Torc hoard is earliest Iron Age gold found in Britain

It’s the first gold hoard of the year! We’ve had Bronze Age weapons and Roman copper vessels packed with plants. Now we have a group of four ancient gold torcs discovered by metal detectorists in a cow pasture in Leekfrith on the Staffordshire Moorlands.

The torcs were found last December by Mark Hambleton and Joe Kania. Hambleton had scanned the field some two decades ago without success. They were about to give up when Joe Kania’s machine signalled the presence of metal. All they’d found up to that point was trash and a 19th century coin or two, so Hambleton had already packed up his metal detector when Kania pulled a gold torc out of the ground. Then another. And another. And another. Three of them are necklaces, one a bracelet. Three are complete and intact, the fourth broken, likely by agricultural interference. The torcs were about six inches beneath the surface about a meter (three feet) apart from each other.

Hambleton spent a fitful night failing to sleep with the hoard by his side. The next morning, the finders alerted the Portable Antiquities Scheme to their discovery. Stoke-On-Trent City Council dispatched archaeologists to the field but they found no evidence of further treasure. Hambleton and Kania defied the odds again, though, returning to the spot last Sunday where they discovered the second half of the broken torc.

The Leekfrith Iron Age Torcs were examined by Dr. Julia Farley, the British Museum’s Curator of British & European Iron Age Collections. She determined they were not of British origin, but likely from what is today Germany or France. Analysis of the gold content found that it was no less than 80% in every torc, making them more than 18 carat gold which is 75% pure. The torcs weigh between 31 grams for the smallest piece, the incomplete bracelet, and 230 grams for the largest. The one bracelet stirred particular excitement because it is decorated, etched with lines inside loops. This is some of the earliest Celtic art ever discovered in Britain. All of the workmanship on the torcs is extremely high quality. One of them even has an incredibly rare maker’s mark.

Dr. Farley:

“This unique find is of international importance. It dates to around 400–250 BC, and is probably the earliest Iron Age gold work ever discovered in Britain.

“The torcs were probably worn by wealthy and powerful women, perhaps people from the continent who had married into the local community. Piecing together how these objects came to be carefully buried in a Staffordshire field will give us an invaluable insight into life in Iron Age Britain.”

A coroner’s inquest was held in North Staffordshire on Tuesday. Coroner Ian Smith asked questions of experts about the hoard, its continental origin and how they pieces may have made their way to Leekfrith. After hearing testimony about the torcs’ age and precious metal content, the coroner ruled that the pieces are treasure trove. The next step is for the independent experts of the Treasure Valuation Committee to determine fair value of the torcs. Local museums will then be offered the first opportunity to raise the amount of the valuation. That money will be divided between the finders and the landowner.

Stoke-on-Trent, which is bidding to be a 2021 UK City of Culture, is mighty keen to secure the torc hoard. Another little hoard you might have heard of, the Staffordshire Hoard, spends half its time in Stoke and it has brought millions of tourists and their cash to the region. The Leekfrith Iron Age Torcs will be on display in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-On-Trent, one of two local museums that share custody of the exceptional Staffordshire Hoard, for three weeks before they go back to the British Museum for valuation.

See Joe Kania and Mark Hambleton tell the story of the discovery (notice the awesome traditional dry stone walls behind them as they goof around for the camera in beginning; I love a quality dry stone wall) and Staffordshire officials glow with happiness over their shiny new babies in this video:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/87o-w0xCj7s&w=430]

Help transcribe World War I love letters

Do you speak English, French, German, Dutch, Italian or Slovene? Okay well if you’re reading this you can obviously speak English, and I know many of you are fluent in other languages, ancient and modern. You can put your polyglot skills to good use by transcribing a collection of World War I-era love letters in Europeana’s digital collection.

Europeana, an online cultural heritage network that brings together millions of digitzed items from libraries, museums, collections and assorted other institutions in Europe, launched a crowdsourcing campaign last November to transcribe personal, handwritten texts from World War I. The records come from libraries and archives all over the world, and from members of the public who submitted their precious family keepsakes to memorialize their loved ones’ experiences in the Great War. The Transcribe Europeana 1914-1918 project enlists the aid of an Internet’s worth of eyeballs to decipher the idiosyncracies of handwriting. Once transcribed, the item can then be translated and searched by keyword, subject, author, etc.

