Rare Merovingian gold ring found in Jutland

A metal detectorist has discovered a rare Merovingian gold ring dating to 500-600 A.D. in Emmerlev, Southwest Jutland, Denmark. The ring is made of 22-carat gold and is set with an oval cabochon almandine garnet, a red semi-precious stone prized among Germanic peoples as a symbol of power. The mount has four spirals on the underside and trefoil knobs where the band meets the bezel. The spirals and knobs are characteristic of the highest quality of Frankish manufacture, and rings of this type were worn by the elite of the Merovingian dynasty.

National Museum of Denmark curator Kirstine Pommergaard believes the quality and construction of the ring suggests there may have been an unknown noble family in the Emmerlev area with close connections to Merovingian royalty.

“The gold ring not only reveals a possible new princely family in Emmerlev, but also connects the area with one of Europe’s largest centers of power in the Iron Age. The gold ring is probably a woman’s ring and may have belonged to a prince’s daughter who was married to a prince in Emmerlev. Gold was typically reserved for diplomatic gifts, and we know that people married into alliances, just it probably happened with Thyra and Gorm the Old and in more recent times when Christian IX became known as ‘Europe’s father-in-law’ for marrying his daughters into other royal houses, ” she says.

Archaeologists do not think the ring was at that location because it was lost on the way to somewhere else. Almost a thousand ancient and medieval artifacts (gold and silver trade coins, textiles, pottery) have been found at Emmerlev, evidence that busy international trade was taking place there for centuries. The trading post of Ribe was just 30 miles north of Emmerlev, an important stop in the lucrative trade network of the Wadden Sea region.

Gold and silver coins in the Emmerlev area confirm Merovingian contact, and the Merovingian kings and merchants did trade through the Wadden Sea network to Ribe. Making a marriage alliance with a Southern Jutland potentate would therefore have been highly advantageous to provide them with safe harbor and local influence.

The find was actually made in 2020, but the discovery of the ring has been kept under wraps until now to allow metal detectorists and archaeologists to explore the site without unwanted attention.The finder, Lars Nielsen, turned the ring in to the Museum Sønderjylland when he found it, and the local museum has now transferred it to the National Museum in Copenhagen.

”We’ve never seen anything like it out here. Many discoveries have been made over time that point to global trade connections at the Wadden Sea. The gold ring substantiates that there has also been an elite who have had something to do with music. Not everyone has had contact with the Merovingians, ” says Anders Hartvig, museum curator at Museum Sønderjylland.

Kirstine Pommergaard adds:

“The Merovingians were interested in entering into a network with families and individuals who could control trade and resources in an area. “Perhaps the princely family in Emmerlev had control over an area between Ribe and Hedeby and thus secured trade in the area,” she says.

Meteorite iron identified in Bronze Age gold hoard

Analysis of two iron objects in the Treasure of Villena, the Bronze Age gold hoard discovered in southeastern Spain in 1963, have identified the metal as meteorite iron. The treasure is the largest and most important Bronze Age hoard ever found in the Iberian Peninsula, and the second largest set of prehistoric goldsmithing in Europe after the riches found in the Royal Tombs of Mycenae, Greece. Now we know it is also the only hoard on the Iberian Peninsula to contain objects made from meteoric iron.

The first pieces of the treasure were found loose in a gravel pit on December 1, 1963. Workers found a gold bracelet and took it to a jewelry store where they were informed it was enormously valuable by weight alone, never mind its historic significance. Archaeologist José María Soler heard about the find and quickly followed up with an excavation of the pit. Soler and local volunteers unearthed the rest of the treasure grouped together in a large ceramic vessel.

The hoard consists of 66 pieces, most of them gold, nine of them 23.5 carat gold. The 11 bowls, 28 bracelets, three bottles and miscellaneous fragments of decorative elements made of gold all together weigh 9.75 kilos (21.5 lb). There are also three bottles made of silver (600 grams, 1.3 lb, total weight), a gold and amber button and the two iron pieces that were the subject of the recent study.

