A cylinder of metal bought at a flea market for less than $25 has been identified as an extremely rare medieval hand cannon and sold at auction last Thursday for more than $2,500. The cast bronze cylinder is 17 cm (6.7 inces) long and 4 cm (1.7 inches) wide at its widest end. The bore is 1.7 cm (.7 inches) in diameter. It is a triple-ring cast cannon with a flared muzzle.

“It really is a remarkable find,” said Charles [Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers]. “Originally this cannon would have been mounted on wood with a powder bag and ram rod. It evolved to become a match-lock firearm with trigger.

The seller found the bargain of their lifetime at a flea market in Hertfordshire. They spent less than £20 for it, thinking it would make a cool decoration for their garden rockery (which it most certainly would). It was spotted in the rockery by appraisers from Hansons Auctioneers who recognized it as a metal barrel firearm made in Europe between 1400 and 1450.

Gunpowder was invented in China in the 9th century, and weapons that utilized it were widespread by the 12th century. Most of them were forms of bombs, but the fire lance, a spear with a barrel strapped to it capable of firing projectiles, was the precursor to the hand cannon. The oldest confirmed hand cannon, the Heilongjiang hand-gun, dates to 1288. At almost eight pounds, it was a heavy device for a hand weapon and the fire lance remained the more popular firearm until the invention of the musket in the early 16th century.

From China, gunpowder and powder-based weapons migrated to Europe, likely introduced by the Mongols during their invasion of the Turkic states and Eastern Europe in the mid-13th century. The earliest known hand cannon from Europe is the Loshult Gun, a cast bronze gun dating to around 1330-50 discovered in Sweden. Its bottle shape and flared chamber suggests it shot iron bolts or arrows rather than stone or metal balls. It’s also far heavier than the earlier Chinese iterations, weighing in at 22 pounds.

The first written record of hand cannons in England dates to 1473, but there are records of their use in France in the late 14th century and surviving examples going back to the 1380s. The Hundred Years’ War saw to it that the English were thoroughly exposed to the latest and greatest weaponry available in France. The rock garden hand cannon predates the English written account and is closer in age to the French examples.

A round soapstone game piece discovered in an archaeological survey in advance of sewer pipe repair in Trondheim, Norway, is inscribed with runes. This is only the second known game piece with a runic inscription ever discovered in Norway.

The excavation uncovered a sunken pit with archaeological layers dating to the Middle Ages. The deepest part of the pit, more than 12 feet below today’s street surface, has been dated to between 1000 and 1150 A.D. A coal layer above it was only slightly more recent, dating to 1030-1180 A.D. The soapstone game piece was found between the two layers.

Archaeologists first thought the lines incised on the round piece’s surface could be stylized floral motifs, but the geometry was also reminiscent of runic inscriptions albeit laid out in artistic fashion.

The team sent high-resolution images of the piece to runologist Karen Langsholt Holmqvist. She was so intrigued she was compelled to view the object in person. That’s when she conclusively identified the decoration as runic writing.

“When you first look at the playing piece, it may look as if it only has a slightly uneven geometric pattern, perhaps a snow crystal. But when I examined the piece more closely, I saw that the lines were not random patterns, but a carefully planned runic inscription. As the inscription follows the curvature of the playing piece, the inscription is a bit odd and strange, but there is no doubt that these are runes.

“And in the microscope I also discovered that there are guide lines drawn, so there is no doubt that the runic maker has planned well to make the inscription follow the round shape of the piece. There are fields on the playing piece that do not have runic inscriptions, and here the shaker has filled the void with a pattern,” Holmqvist continues.

The runes read “siggsifr.” This is likely a name, which is common in runic inscription on small objects like the game piece. “Sig,” meaning “struggle” in Norse, is a name prefix for both male and female names. The “r” at the end indicates this was a male name. “Sifr” is a poetical metaphor meaning “brother,” so perhaps this name meant “brother in arms.” The name could refer to the person who owned the game piece or the person who inscribed it. It could also be an oblique reference to the piece itself, the name of the role it plays, like the equivalent of a knight or a bishop in chess.

Archaeologists have found what is believed to be the oldest drawing in Iceland at the Stöð farm site in Stöðvarfjörður, east Iceland. A small rounded sandstone engraved with the image of a ship at sail was found in the wall of an early 9th century Viking longhouse. These types of ship carvings on bone, wood and stone are fairly common in Scandinavia, but this is the first one found in Iceland.

The Viking site on the northern shore of the fjord was discovered by accident in 2003. Exploratory digs began in 2015 followed by systematic excavations in 2018 and unearthed the remains of two Viking era longhouses, a newer one built on top of the remains of the older one. They were found under the layer of volcanic tephra that covered Iceland at some point between 869-873 A.D.. This was a momentous find, because it meant longhouses had been built and occupied before the official settlement year of 874 recorded in the written records (the Icelandic sagas the Landnámabók, or Book of Settlements).

