Month: September 2013

Four Bronze Age gold “oath rings” found in Denmark

Ancient, Treasures

Amateur archaeologists Hans Henrik Hansen and his nephew Christian Albertsen were exploring a field near the Danish village of Boeslunde, southwestern Zealand, with metal detectors this June 18th when they discovered two bracelet-sized gold rings. They immediately brought the rings to the Zealand Museum where curator Kirsten Christensen recognized them as “oath rings,” arm rings that are open-ended with decorated funnel-shaped tips. Hansen and Albertsen told her they were off to find more of them and returned to the field the next day where they found another two rings within meters of the first two. They are from the Late Bronze Age and date to around 800 B.C.

Oath rings have been found before in this very field. The four new discoveries have almost doubled the number of rare gold oath rings discovered in this spot, bringing the total up to ten. In all of Denmark, only about 50 oath rings are known to have been unearthed. If that weren’t remarkable enough, the other six were discovered one at a time over a period of three decades. Never before have four been found together. The total weight of the ten oath rings from this field is more 3.5 kilos (7.7 pounds). These four range in weight from 95 grams (3.5 ounces) to 290 grams (10.23 ounces), lighter than most of the six previous discoveries which range from 220 grams (7.76 ounces) to 770 grams (27.16 ounces). Arm rings are not the only Bronze Age gold found in the area. Another two kilos of gold artifacts (mainly bowls) have been discovered over the years, indicating that the Boeslunde area was a center of wealth during the Late Bronze Age.

The four rings are all different, although they do share some decorative features like meander patterns, snaking bend patterns like a river seen from above. Those meander patterns are a stylistic feature of Late Bronze Age (950-800 B.C.) metal work which is how the rings were dated. The rings all show significant wear, especially on the tips were some of the decoration has been almost entirely eroded away, which means they were not made solely for sacrifice in a religious ritual, but rather worn by a person or people whose skin and clothing rubbed against the soft gold leaving marks over time.

One of the six previously discovered rings, this one found in 2009, has a similar wear pattern and is in the same weight range as the new four. It was also found near the same spot where the four were unearthed. The five rings could well have been buried together and then been separated by later agricultural interference. All four of the new rings show signs of having met the business ends of plows or harrows. One ring is bent entirely out of its circular shape, and the other three have nicks and scrapes from their encounters with farming tools.

Oath rings have been found in graves of high status men, and only men, as well as in sacrificial pits. Although they were worn for an extended period of time, the Boeslunde rings were all discovered buried on their own, not associated with a grave. Archaeologists plan to return to the find site later this year to find out more about the context, whether they were buried in a bog hole like most of the rings discovered in the area or deposited in some other way. Gold sacrifices in the Bronze Age were often deposited in watery areas, primarily bogs and lakes, but they have also been found buried in soil next to boulders or in barrows.

Having said all this, these rings are not actually oath rings which is why I used quotation marks in the title. In the early 19th century, there was a trend among historians to look in the Icelandic sagas for explanations of pretty much every ancient artifact found. Gold arm rings make an appearance in several sagas as objects used in religious rituals, worn by priests and used by parties in court cases to swear oaths upon the way the Bible is used by believers today.

From the Landnámabók, meaning “The Book of Settlements,” a medieval Icelandic book detailing the settlement of Iceland by the Norse in the 9th century and beyond:

A ring weighing two ounces or more should lie on the stall in every chief Temple, and this ring should every chief or godi [, a local chieftain with administrative and religious duties,] have upon his arm at all public law-motes (logthing) at which he should be at the head of affairs, having first reddened it in the blood of a neat which he himself had sacrificed there. Every man who was there to transact any business, as by law provided by the Court, should first take an oath upon that ring and name for the purpose two or more witnesses and repeat the following words: “I call to witness in evidence,” he was to say, “that I take oath upon the ring, a lawful one (lögeid) so help me Frey and Niord and the Almighty God, to this end that I shall in this case prosecute or defend or bear witness or give award or pronounce doom according to what I know to be most right and most true and most lawful, and that I will deal lawfully with all such matters in law as I have to deal with while I am at this Thing.”