The Love Letter Run, as this sub-initiative of Transcribe Europeana is called, contains more than 40 letters, notes, postcards, diaries, autograph books and other personal documents written by soldiers at the front and their loved ones waiting desperately for their safe return.

To cope with the separation, many soldiers sent long, romantic letters of to their loved ones back home. Some women waited longingly for their lovers on the field, while others sought companionship with the men left behind. There was love that transcended borders, love that lasted the ages, and love for one woman fought over by two different men. In the Love Run, we present you stories of romance and betrayal, of lust and longing, heartbreak and new beginnings – all the makings of your favourite melodrama, but from real, handwritten sources of real, lived experiences.

It’s a poignant experience reading the sweet yearnings of young war-torn lovers. There are also all kinds of interesting side-issues that crop up. For instance, if you’re a postcard aficionado (which I am), there are some fascinating pieces in the collection: war propaganda postcards, postcards featuring slightly naughty stolen kisses, sentimental postcards targeted to loved ones separated by war, postcards bearing the official “censored” mark.

Because I am not the only sucker for a theme, the Love Letter Run was launched on February 14th. It will run through 2018, the centennial of the end of the Great War. The database of love letters will be updated with new documents regularly so check back every so often to see the latest offerings. There are plenty of records yet to be transcribed even in English which tends to be the first category completed in crowdsourcing project because the pool of English-speakers on the Internet is so large.

Stolen “Arbeit macht frei” gate returned to Dachau

A wrought iron gate bearing the infamous Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei” stolen from the entrance to Dachau in 2014 was returned to the concentration camp memorial in a ceremony on Wednesday, Feb. 22th. The gate was stolen from the Dachau memorial on the night of November 1-2, 2014. It was found two years later rusting under a tarp in a parking lot in Ytre Arna outside Bergen, Norway. The thieves remain unknown.

“This is a meaningful day for the memorial,” said Ludwig Spaenle, the Bavarian minister of cultural affairs. He called the theft of the gate an attack on a place of remembrance and said that the integrity of the memorial could now be “somewhat healed.”

Karl Freller, who heads the foundation responsible for the Dachau memorial, said he was “happy and grateful,” stating “now that we have the gate back we will not let it out of our sight.”

Dachau bears the repulsive distinction of being the first concentration camp established by the shiny new Nazi government on March 22nd, 1933, less than two months after Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship of Germany. The former munitions factory was converted into a forced labour camp for political prisoners which at that time were the Communists and Social Democrats who opposed the Nazi Party. As soon as Hitler was appointed chancellor, he ordered the systematic persecution of his political rivals to consolidate his grip on power. Dachau became a death camp for the slaughter of Jews, homosexuals, Roma and anyone else they deemed inferior during the war, but of course they kept that “Works Sets You Free” sign (always a blatant lie since from day one none of those political prisoners could ever work their way to freedom), as if the purpose of the camp were labour, not mass-murder.

The Jourhaus, the entrance and exit to the prison camp, was built by prisoners by command of the SS in May and June of 1936. The SS ordered Communist political prisoner Karl Röder to make the “Arbeit macht frei” sign. The news stories about the theft, recovery and reinstallation all refer to the stolen gate as the “original,” in contrast to the replica that was put in its place in 2015 for ceremonies commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau by the US Army on April 29th, 1945. In fact, the “Arbeit macht frei” sign in the stolen gate is not the original made by Röder.

It’s not clear what happened to the original original. It was in place right after liberation. There’s an undated photograph of the gate taken by former political prisoner Franz Brückl that shows the sign in place. Researchers believe it was taken immediately after liberation. Another photograph, also unfortunately undated, but taken after Brückl’s shows the gate with the inscription removed. An exact replica was created from historical photographs and installed in the gate after the Dachau memorial opened in 1965. This is confirmed by a 1972 memorandum in the memorial’s archives which notes: “Reconstruction of the inscription removed from the iron gate, work is free.”

