Month: July 2022

Viking jewelry of mysterious origins donated to museum

Medieval, Museums

A previously unrecorded set of jewelry once worn by an elite Viking woman was donated to the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology in Norway. The set consists of two oval openwork bronze brooches with traces of the original silver plating, a string of more than 50 variegated beads and a bronze bracelet. A mosaic bead dates the group to around 850 A.D., the early Viking Age.

Museum archaeologists have been scouring the archives since the appearance of the jewelry to investigate the set’s possible origin. All the donors knew is that they were found in the tiny farming village of Frafjord on the southwest coast of Norway, an area with very little archaeological material from the Viking Age. They had no idea exactly where or when. One notable Viking find was made there in 1955: the remains of a funerary boat 23 feet long that was the grave of a woman buried with an axe, a shield, scissors, a heckle (a board used to split fibers for spinning) and an iron weaving sword.

There was no jewelry in the grave, however, which most certainly would have been part of her funerary attire. The two oval brooches pinned up an apron dress at the shoulders while the strand of beads connected the pins. A third brooch would keep a cloak closed was the de rigeur attire for elite Viking women. Archaeologists now believe that the recently-emerged set is the jewelry buried with the Frafjord woman, lost before the ship burial was excavated.

“The Frafjord woman belonged to the upper strata of society, because not everyone was fortunate enough to wear such jewellery. The jewellery showed not only what status she had in this life, but also what social position she should take in life after death, and were thus important social markers, not only on earth, but also in the hereafter”, Kristine Orestad Sørgaard explains.

The Frafjord woman’s equipment testifies to flourishing international contacts and trade. Oval brooches were mass-produced in towns such as Kaupang and Ribe, while several of the beads may have originated in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Several of the beads come from a great temporal distance as well. Three blue glass beads date to the Early Iron Age, so they were hundreds of years old when the Frafjord woman was buried.

“It is regrettable that we have lost this knowledge and that professionals did not have the opportunity to investigate the site when the discovery was made, since we have thus lost a lot of important information.  […]

“Either this is heirloom, or the find is mixed with another find from another, much older grave. We will never know”, says Kristine Orestad Sørgaard, who emphasizes that this is the reason why it is so important that private finds are reported as soon as possible.

Iron Age clay figurine, dough stamp found in Bavaria

Ancient

An Early Iron Age clay figurine of a unique type never recorded before has been unearthed in Bavaria, Germany. It dates to between the 8th and 6th c. B.C., the last centuries of the Hallstatt period when the Proto-Celtic culture was the dominant one in Western and Central Europe. The figurine was discovered in a rescue excavation at a site in Mönchstockheim, Upper Franconia, slated for highway construction. It was in a prehistoric gully that was likely used for groundwater extraction by the residents of a nearby Late Hallstatt settlement.

Just 7.5 inches high today, the figurine was probably about four inches longer in its original condition. The bottom of the legs are missing. It has a finely modeled face with marked eye sockets, nose, lips and chin. The sides of the head are perforated with five holes that may represent a head accessory like a hood decorated with metal rings. Headdresses like that thought to have been worn by women are known from the Hallstatt Period. No clay sculpture of this design has been found before in Bavaria, and the only similar examples are much, much older (5th millennium B.C.) and from the Black Sea area.

Also in the gully were numerous shards of glass, pottery fragments, bone tools and a very well-preserved and very unusual clay stamp. The stamp has a rounded handhold and a concave stamping surface with a series of nested indented rectangles. The convex shape indicates it was not used to stamp a flat surface but rather rounded, soft organic materials like bread dough. Researchers confirmed with a replica and a batch of experimental dinner rolls. The stamp design imprints clearly on the crispy crust and looks both cool and delicious.

The pottery finds were quite sharp still; the edges were not smoothed and rounded as they would have been had they been washed into the gully naturally. Archaeologists therefore believe the objects were deliberately placed in the ditch, perhaps as ritual deposits associated with a water deity.

Prof. Mathias Pfeil, head of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BLfD):

“It is conceivable that people at that time regarded this special scenic location as a sacred place and that the small statuette served them as a ritual offering or even ascribed magical powers to it.”

