Roman silver left behind by Vandals found in Poland

A massive hoard of 1,753 Roman silver coins left behind by Vandals fleeing the invading Goths has been found in southeastern Poland. The coins were discovered last year by farmer Mariusz Dyl while he searched for antlers in a field outside Cichobórz, a village 8 miles south of Hrubieszów near the border with Ukraine. They were scattered over a large area. Dyl collected what he could and then reported the find to archaeologists at the Hrubieszów Museum.

Aided by Mr. Dyl, a team of archaeologists excavated the area and unearthed another 137 denarii up to 100 meters away from what they believed to be the original burial spot. That’s where the finder discovered the largest grouping of coins. Eight silver-plated bronze rivets were found amidst the coins there, likely the surviving remains of a wood or leather container they were buried in.

The coins are silver denarii from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the reigns of the emperors Nerva (r. September 18, 69 A.D. – January 27, 98 A.D.) and Septimius Severus (193-211 A.D.), indicating the hoard was buried in the late 2nd or early 3rd century. They weigh more than 12 pounds (5.5 kilos) in total, making it by far the largest Roman treasure found in the Lublin province and one of the largest ever found in Poland.

When those coins were in circulation, the Hrubieszów area was inhabited by Vandals, eastern Germanic peoples who in the late 1st century allied with Rome against opposing Germanic tribes. Cassius Dio, who like Tacitus called them Lugii, wrote in Roman History that Domitian sent them 100 horses in support of their fight against the Suebi, the first recorded appearance of Roman troops in what is now Poland. In the second half of the 2nd century, they fought with other Germanic tribes against the Roman Empire in the Marcomannic Wars, but in the last two decades of the century, pressure from the Goths moving south drove the Vandals west.

Archaeological material discovered in the Lublin region attest to what a dangerous time it was. There are a large number of Vandal cemeteries with warrior burials where the deceased was interred with ritually destroyed weapons.

Andrzej Kozłowski from the Archaeology Institute at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin believes that the buried treasure represents the last stand of the Vandals in the Lublin region.

“The situation was so bad for the Vandals retreating, or rather the fleeing from the Goths that they hid everything that was most precious,” he said.

“It seems that this is where the Vandals lost the means to continue fighting!” he added.

The archaeologist underlined how important the find is for understanding the downfall of the Vandals in the region.

“They had to get rid of huge financial resources that were necessary to wage war with the Goths, and therefore they ended up helpless. The hidden coins remained under Hrubieszów.

“They couldn’t come back for them and could not recruit soldiers. That is why the Goths peacefully spread to the whole south-east and occupied Ukraine,” he said.

A Roman legionary at that time earned about 300 silver denarii a year, so the hoard constituted a vast sum for anyone even in the most expensive urban centers, geometrically more so for Germanic tribesmen at the outskirts of the empire.

The hoard will now be conserved and examined by experts at the University of Warsaw. With so many coins to go through, the process is expected to take at least a year. The Hrubieszów Museum wants to put them on display, but given all our current givens, the hoard will be an online exhibition before visitors have the opportunity to see them in person.

It’s 10 o’clock in Lausanne and all is not well

For 615 years, Lausanne’s designated night watchman has called out the hour from the bell tower of Lausanne’s cathedral and assured the townspeople that all is well. From his watchtower atop the 153 stone steps of the cathedral belfry, he emerges every hour from 10PM to 2AM, cups his hands around his mouth and cries the hour to each cardinal direction: “This is the watchman! The bell has rung [whatever the hour is]!”

The tradition was established after a fire devastated the city in 1405. During the fire itself, the bells were rung continuously as calls to action. People rallied to put out the fire under their peals of encouragement. The night watchman was appointed to look over the city from the height of the bell tower and keep an eye out for any signs of smoke or fire, shouting the hour to check in and connect with a network of watchmen on the ground who could rapidly rouse the city in case of need.

The job continued unchanged until 1960 when  the city trimmed the hours of the watchman to the current four from the original full night coverage of 9PM to dawn. The hourly ringing of the bells had been automated a decade earlier, fire alarms and sirens had been installed on buildings in 1907 fire emergencies were handled by professionals, and everyone had clocks and watches of their own to figure out the time.

The local press expressed concern that this change sounded the death knell, as it were, of the longstanding tradition and residents rallied to defend their beloved watch, showering the city government with letters demanding the night watchman remain on duty in perpetuity. Today the tradition continues undeterred, a proud holdover of the Middle Ages, a landmark symbol of the city’s history and community spirit. Lausanne is now one of only seven cities in Europe that have a night watchman on duty 365 days a year.

Since 2002, the watchman has been Renato Häusler. For nigh on two decades he has embraced his role for its connection to the city’s past, its significance as intangible cultural heritage and for the unique opportunity it affords him to experience the city at night from on high. Now that another peril is abroad in the land, the night watchman’s vigil has taken on new meaning. He shouts the hour and then he peals Clémence, the bell designated to sound in an emergency, swinging the clapper by hand. Three strikes followed by six strikes and again warn the people of danger.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame of Lausanne was built in the 13th century, but the oldest of the bells, Lombarde, dates to 1493. Clémence is the next in seniority, cast in 1518. With a diameter of 174 cm (5’8.5″) and weighing four tons, she is the second largest of the cathedral’s bells after the bourdon Marie-Madeleine. She rings a C note.

