The History Blog

In 2007, an archaeological survey of a highway construction site near the central Polish town of Bodzia uncovered a Viking era cemetery with several dozen chamber graves dating to between 980/990 A.D. and 1030 A.D. Over the next two years, an excavation of the site revealed the remains of 14 men, 21 women and 14 children, and an extraordinarily rich collection of grave goods including weapons, jewelry, coins, amulet containers and the remnants of silk fabric, marking the cemetery as the final resting place for the élite.

Some of the artifacts are Scandinavian in origin, like silver beads with a traditionally Scandinavian granulation decoration, the weapons buried with a young man whose broken jaw and sliced face indicate he died in battle, and a few of the coins. The north-south orientation of the graves also suggests a Viking presence, since Slavic custom placed graves along an east-west axis while in the Scandinavian tradition people were buried north to south. The graves are relatively spacious, another Scandinavian style element, with wooden coffins lined in fabric and reinforced with iron fittings placed in deep burial pits. Eastern European graves at this time were more shallow and snug to the body.

A unique feature of this cemetery is the remains of wooden palisades enclosing small groups of one to three graves. “Fences of the dead” have been found before in Britain, but they’re centuries older than the Bodzia cemetery and they weren’t fastened together at the corners like the Bodzia fences. Another rarity is a bronze balancing scale possibly used to weigh precious metals. Such artifacts are rare finds in Europe in general, and the first of its kind ever found in central Poland.

Scandinavians had been trading and raiding in central and eastern Europe since the 9th century. Some of them settled in the area and became prominent citizens, often as mercenaries for kings like Mieszko I, founder of the Polish state and father of Boleslav the Brave, the first crowned King of Poland. The young warrior may in fact be connected to Boleslav. Bronze belt fittings found in his grave bear the insignia of Sviatopolk the Accursed, Boleslav’s son-in-law and ruler of the powerful Kievan Rus state east of Poland between 1015 and 1019. (He was Accursed because he killed three of his younger brothers to secure the throne. One he didn’t kill, Yaroslav, killed him and took the throne.)

The warrior cemetery of Bodzia, composed exclusively of chamber graves, is unique in early medieval Europe. It is located near the trading route of the rivers Vistula and Bug, connecting the Baltic Sea areas with the Byzantine world, and from Bodzia it is not far to the borders of Prussia. In the Kuyavia region, where Bodzia is sited, there are rich saline resources.

The discovery of Bodzia’s cemetery is the most recent and most spectacular example of a growing number of funerary sites found in Polish lands, dated to the period between the end of the tenth and the middle of the eleventh century and connected to the presence of migrants, mostly from Scandinavia. There is a certain regularity in the evidence. While in the pre-state period grave goods indicate a ‘domestic’ status for the deceased, many graves from the early Piast period, dated to the late tenth to mid-eleventh century, are distinguished by the frequent occurrence of weapons. Penetration of Scandinavians on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea was associated at that time with both the merchants’ commercial objectives and their military purposes

The artifacts found are an eloquent testament to that synthesis: Scandinavian weapons for fighting, bronze balancing scale for trading, glass beads from Byzantium, silk from even further east, coins from Germany, England and Scandinavia.

This is not a new find but it’s new to me and it’s too awesome not post about. In 2008, metal detectorist David Barker found a bronze Roman knife handle buried under a farmer’s field in Syston, Lincolnshire. It wasn’t a big money find, but what made it stand out was its erotic design. There’s a male on the right engaging in coitus with a woman facing him, her legs around his waist. A second male figure is behind her, his back to hers. In his arms he’s holding a decapitated head, clasping it to his chest.

Erotic knife handles have been found before in Britain, but they’re rare. None of them also include a severed head, which makes this particular artifact unique, as far as we know.

Barker reported his find to the Portable Antiques Scheme and then sold it for just under £1,000 (ca $1,500) in December of that year to Lincoln museum The Collection which put it on display in its Roman gallery.

Collections officer at The Collection, Antony Lee, believes it is the cheekiest relic ever to be unearthed in Lincolnshire.

