A piece of gold art jewelry found by a metal detectorist in a field near Bøvling, West Jutland, is an extremely rare 11th century cloisonné enamel earring. Only 10 or 12 examples of them are known worldwide, and this is the first one ever discovered in Scandinavia.
The crescent-shaped earring is backed with a crescent-shaped gold plate framed with a gold beaded edge decorated with gold loops. The piece is made of cloisonné enamel in shades of purple, green and blue is divided by gold threads to form a stylized design of two birds on either side of a tree. This symbolizes the tree of life motif. This type of earring design has been found in Egypt, Syria, Byzantium and Russia. This example is likely of Egyptian origin.
The only other gold and cloisonné enamel object from the 11th or 12th century Denmark that can compare with this piece in craftsmanship is the exceptional Dagmar Cross which was found in a royal tomb under St. Bendt’s Church in Ringsted. The Dagmar Cross is much more elaborate, a reliquary of Byzantine origin, but like the earring, it would have been inaccessible to anybody in Viking Denmark as a trade good, even if they had been able to afford the astronomical expense. These had to have been gifts from extremely wealthy foreign dignitaries, perhaps even the Byzantine emperor.
That makes the earring’s presence in a Bøvling field even more mysterious. It was not found in a royal tomb. There aren’t even any known Viking settlements anywhere around Bøvling, let alone royal graves.
An entertaining speculative romp on the topic from National Museum of Denmark curator Peter Pentz:
“One explanation may be that many Vikings went into war service for the Byzantine emperor, who had a bodyguard consisting of warriors from Scandinavia. We know from the Icelandic sagas that the mercenaries came home from the East with silk and weapons, and it is also said that the emperor occasionally donated fine gifts to his bodyguard. So it is conceivable that the earring was given personally by the emperor to a trusted Viking in the bodyguard. And then it must have been lost under unknown circumstances in Denmark,” says Peter Pentz.
One possibility is also that a pilgrim has brought home the jewelry. It could, for example, be King Erik Ejegod, who traveled to Jerusalem with his wife Bodil. The king himself died on the journey.
The earring went on display Monday at the National Museum’s The Raid exhibition which combines precious objects from the Viking Age with a cinematic recreation of the raids that secured so much of that treasure.
A weapon found in a burial in Orkney has been identified as a highly decorated 9th century Viking sword with a rare scabbard still attached. It was discovered in a 2015 excavation of the Mayback farm mound, and this year funding was secured for a detailed scientific analysis of the graves and their contents.
In March 2015, the owner of a farmstead on the northeast coast of Papa Westray, one of the North Isles of Orkney, came across human remains during home renovations and alerted county authorities. When the bones were confirmed to be human and ancient, archaeologists excavated the find site. The bones belonged to a simple grave dug into the sand. It was in crouch position on its right side and there were no surviving grave goods. Radiocarbon dating found the burial was from the Iron Age.
A month later, a Viking boat burial was found. It was a stone edged grave cut underneath a stone cairn. Organic materials from timber planks had stained the sand. Iron clench bolts and 200 iron fittings typical of clinker-built wooden boats indicate the presence of a boat, now decayed, that would have originally been about 16 feet long and 4.5 feet wide. It is one of only ten early Viking boat burials found on Orkney.
In August, a second grave richly furnished with weapons a few feet away from the first. Beneath the remains of a truncated rectangular stone cairn was a grave lined with slabs that had collapsed inward, covering the remains of the deceased. Despite the collapse, the skeletal remains were relatively well preserved, with only the feet heavily damaged. The body was buried in crouch position on its right side and a large iron sword laid across it, possibly still in a scabbard. An iron shield boss was found near the shoulder, indicating a wooden shield had been placed in the grave, leaving only the boss behind when the wood decomposed. Also buried in the grave with him was a spearhead or large knife, a group of iron arrowheads, some iron tools and some textiles. The type of burials and the artifacts inside the two graves indicated they belonged to first-generation Norwegian settlers.