Oldest house in Wales found in Cardiff

Ancient

An excavation in Cardiff has revealed the remains of what may be the oldest known house in Wales.

The find was made by archaeologists and volunteers in a dig at Trelai Park in the Caerau area of Cardiff. The park contains the remains of the 1st century A.D. Ely Roman Villa on its grounds, and is just half a mile from the Iron Age Caerau Hillfort. A geophysical survey earlier this year revealed a roundhouse beneath the grounds. Archaeologists thought it might be a late Iron Age settlement and arranged the dig in the hope that the roundhouse might reveal new information about the site during the period between the late Iron Age and the early Roman era, crossing the bridge between the occupation of the hillfort and the construction of the Roman villa.

The excavation unearthed tools, post holes and pottery fragments. The roundhouse was enclosed by a fence — that’s what the postholes were for — with an exterior ditch for defense. About a quarter of the roundhouse emerged, all told, but the most significant find was made in the last week. It is a clay pot whose design marks it as a Bronze Age piece around 3,000 years old. That means the roundhouse was far older than the late Iron Age, likely built in the mid-to-late Bronze Age between 1500 and 1000 B.C. If those dates are borne out, this is the oldest house ever found in Cardiff.

Dr Oliver Davis, CAER Project co-director, based at Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: “What we’ve found is completely unexpected and even more exciting. This enclosure could be providing us with the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff. The pot that’s been found is beautifully decorated and well preserved. It is extremely rare to find pottery of this quality. It’s also unusual to find a Bronze Age settlement in Wales  – there are only one or two other Bronze age sites in this country.

“The people who lived here could have been members of a family whose descendants went on to build Caerau Hillfort.” […]

Tom Hicks, an archaeologist who came through Cardiff University’s Exploring the Past pathway and volunteer Charlie Adams both found and recovered the pot during the dig.

Tom said: “This is a very well-preserved example of Bronze Age pottery and a significant find for the archaeological record in the region. It’s a great opportunity for us to learn more about the lives of the people living on the site around 3,000 years ago.

“The beautiful decoration on the pot shows that these people wanted to display their creativity to others and further scientific analysis may be able to tell what the pot was used for before it ended up in the enclosure ditch and how or where the pot was made.”

Hundreds of volunteers have been involved in the excavation, and will also be involved in the conservation and exhibition of the artifacts.

Pre-conquest Roman gold coin hoard found in Norfolk

Ancient, Treasures

A unique hoard of Roman gold coins buried decades before the Roman conquest of Britain has been discovered in Norfolk. Eleven aurei from the reign of Augustus were found by metal detectorists in a field near Norwich in the Norfolk Broads (a network of lakes and rivers) over several years. The first aureus was discovered in August 2017.

The coins are of two types. Both have laureate busts of Augustus on the obverse. Eight of the coins depict Augustus’ grandsons and heirs Gaius and Lucius Caesar standing with their hands on their shields and spears. They are flanked by a lituus (a crooked augury instrument like a bishop’s crozier) and a simpulum (a libation vessel). The type of coin was struck between 2 B.C. and 4 A.D. The second type dates to 9 B.C. and on the reverse features Gaius Caesar on a horse galloping past the army standards. He holds a sword and shield in his left hand. Both coin types were struck at Augustus’ mint in Lugdunum, Gaul, modern-day Lyons.

Even though they had been churned up and scattered by ploughing over the centuries, the coins were certainly grouped together in a single hoard originally. Not only are they are all aurei of Augustus from the same narrow date range, but they all bear the same mark: a tiny nick that was deliberately done to ensure the coin was solid gold and not a plated forgery.

They are in such good condition that they cannot have been in circulation very long when they were hoarded, and the absence of any later coins in the group suggests they were buried shortly after they were minted, maybe the first decade of the 1st century, predating the Roman conquest of 43 A.D.