He said: “This has to be one of the county’s rudest finds. We have had some amazing finds in the past, but nothing quite this overt. The Romans certainly seemed to have no trouble expressing themselves. Other erotic knife handles have been found all over Britain, but ours is the only one with a decapitated head. It created quite a stir among staff and we’re expecting it to continue to draw lots of interest from the public.”

Mr Lee believes the knife dates from the 4th century and that it was fashioned for a specific and delicate task.

He said “We don’t yet know the full significance of the decapitated head, but we think it may not be as dark as it seems. For the Romans, decapitation was regarded with some reverence and respect.”

There are a lot of unanswered questions about this piece, on top of the mysterious role of the decapitated head in the ménage à trois. It might not even be a knife handle, for example, but the grip of some other tool.

Lincolnshire finds liaison officer Adam Daubney, to whom Barker first reported his discovery, thinks that it might be a symbolic design not meant to be read as a literal threesome with severed head. The imagery could have some religious significance for 4th century Britons, or it could be something as simple as a scene from the theater.

Proving yet again that Britain is basically one giant buried treasure disguised by a thin layer of loam, another metal detector-wielding hobbyist has discovered a Viking hoard of 201 pieces of silver, including ingots, coins and arm rings, in a well-preserved lead container. It’s the fourth largest Viking hoard ever found.

Darren Webster found the hoard in September near the village of Silverdale in North Lancashire. When the metal detector his wife had given him for Christmas went off, he dug down 18 inches to find what turned out to be a lead pot. At first he thought it was just a sheet of lead, but when he picked it up silver fell out and he saw that the lead had been folded into a container. He reported the find to the authorities and the recovered hoard went to the British Museum for expert analysis.

Yesterday the British Museum unveiled the hoard to the press in anticipation of the coroner’s inquest to determine its treasure status next week. The final tally is 27 coins, 10 arm rings from various Viking periods, two rings (for fingers), 14 ingots, six brooch fragments, a wire braid and 141 pieces of hacksilver (chopped up bits of silver from arm rings and ingots that were used as bullion currency). The coins date the hoard to around 900 A.D. They are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Frankish and Islamic coins, including coins of Alfred the Great, first self-described King of the Anglo-Saxons, his nephew Alwaldus, the Viking king of East Anglia Guthrum (who was defeated in battle by Alfred, converted to Christianity, took the baptismal name Athelstan with Alfred as his godfather) and one mysterious Viking ruler previously unknown to us.

The mystery coin is inscribed “AIRDECONUT” on one side, and has the words DNS (for Dominus) and REX in the shape of the cross on the other. Experts believe “Airdeconut” is an Anglo-Saxon attempt to spell the Viking name Harthacnut, and the Dominus Rex indicate that Airdeconut was a Christian ruler. The style of the coin is similar to coins from the Viking kings of Northumbria around 900 A.D., but unlike those kings, Airdeconut/Harthacnut hasn’t appeared on the historical record before now.

Another featured player in the hoard is one of the arm rings. Arm rings were given to Viking warriors by their leaders both as rewards and as symbols of allegiance. This one is elaborately carved in a style that synthesizes Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Frankish decorative elements. Researching these unique features might help elucidate their origin and fill in the blanks in our knowledge of Viking trade networks and economy.

The Silverdale hoard has pieces in common with one of the famous Viking hoards ever discovered, the Cuerdale hoard, which was found just 60 miles away in 1840. It was a far larger find — 8,600 pieces of silver — but includes several of the same coin combinations. The coins dated the Cuerdale hoard to around 905-10 AD, which supports the dating of the Silverdale hoard’s burial to around that time or a little earlier.

At this time Anglo-Saxon forces were fighting the Vikings, who had settled in the area, converted to Christianity and become farmers and traders in the generations since the Norsemen first invaded, for control of the north of England. The hoard was probably buried by a Viking settler/warrior to keep it safe from pillaging while he was off fighting.

Once the inquest determines that the hoard is treasure according to the Treasure Act (and it’s a given that it will because of the silver and its age), the experts will assess its market value. Institutions can then secure the hoard by paying the finder and the property owner the assessed value. The Museum of Lancaster is hoping they’ll be able to raise the funds and secure the hoard for display.