So the gate is original, but the sign is not. The symbolic significance of the gate and the most chilling words inscribed over a doorway since Dante’s Inferno remains undiminished, which is why it and the much larger Auschwitz sign were stolen in the first place.

The recovered gate is now being treated by conservators. It will go back on public display this April 29th, but will not be reinstalled in the Jourhaus. Instead, it will be on view in the Dachau concentration camp memorial museum. The 2015 replica will stay in place.

Mithras sanctuary found in Corsica

Archaeologists from France’s National Institute for Preventative Archaeology (INRAP) have unearthed an ancient Roman sanctuary dedicated to the God Mithras in Lucciana on east coast of Corsica. This is an exceptionally rare found as it is the first mithraeum ever discovered in Corsica, and only a dozen have been found in all of France.

The site was excavated by INRAP in advance of roadwork planned in the neighborhood. The remains of the ancient city of Colonia Mariana are within the municiple boundaries of Lucciana, but this particular area had not been excavated before. It would have been a peripheral sector of the Roman town, and the remains of modest homes and artisan workshops found in the excavation confirmed that it was a working class neighborhood.

The team began the archaeological survey in November of last year. In the three months since, archaeologists have found the worship room of the mithraic sanctuary and an antechamber. The main hall is a rectangle about 36 feet by 16 feet in dimension. It has a central nave with two long benches going down its length. The benches are six feet wide. A vaulted brick niche was built into each bench taking up the full thickness of the banquette. They were positioned opposite each other, and one of the niches contained three intact oil lamps. This was how the sanctuary was lit.

Other artifacts recovered from the site include a marble head of a woman, a marble foot, pottery, two bronze bells, numerous broken lamps and glass paste jars that may have been liturgical furnishings. Two inscribed plaques, one of bronze, one of lead, were found; the inscriptions have yet to be deciphered. Three fragments of a marble bas-relief are of particularly significance because while some of the carving is missing, it is still recognizable as the tauroctony, the iconic scene of Mithras slaying the sacred bull while a dog and snake drink its blood and a scorpion stings its testicles.

The Persian deity Mithra inspired the religion, but the version that spread throughout the Roman Empire starting in the 1st century A.D. bears little religion to the original. The mystery religion is believed to have been brought west by Roman soldiers and spread from military bases and ports. From what we can tell — there are no written records of the faith — it was only open to men and was particularly popular with soldiers. What we know of Mithraism has been gleaned from archaeological remains, mainly artifacts and art depicting myths and rituals.

The Roman city of Colonia Mariana, was founded around 100 B.C. by Roman general, military reformer and seven-time consul Gaius Marius. He and his one-time friend and colleague turned nemesis Lucius Cornelius Sulla, each founded a colony in Corsica (Sulla’s was Aleria) which they seeded with their veterans. Mariana was an important center in Roman Corsica, thanks largely to its commercial harbor that was a hub of maritime trade on the Mediterranean. The patron saint of Corsica and of the Principality of Monaco, Saint Devota, was born in Mariana in the late 3rd century and was martyred there in 303 A.D. Her martyrdom inspired many a conversion and by the end of the century Mariana was solidly Christian. The Diocese of Mariana was created in 4th or early 5th century, one of the first Christian dioceses in Corsica.

It’s possible the rise of Christianity in Mariana came in direct conflict with the worship of Mithras. Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 392 and outlawed all pagan religions, including Mithraism. Some of the objects found in the Mariana sanctuary were damaged in antiquity, most notably the altar, and the sanctuary itself appears to have been deliberately destroyed and filled with rubble. A large Paleochristian church and baptistery complex was built in the city around 400 A.D., the first archaeological traces of Christianity in Corsica. There were likely tensions between the adherents of the religions.

