Rare medieval arrowhead found in Norway

Medieval

A rare iron arrowhead estimated to be about 1,000 years old has been discovered in the mountains of the Hardanger Plateau in central southern Norway. Local resident Ernst Hagen found it lying casually on the ground when he was out for a walk outside his mountain cabin near the spectacular Vøringsfossen waterfall. (He’s in rarified company; composer Edvard Grieg had a cabin there too.)

Realizing the hunting tool had to predate the use of firearms, Hagen took the 12 cm (4.7 inches) iron arrowhead to the county council where archaeologist Tore Slinning confirmed it was a historic piece and no comparable finds had been reported in Hordaland county. Experts have estimated it to date to the early Middle Ages based on its design.

The plateau, the largest eroded plain plateau in Europe, has a cold alpine climate and is home to the Hardangerjøkulen glacier, one of Norway’s largest. There is archaeological evidence of villages in the area going back to the Neolithic era. These are believed to have been nomadic settlements occupied temporarily by hunters following the migrating herds of reindeer. Even today the plateau is home to some of the largest herds of reindeer in the world who cross from their winter feeding grounds east of the plateau to their summer breeding grounds on the west side.

Artifact finds are extremely rare in the area, with small objects destroyed by the glacier movement or covered in ice and snow. Norway’s glaciers have shrunk by 12% over the past 50 years, however, and the glacier retreat is rapidly increasing due to climate change. As with other endangered cold environments, archaeological finds that would otherwise be preserved indefinitely in the ice are being exposed by thaw.

The arrowhead is rusted and could have been so since shortly after the medieval reindeer hunter missed his quarry a thousand years ago. It may also have oxidized very recently when the artifact was exposed to the air after the ice melted. The same goes for the wooden shaft and fletching which have not survived. If the arrow was trapped in soil, they may have decomposed over many centuries. If the whole thing was encased ensconced in ice, on the other hand, we may have lost them very recently.

The arrowhead is now being conserved at the University Museum in Bergen. It will be stabilized so that it does not continue to corrode and experts will attempt to narrow down its date of manufacture.

Exceptional Roman necropolis unearthed in Narbonne

Ancient

An ancient Roman-era necropolis has been unearthed at the gates of Narbonne in Occitaine, southwestern France. Archaeologists from the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) excavated the site prior to development and discovered a burial ground covering half an acre that was in active use during the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. So far they have unearthed 300 tombs of an estimated 1,000.

Colonia Narbo Martius was the first Roman colony in Gaul, founded in 118 B.C. along the Via Domitia, the first Roman road in Gaul which linked Italy to the Iberian peninsula. They made a deal with the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille) to acquire the land for the road and the new city founded at the important crossroads would prosper through trade, eventually eclipsing Massalia, which was conquered by Caesar in 49 B.C., and becoming the capital of the province of Gallia Transalpina. Indeed, the province would be renamed Gallia Narbonensis after its prosperous capital city.

The necropolis was located at the crossroads of two Roman roads just over a third of a mile east of the ancient city’s perimeter. It was designed in parcels, with masonry enclosures structured in specific groups. The groups, some of which border each other openly, others of which are divided by service roads, are characterized by small funerary monuments decorated with painted plaster and inscribed plaques. The inscriptions provide names and status — free or enslaved — of the deceased and attest to the largely Italian origin of the city’s residents. This was the cemetery of Narbo’s urban population, not the tombs of the elite, but the layout, construction and fine grave goods are evidence of widespread prosperity.

Most of the remains are cinerary, burned bones and ashes on pyres or enclosed in ceramic vessels placed on tiled or paved platforms.  They are often accompanied by delicate glassware — small bottles, unguentaria — and ceramic jugs and lamps. Charred organic remains from burned offerings have been identified, including of figs and dates. Personal items like jewelry and protective phallus amulets were discovered among the ashes.

The condition of the graves is exceptional. A tributary of the Aude river used to run nearby and layers of silt from regular flooding protected the remains. Archaeologists dug through 10 feet of alluvial silt, each successive flood sealing different burial phases and giving the team the chance to establish a chronology of the stages of use of the burial ground, the evolution of funerary rites and religious beliefs.

The state of preservation allows us, for once, to understand some of the ritual gestures; at the time of the funeral, at the pyre or in the grave, as well as in the context of the memorial practices, through offerings in honor of the deceased or meals consumed in the enclosures.