The Glastonbury Grace Cup, a 16th century oak tankard intricately carved with images of the 12 Apostles, the crucifixion of Christ, birds, beasts and flowers, is going on display at Glastonbury Abbey, its reputed ancestral home, for the first time since 1886.

Legend has it that the tankard belonged to the abbots of Glastonbury, the last of whom, Abbot Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1539 during the Dissolution of Monasteries. Whiting had been a supporter of King Henry VIII, even signing the 1534 Act of Supremacy that made the king the head of the Church of England, but when Henry’s men showed up to loot Glastonbury Abbey and confiscate its lands, Whiting tried to stop them so they executed him as a traitor on the spot.

Grace Cup was smuggled out of the abbey and given for safekeeping to a Catholic branch of the Arundell family of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, according to Arundell family lore. A hundred years later the tankard had another brush with the pointy end of British history, this time narrowly avoiding destruction when Cromwell’s Parliamentarian forces set siege to Wardour Castle in 1643 during the English Civil War. It was Lady Blanche Arundell, left alone at the castle with only 25 men-at-arms while her husband was off fighting with King Charles, who fended off the attackers for nine days and was able to hide the cup before she finally surrendered.

We can’t know for sure that the tankard came from Glastonbury Abbey. The decoration on the cup suggests that it may have been carved in Germany or elsewhere central Europe. One theory is that the cup was brought to Wardour by Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, returned from fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II against the Ottoman Turks in 1595. Sir Thomas, nicknamed “the Valiant” for his bravery in taking down the Turkish standard and replacing it with the Imperial one during a battle in Gran, Hungary, could have picked it up during his travels.

However, Sir Thomas was in a shipwreck on his way home from the war and lost everything. He made it to shore with only the clothes on his back, so if the tankard was picked up by an Arundell on the continent rather than saved from the violence of the Dissolution, it probably wasn’t Sir Thomas after fighting the Turks.

Also, this kind of tankard is called a Grace Cup because it was traditionally shared around a table after a prayer of thanksgiving, aka saying grace. On the inside of the cup there are vertical rows of pegs that apportion an equal amount of beverage to each drinker. Add that to its religious decoration and it makes the abbey provenance plausible even setting aside the Arundell family stories.

The cup was tracked down and put on display in Glastonbury in 1886 to celebrate the founding of the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society. Now, to celebrate the society’s 125th birthday, Lord Talbot of Malahide, Arundell descendent and current owner of the cup, is loaning the Grace Cup to the abbey again. The exhibition opens December 14th and runs until January 31th.

Tanja Höls was doing her janitorial duties in the fourth-floor archive of the State Library of Passau in Bavaria when curiosity drove her to look inside a wooden box she had seen many times but never opened. Within she discovered tray upon tray of coins. There were 172 coins in total, most of them silver, some bronze or brass, ranging in date from Roman antiquity up through the Napoleonic era. Nobody in the library had any idea they were there.

According to Markus Wennerhold, head of the library, the collection likely came into the library’s possession after the 1803 secularization of Germany. The victorious French armies of Napoleon brought constitutional governments based on Revolutionary humanist principles to what was then the highly fragmented and decentralized Holy Roman Empire. Holy Roman Emperors had been handing out vast estates and titles to religious authorities for centuries by then. Even though the Protestant Reformation had stripped some of that temporal power from ecclesiastical rulers, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the governments of German states systematically secularized religious properties and possessions.

One of those religious properties was the Passau library. It was originally founded in 1612 as the library of the Jesuit College. When Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuit order in 1773, the library passed into the hands of the Passau bishopric and was renamed the Episcopal Academic Library. When secularization hit Bavaria in 1803, the library became state property. Its collection was enormously inflated by the secularization of its neighbors’ holdings. Franciscan, Capuchin, Augustinian, Benedictine, Premonstratensian and Cistercian monasteries in Passau and environs had to give their entire libraries to the new public one.

