A 10th century pommel cap from a Viking sword of the Mammen style discovered in Frisia is the first of its kind found in the Netherlands. It was discovered in May of this year by metal detectorist Sander Visser who found it less than eight inches under the soil of a farm near Witmarsum. He recognized it as a pommel cap and reported it to heritage authorities.

Characterized by double contour lines forming full-bodied animals in profile and foliate elements that interlace with asymmetrical s-shaped tendrils, the Mammen style is named after a highly decorated iron axe head with silver inlay found in a Viking grave in Mammen, Denmark. We know from dendrochronological analysis of the preserved wood in the burial chamber that the Mammen grave dates to the winter of 970-971 A.D. That was the peak of the short-lived decorative style, which arose in the middle of the 10th century and fell out of use in the early 11th century.

The pommel cap is made of copper alloy with traces of gilding still visible on the intricately carved surface. It is decorated with the profiles of wild boar heads on each side. Wild boars were symbols of war and courage in Viking decorative arts. The Norse goddess Freya had a boar named Hildesvini, meaning “Battle Swine,” which she rode like a charger into battle.

The discovery of this Viking artefact in Friesland underlines the role the area played as a link in the Viking networks. Dr Nelleke IJssennagger-van der Pluijm, director of the Fryske Akademy and an expert on Frisia and the Viking world, says: “This extraordinary find shows that there is still a lot to discover about the Viking Age in Frisia, an area larger than presentday Friesland, about which we have learned a lot through research in recent years. Because this beautiful pommel cap is the first of its kind to be found in the Netherlands, it enriches our understanding of the contacts between Frisia and the Viking world in Scandinavia and the British Isles, and adds a new dimension to our historical knowledge.”

With support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Dr Diana Spiekhout, curator of Middle Ages and Mound Culture at the Fries Museum, has long been researching swords from early medieval Frisia that once included the Dutch coastal region, the area around Utrecht and the German East Frisian coast.

Swords were much more than just weapons during the early medieval period in northern and north-western Europe. People attributed human characteristics to them and they could have important symbolic value. “You could call these ‘epic’ swords,” says Diana Spiekhout. Swords with a formidable reputation were passed down for generations within elite networks, with successive owners sometimes adding ornate decorations or replacing parts. Evidence of this way of treating swords has been found in Frisia, but mainly up to the eighth century. Any decorations added later than this were usually standardised.

The Fryske Akademy and the Fries Museum are collaborating to study the pommel cap, examining it in relation to other Frisian archaeological finds from the era and the networks of trade and cultural exchange that brought the object to the Netherlands. In April of 2025, the pommel cap will make its public debut at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden as part of it Above ground level. Archaeological finds 2000-20 exhibition. It will move permanently to the Fries Museum next fall.

One of the largest mass burial pits ever discovered in the UK has been unearthed next to Leicester Cathedral. The pit contained the skeletal remains of 123 men, women and children dumped down a narrow vertical shaft in the early 12th century.

“Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,” said Mathew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services. “At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”

The excavations by Morris and his colleagues suggest the bodies were put into the shaft in three deposits, in rapid succession. “It looks as if successive cartloads of bodies were brought to the shaft and then dropped into it, one load on top of another in a very short space of time,” he said. “In terms of numbers, the people put in there probably represented about 5% of the town’s population.” […]

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles repeatedly mention great pestilences and fevers, severe mortality, and miserable deaths from hunger and famine in England from the mid-10th century through to the mid-12th century, said Morris. “This mass burial fits within this timeframe and provides physical proof of what was then occurring across the nation.”

The discovery of the remains of King Richard III in a Leicester parking lot in 2012 caused a seismic shift in Leicester Cathedral’s identity as a place of worship, pilgrimage and tourist attraction. His body was reburied in a purpose-built tomb at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, triggering a ten-fold increase in the number of visitors to the church.

In January 2022, the cathedral closed its doors for two years while the building was repaired and restored to ensure its long-term stability, the first phase of an ambitious £15m renovation project. Meanwhile, the Old Song School at the eastern end of the cathedral on the garden green was demolished to make way for a new Heritage & Learning Center (HLC). Services resumed November 26, 2023, while
University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) were engaged to explore the site dedicated to construction of the HLC.

The Cathedral Gardens is a tranquil green space that developed over the course of the past 80 years from what was once the old churchyard (closed to new burials in 1856). The churchyard wasn’t just a burial ground in the centuries before its closure. Like many cemeteries, it was a park-like gathering place for the residents of a densely-populated urban center, and there is archival and archaeological evidence of buildings dating to as early as the 12th century as well as dwellings rented to tenants by the church from the 15th through the 18th centuries.

What is now Leicester Cathedral began as the parish church of St. Martin. It is first mentioned by name in historical records in 1220, but historians believed there was an earlier iteration of St. Martin’s dating to before the Norman conquest. In the excavation of the HLC site, archaeologists hoped to find evidence of the earliest church, as well as remains of the ancient Roman settlement of Ratae Corieltavorum, most of which is under the historic center of Leicester and therefore inaccessible to archaeologists.

