Vicksburg. This was the promise of reinforcement that Pemberton was seeking. If he could just hold out until …

But the day of reinforcement never came, instead turning into a day of reckoning, as on July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered to Grant both his men and his position.

But that is all old hat. The new hat is on the recently unencrypted message intended for Pemberton from this mysterious fellow commander who mysteriously never turned up. The message was found in a tiny bottle given over by a Confederate captain who somehow ended up with the message. Pemberton, it runs out, never got the message — not that it would have cheered him up any.

The bottle had sat in the Museum of the Confederacy for some time, since 1896, in fact. The bottle was recently re-examined and found to contain a message that didn't initially make sense. That's when the code-breaking began.

A retired CIA code-breaker cracked the code, utilizing the Vigenere cipher, a common enough code during the Civil War but not used in quite awhile. In this code, letters are shifted to create different letter combinations. The code cracked, the museum released the details.

In the end, it mattered little whether Pemberton got his reinforcements or not. They would most likely have been too late anyway, if they had come. Vicksburg was soon in Union hands, as was much of the rest of the Confederate lands. The Union's overwhelming advantage in money and manpower proved too much for the Confederacy to withstand. The nation was whole again.

Nuns Get Their Baseball Card Money After All

The School Sisters of Notre Dame, an order in Baltimore, have turned over their rare Honus Wagner T206 baseball card and received $220,000. From their point of view, the deal is done. However, the deal almost didn't get done at all.

The original bidder didn't come through, apparently. Stepping into the breach at the end of the 30-day payment period was another bidder who was initially scared away by the amount of the bid but later decided to pay the full amount when he was approached by the auction house. The fact that he was Catholic probably didn't hurt his chances, either of being approached or being willing to pay a few tens of thousands of dollars more than he was originally intended to pay.

That's all water under the bridge now, as the card now belongs to Nicholas DePace, a doctor from Philadelphia who plans to display one of just a few known representations of "The Flying Dutchman" in a sports memorabilia museum to be built outside Philadelphia, in Collingswood, N.J. DePace, a longtime collector, has amassed some impressive items in his collection over the years, including uniforms belonging to Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. His interests extend past baseball to include a uniform worn by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain.

To that he will be able to add one of the rarest baseball cards of them all. The Wagner card was part of the T206 series, a group of cards produced between 1909 and 1911. This particular card is so rare because so few of the original issue exist — and that is because they were made for just a few years, at the insistence of Wagner, one of the game's great all-around players, excelling hitting, fielding, and leadership for 21 seasons, mostly with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Two theories about why Wagner wanted production of the card to stop abound, the more favorable being that he didn't want children, then the main collectors of the cards, buying the other product made by the card-makers, the American Tobacco Company.

The card came to the nuns in the first place by way of a brother of a nun, who recently died and who had kept the card since he acquired it in 1936. The top price paid for a mint condition Honus Wagner card is $2.8 million, back in 2007. The card that DePace got this time round is in poorer condition but it still one of only 60 of its kind.

Found Amelia Earhart at Last?

Here's where DNA testing can really do something worthwhile.

Amelia Earhart is once again in the news, long after her disappearance. This time, researchers have found a few bones on a deserted atoll in the Pacific that, along with a few other clues, would seem to paint the picture of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, spending the ends of their lives on land, alone, slowly running out of food and fresh water, undiscovered by the massive search team sent to look for them.

The other clues are perhaps more intriguing than mere bones: Among the findings are the mirror from a woman's compact, a pocket knife of the kind that was listed on Earhart's plane's inventory, and small travel-worthy bottles made in New Jersey (which, incidentally, is a long way from Nikumaroro, the atoll on which these things were found).

Earhart and Noonan went missing in 1937, so it's conceivable that the remains of small fires found on the atoll point as well to the missing pair's presence there. Also among the findings was a group of empty oyster shells laid out in a row, as if they had been cast down as water collection devices.

The findings were released by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which has long been looking for clues to Earhart's fate.

Among the more outlandish theories were that she was captured by Japanese soldiers and executed as a spy or that she returned to the U.S. under a new identity and lived in secret the rest of her life. (Born in 1897, she would be very old if still alive.)

Finding the plane underwater would put to rest those outlandish theories, to a certain extent. But if the DNA testing on the bones that is now planned matches that of Earhart, then it's moreso an open-and-shut case of what happened on that grim July day in 1937.

JFK Photos Sell for $151,100 at Auction

The old saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. In some cases, pictures are worth thousands (perhaps hundred of thousands) of dollars. Such is the case with a recent group of images snapped by famed White House photographer Cecil Stoughton.

Stoughton is probably best known for his photo of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force Once hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That photograph, showcasing the steely calm of Johnson and the still-in-shock Jacqueline Kennedy, is one of the most famous in American history. The circumstances surrounding the taking of the photo are known, of course: the shooting, the aftermath, the constitutional carry-on. What was known previously only to some was the fact that Stoughton almost didn't live long enough to snap that shot. After hearing that Johnson would be sworn in aboard the plane, Stoughton rushed over in a car and literally ran across the tarmac to get on the plane to capture the moment. Secret Service agents, already frazzled from the horrific events that they had endured in the previous few hours, nearly gunned Stoughton down as a potential assassin. Fortunately, he was recognized.

That photo sold at a recent auction for $13,420, nearly twice the presale price estimated by Bonhams, the auction house in charge of the sale. The photo was one of 12,000 photographs taken by Stoughton of both public and private events involving Kennedy and his family. Among the headlines from the auction was the $9,150 paid for a rare photo showing Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Marilyn Monroe in the same public place at the same time.

Perhaps fittingly, a photo of JFK in the Oval Office with young Carolina and John-John dancing around, sold for $18,300.

Bonhams reported a total sale amount of $151,000.