The coins – silver, bronze and brass – were worth millions, [Wennerhold] said. “We looked for similar ones online, and found that some which were the same but in much worse condition had been sold for considerable sums. Then there were coins that we have that are not recorded elsewhere.”

He said the coins had simply been forgotten about. “No-one currently working at the museum knew they were there,” he said.

“They were hidden in 1803 during the secularisation in Germany, when all books and coins were taken from the monasteries and cloisters and put in state hands. The most valuable things were supposed to be taken to Munich, according to the archives, but someone here in Passau decided to keep some of them here and hid some treasures – including these coins.”

They might also have been hidden in the library by their owner rather than having been confiscated. A noble tax evader, perhaps, who wanted to stash them somewhere the government wouldn’t look.

Keep your eye on the library website because next week they have promised to post pictures of each individual coin. They won’t go on display right away, but next year is the library’s 400th anniversary so the coins will be part of a special celebratory exhibit.

As for Mr. Höls, she’s getting promoted to the curatorial department and Wennerhold et al are planning an appropriate reward of a pecuniary nature as well.

The African Queen, the 28-foot steamship made famous by the eponymous 1951 movie The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, will soon be restored to the grungy-but-determined riverboat that made it a star. The boat has been rusting in dry dock next to the Key Largo Holiday Inn since 2002 when its late owner, Jim Hendricks, lawyer and the owner of the Key Large Holiday Inn, passed away.

His son, also named Jim Hendricks, has leased the boat for 10 years to charter boat captain, business owner and passionate restorer of classic boats Capt. Lance Holmquist. Holmquist and his wife Suzanne plan to spend tens of thousands of dollars restoring the African Queen. Once she’s in running order — the restoration is expected to take at least two months — the Holmquists will offer inland water tours on the African Queen. No word on whether any of the itineraries include getting stuck in the reeds and make some poor drunken Bogey impersonator tow the boat by hand through leech-infested shallows. (For the record, I would take that tour. I would take the hell out of that tour.)

The African Queen was born the S/L Livingstone in Britain in 1912. Built by the Abdela & Mitchell shipyards in Brimscombe, Gloucestershire, the open-hulled steamship was sent to Africa overland and used by the British East Africa Railway Company to transport cargo and passengers over the Ruki River and Lake Albert in the Belgian Congo (now the DR Congo) and Uganda. It was idling in Uganda when director John Huston and producer Sam Spiegel discovered it while scouting locations for the movie in 1950.

They secured the vessel, renamed it the African Queen and pressed it into service for the shoot. The challenges it and the cast and crew had to endure during filming were numerous. The film was shot in Technicolor which required large specialized cameras, unwieldy at the best of times and particularly difficult to haul through malaria and dysentery-infected water in the sweltering jungle heat. Everyone but Bogey and Huston got sick. Bogey attributed his indomitable good health to having eaten only canned baked beans and asparagus and drunk only whiskey.

The movie was a huge success, the top money-maker of the year, and it earned Humphrey Bogart an Oscar, his only one, for Best Actor in a Leading Role. After the boat became a superstar, it went through various changes of ownership and condition. In 1982, Jim Hendricks found himself with $65,000 left over from a bank loan he had secured to build an addition to the Key Largo Holiday Inn. The bank told him to do something sensible with it. He bought the African Queen.

Hendricks kept it in good condition, piloting it himself on the inland waterways of the Florida Keys. In 1992, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. After Hendricks’ death, his son was unable to keep it running but always hoped he’d have the opportunity to restore it as a tribute to his father. The Holmquists will make that dream a reality.

Archaeologists excavating the Cambridgeshire fens near Petersborough, southeast England, have discovered the largest single collection of Bronze Age artifacts ever found in Britain. The 3,000-year-old artifacts were kept in an extraordinary state of preservation by the layers of silt and peat in the Flag Fen Basin.

The discovery, still only in the early phases of excavation, provides a snapshot of Bronze Age life. Among the artifacts is a wooden bowl with a spoon sticking into the contents. Laboratory analysis of the substance in the bowl identifies it as delicious and nutritious nettle stew.

