A long stretch of a 13th century wooden plank causeway has been discovered in Berlin’s historic downtown.  So far the remains of a section of road 164 feet long and 20 feet wide have been unearthed. Tree ring analysis of wood samples taken from the Medieval road revealed the trees were felled in 1238, dating this causeway to the early founding era of Berlin.

Archaeologists from the Berlin State Monuments Office (LDA) discovered the plank road in a preventative excavation before the installation of new power and gas lines under the Stralauer Straße. Today the street is a multi-lane arterial road leading north out of the historic center of Old Berlin parallel to the river Spree. It wasn’t a broad artery at its inception in the Middle Ages, but it was essential to give travelers a safe, solid surface through the waterlogged ground around the Spree from the Mühlendamm embankment dam to the Stralauer Gate in Berlin’s first defensive city wall.

The causeway remains were found just over eight feet beneath the modern street surface. It was built from trunks of oak, pine and birch which have survived 700 years in exceptional condition thanks to the thick peat layer that covered the timbers and the anaerobic environment of the waterlogged soil. The road is structured in three layers: a top layer of logs with the bark removed laid side by side across the road in the direction of travel. Under the top layer are three parallel rows of beams going in the opposite direction — longitudinally along the embankment. The bottom layer is formed of thick trunks roughly worked. The two lower layers were packed over with sand and the uneven areas of the top layer were filled in with stones.

The excavation is ongoing and archaeologists hope to narrow down its age, original extent and the construction methods used to build it. The future fate of this rare survival is uncertain. The utility lines if installed according to plan will destroy the causeway. If the Berlin State Monuments Office plans to salvage it in some way, they have not announced it.

A Medieval gold annular brooch with prayerful inscriptions has been discovered the parish of Manningford in Wiltshire. It dates to between 1150 and 1350 A.D. and is inscribed with a Latin prayer and initials of a Hebrew phrase believed to have amuletic properties. While this type and age of inscribed brooch has been found before, this one is unique on the archaeological record because the inscription is complete, has no errors (common in an age when artisans were not literate), is engraved on four sides and includes both the prayer and the amuletic initials.

The brooch is composed of a circular frame with a pin attached by a loop. The front and back of the frame is bevelled, giving the ring four surfaces, all of which are inscribed in Lombardic style letters. The inscription on three of the surfaces is the Hail Mary which all together read: + AVE. MARIA. GRACIA. PLENA: DOMINVS: + T: ECVM: BENEDICTATV: INMULIERIBV ET: BENEDI(CT)VS: FRVCTVS: VENTRIS: TVI. AMEN. (Meaning “HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE THE LORD/ IS WITH THEE/ BLESSED ART THOU AMONGST WOMEN/ AND BLESSED IS THE FRUIT OF THY WOMB. AMEN.”) The S at the end of “MULIERIBV” is missing, not an error, but a deliberate choice because the pin attachment was in the way.

The fourth surface, the reverse inner angle, reads: + A + G + L + A +, the initials of the Hebrew phrase “Atha Gebir Leilam Adonai. (Meaning “Thou art mighty forever, O Lord.”) The AGLA initials were used in the Middle Ages as words of power to protect against illness, particularly fever, and nefarious supernatural forces.

The brooch was discovered by metal detectorist William Nordhoff in March of last year in a freshly plowed field in Pewsey Vale. At first he thought the circular object, dullened by encrusted soil, was a base metal piece, but when he picked it up, he saw that it was gold and that it was covered with writing. He reported the brooch to the Portable Antiquities Scheme finds liaison.

It was declared treasure last month at a coroner’s inquest (a foregone conclusion given that it’s more than 300 years old and made of more than 10% precious metal). The next step is valuation, after which a local museum, in this case likely the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, will have the opportunity to acquire the brooch for the assessed market value.

The Medieval Park excavation in the historic center of Oslo has unearthed another runic inscription. This is the third rune find in Oslo in a month and a half, the second on wood. (The other was inscribed on a cow or horse bone). Rune finds in Oslo are usually very rare, so this is a relative bonanza. It was found in the same archaeological layer as the falconry figurine which dates it to the 13th century.

