Forsyth Major, Sir Arthur Evans, and a rediscovered ‘neolithic’ treasure
The clay tablet from Capo Pertusato located in the Ashmolean Museum
At the end of April Pascal Tramoni and I were sitting on the train on the way up to Cambridge. Later that morning we would be visiting the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to see the Corsican objects from the collection of Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major, notably the ‘other’ version of the Campo Fiorello figurine.
Pascal mentioned to me an article written by Emmanuel Passemard in 1925 and published in the Bulletin de la Société préhistorique de France, ‘Trois gisements néolithiques en Corse’1. Pascal said that some of the objects found at a dig near Bonifacio had been given to Sir Arthur Evans but hadn’t been seen since. That reminded me that in the Hull archives I had found a letter from Ellen Southwell to Odo Forsyth Major (Charles’ son), which also referred to Sir Arthur Evans and the Ashmolean museum.
Trois gisements
Passemard says that he helped Forsyth Major in three of his digs which were looking for evidence of palaeolithic man in Corsica: the Southwell cave at Vizzavona, the Fiumara rock shelter near Bonifacio, and finally the Abri du Bonnet de Prêtre at Capo Pertusato, also near Bonifacio.
The Capo Pertusato site had been known about for some time, and was described by artillery squadron leader Charles Ferton – a keen etymologist, geologist and archaeologist – in 19012:
“The southernmost point of Corsica, Capo Pertusato, is crowned by a broad limestone table shaped like a priest’s hat. This table, projecting beyond the pillar that supports it, creates a sheltered rocky overhang approximately 30 metres above the sea…
…The shelter formed by the ‘priest’s hat’ is a rich deposit of worked obsidian… This obsidian is common in the Neolithic sites of the Bonifacio limestone region, but there is no natural source of it in Corsica; it was imported. According to information kindly provided by my colleague Mr. Bourgeois, chemistry instructor at the École Polytechnique, this obsidian is identical to that of Monte Arci in Sardinia, which happens to be the nearest known source to Bonifacio and was the primary supplier of the worked obsidian distributed among the prehistoric campsites of Sardinia.
The small beach near Cape Pertusato was one of the landing points for traders bringing obsidian to Corsica. These merchants took shelter under the nearby rock, where, buried in the sand, one finds not only fragments of obsidian but also a large quantity of animal bones, undoubtedly remnants of their meals.3”
Passemard says “I helped [Forsyth Major] finish this work that had been started long ago and was particularly challenging for a 78 year-old man who, in the middle of winter, made sure never to leave the excavation site”. If Passemard is right about Forsyth Major’s age then it implies he is talking about the winter of 1921-22.
They find remains of domestic animals, prolagus and small mammals, fires, and neolithic artefacts such as obsidian blades, arrowheads, pottery fragments, bone punches and grinding stones. “Finally we found two remarkable pieces, which we will discuss in more detail… these pieces were handed over by Ch. Forsyth Major to Arthur Evans. They must be in England, but I am unaware if they have been published.”
The first of these was a “locally-quarried limestone tablet, shaped roughly like a violin with a sort of head or button on the upper part. The total length is 0.20m, and traces of red paint can still be seen on the surface”. Passemard thought it was a human figure.
The second piece was “a rectangular tablet of clay fired after engraving. The piece is incomplete, perhaps broken in half, but it is 0.11m long. The edges have been smoothed by hand, and its surface is covered with strokes directed in roughly one direction, like hatching.
It is very difficult to decipher anything precise, but we can distinguish a sort of oval that must have spread across the centre of the piece when it was whole, then hatched blows made with a worn punch or some other object with a slightly blunt point.
Some intersect and take on the appearance of V’s or chevrons, X’s, Y’s, or crosses. The oval seems to have been traced before some strokes and after others.
The whole takes on the appearance of irregular ‘scratching’ which nevertheless follows a sense of general direction along the greater length of the piece.
Is it a tablet bearing some kind of writing? This seems doubtful; the lack of precision in execution and the confusion of strokes seem to argue against it.
It is more plausible to admit that an oval, representing a material thing or an idea, was bordered by strokes and then smeared with hatching.
I believe it is a magical tablet that could have been part of the cult of the human idol found in the deposit.
Are these pieces truly Neolithic? It seems that one can answer in the affirmative based on what we know, but they are unique to the Mediterranean. Ch. Forsyth Major thought, based on very small particles of green oxide found before my arrival, that small copper objects could be mixed in, which is perfectly plausible [emphases in original].”