The most glamorous of the hundreds of artifacts discovered are six canoes carved out of oak trunks. Finding even one intact Bronze Age boat would be the discovery of a lifetime; six is an embarrassment of archaeological riches. Two of them are decorated and all six of them are in such great condition that you can see the wood grain. You can even see where their Bronze Age owners made repairs to the vessels.

Along the 150-metre stretch of a bronze age river channel, they have found the best preserved example of prehistoric river life. There are weirs and fish traps in the form of big woven willow baskets, plus fragments of garments with ornamental hems made from fibrous bark and jewellery, including green and blue beads. Extensive finds of metalwork include bronze swords and spears, some apparently tossed into the river in perfect condition, possibly as votive offerings. One of the boats is 8.3 metres long. “It feels as if you could get the whole family – granny, grandad, a couple of goats and everything – in there,” said Knight. The smallest boat is just over four metres long.

The finds reveal how, with the rise in water levels in the bronze age, people adapted to a wetland environment, using rivers for transport, living off pike, perch, carp and eel. How far they could travel in the log boats is unclear. Although the boats were unlikely to have been used at sea, one of the bronze age swords is of a type normally found in northern Spain.

They were found buried over 13 feet (4 meters) below ground level, and were only discovered because the firm that hired the archaeologists to survey the area is a brick and concrete company that needs to dig deeply to access the Jurassic clay they use to make their bricks. No aerial photography or even ground-penetrating radar would have been able to detect artifacts so deep underground.

Only a fraction of the site has been excavated so far. Since the find is so rich, archaeologists expect the dig will continue for years. The artifacts will be removed from the site, studied and conserved with an eye to future museum display.

Edit: Yay pictures!

Deep Sea Productions divers have discovered what they believe to be the wreck of the 17th century Swedish royal warship Svärdet, or “Sword” in English. The 82-foot ship was found on the seafloor between 160 and 320 feet deep off the coast of the island of Öland, not far from where the wreck of the 16th century Swedish warship Mars was discovered earlier this year.

Built in 1642, the Svärdet sank with near-legendary drama during the Battle of Öland on June 1, 1676, along with its sister-ship the Kronan, or “The Crown.” Built in the 1670s, the Kronan was the flagship of the Swedish fleet, one of the world’s largest seagoing vessels and one of its most heavily armed. Both it and Svärdet were richly decorated in a style known as a “gaudy” ship, designed to intimidate the enemy with size and fanciness. It didn’t work in this case.

When Admiral of the Realm Lorentz Creutz, the Kronan‘s commander, ordered the ship to turn hard south with open gunports and too much sail, the ship flooded and capsized. Then for a reason never fully explained the gunpowder magazine exploded, taking most of the bow with it and the ship sank taking over 800 men with her, including Creutz, other high-ranking naval officers and the navy’s chief doctor.

Taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Kronan‘s sudden implosion, the allied Dano-Norwegian-Dutch fleet surrounded the Svärdet, attacking it on all sides. Its commander, Admiral Claes Uggla, held off the four attacking vessels, including the flagships of the Danish and Dutch fleets, for two hours. Finally Svärdet lost its mainmast and was pierced below the waterline. Uggla refused to surrender, even after they were hit by a fireship which did its duty and infected the Svärdet with its flames. He and his entire company went down with the ship.

The Battle of Öland is the largest naval battle the Baltic has ever seen. The wreck of the Kronan was rediscovered in August of 1980 after decades of searching by a team headed by Anders Franzén, the marine engineer and amateur historian who had found the Vasa in 1956. Finally finding its sister is therefore enormously exciting.

Malcolm Dixelius, head of Deep Sea Productions, is cagey on its exact location. It was not discovered in Swedish waters, so Swedish conservation law does not apply.

“The Baltic Sea is very complicated… Different countries interpret the laws in different ways,” he said.

“What is important is that we know where it is and we will help scientists to investigate it. We are working with colleagues who found the Mars, since these two ships are fairly close to each other and have a common history,” he added.

The Mars sank in 1564 and was found last spring. Both the Mars and Svärdet “are untouched,” Dixelius said.

