Archaeologists have discovered an early medieval double grave at the center of a circular ditch in Kirchheim am Neckar, southern Germany. Two plots of land in an area of Kirchheim designated as a cultural monument were excavated in advance of development. The presence of a burial ground was known since the 19th century (hence the designation), but the discovery of a double grave inside a ring ditch was unprecedented.

The double grave was found at the southwest end of the burial ground. The circular mark on the ground is all that remains of a large tumulus. The burials consist of two adjacent wooden chamber graves built over carved rock. One belonged to a woman; one to a man. The graves had both been looted in antiquity, but the tomb raiders only pillaged from the knees up. The areas below the knees were untouched, and the looters really missed out.

Below the foot of the buried man were a large ornate bone comb, a ceramic pot, silver sheet bands, a glass tumbler, horse bridles and a bronze vessel filled with organic material and animal bone and a large egg-like object beneath a ceramic bowl. A gold coin was also found in the dead man’s mouth as an obolus [, also known as Charon’s obol, a coin to pay for passage to the underworld].

The remains of a decapitated horse were buried just outside the ring ditch. The presence of horse bridles in the man’s grave suggests the horse was a companion burial.

The woman’s burial was richly furnished as well, despite having been looted. Grave goods found in her grave include a pearl necklace, a gold pendant inlaid with almandine garnets, a disc brooch, a weaving sword, scissors, a glass beaker and a chatelaine with a decorative disc and a Cypraea snail shell hanging from it. These were high value objects, jewelry and household goods alike. The Cypraea was imported from the Indian Ocean and was a very expensive charm to hang from a belt.

The excavation of the two properties found 22 more graves, all of them simple inhumations without funerary offerings. These were the kinds of graves archaeologists expected to find at the site, comparable to the ones discovered there in the past. The occupants of the double grave were set apart in the burial ground, separated from the hoi polloi both in location and in the distinctive grandeur of their burials.

After five years of restoration, the eight internal walls of the Baptistery of Florence adorned with three different colors of marble inlay and magnificent mosaics have been liberated from scaffolding and can be seen again in all their newly-revived glory.

The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the governing body that administers Florence’s cathedral complex which includes both the Duomo and the Baptistery, began a comprehensive restoration of the internal walls of the Baptistery at the end of 2017 following repairs to the external walls and roof. The project was enormously complex. There are 12,000 square feet of marble inlay surfaces, more than 2,000 square feet of mosaics and more than 1,000 square feet of gold leaf.

The parietal mosaics were created in the 14th century as extensions of the motifs and pictorial style of the exceptional mosaics applied to the interior of the dome, which was still ongoing when work began on the apse.

The mosaics of the scarsella [the apse] differ from the parietal ones both in the narrative complexity and for the execution technique. In fact, in these mosaics, extremely minute tesserae were used and an extraordinary chromatic variety of glass pastes and other precious materials including coral – which to date does not appear to have been used elsewhere in mosaic art – branches or in cross-sections that form microscopic circular or teardrop shaped tesserae.

If the mosaics on the other seven internal facades of the Baptistery represent prophets, holy bishops and cherubs, those in the scarsella stage a rich iconographic program. In the vault the mirror images of the Madonna and the Baptist seated on the throne are represented, flanked by four telamons that support the large central wheel. This is divided into eight spokes, occupied by solemn figures of biblical patriarchs and prophets who foretold the coming of Christ, symbolized in the lamb in the center of the wheel with an epigraph, which translated from Latin reads “Here is almighty God indicated by the meek lamb”. Other figures of prophets appear in the intrados of the triumphal arch, while on the external ring there are represented busts of Apostles, Evangelists and Saints flanking the Baptist in the center.

The vault and triumphal arch of the apse and the gallery of the matroneum were clad in marble originally, so when officials decided to install mosaics there too after the completion of the dome mosaics, Florence’s mosaicists had to invent a new technique to apply mosaics onto marble veneers. They used bespoke hollow terracotta tiles, each made to specific measurements, that were then cut and mounted to the marble walls with iron linchpins. Even the mortar was completely customized, closer to an adhesive than a traditional mastic.

The unique approach and materials posed an enormous challenge to conservators. The team started by collecting data, performing the first diagnostic analyses of the parietal mosaics ever done. They found evidence of the original techniques used to install the mosaics, questionable later repairs and materials like traces of gold leaf on one of the column capitals that suggests all of the capitals were originally gilded.

The restoration was repeatedly interrupted and delayed by the pandemic and ultimately cost 2.6 million euros, but that hasn’t deterred the Opera from moving forward with an even more complex project: the restoration of the mosaics on the Baptistery’s octagonal dome. They have designed a new restoration scaffold system of horizontal platforms supported by a central column. This will allow restorers to shift upwards as they focus on new surfaces while still keeping the dome visible from the ground.

The remains of a well-preserved medieval kitchen fully stocked with clean cookware have been discovered in the town of Nový Jičín, northern Moravia, Czech Republic. The kitchen was found under a private home adjacent to the northern side of the town’s historic walls in an archaeological survey before renovation. It dates to the early 15th century.