Ellen Southwell’s Letter
Ellen Southwell, who helped Forsyth Major pack and organise his collection in Bastia before his death, wrote to his son, Odo, in June 1926, evidently responding to a letter he had written asking for details of his father’s collection. She says:
“When we were packing these cases your father gave me 2 cards of introduction, one to the British Museum, to get back for him a curious little ‘pendant’ … I went to the Ashmolean to find Sir Arthur Evans, who had in charge another of the Doctor’s treasures for investigation, but he was away in Crete, so I never got that thing, or I suppose he still has it. When I was in Oxford last year I asked if he were in England and in Oxford, but was told he has retired from his museum work, and I did not like, after so many years, to go and ‘interview’ him in his private house.4”
Note that this letter refers to Sir Arthur Evans having one object rather than two, and suggests that he had been lent it to investigate it, rather than given it permanently. Ellen’s first visit to the Ashmolean was probably in 1922, which is the year her daughter Edith says Ellen “went to Ajaccio… to pack up [Forsyth Major’s] immense prehistoric and paleontological collection and bring it to our villa, near Bastia, to be definitively arranged under his direction”5. Ellen’s letter also confirms that she visited England in June and July 1922, which was also a year when Evans went back to Knossos in Crete6.
The tablet’s regular appearances in surveys of prehistoric Corsican art
Roger Grosjean wrote in 1963 that “on the island, portable art is, so far, very rare; only about fifteen pieces have been recorded, some of which are questionable”7. There have been a few more works discovered since then, but the overall number is low enough that the Bonnet de Prêtre tablet has featured – along with, unsurprisingly, the Campo Fiorello statuette – regularly and prominently in works cataloguing these treasures
Grosjean only had access to the photo in Passemard’s article, and didn’t know what to make of the tablet: “It is not possible to interpret this plaque and its engravings, even if it is considered to come from the same archaeological layer as the [violin-shaped limestone tablet also found in the same shelter]. This piece is also nowhere to be found.”
François de Lanfranchi and Michel-Claude Weiss reproduced a similar illustration based on Passemard’s photo 10 years later8, and amplified Grosjean’s comments on the paucity of examples and evidence: “The Neolithic peoples of Corsica did not leave behind particularly striking portable or cave art. Some portable works have been documented, but they were discovered under particularly unfavourable conditions (surface collection or early excavations without stratigraphic considerations). To our knowledge, none of these pieces comes from an archaeological layer clearly identified within a stratigraphic context. To make matters worse, they have generally disappeared or are housed in a foreign museum.”
Another 15 years on, Gabriel Camps highlighted much the same pieces, again using an illustration of the “exceptional but difficult to understand” tablet based on Passemard’s image9. He reported that, in looking at the photo, Henriette Camps-Fabrer (his wife, and herself a renowned neolithic expert) “believes one can recognise, on the right side, the sketch of a herbivore, of which only the forequarters and the head seem to be represented. The size of the horns suggests a mouflon or a ram, as do the shape of the head and legs, but in the case of a sheep, the horns would be poorly oriented10. The sketch of another head appears in front of the figure, which, occupying the right side, is therefore off-centre. If this interpretation were confirmed (though it would require access to the object), it would make this plaque a unique piece of Corsican prehistoric art, which is otherwise so scarce. It is known that the Ozieri culture sometimes features anthropomorphic or zoomorphic motifs in the decoration of its pottery.”
Correspondence with the Ashmolean
Having discussed Passemard’s article and Ellen Southwell’s letter with Pascal, it seemed to me there was a reasonable likelihood of the two works referred to by Passemard being held by the Ashmolean museum. Sir Arthur Evans was Keeper of the museum from 1884 to 1908, and bequeathed it his own collections on his death.
I couldn’t find anything in the Ashmolean’s online collection referring to the objects or to Forsyth Major, but I emailed an enquiry to the Ashmolean Museum in the middle of May. The curator responsible for the Arthur Evans archives was on sabbatical and due back in the Autumn, so I messaged them again a couple of weeks ago. This time there was better news: the curator hadn’t come across Forsyth Major before, and there was no sign of the limestone tablet in the register, but the museum did hold the clay tablet.
It’s in two pieces now, and its measurements are given as: length 11.2 cm, width 10 cm and depth 1.5 cm. The findspot is recorded as a “neolithic rock shelter” at “Capo Pertusato, near Bonifacio”, and the museum’s accession records also document that it was “given to Evans by Dr C. J. Forsyth Major, January 1918”, entering the collection as part of the Sir Arthur Evans bequest in 1941.