“No one has been on them. Both the Vasa and Kronan were stripped in the 1600s. Here all the cannons are still there. They probably knew in the 1600-1700s where these wrecks were, but couldn’t get at them, because they were so deep,” he said.

The Baltic is a shipwreck lover’s dream. Its low temperatures and low salt levels act as excellent preservatives and make the environment extremely inhospitable to critters who enjoy eating wood, like shipworm. You can see the remarkable condition the ship is in in this footage of the wreck:

On the night of November 2, a Spanish bronze cannon from 1795 was stolen from a suburban Detroit business and its owner is offering a $1,000 reward for any information leading to its recovery. Matt Switlik, cannon collector and expert on historic field artillery, had brought the cannon to the Edston Plastic Company in Romulus, Michigan, to have a plastic replica made for a museum to use as a donation container.

The thieves were looking for a far more pedestrian haul of easily sold power tools and scrap metal. They made off with 20 of the former and several 200-pound boxes of aluminum. The cannon was hidden in the back under some racks and a coffin blanket. The thieves stumbled on it entirely by accident when they rolled out a coil of wire.

The cannon was cast in Seville in 1795. The crest of King Charles IV of Spain is engraved on it, as is the date, a serial number of 3610 and markings indicating it was made from copper from Mexico and from the Rio Tinto government mines in southwestern Spain. The 2.6 inch caliber weapon is 42 inches long, weighs 225 pounds.

Matt Switlik purchased it as part of a matched pair in 1974 from Inez Bandholtz, the widow of Maj. Gen. Harry Hill Bandholtz who acquired the cannons in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and brought them back to Michigan when he retired from the Army after World War I.

The cannon is far too identifiable to be sold to collectors, so if the thieves do anything, they’ll try to sell it for scrap. The $1000 reward is double what they would get for the scrap value of the copper alone.

Switlik, a historian who collects cannons, paid $1,000 for it nearly four decades ago and now values it at about $12,000. He’s getting word out that his cannon was stolen to collectors across the country and sent an e-mail to 600 people Tuesday.

“As a stolen piece, it’s not worth anything,” said Forrest Taylor, owner of www.cannonsonline.com based in Maryland. Taylor buys, sells and reproduces cannons and said collectors will know Switlik’s cannon was stolen if they come across it.

Taylor also said he believes that the cannon’s actual value may be closer to $20,000.[...]

“I’d sure like my cannon back,” Switlik said. “The other one is lonesome.”

The Romulus police are investigating leads from the crime scene and looking for surveillance video any neighboring business might have. Anyone with information about the cannon should contact the Romulus Police Department at (734) 941-8400.

Two hundred works of art ranging from the High Renaissance to German Baroque to the Modern period have been discovered in the dirty backyard shed of a retired bricklayer in Szczecin, Poland. Only one work has been positively identified thus far, a 1903 lithograph by Jozef Czajkowski, and it provides a clue as to the provenance of the rest of the paintings: it is listed on the Art Loss Register as having been looted from the Silesia Museum in Katowice, southern Poland, during World War II. The oldest work, still not identified by name, dates to 1532.

The bricklayer, known only as Antoni M. since Polish law prohibits printing his family name at this juncture, is 92 years old and recently suffered a series of strokes. He cannot speak, so we don’t know how he got his hands on this collection. Preliminary investigations indicate that he found the art in the 60s while working on a construction site. He secreted it away and built a shed in his garden purposely to store the purloined paintings.

It’s not just a lean-to, either. According to police reports, the building looked like a bunker or a bomb shelter, with 30-inch-thick walls, a metal door and interior sliding walls. Unfortunately, he paid all that attention to security and none whatsoever to keeping conditions inside the bunker propitious for a massive art collection. The works were exposed to moisture and dust and are in very poor condition.

They’ve been transferred to the National Museum in Szczecin where Polish and Italian art historians are assessing the damage and working to identify each piece.

Antoni M. is under formal investigation for handling stolen art. Polish police are working closely with Interpol to trace the history of the works and figure out how they wound up in a backyard shed.

Here’s some raw footage of piles of art crammed into that filthy shed and then laid out in what looks like a conference room, maybe at the police station or in the museum.