Most of the Viking burials found on Orkney were excavated in the late 19th and early 20th century when archaeological practices were much cruder than they are now. The discovery of two important early graves gave archaeologists the opportunity to study graves from this period using the latest scientific methodologies, including DNA and strontium isotope analysis. The weapons were removed en bloc for meticulous cleaning and examining in laboratory conditions.
The bundle of arrowheads, which are still being excavated but it looks like there are about six of them, still have significant lengths of their wooden shafts attached. They have broad leaf-shaped blades likely used for hunting animals rather than battle and their position suggests they were placed in the grave in a quiver. They’re of a style produced in the 10th-11th centuries. An arrow bundle is an unusual find in a Viking grave. If any arrows at all are found, they’re usually individual deposits. Orkney, for some reason, has a bit of a concentration of quivers, with three of them found in Viking graves on the islands.
The sword was heavily corroded when found, and archaeologists are working so deliberately on the fragile artifact that they don’t know what the bottom looks like yet. To get a glimpse of the sword underneath all the rust concretions, the team used an X-ray. They identified the sword as Pedersen Type D, produced in the 9th century, and characterized by highly decorated hilts. The Mayback hilt is richly decorated with geometric design, a line of octagons that look like a honeycomb pattern with diamond-shaped accents.
X-rays also found that the a D-shaped buckle stuck to the sword by corrosion is an intricately decorated buckle in the Borre style, characterized by geometric shapes, interlacing design and stylized animal paws. The Borre style was widely manufactured in Scandinavia between around 850 and 950 A.D. Only 10 are known from Britain and Ireland, and this is one of only two known from Scotland.
Given very few Viking Age scabbards have survived, the Mayback example is a very important addition.
Most Viking Age scabbards are made up of an inverted fleece lining next to the blade. This would have been contained within a sheath made from thin lathes of wood, then bound – possibly with strips of a fine textile.
We know of at least 30 of these blades throughout the Viking world. Approximately half have been found in Norway, with others discovered as far west as Dublin, and as far east as Slovakia, Poland, and Russia.
However, the only other Type D sword is from the Isle of Eigg. That one was excavated in the 1830s.
The position of the sword within the Mayback burial is very unusual, as it was laid over top of the body with the hilt at the hip and the blade tip over the face, as opposed to the more common placement of the sword positioned alongside the body blade downwards.
A study of the suit of leather scale armor discovered in Turfan, northwest China, has revealed that it was manufactured in the Neo-Assyrian Empire between the 6th and 8th century B.C., making it the oldest known leather scale armour in Eurasia. It was already a unique find because of the exceptional preservation of the organic materials and its near-completeness, but its origin makes it a very rare example of the movement of technology from West to East across Eurasia in the first half of the first millennium B.C.
The armor was found in an excavation of the Yanghai cemetery site in 2013. It was discovered in the tomb of an adult male about 30 years of age who had been buried on a wooden bedstead. Horse cheek pieces found in the grave indicate the deceased was a cavalryman.
The leather armor was underneath the funerary bed. Deterioration of the leather lining caused some scale loss and separation, so the armor was in two large fragments with a few smaller pieces. A thorn embedded into one of the scales shortly before burial was radiocarbon dated to between 786 and 543 B.C.
It was originally made of about 5,444 smaller scales and 140 larger scales, which together with leather laces and lining weighed between 4 and 5kg. The armor resembles a waistcoat that protects the front of the torso, hips, the sides and the lower back of the body. It can be put on quickly without the help of another person and fits people of different statures.
“The armor was professionally produced in large numbers,” says Patrick Wertmann. With the increasing use of chariots in Middle Eastern warfare, a special armor for horsemen was developed from the 9th century BCE. These armors later became part of the standardized equipment of military forces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which extended from parts of present-day Iraq to Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt.