Iron was extremely rare in Bronze Age Spain, and therefore considered a precious metal like gold and silver. The iron in the Villena hoard is the oldest in Spain. The objects are an open bracelet with rounded ends and a hollow hemisphere of iron covered with thin bands of gold incised with decorated lines that may have been a sword pommel. The corrosion of the iron over the centuries has broken and deformed some of the gold strips.

The discovery of the treasure caused a sensation at the time, and garnered enormous scholarly attention. Experts have long debated its date range. The metal analysis that revealed the meteorite iron also conclusively answered the dating question: the Villena Treasure dates to the Late Bronze Age (1,400-1,200 B.C.)

Their analysis has been able to determine that these are not pieces made with terrestrial iron produced by the reduction of minerals existing in the mantle of planet Earth. Instead, they are “extraterrestrial and [were] made during the Late Bronze Age.” To obtain this data, two tiny extractions were made, under the supervision of the technical staff of the Alicante museum. The samples were then taken to Madrid for analysis at the laboratory of the National Archaeological Museum.

“Meteorite iron is found in certain types of aerolites that, since they come from outer space, are composed of an iron-nickel alloy with a variable nickel composition greater than 5% by weight. They also contain other minor and trace chemical elements, cobalt being one of the most significant. However, the levels of nickel in terrestrial iron are generally low or very low and frequently not detectable in analysis,” the study explains.

The study has been published in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria and can be read here. The treasure, which has been on display at the Villena Museum since its discovery, will soon move to a new state-of-the-art facility. The new Villena Museum (MUVI), located in a restored 1909 flour mill, opens on May 17th with the Treasure front and center in a spacious 800-square-foot room.

Treasure update: flint nodule coin hoard

The British Museum has released the latest annual report of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) which marks that 2022 had the highest number of Treasure cases (1,378) ever reported in a single year. The report highlights some of the most stand-out Treasure finds in 2022, including an intriguing Iron Age hoard of gold coins found inside a hollow flint globule.

The hoard was discovered on New Year’s Day 2023 in East Garston, West Berkshire. It consists of 26 Iron Age gold staters found inside a naturally-occurring hollow flint ball. The staters are of the “Savernake Wreaths” type, produced in East Wiltshire in the late Iron Age (50-20 B.C.). They feature a stylized design of crossed wreaths on one side and a horse at gallop facing right with a spiral above it and a wheel below.

Hollow nodules of flint are commonly found in the upper strata of the Chalk, a limestone geological layer in southern and eastern England formed between 90 million and 66 million years ago. Before it hardened, the Chalk was mud on the sea floor. Dissolved silica filled gaps in the compacting mud, forming nodules sometimes around sea creatures like urchins and cockles that left hollows inside the nodules once they decayed.

This is not the first coin hoard found in a flint nodule. Iron Age coins cached inside nodules have been found in Kent, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. Using hollow flint balls as containers for gold coins appears to have been an established practice in Iron Age England. The nodules often have natural holes and openings making them handy piggy banks even unmodified. Sometimes a hole would be enlarged to fit the coins more easily. The East Garston flint nodule had no natural hole; a piece deliberately broken to create the opening.

The staters and flint ball were declared Treasure, as all coins hoards have been since the Treasure Act was passed in 1996. Under the terms of that legislation, the definition of Treasure in the UK has been two or more prehistoric objects made of metal, any metallic object composed of at least 10% silver or gold by weight that is at least 300 years old and coins in hoard 300 years or older. Once an object is determined by a coroner’s court to be Treasure, it becomes property of the crown and is offered to a local museum for the amount of its assessed value. The money is then split between the finder and landowner.

This definition has allowed exceptionally unique and important archaeological artifacts like the Ryedale Hoard, the Crosby Garret helmet, the Roman licking dog and the Allectus aureus to fall through the cracks. Despite being undisputed and irreplaceable archaeological treasures, they were not Treasure according to the short-sighted legal definition and were therefore returned to the finders who then sold them to the highest bidder.

In 2019, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced a plan to revise the Treasure Act to plug the loophole. The updated language would define Treasure as any object that is at least partially metal, at least 200 years old and is deemed to provide “exceptional insight” into British or regional history because of its rarity, location or connection to a historical personage or event. After five long years, the revision is finally about to take effect. The new criteria will apply to all objects found after July 30th, 2023.