(The article erroneously states Clémence is made of steel. Like most of her kind, she’s made of bell metal, a high-tin bronze alloy that is more rigid and sonorous than regular bronze. The clapper is soft steel.)

The canton of Vaud of which Lausanne is the capital has the highest coronavirus rates in Switzerland. There is no stay at home order in place yet, but public gatherings of more than five people have been banned and the thriving night life that the watchman once watched over has gone silent, lending him fresh insight into what his predecessors experienced.

“Since these restrictive measures urging people to stay at home, it has completely changed,” said Hausler.

“It is quiet all week, even from 8:00pm, and when I get here, there is hardly any activity around the cathedral or even in the city so it brings a tranquility that I have never experienced before.

“There is a real calm which resembles what it would have been like in the past, before there was all this traffic noise.

“There is perhaps just one last thing that would bring us right back to how things were in the Middle Ages: turning out the lights.”

Bronze Age warrior toolkit found at battlefield site

Here’s a follow-up post that’s been almost a decade in coming and is all the richer from the long wait. The original story reported in 2011 was about the discovery of human, animal and material remains in the Tollense Valley of northern Germany strongly suggesting a major Bronze Age battle had taken place nearby. This was the first evidence of a battle from this period, perhaps even the earliest ever found.

Dating to around 1200 B.C., the bones were almost all confirmed to be of young men some of whom had suffered fatal blunt and sharp-force trauma. There were no indications of formal burials — the remains appear to have been washed down to the find site from a battlefield up the Tollense River — and the remains of wooden clubs and horses found also added to the evidence of a prehistoric battle. Evidence of violent events and conflicts going back to the Stone Age has been found, but nothing like the bones of a hundred individuals, their horses and weapons.

Human bones had been pulled out of the Tollense River since the 1980s, most significantly a humerus with a bronze arrowhead still embedded in it found in 1996. It was that arrowhead, whose design dated it to between 1300 and 1100 B.C., that gave archaeologists the first temporal classification of the Tollense Valley remains. Later discoveries narrowed down the dates of the battlefield activity to ca. 1300-1250 B.C. The first systematic excavation of the area was done in 2008 and the first research published in 2011.

All told, more than 12,000 pieces of human bone have been unearthed at the Tollense site, and more than 140 individuals have been identified from the bone material. They were young adult men in good general health who suffered perimortem trauma from long and short-range weapons. Some healed bone lesions indicate they were experienced fighters. Initial DNA and stable isotope analyses found some of the individuals were not local to the Tollense Valley, although it’s not clear where they came from originally.

In 2016, a new archaeological exploration of the site discovered something unusual and highly significant: a group of 31 objects that are believed to have been the personal toolkit of a Bronze Age warrior. The artifacts were found by divers in the riverbed at the location dubbed Weltzin 28. Several bronze artifacts — tools, pins, arrowheads — had been found at this location before, but this group of bronze scrap metal pieces was packed closely together even after millennia in a river, so they must have been in a wooden container of a wrapped in a textile that has long since disintegrated.

The assemblage includes a bronze awl with a birchwood handle, a rare curved sickle knife, a chisel, bronze sheet fragments, ingot fragments, bronze scrap pieces, a star-decorated belt box of the Dabel type, three dress pins and a bronze spiral. Three bronze cylinders in the assemblage may have been the fasteners of the rotted container.

Radiocarbon dating of the collection of objects demonstrates that the finds belong to the battlefield layer and they were probably the personal equipment of one of the victims. The finds were studied in a Master’s thesis by Tobias Uhlig and the new results make it increasingly clear that there was a massive violent conflict in the older Nordic Bronze Age (2000–1200 BC). In fact, recent evidence suggests that it is likely to have been on a large scale, clearly stretching beyond regional borders.

Professor Thomas Terberger, from the Department of Pre- and Early History at the University of Göttingen, says, “This is the first discovery of personal belongings on a battlefield and it provides insights into the equipment of a warrior. The fragmented bronze was probably used as a form of early currency. The discovery of a new set of artefacts also provides us with clues about the origins of the men who fought in this battle and there is increasing evidence that at least some of the warriors originated in southern Central Europe.”

The study of the recent discovery has been published in the journal Antiquity.

8-foot mammoth tusk found in Bavaria

Archaeologists have discovered an impressively large mammoth tusk in the Bavarian town of Riekofen. The team was expecting to find remains of the 15th century town so the discovery of mammoth remains from the Ice Age came as a surprise. The tusk has yet to be radiocarbon dated, but mammoths went extinct in what is now Bavaria about 20,000 years ago.

At a length of eight feet, the tusk still includes the tip tooth. Its size indicates it likely belonged to an adult bull. Mammoth bones are not uncommon finds, but nearly complete tusks of significant length are extremely rare. Another mammoth relic was found right next to the tusk. It’s a bone about one foot by two feet in dimensions probably also from a mammoth. It is not known right now whether it came from the same animal as the tusk.

