A rare Roman metalworking tool discovered in the Czech Republic may shed new light on how Roman armor was made.
Experts consider a well-preserved calibration plate intended for stretching and thinning metal wires to be an exceptional find. Its holes are rusted and may contain traces of metal wires.
“We will hand over the calibration plate to the laboratory for spectrometric analysis, which will help us determine what material the wire was made of. The thinned wire could have been used, for example, to make chain mail,” added Moš. According to experts, this is an exceptional find in Central Europe.
The calibration plate was discovered in a rescue archaeology excavation along the route of a high-speed railway being built between Nezamyslice and Kojetín. The excavation of this 1.2 km stretch of the railway has uncovered more than 1,000 objects ranging in date from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Imperial period.
The earliest finds are the remains of pile dwellings from the Early Bronze Age Veteřov culture. Details of the plaster coating the wattle and daub walls, including traces of the exterior decoration and the impression of wooden rods (wattle) on the interior, were preserved when the building was destroyed by fire. Other artifacts from the period include ceramic vessels, spindle whorls, beads, a bone needle and a bronze pin with a Cypriot-type head which predates all of the artifacts in the group and is evidence of trade or cultural interactions over long distances. Two burials in the settlement were also discovered, one of them containing the skeletal remains of one adult and one child.
From the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, archaeological materials and human remains of the Urnfield culture were found at the site. There was an Urnfield settlement there, and remains of structures have been unearthed as well as pottery. The most unexpected find was a group of partial skeletal remains in one of the settlement structures. Inside a backfilled pit, archaeologists discovered six skulls placed side by side. Urnfield peoples cremated the dead, and these were not inhumation burials given that there are no other bones, which suggests a ritual purpose. Nothing like that has been found before in Urnfield sites.
Objects relating to metal casting were found in the Urnfield settlement layer. Stone casting molds, crucibles and bronze objects (axes, needles, a knife) indicate these was a specialized workshop at the site where bronze objects were produced. They all date to the period of transition from Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age.
All of the finds recovered in the excavation have been transferred to the Archaeological Center Olomouc. The artifacts are now being cleaned, documented and conserved and subjected to scientific analyses. In addition to the material analysis of the calibration plate, the stone molds will also be tested for traces of the metals cast in them.
Thousand finds, spanning more than thousand years, all stretching in less than a mile, arguably in the middle of nowhere, is probably slightly more than one would usually expect.
The ‘Vyškov Gate’ channeled trade routes from southern Europe to the Baltic Sea, while the Moravia runs near Bratislava into the Danube (and from there of course into the Black Sea).
The ‘Cypriot-type bronze pins’ appear to resemble poppy capsules (cf. ‘bilbil juglets’) – i.e. Bronze Age opioid paste and copper may have been traded for amber and tin.
This may be a translation artifact but in English this type of tool is usually known as a “draw plate.” “Calibration” usually means that you are comparing something to a known standard.
Also, it could be a rivet header where you place the plat on an anvil, then insert a piece of wire longer than the thickness of the plate, and then use a punch with a hollow end to flatten the part of the wire protruding above the plate into the rivet head.
A shoemaker’s last in Ancient Greek is referred to as καλοπόδιον (kālopódion, cf. πούς/poús = foot), which in Arabic became قالب / qālib, and got in English rendered into caliber, with a reference to ammunition: Leather (or wire) could indeed get a ‘caliber’.
You seem to have a point. I found the ‘calibration’ likewise confusing, and the Latin verb that I was having in mind, seems to be in fact Italian. Technically, we indeed seem to be confronted with ‘wire drawing’, and to me that seems to be pre-Roman.
Even glass could be ‘drawn’, cf. the 2.1 cm 2nd century BC ‘Wallertheim little dog’ with its yellow, white and blue glass threads. Italian pasta can be ‘al bronzo’, i.e. noodles are shaped by bronze ‘calibers’, i.e. in contrast to industrial teflon moulds 🇮🇹
@George, being no native speaker nor technician, I might know, where the confusion set in:
In manufacturing, I saw hardened steels and carbides being ‘wire eroded’, in order to get appropriate tool parts. Instead of iron or unhardened steel, current wire drawing dies are probably carbides, and for those there are ‘calibrating pins’, i.e. pieces of wire being used for wire drawing. As mentioned, wire is also being used for cutting the tools.
Cheers.
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PS: I found an article on Latène wire drawing dies, doi-‘dot’-org/10.11588/ger.1979.100460, where four pre-Roman Latène period wire drawing dies are presented, i.e. two from Stare Hradisko, likewise in Moravia, and two from Sanzeno (cf. Fritzens-Sanzeno culture).