Piecing together the puzzle: understanding the Late Roman hacksilver from the Traprain Hoard

Excavation work at Traprain Law, an Iron Age hillfort in East Lothian, some 30km east of Edinburgh, was interrupted by the turmoil of the First World War. Two weeks after work began again on 12 May 1919, George Pringle loosened the soil with the tip of his pick and pulled out a Roman silver vessel. This was the first artefact to be found from what would prove to be the largest hoard yet known of Late Roman hacksilver – silver which has been chopped, cut, and crushed. More than a century later, an equally massive 784-page study has been published that tells us what the hoard represents in terms of the art and lifestyles of people from both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, as Chris Catling reports.

There is a multitude of stories about the Traprain Law hoard, and many of them are told by a book recently published by National Museums Scotland (see ‘Further reading’). We learn about the discovery of the hoard, the press and public interest, and the concern that the discovery would spark unauthorised digging by treasure hunters. The ownership of the hoard was happily settled by the ‘patriotic generosity’ of the landowner in donating it to the National Museum of Scotland, after which there followed much discussion about the techniques to be used to conserve the find – including whether and how to unfold those objects that had been deliberately bent and crushed.

Discovered in 1919, the Traprain Law hoard has provided rich insights into the art and lifestyles of Roman Britons, the use of hacksilver as a form of coinage, the relations between the people of the Scottish Iron Age and those of the Roman world, and the role of Traprain Law itself as a distribution centre for Roman imports and the site of a silversmithing enterprise exporting artefacts to the Roman world.

left This replica of the ‘Adam and Eve’ jug, based on casts of the original and made by Brook & Son, the Edinburgh-based goldsmiths, was presented to Lord Balfour in June 1921 to thank him for ‘kindly relinquishing all claims to the relics found [on his land] in favour of the National Museum of Antiquities’. below Sweet cigarettes, made of sugar paste and now banned in many countries, imitated the appearance and packaging of real cigarettes, including collectable ‘cigarette cards’ like this one, dating from 1964 and purporting to show George Pringle’s discovery of the Traprain Hoard. — This replica of the ‘Adam and Eve’ jug, based on casts of the original and made by Brook & Son, the Edinburgh-based goldsmiths, was presented to Lord Balfour in June 1921 to thank him for ‘kindly relinquishing all claims to the relics found [on his land] in favour of the National Museum of Antiquities’. Image: Michael and Donna Brander © National Museums Scotland

How to pay for the work was another topic of debate, and with it the question of whether Brook & Son, the Edinburgh-based goldsmiths, should be given permission to take moulds of a few of the objects and be licensed to produce reproductions – some of which would be highly speculative because they would be based on vessel fragments. Then there was the question of study and display, and the publication of the first monograph in February 1923, a masterpiece of analysis by Alexander Curle, with its expensively produced photogravure plates.

Despite a waning of public interest after the Second World War, though, scholarly interest in the hoard continued and, in 2009 – 90 years on from the first discovery – a conference was held to consider one particular aspect: the implications of the fact that the artefacts had been cut up into smaller pieces. The initial conclusion, in 1923, was that the hoard represented ‘loot’, the accumulated treasure of piratical barbarians with no interest in the aesthetic value of the objects they had acquired. According to the 1923 monograph, and with Europe still recovering from the First World War, such a hoard was no doubt ‘connected with the Teutonic Migrations which overflowed the Rhine boundary at the commencement of the 5th century’. As an alternative to the ‘booty’ theory, others suggested that it consisted of the ‘capital of the prince of the fortress’, intended for melting down into silver bars to be used for exchange.

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