Based on its location, [Pavel Stabrava from the local Novojičín Museum] believes that the house would most likely have belonged to a burgher family, a social class equivalent to the medieval bourgeoisie.

“Since the house was located near the town walls, this would have been a less wealthy burgher family. The richest burghers would have lived in so-called ‘beer court’ houses around the town square.”

The stone foundations of a log house were uncovered beneath the paved courtyard of the Renaissance-era floor in the back of the house.  Within the area bounded by the foundations were the charred remains of a wooden floor. In one corner of the room was a brick oven with a raised hearth. On the hearth was a full set of cookware, complete with lids, and a wooden spatula. The dishes had been washed and put up to dry on the hearth. On the wooden floor near the furnace, archaeologists also found an iron grate, deformed by a much hotter fire than the kind food was cooked over, plus hundreds of glass beads from a necklace, a padlock, a three-tined pitchfork and a spearhead.

The find is exceptionally rare, because city houses were renovated and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and the construction of modern utility infrastructure typically destroyed any remains of earlier townhomes under the ground. It’s a total fluke that this one kitchen survived at all, let alone in virtually untouched condition.

The charred wood floor remains are evidence that the original medieval house was destroyed by fire, possibly in 1427 when the city was burned by Hussite forces in the Fourth Crusade of the Hussite Wars. The Hussites besieged Nový Jičín and overran it, burning the wooden buildings and massacring civilians. The kitchen and its clean cookware were probably hastily abandoned by the homeowners fleeing for their lives.

The artefacts are now in the process of conservation, after which they will be stored in the depositories of the Novojičín Museum. Pavel Stabrava hopes that further planned excavations around the exterior of the house will reveal more about the medieval town and its inhabitants.

A new study of bed burials in early medieval Europe has found evidence that the practice may have been imported by Christian women from the Continent who traveled to England to convert the 7th century Anglo-Saxon elite.

Bed burials, a funerary ritual in which the dead were laid in a bed rather than a coffin, are rare in terms of numbers, but they have been found across a wide geographic range, as far west as England to Slovakia in the east and Scandinavia in the north. Most of them date to the 6th and 7th centuries, with the earliest dating to the early 5th century and the last to the early 10th century. Wooden bed frames were a luxury only the wealthy could afford in life. Burying a bed, whether it be one the deceased had slept in or one custom-made for funerary purposes, was downright extravagant, so bed burials had to have been solely the province of the elite.

Previous studies of bed burials have focused on a selection of well-preserved examples from Continental Europe, primarily southern Germany where anaerobic conditions preserved the organic remains of beds in excellent condition. The recent study by University of Cambridge researcher Emma Brownlee compares 72 bed burials found across Europe, including 17 of them in England.

There are marked differences between continental examples and English ones. Beds found in continental Europe are of two types — crate beds (basically boxes) and baluster beds (turned corner posts with side balusters) — both identified from extensive surviving wood elements. The beds from the burials in England, on the other hand, are identified by their surviving metal fittings because very little of the wood is preserved. English beds had headboards. The bases of the English beds were not constructed of wood planks but of a net or lattice suspended from metal eyelets.

Bed burials on the Continent are diverse. Men, women, adults and children were buried in beds in Germany and Scandinavia, but the bed burials in England are all of women, either adults or, as in the case of the Trumpington bed burial, a teenager but old enough to have passed a cultural line into adulthood and therefore be laid to rest in an adult bed.

That the burials in England are so much more restricted in date range and exclusive to women suggests the practice was imported by women on the move. In the 7th century, conversion was a major motivator for women’s mobility, as high-status Christian women were wed to elite/royal men who either hadn’t converted yet or were freshly converted. Christian women also moved from their hometowns to enter religious communities in other countries.

There is a possibility that the unusually restricted nature of the rite in England is related to women’s mobility, that bed burial was not a local rite, but one introduced by women who migrated to England, possibly as part of a system of exogamy. There is plenty of evidence for high rates of feminine mobility; isotope studies have shown higher feminine mobility than masculine in some cemeteries, and written and epigraphic sources also support narratives of women moving long distances for marriage, across Frankia, Alamannia, Scandinavia, England, and as far east as the Carpathian Basin.84 Women’s movement may also be related to networks of religious houses that existed in the 7th century, with elite women moving between Frankia and England to join religious establishments. […]

At the same time as burials of women in beds appeared in England, the continental Church was rapidly growing in influence. Bed burials appeared in England alongside the appearance of small numbers of other richly furnished feminine burials, such as at Rollright Stones, and Westfield Farm, Ely. This appearance of rich feminine burials has been linked to a wider change in the role of women associated with Christianity. In conversion narratives across the early medieval world, queens and elite women played an important role by marrying into non-Christian families. It is possible that the women’s bed burials in England represent migrants in a Christian context, who were buried according to a rite which was common in their place of origin.