Excavations concluded in March 2023. In ten months of digging in a relatively small pit 43 by 49 feet by 20 feet deep, the team unearthed 19,754 artifacts and 1,237 skeletons spanning 15,000 years of history. The burials range in date from the 11th through the 19th century, the full period when St. Martin’s churchyard was in use.

“It’s a continuous sequence of 850 years of burials from a single population from a single place, and you don’t get that very often,” added Morris. “It has generated an enormous amount of archaeology.”

After documentation and assessment of the archaeological materials collected from the site, the ULAS team analyzed the skeletal remains. The bones underwent osteological analysis, radiocarbon dating, DNA and stable isotope analysis. The dating confirmed that St. Martins was founded in the late Saxon era (a penny found in that layer dates to 880-973 A.D.) and while most of the site was a garden space in the Roman era, the northwest quarter of it housed a building with a cellar that had painted stonework walls and a concrete floor. The base of an altar stone was found there, suggesting this may have been a private cult ceremonial space.

The analysis of the bones in the pit burial revealed that they were older than previously thought. Because there were so many bodies in the shaft, archaeologists first suspected they were victims of the Black Death which cut such a deadly swath through Europe that a third of its population was killed. This would have been the first archaeological evidence of the Black Death in Leicester. Instead, radiocarbon dating results showed the deceased had been dumped into the pit 150 years before that.

To pinpoint what the cause of this mass death event may have been, the ULAS team has sent samples of the bones to the Francis Crick Institute in London for DNA analysis that might identify the pathogen.

“It was clearly a devastating outbreak that resonates with recent events, in particular the Covid pandemic,” said Morris. “But it is also important to note there was still some form of civic control going on. There was still someone going around in a cart collecting bodies. What we see from studying the bodies in the pit does not indicate it was created in a panic.”

He added: “There was also no evidence of clothing on any of the bodies – no buckles, brooches, nothing to suggest these were people who were dropping dead in the street before being collected and dumped.

“In fact, there are signs that their limbs were still together, which suggests they were wrapped in shrouds. So their families were able to prepare these bodies for burial before someone from a central authority collected them to take to the pit burial.”

The exceptional 6th century burial chamber of a woman discovered near the Thuringian town of Kölleda will be presented to the public on November 9th still partially encased in its massive soil block.

The grave was discovered during an archaeological excavation of a 20-hectare site slated for construction. Between 2017 and 2021, the Thuringian State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (TLDA) unearthed more than 3,700 archaeological objects from 4,000 years of settlement of the area. Of particular note were 17 graves dating to the 6th and 7th centuries, a transition period when the Thuringian Kingdom, which collapsed in 531, became part of the Merovingian Frankish Empire.

The excavation also uncovered a settlement from the same period just 330 feet south of the burial ground. The remains of about 70 homes were unearthed. It is one of very few Merovingian villages discovered in central Germany, and the only one to be archaeologically excavated in its entirety with an associated burial ground.

The burial ground was unusual in several ways. Eleven decapitated horses were buried in seven pits next to the human dead. The graves were also atypical: dug exceptionally deep and containing well-crafted wooden burial chambers with grave goods including weapons, jewelry, glass vessels from the Rhine-Main area and bronze vessels of eastern Mediterranean manufacture. The bronze vessels are rare, and have only been found in Frankish territory in the graves of the nobility.

One of the burials stood out from the other 16 because it was buried 13 feet beneath the surface of the soil and had a second chamber built above it with large field stones along the edge. The presence of the second chamber prevented the burial beneath it from being looted. The depth of the burial and the second chamber also kept this highly significant grave from being destroyed when a bomb detonated over it during World War II.

The entire burial chamber and surrounding earth were removed for excavation in the workshops of the TLDA. The total block removed weighed 13 tons and was 15 feet deep. It had to be encased in steel for transportation. It has been in the TLDA conservation laboratory since March of 2022, but excavation was delayed until late 2023 when specialized equipment and a new facility made it possible to handle so large a block.

Various scanning methods for 3D documentation of the individual excavation phases ensured the best possible recording of the exact position of the objects in the grave pit. The skeletal material and other particularly fragile objects were already consolidated with impregnating agents during the excavation. In the next step, the grave goods complexes were removed in smaller blocks and examined using computer tomography and other analysis methods. In this way, for example, very small objects (such as pearl necklaces) could already be identified and specifically exposed by the restorers.

The grave examined belonged to a woman aged around 25-30 years. The deceased had been buried with various food offerings and personal items. In particular, numerous gold and silver jewelry items as well as a chased bronze basin underline the outstanding social status of the deceased. The objects, of outstanding artistic quality, reveal far-reaching cultural relationships of members of this upper class as far as central Italy and the Mediterranean region.

The public is invited to view the Lady of Kölleda grave at the TLDA restoration workshop in Weimar on Saturday. Archaeologists will explain the complex excavation and their findings thus far.