Month: March 2020

This 12th c. Norwegian church tapestry is unique

Medieval

On topic news is a little thin at the moment, so I shall fill the lull with the Høylandet tapestry, a Norwegian embroidered church tapestry from the late 1100s that is the only known surviving tapestry of its kind.

We know from contemporary sources that medieval churches in Norway were draped with textiles and tapestries. This was not only a decorative and devotional statement; swathing the interior of a church in textiles helped insulate the frigid building in the long winters. The church tapestries were made of wool and plant and mineral dyes were susceptible to damage, fading and decay. Even though they were extremely popular in the Middle Ages, the ones that did manage to survive the elements were systematically destroyed and recycled after the Reformation. Other than the Høylandet tapestry, only small fragments of embroidery have been found in archaeological explorations of medieval churches.

It was stitched by a group of women in the village of Høylandet in central Norway’s Trøndelag County for their parish church. This was an agricultural area, and embroidery was a high-status activity performed by women who could afford to spend untold hours putting decorative stitching on cloth instead of working with their families to bring in a harvest. First they wove a red background, then sketched Biblical scenes on it. Finally they embroidered fully realized characters onto the textile. They used yarns in a variety of bright colors — blue, green, ochre, yellow, red — to stitch the Biblical scenes. White linen thread was used for the outlines. Today the vivid colors have faded to brown shades, and coupled with the white outline, it almost has a black-figure pottery vibe.

The tapestry is no longer complete. It is 44 cm (17.3 inches) high, but however long it was originally, only 210 cm (6’11”) of that length is extant. What does remain is embroidered with three scenes: Mary sitting on a throne as Queen of Heaven with the Christ child; the Wise Men, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh; the kings being warned in a dream not to return to Herod and report on the birth of Jesus.

It’s unknown how the tapestry made it through the Reformation. At some point it was stashed in the loft of the Høylandet Church where it was rediscovered in the 1800s. By happy accident, the church attic proved to be a fine conservation climate, keeping the large section of tapestry in excellent condition.

It is now under the care of experts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) University Museum. The iconography and technique of the tapestry lends unique insight to the iconography and craft of sacred art in medieval Norway, which is why art history PhD candidate Ingrid Lunnan Nødseth is writing her dissertation on the tapestry.

“In the Høylandet tapestry we find great pattern and technique variations. For example, the horse is filled with nine different embroidery patterns. It’s embroidered with a so-called fill stitch, a technique only found in Scandinavia. It’s a sign that the work belongs to a Nordic context,” says Nødseth.

The Wise Men are also depicted differently on this tapestry than we typically see the Wise Men depicted in Western art.

In the Middle Ages, the men were portrayed as three holy kings. In the Høylandet tapestry, they are wearing short pants and robes draped over their shoulders; two of them have small crowns and one has a Phrygian hat. Their clothing shows that they have come from the East.

The textures and patterns embroidered on their clothing (and the horse’s skin!) are spectacular. 

Iron Age bucket part of record year for PAS

Ex Cathedra

The remains of an Iron Age bucket discovered in Lenham, Kent, are a highlight of a record-setting 1,311 treasure finds (pdf) logged by the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme in 2019. Discovered by metal detectorist Rick Jones, the elaborate copper-alloy bucket fittings dates to around 50 B.C.; the bucket is part of a hoard with a copper alloy bowl and a clay pot, likely a grave assemblage for a high-status cremation burial.

The bucket was made of wood which has rotted away, leaving the fittings behind. They are unusually decorated. The remains of the copper bands feature pairs of hippocampi (mythical creatures with the forelimbs and heads of horses and fish tails) facing each other. Between them is a four-legged animal on its back. Damage to the body and head make it difficult to identify the animal, but archaeologists think it may be a horse or a deer. Behind the left-facing hippocamp is a bird-like creature with a long hooked beak and sharp curved talons.

The bucket handles are even more ornate. The two fittings feature humanoid heads with large, wide-set eyes, eyebrow ridges that come together and go south to form the bridge of a nose, a wide mouth and combed back hair. Under the chin of one is a straight rectangle, a sort of elongated neck, with a rivet in the middle connecting it to the copper mount. Under the chin of the other is a pyramid of three balls.

The two faces are slightly different: one has dotted decoration along the mouth, brows, hairline and around the back of the neck, whilst the other is plainer with a slimmer jawline.

Close examination of the fittings helps us to understand how the bucket would have been used. The plainer mount appears more worn, and the attachment mechanism has also been repaired, with new holes pierced for reattachment. This was clearly a cherished and much-used object. Buckets like this are usually found in high-status cremation graves, several of which are known in Kent and on the near continent. They probably formed part of a drinking set, used for serving mead, wine or beer at feasts. Perhaps the people buried with these objects hosted such feasts in life, or maybe this was a way for the living to share the funeral feast with them.

Conserving the Wolsey Closet ceiling at Hampton Court Palace

Modern(ish), Renaissance

Hampton Court was built by Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, the immensely wealthy and influential statesman who served as Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII. He spent hundreds of thousands of crowns and ten years building a lavish palace worthy to host visiting royalty domestic and foreign. Henry stayed in the state rooms in 1525 and was favorably impressed, so much so that Wolsey gave him the palace in 1528 in the attempt to stave off his fall from grace.

It didn’t work. In 1529, Wolsey’s failure to secure an annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon saw him stripped of his offices and properties. He would have probably lost his head too, but he died on his way to London to answer to treason charges in 1530.

Henry promptly set to work expanding the palace. The famous kitchens, the Great Hall with its amazing hammer-beam roof, the gatehouse, its astronomical clock, and enough rooms to accommodate a court of one thousand date to Henry’s reign. Subsequent monarchs, most notably William and Mary with their two Baroque wings, made major additions and alterations to the palace.

