Oldest drawing in Iceland found carved on sandstone

Medieval

Archaeologists have found what is believed to be the oldest drawing in Iceland at the Stöð farm site in Stöðvarfjörður, east Iceland. A small rounded sandstone engraved with the image of a ship at sail was found in the wall of an early 9th century Viking longhouse. These types of ship carvings on bone, wood and stone are fairly common in Scandinavia, but this is the first one found in Iceland.

The Viking site on the northern shore of the fjord was discovered by accident in 2003. Exploratory digs began in 2015 followed by systematic excavations in 2018 and unearthed the remains of two Viking era longhouses, a newer one built on top of the remains of the older one. They were found under the layer of volcanic tephra that covered Iceland at some point between 869-873 A.D.. This was a momentous find, because it meant longhouses had been built and occupied before the official settlement year of 874 recorded in the written records (the Icelandic sagas the Landnámabók, or Book of Settlements).

Radiocarbon dating of the oldest longhouse dated it to around 800 A.D., indicating that the eastern fjords, at least, were occupied by Norse settlers 75 years before Ingólfur Arnarson left Norway and sailed to Iceland, founding Reykjavík as Iceland’s first permanent settlement. Archaeologists believe the Stöð site was a seasonal camp, used in the summer to fish, hunt, process whale blubber into oil and collect bog iron, rather than a permanent settlement.

Excavations have continued every summer. An enormous quantity of artifacts and remains have been found attesting to a large-scale operation of whaling and fish processing. That is confirmed by the sheer size of the longhouse — 103 feet long — which is twice the length of the earliest longhouses in Reykjavík. It is the richest longhouse ever excavated in Iceland, with 92 beads and 29 silver artifacts (including Roman and Arabic coins) unearthed.

A geophysical survey of the site performed this spring before the dig season began found evidence of more buildings and boats underground, the latter likely ship burials rather than wrecks. The boats and structures have yet to be excavated.

Bronze Age octagonal sword found in Bavaria

Ancient

incredible condition

Archaeologists in Nördlingen, western Bavaria, have unearthed a Bronze Age sword in extraordinarily good condition. The hilt is octagonal and made entirely of bronze. It dates to the late 14th century B.C., the Middle Bronze Age, but it is in such good condition that it retains its shine.

The age, shape, material and condition of the sword make it an extremely rare find, all the more so because it was discovered in its original context: an intact burial mound. Most of the mounds from this era were looted for their valuable grave goods long ago, and many of the known swords from this era were pillaged from mounds destroyed in the 19th century. Others were archaeologically excavated, but were individual finds, likely from ritual depositions.

The sword was unearthed from a grave that held the skeletal remains of three individuals: an adult man, an adult woman and a teenager. They were buried with rich funerary furnishings, but there is as of yet no direct evidence of a familial relationship or some other connection between the three. The hilt is octagonal in shape was manufactured by casting the handle over the blade, a complex process known as overlay casting. It is intricately decorated with incised geometric designs and inlay.

Octagonal-hilted swords are distributed in two regions: southern Germany and northern Germany/southern Denmark. Comparisons of the casting and decoration techniques indicate that the octagonal sword found in the north consist in part of replicas of southern German originals and in part of imports. Some may have been produced by migrant smiths who brought their signature overlay casting method north.

Kallerup Hoard exhibited in new local museum

Ancient, Museums

The hoard of unique Bronze Age artifacts discovered in Kallerup, outside of Thisted, Denmark, in 2019 is heading back home in a landmark exhibition for the opening of the new Thisted Museum.

The Kallerup Hoard is a grouping of four bronze figurines of exceptional craftsmanship and quality discovered during an archaeological survey at a site slated for development. The bronze figure of a double-faced man wearing a horned helmet on each head was first discovered in a field by a metal detectorist working with archaeologists from the Museum Thy. The top of a large ceremonial axe, also bronze, emerged next. A foot in diameter with spiral ends, the axe was removed in a soil block for excavation in laboratory conditions. A CT scan of the block revealed two more double figurines with heads of horses and serpentine bodies.

Thorough excavation and conservation of the grouping took months. The cleaned-up Kallerup Hoard made its debut at Denmark’s National Museum in January 2020. The exhibition emphasized the motif of dualism in the religious art of Bronze Age Denmark, as seen in the double-headed horned helmeted man and the serpentine double horses.

The hoard is owned by the National Museum, but it will be on long-term loan to the Thisted Museum. The loan will have to be renewed every five years, but the expectation is that the renewals will repeat indefinitely so that the hoard can remain within a stone’s throw of its original context. The new museum is much larger than its predecessor with more than 17,000 square feet of exhibition space over three buildings. Seven permanent exhibitions will showcase the area’s history and prehistory going back to the Stone Age with archaeological materials found in the area.

The grand opening is on June 24th, and the Kallerup Hoard will be sharing space with other spectacular local finds, like the Ydby runestone, a gold six-ring bracelet, amber jewelry and grave goods from an Iron Age warrior’s burial, including a wooden pot spoon that is the certainly best-preserved and perhaps the only Iron Age pot spoon found in Denmark. (The other possibilities are too damaged to be conclusively identified as pot spoons.)

