Viking bronze die goes under the hammer

Medieval

An 11th century Viking bronze die discovered by a metal detectorist in Norfolk earlier this year is going up for auction with a pre-sale estimate of £16,000–£24,000 ($21,000-$31,000). Its size, excellent condition and depth of the relief make it one of the finest examples of a Pressblech die found in England.

The thickness, sturdiness and high reliefs of these objects points to them having been used as dies to produce decorated foils quickly. The die would be placed on a hard surface (like an anvil) face-up, and metal foil put on top of the die. It would then be covered with a flexible buffer and hammered hard to push the foil deep into the relief and stamp the design on it. The gentle curve of the Norfolk die suggests the stamped foil was intended for a curved surface, the cheek guards of a Viking helmet, for example.

Jason Jones discovered the die in January while metal detecting in a field in Norfolk. He had scanned the site before and discovered two silver coins, so returned in the hopes of finding more. Just two inches under the surface, he found the bronze die instead. He didn’t know what it was or what age it might be until he posted a photo on Facebook and he was deluged with suggestions that it might be a Viking artifact. He called it in to the local finds liaison officer of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

It is 5.5 inches long and 1.27 inches wide at the rectangular end which then tapers to a pointed end. There is a slight curve to the die and the back is undecorated. The front is intricately carved with a high-relief design of two stylized animals, one larger that interlaces its body and tendrils, forming an open figure eight with the smaller creature at the base. The relief is bordered by a beaded ridge that runs about two thirds of the way down then flattens into a plain ridge. That angles inwards just before reaching the terminal and the ridges converge to form a fleur-de-lis that fills the pointed end.

The design motif may be a representation of the world tree Yggdrasill with the great serpent Nidhogg weaving around the tree. The smaller creature could represent the squirrel Ratatosk or one of the other serpents who called Yggdrasill home. The features of the enlaced animals — small heads, oval eyes, the open figure eight, the wide, flat ribbon-like bodies — are typical of the Urnes style. Urnes style decoration was produced between around 1030 and 1100 A.D.

The closest comparable example is an 11th century bronze plaque with a foliate animal relief in a hybrid of Urnes and Ringerike styles that was found in the Thames in the early 20th century and is now in the British Museum. The carving is cruder and it is 1.3 inches shorter that the Norfolk Urnes Die.

Rijksmuseum acquires rare restituted silver salt cellars

Modern(ish), Museums

The Rijksmuseum has acquired four silver and gilded salt cellars by 17th century Amsterdam silversmith Johannes Lutma after they were returned to the heirs of German Jewish collector Emma Budge.

They are two matched pairs, one pair made in 1639, the other in 1643. The design features a cupid sitting on a dolphin with the marine mammal’s tail draped over his shoulders. The cupid supports a shell-like bowl in his hand. Very few examples of Lutma’s oeuvre have survived, and these salt cellars are masterpieces showcasing his command of classical sculptural form and the auricular or lobate style that dominated the ornamental arts of Northern Europe in the first half of the 17th century. The other Lutma pieces in the Rijksmuseum collection are medallions and reliefs.

Johannes Lutma was born in 1587 and as a teenager was apprenticed under Baroque silversmith Paul van Vianen before opening his own shop in Amsterdam in 1621. He became the city’s premier silversmith, a significant rating seeing as 17th century Amsterdam had more than 300 silver and gold workshops. It was second only to Paris in the size of its silver and goldsmith community. London had fewer than half that number. Poets and writers sang his praises as an artist and craftsman. Rembrandt etched a portrait of him in 1656.

Despite his fame during his lifetime, few of Lutma’s silver pieces have survived the centuries. Before World War II, the salt cellars belonged to Emma and Henry Budge, a wealthy couple from Hamburg who built a large, fine art collection. Emma outlived Henry by almost a decade, and by the time of her death in 1937, Nazis were forcing Jews to sell their belongings with all profits going to the party rather than the heirs. The four salt cellars were bought in the forced sale by a German dealer. They re-emerged at auction in 1960 where they were bought by the City of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Two went on display at the Rijksmuseum, the other two at the Amsterdam Museum.

