Month: August 2025

Bronze Age cremation urn burial found in Yorkshire quarry

Ancient

An excavation at Breedon’s Leyburn Quarry in North Yorkshire has uncovered a high-status Bronze Age cremation urn burial. It dates to between about 2000 and 1700 B.C.

The limestone quarry is located in an area of the Yorkshire Dales known for Bronze Age remains. Metal hoards have been found there, as well as burials and traces of settlements. A team from Archaeological Research Services (ARS) was engaged to explore a previously unused part of the quarry. The five-week excavation uncovered a group of prehistoric features consisting of pits and two ditches that met in a T-shaped junction.

One of the pits at the southern end of the group had fragments of cremated bones at the surface. Deeper in the pit archaeologists found a much larger, compacted deposit of cremated bones. Neolithic and Bronze Age people buried cremation remains in pits like this. Radiocarbon dating will clarify the period this burial dates to.

A second cremation burial was excavated on the eastern side. This one contained an upside-down pottery vessel. The vessel was of the collared urn type, known for being used as cremation urns during the Bronze Age. It is 16 inches high and 12 inches wide and its widest point. Even though the base had been damaged by farming, archaeologists could not see its contents as it was filled with soil. They were able to remove the entire vessel en bloc to the ARS research laboratory where it was excavated securely.

They did indeed find cremation remains, but they also found an unexpected artifact: a stone axe hammer with a perforation in the center. It is about four inches long and was carved from volcanic rock that is not available locally and may have come from as far away as Scotland. It was carved and honed by an expert craftsman and must have been a highly prized object. Its inclusion in the cinerary urn suggests it was a personal possession of the deceased who must have been someone of wealth and social status to have access to a trade networks that transported such finely-crafted objects.

The finds will now be radiocarbon dated and the bones will be analysed.

This will give researchers an insight in where the cremated person grew up and their sex.

“We should be able to expand this story out and relate it to the wider area, because the bigger backdrop to this at the time is that Britain is very much the cradle of the European Bronze Age,” said Mr Waddington.

“Britain becomes very wealthy and it’s not just confined to the south west where the tin is. Britain’s got huge mineral reserves of all kinds, and particularly metals.

“The Yorkshire Dales is very lead-rich. And so another source of wealth for these people may have been coming through the lead exploitation and that’s allowing them to become part of this huge trade in early metallurgy, which is not just a British trade, it’s extending all the way across Europe, all the way to the Middle East.”

3,000-year-old funnel axe found on Borneo

Ancient

A rare Bronze Age funnel-shaped axe that legends suggest may be made of meteorite iron has been found in Paau Village on the island of Borneo. It is approximately 3,000 years old and is the first Bronze Age axe head of its kind found in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo).

Paau Village is in the middle of the Riam Kanan Reservoir and is very remote, accessible only by a two-hour boat journey. The axe head is one of numerous ancient artifacts discovered by Rahmadi, one the 600 inhabitants of the village, while panning for gold. It is the object that most impressed archaeologists when they saw it in Rahmadi’s generally impressive collection, because funnel axes are so rare and this is the only one known from Kalimantan. It is evidence that the area was developing metalworking technology at the same time as other populations elsewhere in the archipelago, and using it for artistic and symbolic purposes.

This discovery also caught the attention of Hartatik, a member of the Banjar Regency Cultural Heritage Expert Team (TACB). He explained that the funnel axe, also known as “Gigi Petir” or Untu Gledek by the Javanese, has its own mythological origins. It is said that the object appeared after lightning struck and became embedded in the ground or a tree. However, scientifically, researchers suspect it was made using metal technology from melted meteorite rock.

These types of axes were not utilitarian tools like their stone predecessors. They were very small and light, designed for their form over function. Archaeologists believe they were symbols of social status, or maybe used as valuable trade goods.

Cultural heritage authorities and archaeologists plan to collaborate on further study of the artifact. It needs to be authenticated first and foremost (there is a thriving market in counterfeit antiquities in Indonesia), and its original context explored. If its authenticity is confirmed, the axe will shed new light on Borneo’s early metalworking abilities.

Shakespeare family will that caused legal drama found in National Archives

Modern(ish)

A 1642 will that bequeathed William Shakespeare’s home to someone entirely unrelated to him that caused much courtroom drama has been rediscovered in the U.K.’s National Archives. Legal records specialist Dan Gosling found the will in a box of unlabeled chancery court documents dating from the 17th century and earlier. It was first described by a Shakespeare scholar in the mid-19th century. He had discovered it in the Rolls Chapel, the repository of the Court of Chancery’s document records from 1484 until 1856 when the rolls were moved to the new Public Record Office building. We now know that the original will was absorbed into the National Archives without being catalogued.

The will was made by Thomas Nash, husband of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, who lived with her and her mother, Shakespeare’s eldest daughter from his first wife, Susanna Hall, in the playwright’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Known as New Place, Shakespeare had bought it in 1597 for the hefty sum of £60. It was three stories high with timber and brick construction and had 20 rooms, 10 fireplaces, a courtyard and a sizeable property that contained two bards and an orchard. It was the second largest private home in Stratford at the time and obviously a very desirable piece of real estate. After he died in 1616, he left the bulk of his possessions, including his extensive properties, to Susanna, entailed to her sons upon her death, and in the case there were no sons, to her daughter Elizabeth and her male heirs.