Most of the original spaces from Cardinal Wolsey’s time are gone. The Wolsey Closet, today part of the 18th century Georgian Rooms, is now the only surviving room from what were once the cardinal’s personal apartments. It too has gone through changes. The linenfold oak panelling is Tudor but not original to the room. The panel paintings on the walls — scenes from the Passion of the Christ — were commissioned by Henry VIII but also later installations in the room. The frieze at the top of the walls repeats Wolsey’s motto taken from Psalm 117 “Dominus michi adjutor” (The Lord is my help) and surely dates to his time, but it isn’t original to the room either. It was in a larger space, trimmed and reset in the Closet as it is today.

The Tudor roses and Prince of Wales feathers on the elaborate ceiling were long believed to be made of leather maché in the Tudor era, but when Historic Royal Palaces conservators began to study the ceiling to learn how best to repair it, they discovered how much they still have to learn about the complicated history of this room. This video gives an all-too-brief summary of what they’ve found so far.

New info revealed about Dublin’s first Viking settlement

Medieval

An excavation in advance of construction behind Dublin Castle has revealed new information about the 9th century Viking settlement of Dublin. The remains of a ditch, palisade and embankment from the first Viking settlement in the city have been unearthed. These would have overlooked the harbour where the Vikings moored their ships.

Vikings had been raiding Gaelic settlements on the coast of Ireland since 795, but they didn’t build a permanent home base there for another 50 years. Around 841, the Viking warlord Turgesius conquered the pre-existing Gaelic ecclesiastical settlement and established a longfort on the edge of a tidal pool known as the dubh linn, an easily defendable natural harbour whence ships could be quickly deployed to Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea. In early Classical Irish, dubh means black or dark and linn means pool, and the pool at the confluence of the River Liffey and one of its tributaries, the River Poddle was tidal, hence the darkness.

The city is named after the pool, now long-since dried.  The site of the former dubh linn has been pinpointed as a garden behind Dublin Castle today, but the excavation has discovered that when the Vikings settled it, the pool extended much further than originally believed. It was almost 400 meters (a quarter mile) wider, reaching the site of St Michael le Pol church, aka St Michael of the Pool, originally founded in the 6th century and one of Ireland’s oldest churches.

[University College Dublin archaeologist Alan] Hayden says this solves two questions that has puzzled historians – why St Michael’s Church referred to ‘le pole’ or the pool and how reports that the Vikings had up to 200 ships on the Dubh Linn.

The team also unearthed layers of later archaeological remains, including a 12th century quarry which supplied the stone used to build Dublin Castle, walls and agricultural furrows from a medieval farm, and prison cells from the police station built there in 1830.

New mammoth bone circle found in Russia

Ancient

A mammoth bone circle recently unearthed at the Kostenki 11 site in Russia has been identified as one of the oldest and largest in the world. It is a concentric ring of mammoth bones laid in a continuous circle 41 feet in diameter. A preliminary inventory of the bones has counted 51 mandibles and 64 crania of mammoth and a smattering of reindeer, horse, bear, wolf and fox bones. Radiocarbon analysis of samples from across the site date it to 25,063-24,490 years before the present, making it the oldest mammoth bone circle ever discovered on the Russian Plain.

Kostenki 11 has two other mammoth bone structures, the first discovered in the earliest excavations of the site in the 1960s, the second in 1970. A 2014 archaeological survey unearthed a new mammoth bone circle, and the next three seasonal excavations revealed another circle, this one exceptionally large and well-preserved. The surface of the circle was interfered with by burrowing animals and the roots of shrubs, birch, pear and cherry trees, but the bones managed to survive the centuries mostly intact and in their original positions. Starting in the 2015 season, the excavation team took a comprehensive approach to the interior and exterior of the circle to recover plant/organic remains, evidence of fuel usage and any evidence that might help identify human usage of the site.

Combustion deposits consisting of layers of burned sediment, bone and charcoal were found in one quadrant of the circle. The high proportion of carbonized bones, small size of the fragments and low number of wood charcoal suggests a deliberate choice to burn mostly bone at the site, either for fuel or to dispose of waste, as well as wood. Plant remains are evidence that the residents also foraged plants from the area, using them for food, medicine, string and fabric.

Three pits were found on the southeast perimeter of the circle, each containing large mammoth bones, lithic debris, bone debris and charcoal, the same materials found in the circle. They were therefore either deliberately filled during the site’s occupation, or infilled after its abandonment.

The dense lithic debris in the pits and circle allowed archaeologists to map knapping activity for the first time at mammoth circle site. More than 300 flint chips left behind when the inhabitants knapped stone into sharp tools is actually a small number compared to other Ice Age sites. It indicates the site was not a long-term dwelling.

Upper Paleolithic circular mammoth bone structures surrounded by pits have been found throughout eastern Europe, around 70 of them in Ukraine and the Russian Plain. and up until now have been consistently interpreted as dwellings offering shelter during the long, cold ice age winters, with the smaller pits used to store supplies. The third Kostenki 11 circle suggests instead that it was occupied only briefly rather than used for months as a base camp.

Dr Alexander Pryor, who led the study, said: “Kostenki 11 represents a rare example of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers living on in this harsh environment. What might have brought ancient hunter gatherers to this site? One possibility is that the mammoths and humans could have come to the area on masse because it had a natural spring that would have provided unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter – rare in this period of extreme cold.

“These finds shed new light on the purpose of these mysterious sites. Archaeology is showing us more about how our ancestors survived in this desperately cold and hostile environment at the climax of the last ice age. Most other places at similar latitudes in Europe had been abandoned by this time, but these groups had managed to adapt to find food, shelter and water.”

The study of the mammoth circle has been published in the journal Antiquity.