Normandy acquires Charlotte Corday’s assassination manifesto

Modern(ish)

The manifesto written by the hand of Charlotte Corday justifying her assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat has been bought at auction by the region of Normandy, the city of Caen and the department of Calvados. It’s a good thing they were able to pool their resources to save this priceless historical record, because the autograph manuscript, estimated at 80,000 – 100,000 EUR ($92,000-108,000), blew past the high figure and sold for 215,000 EUR ($232,000). And that’s just the hammer price. The final cost with fees and taxes was 270,000 EUR ($292,000).

Born in Normandy to a penniless minor aristocratic family, Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont was sent to the convent of Abbaye-aux-Dames in Caen at age 13 to receive an education. She remained in the convent until she left for Paris ten years later, studying the great French authors, including Voltaire, Rousseau and her own great-great-great-grandfather, the tragedian Pierre Corneille, whom Voltaire declared the French equivalent of Homer.

Her intellectual ferment was stimulated by the heady philosophical debates of the French revolutionaries. She sided with the moderate Girondins and was spurred to action by the September Massacres on 1792 in which more than 1,000 prisoners, half of Paris’ prison population, were summarily executed out of fear they were in league with Prussian invaders. Corday held Marat’s incendiary rhetoric and his radical Montagnard faction responsible for this outrage.

Determined that killing Marat would end the orgies of revolutionary violence taking hold in France, Charlotte set out for Paris on July 9th, 1792. She bought a knife, wrote her three-page manifesto
Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix (“Address to the French, friends of Law and Peace”) and sighted her quarry. On the evening of July 13th, she gained admission to Marat’s quarters by claiming she had information about a Girondist plot in Caen. She was shown into his room where he was in his sulfur bath. (His skin disease was so severe at this point that he basically never left the bath anymore.) She told him the names of the purported conspiracists and then stabbed him in the heart.

She had no intention of getting out of this alive. She knew she’d be arrested and executed for this crime and she came prepared: she had stashed the letter in her bodice. It was found during a search of her person after her arrest, but it was never entered into evidence at her trial because the prosecutor preferred to promote the politically expedient fiction that Corday was a royalist, nor did it square with the Montagnards’ insistence that Corday was but a tool of a vast Girondist conspiracy.

The last lines of her manifesto read:

My parents and friends should not be worried, no one knew my plans. I am attaching my baptismal certificate to this address to show what the weakest hand can do led by complete devotion. If I do not succeed in my enterprise, Frenchmen, I have shown you the way, you know your enemies, rise up, march and strike.

Charlotte Corday was tried, convicted and died four days after her victim, beheaded by guillotine. Her statement of purpose disappeared, reappearing at an auction in 1834. Since then it has been sold another seven times, passing from private collection to private collection. At first Normandy’s cultural heritage authorities tried to prevent this latest sale, fearing it could be acquired by a foreign buyer and leave the country. When they weren’t able to get it pulled from the auction, they chipped in with departmental and city authorities to bring this hugely significant manuscript back to Charlotte Corday’s beloved homeland.

Roman mausoleum with stacked mosaics found in London

Ancient

The remains of a Roman mausoleum that is the most intact ever discovered in Britain have been unearthed in London. A team from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) made the discovery near London Bridge in Southwark, at the site of a new multi-use development where the largest Roman mosaic found in London for over 50 years was discovered in February 2022.

The mausoleum’s walls were dismantled, probably recycled for construction materials in the Middle Ages, but the foundations of the walls and interior flooring survive. When it was intact, the structure was very substantial, with large buttresses in the corner believed to have supported a second story. The first entrance steps survive as well.

The mosaic floor is surrounded on three sides by a raised platform of opus signinum (a waterproof form of concrete with broken pottery, tiles and brick used as aggregate). Parallel to the outer walls, the platform is where the bodies in the mausoleum would have been laid to rest originally. (No human remains have been found.)

The mausoleum was modified repeatedly in its lifetime. Most notably, the floor was raised. Archaeologists discovered a second mosaic directly beneath the first one they found, indicating that a new floor had been built over the first one and the mosaic redone. Both mosaics are similar in motif. They feature a central flower surrounded by concentric circles with a square border. The tesserae are mostly black and white with some red accents on the central flower. Around the outside of the decorative mosaic, the floor is inset with red tile. The newer mosaic is a smaller square, while the one in the bottom layer extends all the way to corners where the bases of the beds begin.

The mausoleum would have been used by wealthier members of Roman society. It may have been a family tomb or perhaps belonged to a burial club, where members would have paid a monthly fee to be buried inside.

Archaeologists didn’t find any of the coffins or burials that would have originally been inside the mausoleum. However, over 100 coins were discovered, together with some scrap pieces of metal, fragments of pottery and roofing tiles. Furthermore, the area immediately surrounding the mausoleum contained over 80 Roman burials, which included personal items such as copper bracelets, glass beads, coins, pottery, and even a bone comb.

The mausoleum has been digitally scanned and a 3D model created. The remains will stay in place and developers will work with archaeologists to devise a means to display them to the public.