For reasons unknown, perhaps because Nash assumed erroneously that he would outlive his wife and his mother-in-law and somehow handwaved away the whole question of Shakespeare’s complex entailment measures, he left the home to his cousin Edward Nash. Even if Thomas Nash didn’t know that New Place was entailed, it was rashly optimistic, to say the least, to think that he would outlive his wife and mother-in-law as he was 59 when he wrote the will and so was Susanna. Elizabeth was 34.

When Thomas Nash died in 1647, legal confusion ensued. Elizabeth and Susanna had to obtain a deed of settlement to prove that they still owned the house they literally lived in along with all the other properties that Shakespeare had willed to his daughter. Edward Nash took umbrage and being deprived of a house that had been willed to him by someone who never owned it, and sued Elizabeth in the Court of Chancery.

“He argues the will of Thomas Nash was proved in the property court of Canterbury, and Elizabeth Nash, as the widow and executrix, was duty bound to abide by the terms of the will and give New Place to Edward Nash,” [says Dan Gosling.]

Elizabeth appeared at the chancery court to explain the lands and property were granted to her and her mother by “my grandfather William Shakespeare”. As part of proceedings she was asked to produce Thomas’s will, which is how the document eventually ended up in the chancery archives, now held by the National Archives.

The upshot of the proceedings is not clear, but, Gosling said, it appears Edward never got to own the property. When Elizabeth died in 1670, having had no children and ending Shakespeare’s direct line of descendants, her will stipulated Edward Nash would have the right to acquire New Place.

“She uses the words ‘according to my promise formally made to him’, which suggests some spoken procedures were made,” said Gosling. In the event, there is no recorded mention of Edward as owner of New Place, which went to the wealthy landowning Clopton family after Elizabeth’s death and was demolished in 1702.

Game piece reveals Viking hairstyle

Medieval

A new examination of a small Viking-era gaming piece in the collection of the National Museum of Denmark has found that the hairstyle is so detailed that researchers believe it depicts a coiffure that was actually fashionable in the 10th century.

“It’s exceptional that we have such a vivid depiction of a Viking, even a three-dimensional one. This is a miniature bust and as close as we will ever get to a portrait of Viking,” says Peter Pentz, who is a curator at the National Museum.

Just three centimeters (1.2 inches) high, the piece was discovered in 1796 in a 10th century horse burial mound in Viken near the Oslofjord, southern Norway. It is carved from a walrus tusk and depicts the head and chest of a man with a thick moustache, long, braided beard and sideburns. His hair is parted in the middle and has a wave of the side that exposes his ear. The back of his hair is cropped short.

“Hitherto, we haven’t had any detailed knowledge about Viking hairstyles, but here, we get all the details – even the little curl above the ear is marked. This is the first time we see a figure of a male Viking with his hair visible from all angles. It’s unique,” says Peter Pentz.

The arms are damaged, but the beard identifies it a type of carving known as beard-stroking or beard-pulling figurines. The new study proposes that they are kings in the Norse strategy board game hnefatafl. The pulling of the beards symbolizes masculinity, fertility and kingship.

This is one of the first objects catalogued by the National Museum, number 589 out of what are now more than two million objects in the museum’s collection. Held in storage for 200 years, figure is currently on display as part of The Wolf’s Warning, the museum’s exhibition on Viking seeresses.

Large Bronze Age metal hoard found in Saxony

Ancient

A Bronze Age hoard comprising 35 pounds of bronze in 310 objects has been discovered in the Klein Neundorf suburb of Görlitz in eastern Germany. Dating to the 9th century B.C., it is the largest Bronze Age hoard ever found in Upper Lusatia and the second-largest in all of Saxony.

Bronze Age objects had been found at the site since 1900, when children harvesting potatoes stumbled on three bronze daggers. One of them was lost soon after the discovery; the two remaining ones were acquired by the Görlitz Museum in 1905. One of the surviving pair was lost in the chaos of World War II, so of the original three daggers, only one remains. The children’s father donated a socketed axe to the museum two years later.

The objects had been in the museum collection for more than a century when Dr. Jasper von Richthofen, the director of the Görlitz Collections, hatched a plan to excavate the find site for the first time in August of 2023, with the collaboration of the Saxon State Office for Archaeology and volunteer metal detectorists. It was one of the metal detectorists who made the initial breakthrough, finding bronze sickle fragments on the western edge of the exploration area. The rest of the team joined in and more objects were discovered in the plow zone. In total, 108 objects from the hoard were discovered that had been scattered by plowing activity.

Finally, several objects were found clustered together in one place. They were the surface of the original deposition, what was left in place when the artifacts at the top were scattered by plows. The rest of the hoard was still intact in its burial site and was removed in a soil block for excavation in the restoration laboratory of the Saxon State Office for Archaeology.

Excavation took place from September 2023 through the end of April 2024. The objects in the hoard include tools, weapons, jewelry, garment fittings and raw metal ingots known as cast cakes. The most of any single object found thus far is sickles; there are 136 sickles in the hoard. The runner-up is axes. There are 50 of them. Photogrammetric pictures were taken at every stage of the excavation so that a 3D model of the hoard could be created that will allow researchers to study artifacts in their original positions and relative to each other.

Special features include a sword broken into four pieces and a brooch of the Spindlersfeld type, named after a site near Berlin. Of the four fractures in the sword, two are demonstrably old, indicating that the weapon was deposited in a broken state. When put together, the sword has a total length of 44 cm, making it strikingly short. The pommel consisted of two sheet metal shells between which a disc of organic material, possibly bone or ivory, was attached. Further analyses will shed light on this. Although the sword is typologically unique, experts suspect that it originates from southern Germany.

All of the artifacts are now being scientifically analyzed and conserved for future exhibition.