Rarely attested in Gaul, libation conduits were used in one out of three graves at Narbonne. Extending above the ground, these conduits are ceramic, sometimes amphorae, driven into the tomb to get closer to the deceased. They allowed the introduction of offerings. Some still contain cups used for libations and shells. The studies of them focus on identifying the libation practices through organic chemistry analyses.

The diversity of the funerary structures, their state of preservation, and the superimposition of floors and tombs make this a unique site in Gaul, which can be compared with sites in Italy, such as Pompeii and Rome. It offers a very rare opportunity to understand funerary practices in time and space. The Narbonne necropolis is already considered as a main source in the study of funerary practices in Roman Gaul, as well as for our knowledge of the working class in Antiquity.

Church donates medieval hand-bell donated to National Museum of Ireland

Medieval, Museums

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has donated an early medieval hand-bell believed to date to the 8th or 9th century to the National Museum of Ireland. The bell is something of a mysterious object and little is known about its ancient and recent past.

The Knockatemple Hand-Bell was discovered in 1879 at the site of a ruined church in Knockatemple near Glendalough Co. Wicklow. Dr. W. Frazer announced to the Royal Irish Academy on May 26, 1879, the results of the excavation on behalf of Mr. Henry Keogh of Roundwood House who explored the ruins of the church that year.

“This church is situation in the parish of Newcastle, Co. Wicklow, near Roundwood, and in the vicinity of the Vartry Water Reservoir. There appear to be no reliable records of its foundation or destruction, which is so complete that its walls were level to the ground, and what remained of it required to be cleared out of clay and rubbish for two or three feet before the flooring was reached. It must have been a large building, 50 feet long and 26 feet wide, with two side aisles 9 feet wide in the clear, and 26 feet in length, which from the plan may have been of later erection that the church itself. It was disposed east and west, and the floor, which was on the south side, was 4 feet in width. The aisles as well as the central portion of the church were paved with large flat stones, and in one of the aisles to the northward was what Mr. Keogh conjectures to be the remains of a stone altar situated in the east of the building; but he could find no trace of an altar in the body of the church itself. […]

The large square-shaped bronze bell…, measures 12 inches high, and 8 inches across. It was found at the east end of the church, about two feet under the surface, near the position the altar would occupy. It had a handle, which was broken off by the workmen in excavating it…. They also damaged one part of the top of the bell with a pickaxe. Mr. Keogh has polished a corner of it, and it consists of fine bronze made in two portions, the halves being rivetted together.

There was no indication as to the age of the bell noted in the 19th century records. The only artifacts recovered in the 1879 excavation with absolute dates were two coins of Henry III of England (r. 1216-1272) and Alexander II of Scotland (r. 1214-1249) found in burials in the clay and debris layer, so either disturbed church burials or post-destruction interrals.

The bell’s history after its excavation is obscure too. The Archdiocese has owned it since the 1920s. They believe it was bought at auction by a priest of St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, the episcopal seat of the Archbishop of Dublin, in 1915. In 1927, the discovery of the bell was recorded in The Deaneries of Arklow and Wicklow a paper by V Rev. Myles V. Ronan published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. Ronan’s description differed slightly from Frazer’s in that he recognized the bell was made of iron with “traces of bronze plating.”

The Archdiocese wasn’t actively aware of the delicate historic treasure in its care until Cormac Bourke a curator of Medieval antiquities at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, tracked down the bell through the records and reached out to the Diocesan Archives a few years ago. Realizing the artifact needed special conservatorial experience, Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, wrote to the National Museum of Ireland telling them about the bell and offering to donate it to the National Collection of historic hand-bells.

Archbishop Martin officially presented the Knockatemple Hand-Bell to Maeve Sikora, Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the NMI, on September 26th.

Huge medieval coin hoard found in Denmark

Medieval

A hoard of approximately 1,000 silver and copper coins from the Middle Ages has been found in the woods near Vejle, southeastern Denmark. It is the first medieval coin hoard and the greatest treasure from the Middle Ages ever found in this part of the country and will shed new light on the history of trade in the area.

The hoard was found by VejleMuseerne archaeologist Kasper Terp Høgsberg who was searching the area where individual coins had been found earlier: four of them in March 2017, another in August 2018 and another in September of this year. The finders had turned them into the museum, and after the most recent discovery, Høgsberg decided to investigate the site with a metal detector. He was astonished when his detector started signalling over and over and he quickly found coin after coin just under the surface.

