A rare early Medieval brooch has been restored and put on display at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton.

Discovered by a metal detectorist on farmland near Cheddar in October 2020, the disc brooch is the first of its kind ever found in southwestern England. It is made of silver and copper alloy decorated in the Trewhiddle openwork style which dates it to between 800 and 900 A.D. The decorative motif consists of winding zoomorphic figures interlaced with each other. The surface is dotted with dome-headed riveted bosses, the largest of them (10mm in diameter) in the center. The brooch is unusually large at 91mm in diameter (3.6 inches). The more common examples are 50-60mm in diameter.

When the Museum of Somerset acquired the brooch in February 2023, its openwork design was still caked with soil and corrosion materials. The museum contracted Drakon Heritage to clean and conserve the brooch. The removal of the crusted soil and corrosion deposits revealed the rich details of the decoration: silver plant and animal forms woven into each other, enhanced by black niello enamel and a gilded back panel.

Amal Khreisheh, the curator of archaeology at the South West Heritage Trust, said: “Conservation has transformed this fascinating brooch and revealed the intricacies. The details uncovered include fine scratches on the reverse, which may have helped the maker to map out the design.

“A tiny contemporary mend on the beaded border suggests the brooch was cherished by its owner and worn for an extended period of time before it was lost.”

Khreisheh said it was likely that it belonged to an important and wealthy person who had access to a goldsmith of exceptional ability.

The conserved Cheddar Brooch will go on display in the Making Somerset gallery starting October 20th.

Researchers at the National Museum of Denmark have identified the carver of the runes on the iconic Jelling Stone. His name was Ravnunge-Tue and his boss was Queen Thyra of Jelling (d. 958 A.D.), wife of King of Denmark Gorm the Old (d. 958-9) and mother of Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark and Norway (ca. 911 – 985 A.D.).

The large Jelling Stone has been dubbed Denmark’s birth/baptismal certificate because the runic inscription uses the name “Denmark” (“Danmǫrk” in Old Norse) and refers to its conversion to Chritianity. Harald Bluetooth had it carved as a memorial monument for his parents, but added his own credits at the end, describing himself as “that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”

The smaller of the Jelling stones is the earlier of the two. It was erected by Gorm the Old as a memorial to Thyra whom he lovingly describes as “Denmark’s adornment.”

3D scans of runestones enable researchers to gain a close-up view of traces of the carving process. This means they can tell the carving technique of the different rune stones apart. Every experienced stonemason holds his chisel at a certain angle and strikes the hammer with a specific force: this is visible in the angle of the traces of the carving and the distance between them. The motor function developed in such work is individual.

The carving technique on the large Jelling Stone matches that of the runes on the Læborg Stone found in a field near Læborg Church 20 miles southwest of Jelling. The author helpfully signed the inscription on the Læborg Stone. It reads: “Ravnunge-Tue carved these runes in memory of Thyra, his queen.” He also gave himself and his two collaborators credit on the Bække 1 runestone found a mile from Bække Church. That inscription reads: “Ravnunge-Tue and Fundin and Gnyple, these three made Thyra’s mound.”

In total, seven of the runestones in Jutland were 3D scanned for this project: the two Jelling stones, the two Bække stones, the Læborg stone, the Home stone and the Randbøl stone. The runes on the smaller Jelling Stone were too worn for the signature chiseling techniques to be detectable. It’s possible Ravnunge-Tue carved that one too.

This identification answers a long-standing question about whether the Queen Thyra mentioned on the Jelling Stones was the same person as the Thyra mentioned on the Læborg Stone. The fact that Thyra and Gorm’s rune carver made the runes on the large Jelling Stone as well as the Læborg runes strongly suggests this was the same queen, not two people who happened to share a popular name. That means Queen Thyra was on at least four rune stones, more runic mentions than anyone else in Viking era Denmark, twice the number of mentions her husband and son got.

“This means that Queen Thyra was far more important than we previously assumed. She probably came from a nobler, older family than Gorm the Old, whom we usually refer to as the first King of Denmark. This is extremely interesting when it comes to understanding the power structure and the genesis of Denmark as a nation,” says [Denmark National Museum runologist] Lisbeth Imer.

All four rune stones that mention Thyra are located in Southern Jutland, implying that her power was based in this area, while Gorm the Old may have come from elsewhere.

A bronze cannon found on the seafloor off Marstrand, Sweden, has been dated to the 14th century, making it the oldest know shipboard cannon in Europe.

The cast copper-alloy cannon was found in the open sea at a depth of about 65 feet by a recreational scuba diver in the summer of 2001. He did not immediately realize that the small, funnel-shaped object less than 19 inches long was an archaeological artifact. When he cottoned on, he reported his find to museum experts. It was expropriated as state property, conserved and entered the collection of the regional Bohuslans museum.