Dr. Christoph Steinmann, archaeologist with the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, thinks the tusk and bone were underwater for some time, which helped preserve them. There used to be a bend in the Danube in this area, and the thick, wet soil applied constant pressure to the external layers of the tooth. Even when the dentin forming the structure inside the tusk cracked and fell apart, the outer layers remained intact. Had they been in dry soil and exposed to air, they would have disintegrated.

To prevent this dangerous exposure, paleontologists coated the tusk with plaster strips, ensuring it could be lifted whole without any loss of bone material. Conservators with the State Office of the Preservation of Monuments will remove the moisture from the tusk gradually over the course of the next year or two (either freeze-drying or PEG, I’d guess). Once it is stabilized, it will go on display in the museum.

The team did find what it was originally looking for, by the way. They discovered a well, rubbish pits, an oven, potsherds and the remains of a Grubenhäuser, a pit-house or sunken featured domestic dwelling, from the Medieval village.

Interesting note from the press release. In Bavaria archaeological excavations abide by the same safe distance regulations that govern construction sites, so digs are continuing in Germany, which has an atypically low rate of coronavirus deaths, when they’ve been shut down as non-essential in so many other countries.

Polo donkey bones found in Tang Dynasty noblewoman’s tomb

Archaeologists have identified the bones of probable polo donkeys in the tomb of a Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) noblewoman. Tang-era texts do describe the sport of lvju, or donkey polo, played by royalty and nobility, but this is the first archaeological evidence of it.

The tomb was discovered in 2012 in Xi’an, ancient Chang’an, onetime capital of the Tang Dynasty. The brick structure has a vertical entrance, a corridor and a burial chamber with brick-lined floors. The contents had been looted in antiquity, but there were some artifacts found, including a lead stirrup and a stone epitaph. The tomb and murals of servants and musicians at a funerary feast  indicate she was a member of the societal elite. The epitaph confirmed her status, identifying the tomb as that of the Lady Cui Shi, wife of Bao Gao, governor of two administrative regions in the late Tang Dynasty. The inscription notes she died October 6th, 878, when she was 59 years old, and was buried August 15th, 879.

Chang’an was located at the beginning of the Silk Road and donkeys were highly valued as pack animals to transport goods along the trade routes. Tang Dynasty texts refer to them being used in households and pack animals and in military and governmental transports. An edict of the period prohibited donkeys being killed or eaten. Commoners were known to ride them for transportation, but not the upper classes.

Polo is believed to have developed in Persia and spread east through the influence of the Parthian Empire (ca. 247 B.C. – 224 A.D.). Polo played on horseback was established as a prestigious sport in central China. At the Tang court it was valued as a proving ground for cavalry skills, but it was dangerous, even fatal to play. Lvju used sturdier, shorter, easier to handle donkeys and therefore appealed to women and older players.

Only two pottery figurines of donkeys wearing saddles have been unearthed in Tang tombs in Xi’an. The discovery of skeletal remains of three donkeys among piles of animal bones in the corridor and on the coffin of Cui Shi’s tomb gave researchers the unique opportunity to analyze their bones and determine what they were used for in life and why they were buried in a noble woman’s tomb.

Dental analysis identified the different equid species in the mix. Their ages were determined by tooth eruption on the jaws and wear patterns. Measurements of metatarsals from three individuals determined their sizes. Stable isotope analysis was done on the metatarsals of two specimens.  Micro-CT scans were done of three humeri from two donkeys to determine the biomechanical stress they were subjected to, a marker of whether these donkeys were pack animals in life. Radiocarbon dating found the donkeys’ date range coincides with the one in the epitaph, 856-898 A.D.

One hint to why they were in Cui’s tomb, [Washington University in St. Louis anthropologist Fiona Marshall] says, may lie in the identity of her husband, Bao Gao. Ancient texts reveal that the polo-obsessed Emperor Xizong promoted Bao to the rank of general because of his skills on the polo fields. Polo was wildly popular during the Tang dynasty—for both women and men—but it was also dangerous; riders thrown from their horses were frequently injured or killed. If a woman like Cui wanted to join a game, then riding a donkey—slower, steadier, and lower to the ground—might have been a safer alternative.

When the researchers, led by archaeologist Songmei Hu of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, analyzed the size of the donkey bones in Cui’s tomb, they found that they were too small to have been good pack animals. Computerized tomography scans of the leg bones revealed patterns of stress similar to an animal that ran and turned frequently, rather than one that slowly trudged in a single direction. Taken together, the evidence suggests Cui played polo astride a donkey, the researchers report today in Antiquity. The noblewoman’s donkeys may have been ritually sacrificed when she died to allow Cui to continue to play in the afterlife.

“There’s no smoking gun … [but] there’s really no other explanation that makes sense,” Marshall says, adding that the finding suggests Tang dynasty donkeys were held in higher regard than believed.

Read the full study published in Antiquity here.