The Musings of Chris Samuel

A metal detectorist has discovered a hoard of precious items (now declared treasure under the Treasure Act 1996) in land that was once part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in England. Archaeologists were called in and recorded around 1500 items altogether, with around half being precious metals and gems.

It looks phenomenal, and is far larger than the hoard found at the Sutton Hoo ship burials which itself was impressive enough. What is really interesting to me is that these are often fragments of larger items and even the whole items haven’t been treated with care by whoever assembled the hoard – crosses are folded up for example – indicating that it was the previous metals and gems rather than items themselves that were valued. One of the experts who examined the hoard wrote:

The material is predominantly associated with war – swords, sword fittings, bits of helmets and the like – but all the precious metalwork has been stripped. That means they’re not treasuring the objects as wholes, they’re taking the precious metals off and keeping them.

Basically it looks like the collector of this was an Anglo-Saxon magpie, on a massive scale!

I’m glad to see that this is a case where the Treasure Act and the Portable Antiquities Scheme worked out really well; the find was reported immediately allowing archaeologists to excavate the items in situ and record all the vital information that lets us put these items into the wider context which is otherwise lost if these things are just ripped out of the ground and disappear into a private collection or onto the black market. All too often we are losing that valuable information about our past forever when that happens. So big props to the finder and the landowner for doing the right thing (not to mention they’re up for a massive reward, which is also the right thing to do).

Wessex Archaeology (a registered charity in the UK) have the Time Team excavation reports from 2005-2009 on their website as part of their Time Team site.

They’ve also got a number of blogs (and an aggregator for them), an awesome HD LIDAR flyover of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, a Twitter feed and a Flickr stream including a Time Team set. Nice one folks!

Having just watched the first showing of the Time Team Friars Wash dig on the ABC I went searching for any post excavation reports and managed to find one on Scribd written by Wessex Archaeology (where W.A. seem to be putting up a number of reports) which has some interesting follow ups to what’s seen in the program, for instance:

• It now appears there were likely three temples and an ancillary building, not the four temples talked about (and even then they’re not sure whether the circular building was a temple or a shrine).
• The lead items thought to be “curses” (lead sheets with writing folded up and deposited at temples) turned out to be, sadly, more likely fishing weights as they were not comparable with previously found “curses”.
• Whilst they found a lot of coins in Trench 4 (22 all up) calling them a hoard is apparently “tentative”.
• There are apparently no “direct parallels” of the enamelled broach they found, and it could be 2nd century CE.
• They found 7 (fragmented) pig jawbones in the sondage through the floor in Trench 1!
• The closest parallel to the dual temple structure is at Mont de Sene in Burgundy

You can download the PDF of the report if you login to Scribd (they support OpenID, but not OpenID redirections like WP-Yaddis can do to Wordpress.com, etc).

..about 6,000 year old news in fact!

Archaeologists in Ecuador have found evidence that chillies were used in cooking more than 6,000 years ago. [...] The team of scientists who made the discovery in a tropical lowland area say the spice must have been transported over the Andes to what is now Ecuador as the chillies only grew naturally to the east of the mountain range.

The BBC also has a nice chilli recipe site which includes recipes for chocolate and chilli ice cream and chocolate chilli crème brûlée!

One of the things I miss moving from the UK to Aus was the TV, here we’ve only really got 2 channels worth watching (ABC and SBS), the commercial channels are awful – poor content, poor presentation and (deliberately) poor timekeeping – fortunately I’ve never watched a lot of TV!

One of the gems of UK TV is Time Team from Channel 4, an archaeology program showcasing a 3 day excavation from random peoples gardens where interesting artifacts have been found to prominent archaeological sites. A great bunch of characters and always interesting and I’ve missed it a lot.

But now it’s arrived down under! The ABC are showing it on TV on Tuesday nights at 6:10pm (though I missed the first one through being at a LUV meeting). Can’t wait!