Child’s footprints found in ancient Egyptian mortar

Archaeologists have discovered child-sized footprints in an ancient mortar pit at the archaeological site of Pi-Ramesse, modern-day Qantir, in Egypt. The site at the eastern edge of the Nile Delta about 70 miles northeast of Cairo was once the capital of the pharaoh Ramesses the Great (r. 1279–1213 B.C.) and is recorded in ancient sources as a city of great beauty, power and wealth. An estimated 300,000 people lived in the city which covered seven square miles during its heyday, making one of the biggest late Bronze Age cities in the Mediterranean both in area and population. It had a massive temple, riverside mansions, modest mud-brick homes, a planned street grid, a harbour, a system of navigable canals and lakes like Venice, Ramesses’ great palace, industrial works and high-end artisan workshops.

It was inhabited from the reign of Ramesses until and 1050 B.C. when the branch of the Nile that provided Pi-Ramesse with all of its water silted over. The pharaohs of the 21st Dynasty (1077-943 B.C.) used the former capital as a ready source of building materials. All the splendid architecture — temple reliefs, obelisks, statues, sphinxes — were moved whole to the new capital Tanis and reinstalled there. Entire buildings were dismantled in the abandoned city and rebuilt in the new capital. If the buildings weren’t worthy of reassembly at Tanis, they were simply demolished and their stone used for new structures. They were so thorough that nothing of Pi-Ramesse survives above the surface today.

The site was discovered in the 1960s by Austrian Egyptologist Manfred Bietak. An international team of archaeologists based at the Roemer-Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, have excavated the site since 1980, discovering, among many other things, the largest bronze foundry ever discovered, glass-making workshops specializing in red glass, faience factories, a chariot manufacturer with massive stables that could accommodate close to 500 horses and a bone workshop that used the bones of animals long-since extinct in Egypt (lions, elephants, giraffes) that can only have been exotic imports in Ramesses’ days.

From 1996 through 2003, Caesium-Magnetometry was used to take measurements of the ancient city. The technology can differentiate between materials with different magnetic signatures, so for instance since mud brick responds differently than soil, mud-brick structures under the surface became apparent. With the magnetometry data, the team was able to map the layout of Pi-Ramesse.

In one area they identified the remains of a monumental structure measuring about 820 by 490 feet and sections of walls. Archaeologists believe this was a construction site for the renovation of a monumental complex, likely a palace or a temple. Pottery sherds found on the spot date the building to between 1300 and 1200 B.C., so either during the reign of Ramesses or shortly thereafter. Near the monumental remains, the team found an intriguing feature this season: a mortar pit. The pit measures about eight by 26 feet and at the bottom an ancient layer of mortar was still extant. Embedded in the mortar were prints left by the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

The footprints are 5.9-6.6 inches long, so about the size of kids between three and five years old, according to modern growth charts (which may or may not apply). Archaeologists can’t tell yet if they were left by multiple children or if the prints were smeared.

The reason for the children’s presence remains a mystery. Although no modern concept of banning child labor was in place, the footprints seem to be too small even for children who may have been working.

On the other hand, it appears unlikely that royal kids were left to play in the mud and mortar.

It does feel very satisfyingly squishy between your toes. I could easily see a little Prince demanding to have a stomp through the wet mortar, protocol be damned.

On top of the mortar layer, the team found smashed piece of wall plaster bearing the remains of polychrome paint in black, yellow, red and shades of blue. The fragments are small and the original paintings appear to have been large-scale, so the team has not yet been able to identify imagery or motif from the pieces. The fragments are of hard plaster, a substance rarely used in Egyptian art, so may indicate foreign craftsmen were employed at the site. Fresco technique — pigment applied to wet plaster — is also extremely rare in ancient Egypt. More analysis is needed to determine whether this painted plaster was a fresco.

Next season, archaeologists will excavate the pit further in the hope of recovering more missing pieces of the colored plaster. They will then try to puzzle them together to determine their motif and size, which will in turn suggest which walls the paintings may have once adorned. From what we know now, it was likely the monumental structure nearby. The mortar pit could have been used in the renovation and the frescoes stripped from the wall to redecorate in a style more au courant with the fashions 1200 B.C. They will also bring in specialists to analyze the footprints.