Roman arm guard restored from 100 fragments

Ancient, Museums

A brass Roman arm guard that was found in more than a hundred pieces has been reconstructed by conservators at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. It is one of only three Roman lorica segmentata (banded armor) arm guards known to exist today and it is by far the most complete of the three. The pieces of the arm guard were discovered in 1906 at the Roman outpost fort of Trimontium near Melrose in the Scottish Borders. They date to the 2nd century and were found in excellent condition, with pieces of the leather laces still embedded in the holes of at the ends of some of the plates.

The fragments have been in National Museums Scotland’s collection for over a century. The upper section has been on display in the National Museum of Scotland for 25 years, with the lower section loaned to the Trimontium Museum and dozens of fragments stored at the National Museums Collection Centre. They have now been brought together and assembled for the first time, offering a glimpse into the life of a legionary in Roman Scotland. Following the exhibition at the British Museum, the arm guard will go on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland. […]

The arm guard stretches down from the shoulder and ends in a thin square of metal that would have protected the wearer’s hand, a design that may have been inspired by the equipment worn by gladiators fighting in the arena. Experts initially believed it would have been body armour, and it was later thought to be a thigh guard for a cavalryman. It is only in recent years that its true function has been understood.

First constructed in the 80s A.D., Trimontium was an enormous legionary fort (49 acres in area) that was at various times an advance outpost into Scotland, a civilian and military settlement 60 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall, a supply stop behind the front lines of the Antonine Wall, and lastly a settlement of dwindling civilian and military population until its ultimate abandonment in the late 2nd century.

The site was rediscovered by accident during railroad construction in the 1840s. The first professional excavations took place between 1905 and 1910 under the leadership of solicitor and archaeologist Dr. James Curle. Curle’s excavations unearthed an unprecedented number and variety of Roman armature, the largest collection of Roman military objects ever discovered in Britain. Most of this armature was found in the Pincipia, the administrative headquarters of the fort, where a workshop for equipment repairs was located. When the fort was abandoned in 180, the arms and armature still awaiting repair in the workshop were left behind.

Curle mentions the arm guard fragments (and his misunderstanding of them as shoulder and chest protection) in his seminal 1911 publication of the finds, Newstead, A Frontier Post and its People.

Remains of another type of scale armour were discovered in the floor of the chamber situated at the north-west corner of the Principia. Unfortunately, here also the pieces were too small to enable the cuirass of which they had formed part to be reconstructed. Altogether there were more than one hundred fragments (Plate XXIII.). These consisted for the most part of thin plates of brass from one inch to one inch and three-sixteenths in width, slightly curved, and having a thickness of two mm. The longest piece was about three and a half inches in length. In several instances it was clear that the fragment had formed the extreme end of the band to which it belonged. In such cases it was noted that the outer margin formed an acute angle with the lower edge, but that the sharp corner was blunted in the same manner as were the corresponding parts of heavier iron bands from Carnuntum. On the concave side of the bands near the upper edge are rivets. Upon several of these there are still to be seen adhering pieces of the leather backing to which they have been attached. At the end of each band near the edge a round hole has been bored; as none of these holes were found with rivets in them, it is possible that they were used for the insertion of a cord to draw the coat together. It is quite evident from the oxydisation of the metal that when the armour was left where it was ultimately discovered, the bands were overlapping. The curve of some of the pieces suggests that they were intended to protect the shoulders and arms. Others may well have covered the body. About half a dozen pieces, the largest of which measures four inches by three and seven-sixteenths inches, may have belonged to the breastplate.

Most legionary armor was made of iron. The brass arm guard would have shone like gold when new, so this must have belonged to an officer of high rank rather than an infantry grunt. While the shiny gold finish has oxidized to green now, the patina proved useful to conservators. Patterns of corrosion helped convey how the plates were connected, the laces tied and the padding attached.

The reconstructed arm guard goes on display at the British Museum’s Legion: Life in the Roman Army exhibition on February 1st. The show will run through June 23rd.

Rusty Roman-era iron hoard found in Poland

Ancient

A hoard of iron weapons has been discovered in the state forest outside Hrubieszów, Poland, near the border with Ukraine. Forester Mateusz Filipowicz and some friends came across the iron objects earlier this month. In marshy area that had been disturbed by heavy forestry machinery and animal activity, they saw a rusty, mud-covered object they could not identify. They dug a small hole to remove the object and found more than a dozen additional iron objects just as filthy and heavily corroded.

