Hoard

Finds Tray: Bronze Age button

This Bronze Age button comes from a hoard of three copper-alloy items that also included two axe heads. One of the axe heads was noticed by a farm worker in 2021, while backfilling a water pipe trench in Lessingham, Norfolk.…

Treasure Heritage Commission

CWA news in brief

Beneath Grønhaug In 1902, investigations of the Grønhaug burial mound on Karmøy, western Norway, revealed the poorly preserved remains of a Viking Age ship dating to the mid-9th century. Now archaeologists have returned to the site. They have determined that…

Roman hoard uncovered in Buckinghamshire

A metal-detectorist has discovered a hoard of Roman bronze objects in the Chilterns, Buckinghamshire, including a rare rattle that may have been used in religious ceremonies (below centre). Adam McClelland was detecting with the permission of the landowner when he…

Silver treasure in Sweden

A large silver hoard dating to the medieval period has been discovered near Stockholm, Sweden. The treasure was unearthed by a member of the public digging for worms near his summer house, and reported to the County Administrative Board in…

A tale of two hoards: Interpreting unusual Bronze Age collections from Carnoustie and Rosemarkie

Bronze Age hoards tend to be found in watery locations – rivers, lochs, bogs – where they are routinely interpreted as ritual votive deposits. Two recently published examples, however, discovered 150 miles apart in Scotland, came from contemporary Bronze Age settlements. Rachel Buckley explains what micro-excavation of their strikingly different contents has revealed about why these collections may have been buried 3,000 years ago.

Karnak pot of gold

The team from the French-Egyptian Centre for the Study of the Temples of Karnak (CFEETK) has uncovered a large collection of gold jewellery and amulets, which was in a broken pot. The treasure, found during recent excavations at Karnak, is…

Silver-gilt vessel

The vessel was… packed with precious objects and placed upside down. What is it? This lidded, silver-gilt vessel is c.150mm tall, and 92.4mm in diameter at the rim. It was discovered as part of the Viking Age Galloway Hoard, filled…

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.

Treasure of Mercia

The Staffordshire Hoard – the largest cache of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found in Britain – is predominantly made up of weapon parts and other martial gear, including sword fittings, ceremonial objects, and fragments of a helmet (see CA…

Excavating Suffolk

The result of many years’ fieldwork by local voluntary and educational organisations came to a head there in the early 1990s, when a long-proposed bypass was constructed, destroying major elements of the Roman settlement.

The Nebra Sky Disc (opposite) was reportedly deposited alongside a pair of swords (below), axes and spiral arm rings, as well as a single chisel (left). It is the dating of these objects that allows the burial of the Sky Disc to be assigned to

The Nebra Sky Disc: decoding a prehistoric vision of the cosmos

It was probably around 3,600 years ago that the earliest known depiction of the cosmos was buried in eastern Germany. By then, the Nebra Sky Disc had already served several roles. Repeatedly refashioning the artefact allowed it to keep pace with changing desires to express knowledge, belief, and power, as Neil Wilkin told Matthew Symonds.