Harpole burial: micro-excavation bears fruit

A year of painstaking micro-excavations of soil blocks recovered from the 7th century bed burial unearthed near the village of Harpole, Northamptonshire, in April 2022, has revealed new details about the burial and its exceptional furnishings. The gold, glass and gemstone necklace with its 30 pendants has been cleaned, uncovering the intricacy of the goldsmithing and the brilliant colors of the glass and gems. The central pendant is a large square inlaid garnet and gold spirals, reminiscent of many of the pieces in the Staffordshire Hoard.

Here are photographs of the necklace before and after cleaning:

Comparing the after photograph to the digital reconstruction made in 2022, I’d say they were pretty much dead-on.

The unique silver pectoral cross is still in the process of being liberated from its soil enclosure. Archaeologists are excavating it extremely slowly because of its complexity and fragility.

A central cross is decorated with a smaller gold cross, which has a large garnet and four smaller garnets. At the end of each arm are smaller circular crosses made of silver, with garnet and gold centres. These are very similar to the pectoral crosses found in other high status female burials from this time, including the Trumpington burial. The use of these crosses within one larger cross, however, is unique and suggests the individual may have held a very special position within the Christian community.

Through micro-excavating the feature, our conservators have revealed it is mostly made of extremely thin sheets of silver attached to wood, its corroded surface barely distinguishable from the surrounding soil. We hope to identify the type of wood used, and better understand how the cross was constructed.

The laboratory excavation has also found more skeletal remains of the high-status woman buried in the grave. In the initial in situ excavation, only a few partial teeth were discovered, but one of the soil blocks recovered from the dig turned out to contain more parts of the skeleton: an upper femur, a piece of the pelvic bone, vertebrae, part of a hand and wrist. The bones were pinned under a crushed copper dish that had been buried with the deceased. The copper prevented the usual decomposition process of the organic remains.

Our specialists are continuing to analyse and piece together the story of the Harpole Burial. As well as getting a better understanding of the items recovered and individual buried, it is hoped that scientific techniques may reveal more about funerary rituals at the time. This potentially includes studying tiny fragments of organic matter, which may hold clues as to what the person was wearing and the types of materials they were lying on.

Small medieval coin hoard assigned to Ostróda Museum

A small but significant hoard of medieval coins found near the town of Iława in northern Poland has been transferred to the Ostróda Museum by the provincial conservator of monuments. There are 13 coins and partial coins, most of them cross denari: silver coins minted in Saxony specifically for trade with the Western Slavs. One of the fragmentary coins (used for its weight value) is a 13th century bracteate minted by Sambor II, Duke of Pomerania.

The coins are named for the cavalier’s cross that is always found on the reverse of these denari. Both the obverse and reverse have what looks like lettering bordering the central images and symbols, but they are imitations, a pseudo-legend rather than an inscription. Without any real inscriptions or any other references to the minting year, they are impossible to date precisely, but they were only in production between 965 A.D. and the beginning of the 12th century. They have unusually high edges on both sides.

Cross denari were the primary currency in what is now Poland in the second half of the 11th century. Several hoards of cross denari hve been found in Poland, the largest of which, discovered in 1935 in Słuszków, central Poland, contained more than 12,500 coins.

According to Łukasz Szczepański from the Ostróda Museum, the location of this treasure fits in an interesting way with the identified settlement structure of the southern Jeziorak microregion.

“We have there, among others, a Prussian stronghold from the 11th-12th centuries, a network of open settlements, various types of earth fortifications that are attributed to Prussia. This treasure complements our knowledge about the settlement activity of this zone” – said the archaeologist.

Metal detectorists from the Iława Search Group discovered the coin hoard on a hillside outside the town on a weekend rally earlier this year. As required by Polish law, the metal detectorists had permission from the landowner and the conservator of monuments to search the site. The group hopes that this find and others they’ve made will go on display in a future local museum in Iława, but until then, the Ostróda Museum will be the beneficiary of their work.