“Thing” here means a governing assembly of free men that met at regular intervals to pass new laws, elect leaders, adjudicate disputes and make political decisions.

The open-ended arm rings became associated with the oath-taking rings. Eventually archaeologists recognized that the so-called oath rings were made and buried thousands of years before the time of the sagas, but by then the name had stuck and remains in use as an asterisked convention today.

The four newly-discovered oath rings are now on display at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Last day to get Walter Koessler’s photo album

Modern(ish)

Dean Putney’s Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of his great-grandfather Walter Koessler’s World War I photographs has been a smashing success. Earlier today they crossed the $100,000 mark, two times the original goal of $50,000 which was already very ambitious. Dean has very wisely, in my opinion, put that extra money to use in improving the quality of the book rather than expanding the scope of the project or creating a rat’s nest of additional rewards.

He also reopened the $75 pledge level for people who want a copy of the book (plus the pdf version of the book and the digital pictures.) When I blogged about it the $89 level was the least expensive option if you wanted to order a book, and it cost more because there’s a large format print along with the other stuff. If you’d like to get a book, you have just one day left to do it.

Dean has put his shoulder to the wheel this month, hired a professional designer and copy editor and worked with the printer to make the book take shape as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality. He enlisted the aid of backers to help proofread a pdf advance of the book and to help translate German postcards and letters. The comment threads on those two updates are fascinating and not to be missed.

The first of them also includes pictures of draft spreads of the book and it just gorgeous. I love the choice to have the cover be all black with Walter Koessler’s name and the years the war started and ended embossed in gold on the bottom right just like on the original album. A belly band with select pictures will be wrapped around the none more black front cover. It’s so classy I can hardly stand it.

You can get an even better sense of the size and quality of the book in the following video. Dean already has a dummy copy of the book. There’s no content in it or on it and some minor details are different — the foldout page is a different width and in a different location than it will be in the book — but it looks great already.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/rtfUeG4jcIo&w=430]

So! Twenty-three hours before pledging ends and money changes hands at 5:00 PM EST. Just thought you should know.

Richard III had roundworms

Medieval

Researchers from Cambridge University and the University of Leicester have analyzed sediment samples collected in September of last year from the burial site of King Richard III and discovered that he suffered from intestinal parasites, namely roundworms. The samples were taken from three places: the sacral region of the pelvis at the base of his spine (marked S on the picture), the skull (C1) and a spot outside the grave’s edge (C2). The sacrum is a triangular bone that forms the back wall of the pelvic girdle. The intestines are contained in the pelvic girdle. Since obviously Richard’s intestines are long gone, any remains of their contents would be found in the sediment around the sacrum.

Analysis of the sacral sample found multiple eggs of the giant roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) ranging from 55.1 to 69.8 micrometers in length. From those tiny eggs hatch the largest parasitic worm in humans. Adult females, which are bigger than the males, can reach over a foot in length. They are tremendously fertile, capable of laying 200,000 eggs every day. A person contracts a roundworm infection when they eat or drink something contaminated with egg-containing human feces. The eggs hatch in the small intestine and the larvae pass through its walls into the blood stream. From there they travel to the lungs where they grow for a few weeks until they’re coughed up and swallowed so they can head back home to the intestine. That’s where they grow to full size and sexual maturity and start producing hundreds of thousands of eggs a day so the cycle can start over again.

Roundworm eggs are remarkably resilient. They can remain viable in the soil for up to 10 years, and archaeological examples up to 24,000 years old have been found. Roundworm is the most common parasite in humans, infecting an estimated one sixth of the world. Improvements in sanitation in the US and Europe have drastically reduced the rates of roundworm infection making it relatively uncommon, but in Richard’s time it was widespread. Even kings weren’t spared, despite their access to the best food. All it took was an infected food handler with unwashed hands or vegetables grown using human feces as fertilizer, a common practice in the Middle Ages.