In 2013, Amsterdam Museum researchers discovered their salt cellars had a very dubious ownership history. That triggered an investigation by the Rijksmuseum as well, and its researchers also flagged the provenance as suspicious. In 2014, restitution committees from several countries found the Emma Budge estate auction to have been a forced sale and a wide variety of works of art were returned to the Budge heirs by some of the world’s biggest museums. The Netherlands’ Restitution Committee determined the salt cellars were subject to claim in 2018, and in 2022, the committee advised that they should be returned. On May 12, 2023, the salt cellars were restituted to the heirs of Emma Budge. Also on May 12, 2023, the heirs sold all four salt cellars to the Rijksmuseum.

Starting September 6th, the salt cellars will go on display at the Rijksmuseum in a dedicated exhibition that contextualizes the history of the objects as well as the history of Emma Budge as a philanthropist and art collector. Also part of the exhibition will be a pair of portraits of Lutma and his second wife Sara de Bie painted by Jacob Adriaensz.

Backyard Viking grave may be double burial

Medieval

The Viking warrior grave discovered by homeowners in their backyard in Setesdal, southern Norway, is even richer than it first appeared. When the grave first emerged late last month, a sword, lance, a few gilded glass beads, a fragment of a brooch and pieces of belt buckles were unearthed. Archaeologists from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo called to the site were not expecting to find much more than a few additional beads, maybe human remains if they were lucky.

But it turns out those initial finds weren’t even half the contents of this grave. In the past two weeks, an axe head, a shield and some knives have been discovered, making up a complete set of armature for a Viking warrior. Instead of a few more beads, they found about a hundred more from multiple necklaces. They also found a sickle, an iron oval with an elongated handle that may be a cooking pan, two spindle whorls and fragments of four large oval brooches, one of them almost intact.

Domed oval brooches like these were typically worn in pairs by Viking women to fasten the back straps of their gowns to the front straps at the shoulders. The two highly decorated cast bronze brooches were often joined by strands of beads. Viking men used brooches to fasten their cloaks, but they are not domed ovals, usually, and they don’t come in pairs. This opens up the possibility that two people, a man and a woman, were buried in the grave, either at the same time or one spouse interred in the other’s reopened grave after their death.

The style of the sword hilt dates the grave to the late 9th, early 10th century. A grave with similar contents was discovered at a neighboring farm in the early 20th century, and two or three other area graves contain swords, brooches and glass beads of the exact same type. These wealthy graves are indicators of the area’s prosperity in the Viking Age.

Some of the largest iron extraction sites from this time period are found a bit further north in the valley. Extracting iron was something the farmers could do during the wintertime, and iron was exported by the Vikings in massive quantities to Northern Europe and England.

“These exports were so huge that somebody must have gotten quite wealthy from it. And these finds make it tempting to connect the iron extraction business to Valle,” [Museum of Cultural History archaeologist Jo-Simon Frøshaug] Stokke says.

“It’s a captivating thought to imagine such an aristocracy here in Valle, a group of people that have had a style and identity markers that have shown that they belong to this segment of society. Not simply that they are part of the upper echelons because they own swords and such, but that they actually make up a small aristocracy. They’ve dressed in similar ways and brought the same items with them in the grave.”

Early Iron Age cremation burial found at Hallstatt

Ancient

A cremation burial containing bronze jewelry and rare surviving textile fragments has been unearthed from the Early Iron Age (800-550 B.C.) burial ground at Hallstatt, Austria. Grave goods discovered in the burial include spiral discs of bronze wire placed on top of the cremated remains that were likely fibulae (large brooches used to fasten garments), a massive ribbed arm bangle, the blade of a bronze knife with fragments of the wooden handle still attached, a piece of sheet iron from a belt buckle and an animal bone from a food offering.

The finds were densely packed into the grave, and it was only when the objects were detached and examined closely that archaeologists recognized the surviving traces of fabric on the undersides of the spiral discs. These might be the first archaeological evidence that textile pouches were used to contain cremated remains for burial. Urns were used in other cemeteries of the period, but are very seldom found in the Hallstatt burial ground. The cremated remains are so compact, however, that archaeologists have long suspected they were buried in organic bags whose fabric or leather had decayed over the millennia.