While there is no direct parallel to the 2,700-year-old armor in the whole of Northwest China, there are some stylistic and functional similarities to a second contemporary armor of unknown origin held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met). It is possible that the two armors were intended as outfits for distinct units of the same army, i.e. the Yanghai armor for cavalry and the armor in the Met for infantry.
It is unclear whether the Yanghai armor belonged to a foreign soldier working for the Assyrian forces who brought it back home with him, or whether the armor was captured from someone else who had been to the region.
There are cuneiform tablets recording the production of leather scale armor, but none has ever been found before in Mesopotamia. The only complete set of leather scale was discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, but it was so fragile only a few scales could be studied. This find could be studied in detail, each scale counted and examined to explore its construction.
The study has been published in the journal Quaternary International and can be read in its entirety here.
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a man with a nail driven through his heel that is the first evidence of Roman crucifixion found in Britain. It is the first physical evidence of Roman crucifixion found in northern Europe, for that matter, and only the second example with the nail that was driven through it still piercing the bone.
The skeleton of the crucified man was one of many burials unearthed at Fenstanton in the Cambridgeshire fens in excavations between 2016 and 2018. Fenstanton was on the Via Devana, the Roman road linking Cambridge to Godmanchester, and a few remains of a Roman villa and settlement have been found in the northern perimeter of the town. The southern edge of town was excavated for the first time in 2016 before construction of a housing development. Those exploratory trenches revealed evidence (coins, pottery, animal bones) of a Roman settlement from the late 1st or early 2nd century that was more populous and larger than previously realized. County officials worked with the developers to revised the plans to allow for additional excavation and keeping the best-preserved archaeological remains in situ.
Contractors Albion Archaeology returned to the site in 2017 to excavate it fully. A 2018 excavation expanded at the site of a former bottling plant across the street. Over the two sites, archaeologists identified five small cemeteries and a few individual burials totaling 48 individuals. A smattering of grave goods, pottery and animal bones date almost all of the burials to the 4th century A.D.
Skeleton 4926 was found in the 2017 excavation, one of a group of seven closely spaced burials in Cemetery D. He was an adult male between 25 and 35 years old at time of death. Radiocarbon analysis dated the bones to 130-340 A.D. His body was in supine position with his arms bent and hands crossed over the pelvis. The skeleton was surrounded by a dozen iron nails, not in the rectangular shape you’d expect if they had been coffin nails. There were traces of oak on some of the nails, however, so wood construction was involved, perhaps a bier.
His difficult life was writ on his bones. He suffered extensive tooth decay — cavities, abscesses, tooth loss in childhood and shortly before death — severe gum recession and a pitted palate probably caused by infection. He was malnourished in childhood and already had arthritis in his spine. There was an indentation on his left fibula, possibly caused by an old fracture, and the tibiae and fibulae of both legs were thinned from either infection/inflammation or constant irritation from being bound or shackled.
The archaeological team didn’t realize there was something special about this skeleton until his bagged and tagged bones were being cleaned in the laboratory. That’s where a 13th iron nail was found, only this one was driven through his right heel bone horizontally. The only other known example of a calcaneus with a nail through it was found in Israel in 1968. It was in an ossuary inscribed with his name: Yehohanan, son of Hagakol. The nail in Yehohanan’s heel was in the same horizontal position as the Fenstanton man’s.
David Ingham, project manager at Albion Archaeology, which conducted the dig, said: “Well it’s the first time a skeleton has been excavated archaeologically that anyone has found a nail in, so it’s not the sort of thing you’re looking for.”
He went on: “We know a reasonable amount about crucifixion; how it was practised and where it was practised and when and so on from historical accounts. But it’s the first tangible evidence to actually see how it worked.”
The off-site analysis was conducted by Corinne Duhig, a renowned archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, who came to the conclusion that crucifixion was the reason the nail was used.