Because the artifacts were caked in sand, mud and corrosion materials, they couldn’t tell what the objects were at first glance. They took the group to a garage to clean them and hopefully determine what they might be. They expected they’d found some random twisted metal from World War II, but as soon they rinsed them off, they realized they were much older archaeological materials and immediately reported the objects and find site to the director of the Museum of the Priest Stanisław Staszic in Hlubieszów.

Two hours later, they dropped off the artifacts at the museum in a mushroom basket. Museum director Bartłomiej Bartecki examined the contents of the basket and determined it contained nine iron spearheads, two iron battle axes, one blade axe, one iron shield holder and two iron points or chisels. It had to have been collected and deliberately deposited in antiquity, likely during the Roman imperial period.

No assemblage like this has ever been found in the Hrubieszów region before. Iron weapons have only been found in the graves of Germanic and Vandal peoples, and those were individual pieces interred as grave goods. The find site shows no evidence of a burial, no bones, no pottery, only weapons. This means someone brought an organic container full of iron weapon pieces to the ancient marsh and deposited them there. The container survived long enough to keep them together in a single group before decomposing.

It’s possible that the iron hoard was deposited by Goths. Unlike the other peoples who inhabited the area in antiquity, the Goths did not bury iron weapons and tools in graves, even though they certainly used them just like everyone else. If they were “retiring” them by depositing them in swamps, that would explain the paucity of iron at Gothic sites in Poland.

The objects are currently undergoing conservation at the Museum of the Priest Stanisław Staszic to reveal their true visages under all the rust and crust. Archaeologists will return to the find site for a follow-up excavation in the spring.

Women buried with elaborate neck rings found in Ukraine

Medieval

The remains of women buried with thick twisted bronze neck rings have been discovered in an 11th century cemetery near the village of Ostriv south of Kyiv, Ukraine.

The 11th-century cemetery is located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Kyiv. Of its 107 graves, “most of the identified burials were deposed in wooden coffins,” Vsevolod Ivakin and Vyacheslav Baranov, both archaeologists at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, wrote in a paper they presented at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, which was held Jan. 4-7 in Chicago.

The cemetery’s dead include both men and women. Some of the men were buried with weapons, such as axes, spearheads and swords, Ivakin and Baranov wrote. A few of the women were buried with elaborate neck rings, which “are found only on necks in female burials and were apparently a kind of social marker,” in this region at the time, Baranov told Live Science in an email.

An expedition by the Institute of Archaeology of Ukraine discovered the Ostriv graveyard in 2017. Between 2017 and 2022, excavations unearthed the 107 inhumation burials dating from the late 10th and 11th centuries. The unique nature of the graves was quickly apparent. Unlike the unusual funerary practices in the Kyivan Rus during this period, the graves were oriented south and west instead of north.

Red slate spindle whorl. Photo courtesy Vyacheslav Baranov.The deceased were laid in supine position (on their backs), with outstretched limbs. Traces of wooden coffins were found in most of the graves. The remains of funerary food offerings (chicken bones, eggshells) were found in the graves and in wooden buckets at the feet of some of the deceased. Some individuals were laid to rest with extremely rich goods: slate spindle whorls, jewelry, including the bronze neck rings and bracelets, pennanular brooches, cast bronze belt rings, cowrie shell bead necklaces, and weapons including battles axes, knives and spearheads.

The orientation and funerary furnishings were very similar to the practices of Western Baltic tribes, but the comparison was not exact. Most notably, the Western Baltic peoples typically cremated their dead, and none of the Ostriv graves were cremation burials. Buckets are also not typical of Baltic funerary traditions. Archaeologists hypothesize that these key differences may be attributed to restrictions placed on traditional funerary practices by the Christian dukes of Kyiv, primarily Volodymyr the Great (r. 980-1015) and Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019-1054), and by the process of Christianization of the Baltic settlers of the region during the 11th century. A stone altar found in the cemetery could have been used for Christian or pagan rituals, or a mixture of the two.