The shipwreck it came from was never found (conditions at the site are not conducive to the long-term survival of wood), but the gun itself surprisingly preserved a key piece of information: a piece of cloth stuck to the inner wall of the powder chamber by copper corrosion materials. It was the remains of a cartouche that held the powder charge. The textile fragment suggests it was loaded and ready to fire when it sank under the waves, which it would not have been if it was cargo rather than ship’s armament.

This bit of cloth made it possible to radiocarbon date the gun, a rare opportunity with early artillery that is sparsely documented and cannot be accurately dated by type. With calibrated results in the range of 1285-1399, it is one of the oldest pieces of European artillery ever to be absolutely dated. Cannons of the Marstrand type were previously thought to date the 15th-16th centuries, as were powder cartouches. This one discovery has redefined the timeline for European ship artillery.

A recent multi-disciplinary study documented the cannon with 3D scanning and analyzed the metal. The team found it was made with a copper alloy containing 14% lead, a high amount that would have made the gun prone to breakage with intensive usage.

“Clearly, the person who cast the cannon did not have the necessary knowledge and understanding of the properties of various copper alloys,” says Staffan von Arbin.

“This shows that the noble art of cannon casting had not yet been fully mastered at that time, and that production was largely based on trial and error.”

The analysis also indicates that the copper ore used in the cannon’s production was mined in present-day Slovakia, while the lead probably came from England or the border region between Poland and the Czech Republic. […]

The new types of firearms developed at this time provided great tactical advantages in battles at sea. But it wasn’t just warships that were armed – during the late Middle Ages merchant ships also started being equipped with cannon more and more often to defend themselves against pirates and other hostile vessels. The study of the Marstrand cannon provides new knowledge and perspectives on the development of this military technology.

The study has been published in the journal The Mariner’s Mirror and can be read in its entirety here.

A treasure hailed as the “gold find of the century in Norway” has been discovered by a metal detectorist in Rennesøy, an island in southwestern Norway. The group of gold bracteates and beads dates to the late Migration Period (375-568 A.D.), and is believed to have been part of a single opulent necklace.

Erlend Bore picked up metal detecting when his physiotherapist and doctor strongly recommended he get outside more to combat the ills of sedentary living. On June 7th, he took his new metal detector out for its first spin. Two months later, he went to Rennesøy. When his detector gave a strong signal, he lifted a clod of earth and saw a glitter that he thought was a wrapper for a chocolate coin. Reader, it was not a chocolate wrapper. Bore scooped it up to take a closer look and when the soil around it fell apart, even more gold beads came out.

He immediately contacted the county archaeologist and sent him a picture of the find. The archaeologist informed him he had found Migration Era gold treasure. The find consists of nine gold bracteates (flat, thin, single-sided medallions that never circulated as actual coins but were often modelled after coins), all of them bearing a stylized horse image, ten gold beads and three gold spiral rings. The total gold weight of the find is just over 100 grams.

Archaeologists believe the gold necklace and spiral rings were buried in the 6th century during a time of conflict, plague and upheaval after a volcanic eruption blocked out of the sun in 535-6 A.D. leading to widespread crop failure and famine. Ole Madsen, director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Stavanger, called the treasure “the gold find of the century” because it has been that long since so many pieces of gold jewelry have been found together in one place in Norway. The bracteates alone, however, would be sufficient to garner such high praise.

Professor Sigmund Oehrl at the Archaeological Museum is an expert on bracteates and their symbols. Approximately 1,000 golden bracteates have so far been found in Scandinavia. According to him, the gold pendants from Rennesøy are of a specific type that is very rare. They show a horse motif in a hitherto unknown form.

“The motifs differ from most other gold pendants that have been found so far. The symbols on the pendants usually show the god Odin healing the sick horse of his son Balder. In the Migration Period, this myth was seen as a symbol of renewal and resurrection, and it was supposed to give the wearer of the jewelery protection and good health,” says Oehrl.

On the Rennesøy bracteates, however, only the horse is depicted. A somewhat similar horse, depicted together with snake-like monsters, is also found on a pair of gold bracts found in Rogaland and southern Norway.

“On these gold pendants the horse’s tongue hangs out, and its slumped posture and twisted legs show that it is injured. Like the Christian symbol of the cross, which spread in the Roman Empire at exactly this time, the horse symbol represented illness and distress, but at the same time hope for healing and new life,” says Oehrl.

The bracteates, beads and spirals are now being conserved at the Archaeological Museum at the University of Stavanger and will soon go on display. According to Norwegian law, any archaeological object dating before 1537 belongs to the state. The finder and the landowner will split a finder’s fee in an amount determined by the National Antiquities Authority.