His cooks deserve credit for keeping other parasites at bay, though.

No other species of intestinal parasite were present in the samples. Past research into human intestinal parasites in Britain has shown several species to have been present prior to the medieval period, including roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), beef/pork tapeworm (Taenia saginata/solium), fish tapeworm (Diphyllobothrium latum), and liver fluke (Fasciola hepatica). We would expect nobles of this period to have eaten meats such as beef, pork, and fish regularly, but there was no evidence for the eggs of the beef, pork, or fish tapeworm. This finding might suggest that his food was cooked thoroughly, which would have prevented the transmission of these parasites.

We know the eggs in sacral sample weren’t the result of later contamination of the soil because the control sample taken from the skull area had no eggs present and the control sample from the edge of the pit had 15 times fewer eggs than the pelvic sediment sample. This is the first time the remains of a British king have been examined for intestinal parasites. If Richard had any idea he was infected — he could easily have been asymptomatic — treatment at the time would have involved bloodletting and medicines to counter specific symptoms like coughing, fever, bloody sputum and abdominal pain.

To close on the grossest note possible, here’s a thought from the AP article about this discovery:

It’s also possible Richard’s worms made a gruesome appearance when he died on the battlefield in 1485 as the last English king killed in war. In adults infected with roundworm, traumatic events like car crashes can cause the worms to pop out of peoples’ noses and ears.

“The worms get shocked and they move quickly,” said Simon Brooker, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not part of the study. He said it was possible the many blade injuries suffered by Richard before his death could have prompted the worms in his body to make a hasty exit.

WWI model of Messines battlefield to be excavated

Modern(ish)

Preparatory work began yesterday to excavate a scale model of the battlefield of Messines, Belgium, built at Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, by German prisoners of war in 1917. This is one of the most complete World War I site remaining in England. The dig starts next week and will continue into October. Once it has been thoroughly recorded, the original model will be reburied for its own preservation.

Cannock Chase was the site of two training camps, Brocton and Rugeley, that were built to house and train 20,000 men each, the size of a standard infantry division. Half a million troops from all over the empire passed through these camps between 1915 and 1918, spending several months learning how to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. In September of 1917, the 5th Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade (NZRB) arrived at Brocton fresh from the trenches to train new soldiers, as they themselves had been trained in the same camp when their division was formed in May of 1915.

The New Zealand Division of the II ANZAC Corps had suffered 4,978 casualties fighting to capture the German defenses on high ground south of Ypres during the Battle of Messines Ridge (June 7th-14th, 1917). To convey the realities of the battle to the men they were tasked to train, the NZRB designed a scale terrain model of the section of the front they had successfully captured. Using trench maps, aerial photographs and their own first-hand knowledge, they designed a highly accurate model of the Messines trenches, roads, railways, village buildings, topographical contours, everything tactically relevant.

The finished product, built by German prisoners from a nearby POW camp, was about the size of a tennis court and surrounded on three sides by a viewing platform where trainees could watch and learn. The model was made out concrete. Gaps filled with Bunter pebbles represented roads while weed-filled gaps acted as contour lines. Bricks played the part of buildings. The trenches were modeled in the most detail, every curve, corner and turn recreated in concrete. The precision of the model and the practical training it made possible doubtless helped save lives.

The Great War was winding down when the New Zealanders were struck with an even deadlier enemy: the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Fifty of them were members of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade stationed at Brocton camp. They are buried in the Cannock Chase War Cemetery. The battalion mascot, a Harlequin Great Dane named Freda, also died in late 1918 and is buried in a Cannock Chase field.

The last of the New Zealanders left the camp barracks in May of 1919. The camps were dismantled and sold for parts, but the model was left alone. The soldiers had given it to the people of Staffordshire at a goodbye ceremony before their departure, so the mini-Messines ridge was the only thing that was not auctioned off. Eventually it was buried to ensure it was not destroyed by the elements and people of ill-intent.