Radiocarbon dating of the oldest longhouse dated it to around 800 A.D., indicating that the eastern fjords, at least, were occupied by Norse settlers 75 years before Ingólfur Arnarson left Norway and sailed to Iceland, founding Reykjavík as Iceland’s first permanent settlement. Archaeologists believe the Stöð site was a seasonal camp, used in the summer to fish, hunt, process whale blubber into oil and collect bog iron, rather than a permanent settlement.

Excavations have continued every summer. An enormous quantity of artifacts and remains have been found attesting to a large-scale operation of whaling and fish processing. That is confirmed by the sheer size of the longhouse — 103 feet long — which is twice the length of the earliest longhouses in Reykjavík. It is the richest longhouse ever excavated in Iceland, with 92 beads and 29 silver artifacts (including Roman and Arabic coins) unearthed.

A geophysical survey of the site performed this spring before the dig season began found evidence of more buildings and boats underground, the latter likely ship burials rather than wrecks. The boats and structures have yet to be excavated.

An archaeological excavation in Skälby on the outskirts of Västerås, southeastern Sweden, has uncovered a scramasax (short sword) with its decorated wooden handle so well-preserved it looks like new even though it’s more than 1100 years old.

About 16 inches long with its unusually decorative grip intact, the scramasax was discovered in 2021 at the bottom of a well, embedded deep in the mud and the waterlogged clay. The anaerobic environment preserved the wooden handle in pristine condition. It is turned to fit the hand and carved with a central enlaced design. Its style dates it to the Vendel Period between the 7th and 9th centuries A.D.

The Skälby site was home to several scattered farming settlements in the Iron Age. Its wells were used for different purposes in different phases, alternating between water sources, garbage pits and places for ritual deposits. Archaeologists believe the short sword was sacrificed, thrown into the well as an offering, as swords like this were extremely valuable objects and not likely to be lost by accident. In fact, they are most frequently found as grave goods, interred with the warrior who wielded it as one of his most prized possessions.

The sword was fully excavated and cleaned in the archaeological laboratory of the Acta Conservation Center in Uppsala. It was examined under a microscope and determined to be a hardwood. A small fragment that broke off the inside of the grip was used to take a tiny sample. Conservators scraped the fractured surface of the loose piece with a scalpel for analysis, leaving the carved exterior surface intact.

A massive rune stone discovered under the kitchen floor of a farm in Mosekær, Denmark, may be one of the country’s oldest.

Homeowners Lene Brandt and her husband Anders Nielsen were renovating their mid-19th century farmhouse, when they exposed a large stone after pulling up the old linoleum flooring in the kitchen. They tried to dig it out, but by the time they were done, they’d unearthed a stone more than 6.5 feet long and 2.6 feet wide weighing close to a ton. A neighbor kindly offered to come over and cut it in half to help them get it out of there, but they declined, much to history’s relief.

Viking Age artifacts have been found in the area before, so Brandt and Nielsen decided to call in an archaeologist from the Museum East Jutland to examine the stone before removing it. Viewing the top of the stone, the archaeologist deemed it to have been shaped more recently than the Viking Age, so the owners turned their attention to challenges of moving so huge and heavy a stone in one piece.

Helle Nielsen, a metal detectorist friend of Lene’s saw pictures on Facebook of the stone being craned out of the house and spotted some faint markings on the back. She thought they might be runes, and asked a friend of hers who works for the museum to take a look. They sent photos of the back, which the first archaeologist had never seen, to the Museum of East Jutland, and this time they recognized that it was a Viking Age rune stone.

It was a significant find, the first rune stone found in the area in 27 years. The last one had been recycled as building material too, incorporated into the construction of Borup Church. This was a common practice in the 19th century when the farmhouse was built, and while the relocation divorced the stone from its original context and all the information that would have come from that, it also confirms its authenticity. There was no interest in creating forged runes in the 19th century, especially not a handful of faint ones on a slab destined to become part of a kitchen floor.

Only five runes have been identified on the stone. National Museum runologist Lisbeth Imer reads them as “Aft bi,” which translates to “after B-.” Monumental rune stones were often erected as memorials, so it’s likely the B was the first letter of the name of the person being memorialized, perhaps a Birk or a Bjørn.

Determining its date is difficult, but the style of the inscription and typology of the runes suggest they are very old. Typologically speaking, if the runes were the beginning of a sentence rather than the end of one, they were carved very early, likely in the 8th century. There are only ten or 20 rune stones of that age in Denmark.

The stone has been declared danefæ, Denmark’s version of treasure trove. It is now at the Museum of East Jutland where it is undergoing further analysis to narrow down its age and interpret the runes.