Apart from the mystery of what has happened to the limestone tablet there are two other puzzles now presented.
Puzzle number 1: timing
My reading of ‘Trois gisements’ led me to think that Passemard was present when Forsyth Major found the two tablets, and that that must have been in the winter of 1921-22 given his remark about Forsyth Major’s age. Passemard says “I assisted him in the three main excavations he made, they had long been started but we finished them together”. He repeats that remark in relation to the Bonnet de Prêtre shelter, and then says “Finally, we found two remarkable pieces”. There’s a clear suggestion that he has seen the items themselves, and his article provides photos of them.
That timing is not consistent with the Ashmolean museum recording that the tablet was given to Sir Arthur Evans in January 1918 (assuming that is correct – and it should be remembered that it didn’t actually enter their own collection until 1941). Nor does it really fit with Ellen Southwell going to Oxford in June or July 1922 in order to try retrieve an object in Evan’s care, assuming that she actually was looking for the tablet, rather than something else: Evans couldn’t have had it for very long if it was only found that winter.
Puzzle number 2: why did Forsyth Major give the tablet to Sir Arthur Evans?
Other than ‘Trois gisements’ and Ellen Southwell’s letter, I’ve so far been unable to find any documentary evidence directly linking the two men. The Ashmolean doesn’t seem to have any correspondence related to Forsyth Major.
Yet the two men clearly knew of each other and shared interests. Between 1886 and 1888 Forsyth Major made three successive trips to Samos and neighbouring islands in the eastern Aegean; not long after Evans started his renowned work at Knossos, in Crete. Evans spent quite a lot of time in Italy in the early 1890s, where Forsyth Major was also living at the time11. And both were Fellows of the Royal Society in London – Evans from 1901, and Forsyth Major from 1908.
Ellen Southwell’s comment that she didn’t like to go and ‘interview’ Sir Arthur “after so many years” also raises the intriguing prospect that she might have known him herself (from the UK, or Italy perhaps) and could have been the link to Forsyth Major.
Beyond any personal connections, perhaps Evan’s subject-matter expertise was the most important. In 1895 he had given an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘On Primitive European ‘Idols’ in the Light of New Discoveries’, a wide-ranging discussion of the “female figures, more rarely male” found around the Mediterranean as well as central and Eastern Europe and as far north as Orkney”12. The same year, Evans also published a significant work, ‘Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script’: “throughout what is now the civilized European area there must once have existed systems of picture-writing such as still survive among the more primitive races of mankind”.
The Capo Pertusato clay tablet is currently held away from the Ashmolean museum’s main site and is in the process of being relocated to new storage facilities, a project due for completion in 202713. But even if a few more years’ patience is required before the tablet can be studied in detail it’s surely good news that its whereabouts is now known.
E Passemard, Trois gisement néolithiques de la Corse, in: Bulletin de la Société préhistorique de France, tome 22, n° 6-7, 1925.
C Ferton, Nouvelles preuves de l’existence du détroit de Bonifacio a l’époque néolithique; climat de Bonifacio pendant cette période, in: Association française pour l'avancement des sciences. Congrès (030; 1901; Ajaccio).
This and all other translations are my own.
Letter from Ellen Southwell to Odo Forsyth Major, 23rd June 1926, Hull History Centre, Papers of Major OA Forsyth Major, U DFM/2/1.
E Southwell-Colucci, Un insigne scienzato inglese amico della Corsica: Dott. Ch. Forsyth Major, in: Archivio Storico di Corsica, Luglio-Settembre 1930.
DB Harden, Sir Arthur Evans 1851-1941 A Memoir, 1983.
R Grosjean, Art Pré- et Protohistorique mobilier de Corse, in: Corse Historique, No. 9-10, 1963.
F de Lanfranchi & M-C Weiss, La civilisation des Corses. Les origines, 1973.
G Camps, Préhistoire d’une Île, 1988
A friend in the village also made a similar observation to me, unprompted, on seeing Passemard’s photo.
J Evans, Time and Chance, The story of Arthur Evans and his forbears, 1943.
AJ Evans, ‘On Primitive European ‘Idols' in the Light of New Discoveries’, Sixty-fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September 1895.
Notice on Ashmolean Antiquities study room website, https://www.ashmolean.org/antiquities-study-centre. Accessed 25th November 2024.