At that time, the Britannic Iceni tribe ruled over what is now Norfolk. The Iceni would become famous for the 60-61 A.D. uprising against Rome led by their queen Boudica, but relations between the Iceni and the Roman Empire were positive six decades earlier. The Iceni were allies before the invasion and given preferred status after the conquest, so it’s eminently possible they had access to gold coins even when the general trend during this period was for Roman gold coins to be spent on luxury goods from the east, not for them to wander up north to the hinterlands.

Augustus vastly expanded the number of aurei struck. His uncle Julius Caesar had struck the first large-scale gold coinage in Rome as part of his Triumph celebrating his conquest of Gaul. Augustus systematized Roman coinage,  establishing consistently graduated denominations and striking large issues that were distributed throughout the empire.

Norfolk, however, was very much not the Roman Empire, and amassing 10 aurei in the first decade of the first century was no easy feat for anyone, let alone for the northern tribespeople. Iceni gold coins of this period were made of a much lower grade of gold, but Iceni jewelry like the Great Snettisham Torc used gold of high purity. A goldsmith looking for raw materials to make something like the torc would be ecstatic to get his hands on Roman aurei made of 20-carat gold. If the gold was being collected for reuse, that would also explain the consistent nick marks as the smith testing them for purity before melting them down to make something new with the gold.

The hoard has been acquired by the British Museum. The report of the find has been published in The Searcher and can be read here (pdf).

Norse settlers in Greenland traded walrus ivory with Kyiv

Medieval

A group of nine mysterious bones unearthed in Kyiv years ago have been identified as walrus remains that originated in Greenland. The nine pieces of bone were excavated in 2007, 2008 and 2011 and were stratigraphically dated to the mid-12th century. It wasn’t immediately clear what animal they came from and researchers have only just determined that they were indeed walrus tusks.

Samples were successfully extracted from seven of the nine bones and subjected to staple isotope and DNA analysis. Results found the ivory all came from the Atlantic walrus whose habitat ranged from Greenland to the Canadian Arctic. The evidence of human processing on the bones confirmed the western origin.

When the walrus tusks were exported, they were still attached to a piece of the snout bone. Remains of this bone are what the archaeologists found. Walruses have extremely strong muzzles, since they like to support their entire body weight on their tusks when they relax. In order to make it easy to break off the tusks, the muzzle was therefore “thinned” before export. This was done in a particular way in Greenland.

Walrus ivory was a prized raw material in the Middle Ages, particularly in northern Europe. Elephant ivory was a luxury import and the disruption of ancient trade networks made locally-sourced walrus teeth even more valuable. Master carvers transformed walrus ivory into luxury game pieces like the Lewis Chessmen or masterpieces of religious art like the gilded and painted Crucified Christ.

Walrus hunting was immensely profitable. (A 14th century tax document records a single tusk was worth the equivalent of a year’s average income in Norway.) Indeed, it was such a cash cow that it was one of the main drivers for the Norse settlement of Iceland in the 9th century and, once they rapidly obliterated that population of walruses, the settlement of Greenland in the 10th century. Walrus remains are so widespread in the medieval archaeological layers of Greenland that the Norse settlers were all involved in the walrus ivory trade, either as hunting crews who spent three months of the year trawling the Arctic Sea for their quarry or in the extraction and processing of the tusks and teeth.

The ivory harvested in Iceland and Greenland was believed to have been sold in Western European markets whereas the medieval walrus ivory found in Eastern Europe was believed to have originated in Arctic Russia. The Kyiv ivories have proven that the eastern market for walrus products relied on Greenland’s hunting grounds as well.

Kyiv was a very important trading city in the Middle Ages, centrally located on the banks of Europe’s fourth longest river, the Dnipro, where traders from the north and south met.

“In the 12th century, Kyiv was a mediaeval metropolis and the capital of a state with an economy built on trade. Archaeological research shows that the largest amount of imported finds stem from the end of the 11th century and the 12th century,” says Khamaiko.

“What we’ve now discovered about the walrus bones shows that Kyiv was an unusually large trading centre, with goods flowing through from distant parts of the world.”

The research team’s report of the findings, the excellently named Walruses on the Dnieper, has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and can be read in its entirety here.