The piece of wood is 11.4 cm (4.5 inches) long and wide on the ends with a notch cut in the middle. One the flat side are eight runes, carved in the surface to follow the shape of the stick which means they wood was carved first and the runes added to it.

The runes were translated by Kristel Zilmer, professor of runology at the University of Oslo, who identified it as an owner’s inscription.

“The name is spelled as asbin , and it probably stands for Ásbjǫrn , Asbjørn. The rest of the text in Norse is á mik which means ‘owns me’.” […]

“Owner inscriptions are a common type of medieval inscription,” Zilmer further explains. The texts contain personal names, alone or together with the verb “owner”. Sometimes it is also mentioned what the person owns.

“The label from Oslo uses the expression ‘owns me’. This is a well-known expression in the rune material – the object itself takes the floor. Some other inscriptions that contain the pronoun ‘me’ are master formulas that tell who made the object,” says the professor.

The irregular shape of the wood suggests it was cut to a specific shape for use as a label. The shape might represent something about the owner, a stylized branding device. It would have been mounted to something in order to mark that something as Asbjørn’s property. There are no remains in the excavation layer that might attest to what materials the marker was labelling, but archaeologists believe they may have been trade goods.

Common goods that were traded in medieval Oslo were imported grain, honey and other foods, salt, beer and wine, staples of metal, ceramics and glass, clay pots, baking slabs, millstones and whetstones, imported textiles, etc.

Finds of such markers can help illuminate the city’s trading activity. Maybe the stick was thrown when Asbjørn no longer owned the item? In that case, it is hardly thrown far from where the goods were stored or sold. […]

The town’s artisans had their stalls along the streets and sold products such as shoes and boots, chambers, iron tools, weapons, fine forging products, turned and made vessels, as well as foods such as bread, meat products and fish.

Larger lots of goods were sold directly from the apartment buildings or from the boathouses.

Iron tools used to mine gold in the Middle Ages have been discovered in the Malá Magura hills outside the village of Tužina in western Slovakia. This is the first direct archaeological evidence that gold mining took place in Tužina.

Gold was known to have been mined in other villages in the Upper Nitra area. The discovery of gold in the Malá Magura foothills in the 14th century sparked a gold rush. People moved to the area, staked land claims, panned the river, scoured the surface for gold veins and then tunneled down to pursue them. It ultimately proved a shallow find.

The gold rush occurred in the region because nobody knew how much gold there actually was, Hornonitrianske Museum expert Ján Vingárik told TASR.

“There was enough of it, given the findings of golden grains in streams flowing from the hills,” he argued. Germans settled in the area and expected a huge boom to continue for years to come but they were wrong, he added.

“It later turned out the available gold reserves were not as extensive as in volcanic areas.”

Archaeologists believed that Tužina was part of the Upper Nitra gold rush, but it was only recently verified, first by anomalies characteristic of underground mining identified on a digital relief model of the terrain. When the anomalies were inspected, archaeologists found two large mining areas near the source of a stream at the end of a valley. The first area features two tunnels dug one above the other on a slope. At the top of the slope is a ping field where dozens of exploratory pits of different size were dug to seek out veins. The second area is smaller with a single tunnel and only one ping.

Mining irons were discovered in both areas; mining wedges and the remains of an iron lamp were discovered at the second mining area. The finders were operating in the penumbra, using metal detectors without authorization which is a heritage crime in Slovakia. They reported their finds, thankfully.

It is difficult to accurately date the tools and they were pretty much uniform in design and materials for hundreds of years. The lamp is the only tool with a plausible end date: the metal ones stopped being used in the middle of the 16th century, replaced by clay lamps.

“The lamp is a rarity because it shows that miners entered the underground area in Tužiná,” archaeologist Dominika Andreánska from the museum told the TASR newswire, “It complements the overall picture of gold mining in Upper Nitra.”