Now the Messines model will see the light again for the first time in years, albeit for a very short time. Once it has been thoroughly recorded, a replica of the model or digital recreation will be installed in the Marquis Drive Visitors’ Centre to help explain how it was used in training. A reconstructed cabin from the camp at the visitors’ center already includes information about the Messines model drawn from period pictures and recent exploratory excavations.

The Staffordshire County Council expects the site and recreated model will play a part in the events commemorating the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I next year. The county has extensive plans for the centenary. Earlier this summer the council received a grant of £80,000 ($124,440) to create a Staffordshire Great War Trail, an ambition project to emphasize Staffordshire’s World War I history by bringing attention to relevant locations and institutions and by digitizing archives and individual memories of the war.

This BBC story from last year has some great views of Cannock Chase and pictures of the camp during the war.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/uYrGCuTGlz4&w=430]

First Iron Age “loch village” found in Scotland

Ancient

Archaeologists excavating the infilled Black Loch of Myrton on the Monreith estate in Wigtownshire, southwestern Scotland, have discovered that what they thought was an Iron Age crannog (a man-made island built in a lake or river) is actually an Iron Age “loch village,” a small town built on natural peat mounds in the lake, from the middle of the first century B.C. Lake villages have been discovered in England before, for example Glastonbury lake village in Somerset, but this is the first one found in Scotland, which means it’s the first loch village ever found.

What initially appeared to be one of a small group of mounds before excavation was revealed to be a massive stone hearth complex at the centre of a roundhouse. The timber structure of the house has been preserved, with beams radiating out from the hearth forming the foundation, while the outer wall consists of a double-circuit of stakes.

The most surprising discovery was that the house was not built on top of an artificial foundation, but directly over the fen peat which had gradually filled in the loch. Rather than being a single crannog, as first thought, it appears to be a settlement of at least seven houses built in the wetlands around the small loch.

This find is as fortunate as it is historically significant. We know the Black Loch was subject to land reclamation efforts in the first half of the 19th century because on the Ordnance Survey map of 1848 the loch itself is tiny and the adjacent land is labeled Black Loch Plantation. By 1880 the lake had been drained thoroughly enough to allow Sir Herbert Maxwell, 7th Baronet of Monreith, to excavate what he thought was a crannog and to recover Iron Age hammer stones and one whetstone. Those finds didn’t stop the attempts to keep the lake drained so the land could be farmed. Unfortunately for the farmers but fortunately for archaeology, drainage couldn’t keep up with the boggy, peaty terrain. The land was used for pasture when it got too wet to plow and by 1993, the crannog could no longer be seen.

In 2010, new field drains were cut in Black Loch and a run-off channel for the new drains to empty into was dug underneath a forested area near the center of the loch to connect to one of the 19th century drains. During the digging of the run-off channel, worked oak timbers were discovered. A reconnaissance survey by AOC Archaeology Group followed in which test pits were dug around the crannog-like mound and core samples taken along the channel. The team found charcoal in the core samples and horizontal timbers in the test pits. Radiocarbon dating of the timbers found that they date to middle of the first millennium B.C., the early Iron Age.

These elements are often found in crannog excavations, and since the White Loch right next to the Black has a visible crannog, archaeologists had good reason to believe that’s what they had found here too: an early Iron Age crannog. Their final assessment was the site was archaeologically significant and that the new drainage channels posed a serious threat to the timbers and other organic deposits that had been preserved for thousands of years in the wet, peaty environment.

Three years later, funds from Historic Scotland allowed AOC Archaeology Group to return to the site for a pilot excavation this July. Local volunteers also participated in the dig. They found the alder timbers radiating out from the central hearth and outside the radial timbers was a ring of small cobbles that were probably used to keep the perimeter of the roundhouse dry. As they continued to dig down, archaeologists found the earliest iteration of the hearth. This one hearth was reused at least three times, probably by different people who occupied the site over the years.

Archaeologists have sampled, documented and photographed every timber before removing them to the laboratory for conservation and further analysis, but even so they’ve barely scratched the surface of this unique and important find. They hope to be able to return soon for a more extensive archaeological excavation.