The find is more remarkable because it is highly unusual for the body of a crucifixion victim to be reclaimed, brought back to a settlement and buried alongside others.
A report on the excavation and discovery of the crucifixion victim has been published in British Archaeology Magazine and can be read in its entirety here (pdf).
The Getty Museum has acquired an extraordinary 1st century portrait bust of Germanicus Julius Caesar, triumphant general, grandson of Mark Anthony, grand-nephew of the emperor Augustus, nephew and adopted son of Augustus’ successor Tiberius, father of Tiberius’ successor Caligula and older brother of Caligula’s successor Claudius.
“This stunning portrait bust adds an extraordinary sculpture to the Villa’s collection of Roman portraits,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It is among the finest and best-preserved portraits of the young Germanicus at the time of his adoption in AD 4 by his uncle, the soon-to-be Roman emperor Tiberius and complements nicely other Roman busts in the antiquities collection at the Villa.”
The bust depicts the young Germanicus before the depositio barbae, the Roman ritual first shaving of the beard. While the image, or portrait type, was created at the time of his adoption, this bust is a posthumous portrait of the popular general, who was being groomed to be emperor but died young. Ten copies are known today of Germanicus’ “Adoption type” portrait—identified by the facial features and careful arrangement of the locks of hair over the forehead.
While the original of the portrait type was likely carved after Germanicus’ adoption in 4 A.D., the copies are believed to have been made in the reign of Caligula or a few years into Claudius’ (ca. 37-45 A.D.). Germanicus was still enormously beloved by the Roman people when Caligula ascended the throne, and the new emperor promoted his father and their connection with portraiture of Germanicus as the brilliant young general destined for imperial greatness before his untimely (and highly suspicious) death at age 33.
The bust’s documented ownership history goes back to 1798-99 when it was bought in Rome by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, despoiler of the Parthenon Frieze. Elgin, on his way to Constantinople to serve as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had his private secretary buy “marbles” in Rome and ship them to Constantinople to decorate the official residence of the ambassador. His term ended in 1803, and the statuary was shipped to Broomhall House in Scotland, seat of the Earls of Elgin. Germanicus stayed in Broomhall for two centuries until it was sold at auction by Elgin’s descendants in 2012 for an eye-watering $8,146,500.
The bust will first be displayed in December 2021 as part of an exhibition highlighting new acquisitions–Recent Acquisitions 2021: Collecting for the Museum–at the Getty Center and then go on permanent view at the Getty Villa Museum in the Early Roman Imperial Sculpture gallery in 2022.
A piece of gold art jewelry found by a metal detectorist in a field near Bøvling, West Jutland, is an extremely rare 11th century cloisonné enamel earring. Only 10 or 12 examples of them are known worldwide, and this is the first one ever discovered in Scandinavia.
The only other gold and cloisonné enamel object from the 11th or 12th century Denmark that can compare with this piece in craftsmanship is the exceptional Dagmar Cross which was found in a royal tomb under St. Bendt’s Church in Ringsted. The Dagmar Cross is much more elaborate, a reliquary of Byzantine origin, but like the earring, it would have been inaccessible to anybody in Viking Denmark as a trade good, even if they had been able to afford the astronomical expense. These had to have been gifts from extremely wealthy foreign dignitaries, perhaps even the Byzantine emperor.“One explanation may be that many Vikings went into war service for the Byzantine emperor, who had a bodyguard consisting of warriors from Scandinavia. We know from the Icelandic sagas that the mercenaries came home from the East with silk and weapons, and it is also said that the emperor occasionally donated fine gifts to his bodyguard. So it is conceivable that the earring was given personally by the emperor to a trusted Viking in the bodyguard. And then it must have been lost under unknown circumstances in Denmark,” says Peter Pentz.
One possibility is also that a pilgrim has brought home the jewelry. It could, for example, be King Erik Ejegod, who traveled to Jerusalem with his wife Bodil. The king himself died on the journey.
