Month: December 2025

Worcestershire  museum acquires Bronze Age weapons

Ancient

Museums Worcestershire has acquired a pair of Bronze Age weapons for the county’s collection. The spearhead and knife were discovered by a metal detectorist in June of 2021 and reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. They were later declared legal treasure under the Treasure Act, which gave the museum the opportunity to acquire the objects for the amount their assessed value. Museums Worcestershire snapped them up.

The spearhead is the older of the two, dating to 1550-1250 B.C. It is five inches long with an elliptical blade with a tapering rib and two side loops on the socket. The knife dates to ca. 1000-800 B.C. It is four inches long and has a leaf-shaped blade with a mid-rib down the length.

The spearhead and knife were found in relatively close proximity — about 55 feet away from each other — but may not have been buried together in a single event. They were in a layer of wet clay close to a spring or other water source. Bronze Age peoples often left artifact deposits in watery natural places (rivers, bogs, lakes, etc.), and might leave these offerings over a period of a time, so you find several objects that are clustered in one spot but were not all deposited ate once.

Two of Switzerland’s oldest gold coins found

Ancient, Treasures

Two Celtic gold coins that are among the oldest ever found in Switzerland have been discovered by volunteers near Arisdorf, three miles south of the German border. They date to the second half of the 3rd century B.C., and only about 20 examples are known from Switzerland.

Research suggests that the introduction of monetary systems in Central Europe can be traced back to Celtic mercenaries. These men were paid for their services in Greece with coins and brought them back home with them. Around the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Celts began their own coinage, imitating gold coins of the Macedonian king Philip II (359–336 BC). The obverse of these coins depicts the head of the Greek god Apollo, the reverse a chariot (biga). The Celts adapted both motifs in their own distinctive style. The two gold coins from Arisdorf are among these imitations. Coin expert Michael Nick of the Inventory of Coin Finds of Switzerland (IFS) identified the stater (weight 7.8 g) as the Gamshurst type and the quarter stater (1.86 g) as the Montmorot type. They thus belong to the very small group of just over 20 known examples of the oldest Celtic coins from Switzerland, which originated around the middle and second half of the 3rd century BC.

These were extremely valuable coins, far too valuable to serve as regular circulation currency. The Celts probably used them to pay their soldiers just as the original Greek staters had been used to pay for their mercenary services in Macedon. They may have also been diplomatic gifts, to secure political favors or alliances, or as dowries.

The find site is on the Bärenfels Moor, which may be a clue to how the coins got there. These gold coins are most often found in graves or in bogs/bodies of water which were held as sacred by the Celts. The coins are believed to have been left as offerings.

Because the two gold coins are so rare, canton officials decided to put them on display as soon as possible. In March, they will join the ongoing exhibition “Treasure Finds” at the Historical Museum Basel in the Barfüsserkirche. The exhibition includes Celtic silver coins from a hoard of 34 dating to around 80-70 B.C. that were found in the Bärenfels area in 2022.

Export bar placed on Trafalgar Union Jack

Modern(ish)

One of only three British flags to survive the Battle of Trafalgar is at risk of the leaving the UK. Worn by RMS Royal Sovereign, the ship that led the British attack, it is the most historically significant of the three and the only complete example of a Union Jack from a 100-gun first-rate flagship. The Minister of Culture has placed a temporary export bar on the flag to give local institutions the chance to acquire it for the purchase price of £450,000 ($600,000) before it leaves the country.

The Battle of Trafalgar took place on October 21, 1805, when the outnumbered British fleet under the command of then Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the combined fleet of Napoleonic France and Spain. Commanded by Admiral Collingwood, Royal Sovereign led one of the two columns of warships with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s Victory leading the other. Royal Sovereign moved faster under the day’s light winds than Victory and quickly pulled ahead of the other British ships, raking the Spanish three-decker ship Santa Ana. Royal Sovereign and Santa Ana fought each other for almost three hours until the latter surrendered. Royal Sovereign’s foremast was heavily damaged, but the Union Jack was still flying.

By the end of the battle, Royal Sovereign had lost her mizzen, mainmasts and foremast. The rigging was shot to tatters and the ship had to be towed. The flag bears the scars of its pole-position role in the fight. There are holes, burn marks, gunpowder stains and wooden splinters from the ship embedded in the woven cloth.

Unique among the surviving Trafalgar flags, this one was made and repaired by the sailors of the Royal Sovereign. They made it from hand-stitched wool bunting with a weighted edge. Charles Aubrey Antram, one of Royal Sovereign’s four master’s mates kept it after the action, indicating he may have been the signal mate. It remained in his family by descent until 2004 when it was sold at auction to a private collector.

Culture Minister, Baroness Twycross said:

Few symbols in our country are as evocative as the Union Flag, and this flag in particular is an extraordinary representation of Britain’s history and national identity.

This flag was made by ordinary Britons and now epitomises a defining moment in our national history. I hope this profoundly important historical artefact can remain in Britain for the public to enjoy.”

Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet jewels found in Lincolnshire

Medieval, Treasures

In 2023, two metal detectorists discovered an assemblage of five Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet jewels on a hillside near Donington on Bain in Lincolnshire, UK. Dating to the 7th century, they were found dispersed over a radius of 20-30 feet in plough soil, indicating they had recently been churned up by deep cultivation. The assemblage is the largest group of gold and garnet jewelry known from Lincolnshire.

The largest jewel in the grouping is a D-shaped pendant with an inset garnet decorated with gold bands and panels of gold wire filigree. It has damage in the upper right corner that is so finely wrought it was unlikely to have been caused by agricultural activity. It’s more likely that it was done with tools, either during the setting of the garnet or before burial.

Also in the assemblage is a gold disc pendant with a garnet in the center and eight double-twisted filigree ropes radiating out from the gemstone in a star shape. It shows minor damage in the gold wire border and filigree. A second circular gold pendant featured beaded filigree on the suspension loop and s-shaped scrolls. It once contained a gemstone at the center, but that has been lost. The gold sheet has been bent inwards in the upper left.

The fourth pendant is the smallest of the group. It is a lightweight piece made of gold sheet with a gold strip border decorated with gold beading. A dark red gemstone (also likely a garnet) is set in the center. There is a crack across the surface.

The last piece is a domed gold boss decorated with garnet cloisonne cells. The circular cell in the top center contains remains of its garnet, and only two of the five triangular cells on the side still contain their garnets. The cells have gold wire borders, one undecorated, two beaded. This may have been the dome of a brooch that was later converted into a pendant. It is the first example of a “crown arches” style of decoration found in Lincolnshire.

Pendants with large garnet settlings were part of elaborate necklaces that also included beads, spacers and smaller pendants, found in the graves of high-status women from the period, but this assemblage is lacking the other necklace elements or any other artifacts typically found in female Anglo-Saxon burials. There was no evidence of a grave or human remains at the find site. One of the metal detectorists had explored the field many times over the course of more than 10 years and never found any other Anglo-Saxon artifacts or grave materials.

Lincolnshire Portable Antiquities Scheme finds liaison officer Lisa Brundle has been studying the assemblage and recently published her findings in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.

The Donington group of jewels is unlikely to have been a necklace set from an Anglo-Saxon woman’s grave, Brundle noted, because no beads or spacers were found to suggest they had all been strung together. To try and unravel the mystery, Brundle instead sought alternate explanations for why these five items were found in a group.

“One possibility is that the assemblage derives from a smith’s hoard,” Brundle wrote.

During the seventh century, garnet supplies were dwindling, and an itinerant goldsmith may have collected some antique jewels to modify into new accessories. How the smith collected them is up for debate, though, as grave-robbers are known to have targeted high-status women’s graves to remove their prized jewels, Brundle wrote in the study.

Removing the pendants from circulation can also be seen as a kind of “ritual killing,” which transformed powerful, antique symbols of elite status into new items no longer connected to those individuals, Brundle noted.

But it is also possible that one or more women simply gathered their own jewelry and hid it away.

“One interpretation is that the assemblage represents the treasured possessions of kin or social groups, deliberately concealed during periods of instability or transition,” Brundle wrote.

The assemblage has been declared Treasure and acquired by the Lincoln Museum.

Massive Egyptian false door raised at Penn Museum

Ancient

After nearly three decades of conservation and intensive study and planning by engineers and conservators, the Penn Museum has reassembled the five-ton false door from the Tomb Chapel of Kaipure and installed it its new Egyptian gallery on the main floor. Almost 100 limestone blocks forming the rest of the chapel will join the false door to reconstruct the entire tomb chapel over the next few weeks.

The limestone offering chamber dates to around 2350 B.C., the late 5th or early 6th Dynasty of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. It was one of two chambers in the above-ground portion of the tomb of Kaipure, a treasury official, documented at the Old Kingdom cemetery at Saqqara in the 19th century. The tomb was dismantled and transported to the United States for Egypt’s pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, aka the World’s Fair of Meet me in St. Louis fame, in 1904.

The Penn Museum (then called the Free Museum of Science and Art) heard Egypt was willing to sell it and bought the chapel a few months after the World’s Fair for $10,000 ($265,000 in today’s money). After they secured the limestone blocks of the Kaipure chapel, they found the whole thing was too heavy to install on the second floor where they’d planned it to go, so it could not be immediately placed on display because they were too heavy. Twenty years later, the chapel was finally installed in the new wing of the museum.

It was on display there for 70 years. In 1996, the Penn Museum embarked on a conservation project that would fully restore the west wall, including the false door, followed by the south and east walls. Its carved hieroglyphic inscriptions and vivid painting have been restored brilliance. This ambitious endeavor is at long last reaching its conclusion, and next year, the fully restored Kaipure chapel will be the centerpiece of the museum’s new Egypt Galleries: Life and Afterlife.

Once completed, visitors will be able to move through the monumental structure and experience what it feels like to be inside an ancient tomb chapel.

“To preserve the experience of going into a large space like the funerary chapel, the conservation process is a complex and collaborative effort,” says Julia Commander, Senior Project Conservator at the Penn Museum. “Every level of detail matters—from the smallest trace of original pigment to the structure’s overall layout.”

The museum has created a cool timelapse video showing the reinstallation of the false door.