“It felt completely unreal. It is a once-in-a-lifetime thing to find such a treasure. It will never happen again in my career as an archaeologist!” said Høgsberg.

“I thought I was going to find a lost purse with 20 coins along a road, but it just kept going until I eventually had hundreds of coins.”

To get an overview of the walking trail and perhaps find a central location where a hoard might have been buried, Høgsberg scanned along the path. A little ways up on a slope, the detector gave a strong signal. The archaeologist called in a colleague and together they dug out a large block of soil for removal to the Conservation Center in Vejle. As they dug around the area indicated by the detector, they found fragments of pottery and textile with coins still attached to them. This was how the hoard had been buried: wrapped in a cloth and placed in a vessel.

In total, they discovered 803 loose coins, 80% of them silver, 20% copper, along the path and an estimated couple of hundred still ensconced in the burial pot. That’s not counting the six individual ones found over the past two years or any other random finds people might have picked up while strolling through the woods. The museum has made a call to the public to turn in any coins found in the park.

Most of the coins were minted in Hanseatic League cities in Germany around 1400. There are also some Danish coins of yet-to-be-determined dates and one that has been dated to 1424. That is the most recent coin of the ones that have been examined, so the hoard had to have been buried after that. In the first half of the 15th century, Erik of Pomerania ruled Denmark and there were significant conflicts, some escalating to full-blown wars, between Denmark and the Hanseatic cities of northern Germany. Nonetheless, the Hanseatic League remained Denmark’s main trading partner throughout the period, hence the high number of German coins in the hoard.

While it’s difficult to do any direct conversion of currency from 600 years ago, in terms of buying power all the silver coins in the hoard could have bought 10 cows or supported a farmer’s family for more than a year.

The 803 loose coins will go on temporary display at the Spinderihallerne Culture Museum in Vejle this autumn. The coins still attached to the surviving textile and pot are currently being excavated and conserved.

Bloody gladiator fresco found in Pompeii

Ancient

A gripping fresco of gladiatorial combat has been discovered in the excavation of Pompeii’s endlessly awesome Regio V neighborhood. The scene depicts two gladiators at the very end of what must have been a vigorous battle as the loser is a veritable fountain of blood.

On the left is a murmillo-class gladiator kitted out with a gladius (a double-edged short sword), a manica (a segmented arm guard) on his right arm, a scutum (long rectangular shield), an ocrea (shin guard) on his left leg, and a richly beplumed or horsehaired cassis crista (full-coverage helmet with face grill and crest). He stands tall, holding his shield aloft and sword at the ready.

On the right is his opponent, clearly defeated. His is a Thraex or Thracian type gladiator. Thracians were often pitted against murmillos as they were similarly armed with a short sword, a shield (albeit a shorter one) and full-coverage crested helmet. This Thracian has high shin guards on both legs and his shield is on the ground behind him. Blood pours from wounds on his chest, groin and wrist. He isn’t on his knees quite yet, but they are bent. His left arm is outstretched with his finger pointing in what looks like the adlocutio gesture, customarily done with the right arm by a general, the emperor or magistrate running the games to concede grace. Clearly the murmillo has won this bout; the Thracian’s gesture was likely a plea for mercy. Whether our Thraex friend was dealt a final blow or was granted grace for a fight well-fought, we’ll never know.

Another Pompeiian depiction of a battle between murmillo and Thracian is helpfully labeled. The graffiti stick-drawing tells us that the murmillo, a first-time fighter named M. Atillus, defeated the Thraex, L. Raecius Felix, but that Felix, who was previously undefeated with a record of 12 fights and 12 victories, was granted missio (ie, his life was spared).

The fresco was found in a building at the back of the intersection between the Alley of the Balconies and the Way of the Silver Wedding. The wall is trapezoidal and was located under a staircase. The steps are gone, but you can see the impression of where they used to be on the wall above the fresco. On the adjoining wall is a  fragment of another fresco depicting a man in a yellow tunic.

It was probably a shop or a tavern frequented by gladiators — the gladiators’ barracks were nearby — with the second floor either housing the owners’ living quarters or rooms where prostitutes took in customers. Sex workers were often associated with gladiator haunts.