Excavations at Ostriv (and everywhere else in Ukraine) are on pause for now due to the Russian invasion.

Lost 4,000-year-old tomb rediscovered in Ireland

Ancient, Modern(ish)

A local folklorist has discovered the remnants of a Bronze Age tomb that was believed to have been destroyed in the mid-19th century. The megalithic structure known as Altóir na Gréine (the altar of the sun) was built on top of a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter, County Kerry, about 4,000 years ago. It was a wedge tomb, a funerary monument containing the cinerary remains of a family or community group but may also have been used for other ceremonial purposes. This style of tomb is typically oriented to the west or southwest and may have had a cosmological connection to the setting sun, hence its traditional appellation.

It was still intact in 1838 when it was visited as a local attraction by Victorian writer and world traveler Lady Georgiana Chatterton. She recounted her visit, complete with a sketch of the “sun altar,” in her best-selling travel memoir Rambles in the South of Ireland.

On the top of the hill were the remains of a very curious piece of antiquity, once an altar, supposed to have been used for offering sacrifices to the sun. We heartily wished we could have had an opportunity of telling the sun, before hand, of our intention of visiting his altar; for a more thick, penetrating rain I think never was experiences, than fell to our lot while poking over the remains of the old stones, and taking the sketch which is here given.

Inspired by Lady Chatterton’s record of her ramble, Kerry antiquarian Richard Hitchcock visited the hill site in 1852 seeking what he called the cromleac (literally “bent stone” meaning a megalithic tomb with two standing stones topped by a capstone) that she had sketched.

I regret to say that this cromleac, or, as Lady Chatterton calls it, “sun altar,” does not now exist, the stones which composed it having been broken and carried away for building purposes, as if there were no others in the neighbourhood! It is, however, fortunate that we have even a small engraving of the monument preserved to us.

That last line proved prescient. The location of the lost tomb disappeared from collective memory and nobody had ever noted its coordinates when it was still apparent on the landscape. It was Lady Chatterton’s sketch that bore mute witness to its presence 185 years later when folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn came across megalithic stones on a tomb-mapping project on the Dingle peninsula run by Sacred Heart University. He was very familiar with the drawing and specifically had it in mind when he climbed the hill looking for the long-lost Altóir na Gréine and filmed the stones he saw there.

When converting the video into a 3D scan he noticed that a stone in the undergrowth resembled one from Lady Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.

He sent the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, which dispatched archaeologist Caimin O’Brien, who confirmed it belonged to a so-called wedge tomb dating from the early bronze age between 2500BC and 2000 BC.

There is a capstone and several large upright stones called orthostats, comprising about a quarter of the original tomb, Mag Fhloinn said on Thursday. “People had assumed it was all destroyed.”

Ulfberht Viking sword dredged out of Vistula river

Medieval

A Viking-era sword bearing an Ulfberht inscription was discovered last week during dredging works on the Wisła river in Włocławek, central Poland. The sword is more than a thousand years old. Even heavily encrusted and blackened by years spent at the bottom of a silty river, the three lobes of the pommel are clearly discernible, categorizing it as a Petersen Type S sword which typically date to the 10th century.

The sword was found by workers removing the alluvial sediment that had built up on the floor of the marina basin. An oblong metal object was spotted in the pile of extracted sediment and a quick rinse revealed it to be a sword. An X-ray of the sword found the inscription “+VLFBERHT+” on the blade.

There are about 170 Ulfberht swords known. Characterized by the inscription +VLFBERHT+ or +VLFBERH+T on the blade, because “Ulfberht” is a Frankish name, the swords are believed to be of Frankish origin, likely from the Rhineland region. They were manufactured from the 9th to the 11th centuries using a variety of metalworking techniques. Most of them have been found in Northern Europe, Russia and the Baltic states. Only eight of them have been found in Poland.

Petersen Type S swords were often covered in organic materials like leather or rope at the hilt, materials that could very well have survived the centuries in the anaerobic conditions of the river sediment. The Provincial Office for the Protection of Monuments has delivered the sword to researchers from the Nicolaus Copernicus University who will study, clean and conserve it. Once it has been conserved, it will become a permanent addition to the collections of the Museum of the Kuyavian and Dobrzyń Lands, and will go on display at the Włocławek History Museum.