Hallstatt is the site of a salt mine that drew seasonal visitors going back 7,000 years ago to the Neolithic. They attempted to extract the salt using picks made of deer antlers and stone axes, but systematic mining of the salt began in the 16th century B.C. Three prehistoric mines have been identified amidst the warren of subterranean tunnels, one Bronze age, one from the Early Iron Age, one from the Late Iron Age.

High in the Salzberg Valley is a burial ground connected to the mine that is one of the most important prehistoric burial grounds in Europe. The burial ground was in use from 850 B.C. through about 350 B.C. Luxury goods imported from all over the known world were buried with the dead, a testament to the great wealth and far-reaching trade relations generated by the mining of salt at Hallstatt. The variety, quality and distinctiveness of the artifacts found there prompted researchers to use “Hallstatt” as the name of a culture and an entire period of European prehistory (8th-5th centuries B.C.).

The Iron Age burial ground was first discovered in 1846 by Johann Georg Ramsauer, the director of the salt mine who had worked there since he was a 13-year-old apprentice and rose through the ranks to become Bergmeister (mining master) by the age of 36. Then, after discovering the first grave in a gravel pit, with zero training or education he transformed himself into a meticulous accidental archaeologist. From 1846 until 1863, he directed the excavations of the Hallstatt cemetery, and documented everything he found with incredibly detailed watercolors.

In 17 years of excavations, Ramsauer and his crew unearthed 980 graves containing almost 20,000 objects. He thought they had found all that there was to be found, but new graves were discovered in the 1930s and the Natural History Museum has found many more since it began annual excavations of the burial ground in 1992. As of now, more than 1,500 graves have been unearthed and documented, and the discovery of the latest grave suggests the burial ground is even larger than previously realized. Archaeologists estimate there may be another 4,000-5,000 unexplored graves at the site.

Bronze Age rulers’ tombs found in Cyprus

Ancient, Treasures

Bronze Age tombs so rich in luxurious grave goods they likely belonged to the rulers of the city have been discovered in the ancient city of Dromolaxia Vizatzia on the southeastern coast of Cyprus. The opulent funerary furnishings mark these tombs as among the richest ever found from the Mediterranean Bronze Age.

The tombs were found in Area A, a cemetery just outside the city perimeter. Broken pottery had been churned up by ploughs during previous agricultural work, spurring archaeologists to scan the site with magnetometers which can relay images of objects up to six feet beneath the surface of the soil. The magnetometer map revealed large cavities three to six feet under the surface.

The excavation unearthed three chamber tombs dating to the 14th century B.C. One had been looted, probably in the 19th century, suffering extensive damage to the grave goods and the human remains. The scattered bones were collected for conservation and study. Archaeologists were also able to recovered some jewelry and sherds from pottery imported from the Mycenean cultures of the Aegean, Egypt and Anatolia.

The other two tombs had never been looted, although their chambers had collapsed in antiquity. Between the two tombs, archaeologists found more than 500 artifacts, including local pottery, jewelry, daggers, knives, spearheads and imported pottery and decorative ornaments from the Aegean, Anatolia, Egypt and the Levant. The imported luxury items came from even greater distances too. There was amber from the Baltic Sea, for example, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and deep red carnelian from India.

The several well-preserved skeletons in the tombs include that of a woman surrounded by dozens of ceramic vessels, jewellery and a round bronze mirror that was once polished. A one-year-old child with a ceramic toy lay beside her.

“Several individuals, both men and women, wore diadems, and some had necklaces with pendants of the highest quality, probably made in Egypt during the 18th dynasty at the time of such pharaohs as Thutmos III and Amenophis IV (Akhenaten) and his wife Nefertiti.”

Embossed images of bulls, gazelles, lions and flowers adorn the diadems. Most of the ceramic vessels came from what we now call Greece, and the expedition also found pots from Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

The grave goods also included bronze weapons, some inlaid with ivory, and a gold-framed seal made of the hard mineral haematite with inscriptions of gods and rulers.

Dromolaxia Vizatzia was a Late Bronze Age harbor city on the shores of the Larnaca Salt Lake that flourished from around 1630 to 1150 B.C. Mines in the nearby Troodos Mountains produced copper ore and between 1500 and 1300 B.C., the city prospered as a major center of copper refining and export. Little is known about the city’s form of government, so it’s hard to say whether the people interred in the chamber tombs were royalty, exactly, but they were certainly part of the governing structure.