Gone Medieval - Galloway Hoard

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

In September 2014, a metal detectorist discovered the rarest collection of Viking-age objects ever found to date in Britain. The Galloway hoard displays a remarkable variety of material and treasures, not only from the United Kingdom but as far as central Asia. In this episode, Dr. Martin Goldberg, the Senior Curator of Early Medieval and Viking Collections at the National Museums Scotland joins Cat. Discussing the extraordinary hoard, we delve into the range of objects. What can it tell us about medieval Scotland? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Today we're going to be talking about a really special hoard called the Galloway Horde. In September 2014, metal detectorists found one of the most remarkable hordes ever discovered in Britain at Galloway in Scotland. The hoard contained more than a hundred objects including beautifully shaped gold, silver, glass, crystal and stone, but also, strangely, some small balls of dirt. Many of these were packed inside a silver vessel carefully wrapped in woolen cloth, which new research now shows may have been made in Central Asia. So I've been dying to hear more about this particular hoard. So for today's episode, I am very

pleased to welcome Dr Martin Goldberg, who is the principal curator of medieval archaeology and history for the National Museum Scotland. So welcome to Gone Medieval, Martin. Thank you for having me, Kat. I have to admit I haven't actually seen it in person yet, but I'm absolutely dying to go and visit. But you've been studying this really over quite a few years because your museum is in charge of the hoard. Is that right? Yes, it was allocated to us in 2017. We were given six months to fundraise the £1.98 million pounds. And, yeah, with the support of some very generous funders, including the National Heritage Memorial Fund,

Fund and the Art Fund and the Scottish Government, yeah, we secured the hoard for the nation in that six-month period. That's excellent. That's such good news. Now, just talking about back to the beginning of the fine, really, can you tell us something about the circumstances? How was this discovered in the first place? Well, as you've already said, it was discovered in 2014. It was on Church of Scotland land in Dumfries and Galloway. A group of metal detectorists said there had already been silver, found in the field and they were continuing to work the field. And on finding the concentration that we now call the Galloway Horde, they called the Treasure Trove Unit immediately, which is what the law requires. And the Tregor Trophy unit arranged for the county archaeologist, Andrew Nicholson, to assist the metal detectorists. And so the horde was removed that same day. And then in the following days, there was fieldwork that was organised by Historic Environment Scotland and led by AOC

Archaeology. And this was so that the site could be scheduled and legally protected. But what this revealed was a context for the Horde. The negative features that were planned, mapped out as a building, and there was evidence for other structures. So this was planned and recorded so that the site could then be scheduled legally. protected. And that surrounding context has not yet been fully excavated. So there is definitely much more to do at that site. So does that mean that the hoard was originally inside a building or next to a building, do you think? The way it appears on the plan, it's within, yeah, it's within that structure, a series of double line of post holes that suggests there was a

building there. So yeah, there was also evidence for burnt wattle and daub and things like that. So there is definitely a site context and that in itself is quite unusual for a horde and something that will yeah no doubt reveal a grander narrative. Fantastic. Yeah, that is really unusual, isn't it? And we're going to get into a bit more about the objects in the moment, but just in terms of the date that it was buried, how much do you know about the time that it was buried and the sort of date of it? Well, there is a group of silver arm rings that are the most common object that are found in the horde and they're a type that can be reasonably closely dated to a sort of 50-year period, roughly 880 to 930 AD.

And that date range is based on other hordes that contain these arm rings where there have also been coins that have been found with that horde. Okay, so we're kind of late 9th, early 10th century here, which is obviously the Viking Age. And can you tell me a little bit about the, there's a sort of. sort of broader context. What's happening in this particular part of Scotland at that point in time? Well, the wider context, around AD 900 to the north, is when you first get the mention of the Gallic Kingdom of Alba. And so this is the core of what would then become the medieval kingdom of Scotland. But the sort of general historical narrative for this period is quite often framed, and I would say

too often framed, in terms of what's happening to the south. So the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Alfred fighting the day-in-law, his success is pursuing the idea of England rather than separate Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. So I guess north and south, this is an important historical moment where you get these national identities, the things that we now call England and Scotland,

are coming into being. But where the Galloway Horde is deposited, Dumfries and Galloway. is part of this sort of debatable land between these two emerging political entities. And so the historical context for the late 9th century, probably what's more important events like the taking of York by the Great Army in 866 or 867, to the north of that, presumably Northumbria, and particularly the northern part of what had been Northumbria,

and Dumfries and Galloway, which we would assume is the western part, remains Anglian, so under various dynasties that are of Anglo-Saxon descent. And one of the things that's sort of curious, that people now find curious, is that in Irish sources, Galloway was referred to as the Saxon shore. So it's that Irish sea context. The majority of the material in the Horde really seems to speak to. What's happening in the Irish Sea zone with the activities of various Scandinavian dynasties during the 9th century, the founding of Dublin, the Galgale, the Gallic-speaking foreigners, as they're referred to in the Irish sources. So these are people of Scandinavian descent who've been living in this region for several generations, and they've created this sort of hybrid identity.

And so the arm rings that are in the hoard are referred to as Hibernus Scandinavian because they're seen to be a material example of that hybrid culture. And then I guess even closer than York, you've got things like the siege and the sack of Dumbarton in 870 AD, where the historical record describes the taking of many slaves. And of course, the role of silver in that economy of raiding and trading is what the bulk of the material in the whole. Horde represents. So it's a very complex picture even from the limited sources that we have for Northern Britain. But what's great about the Horde itself is that it seems to capture a lot of that complexity in its material form. Well, let's go into that. That's a really great setting for us. So let's talk a bit more about the objects. You mentioned the armings already. So there's obviously a huge big range. I mentioned in the introduction the silver vessel. So some of the

objects were in a silver vessel, is that right? And somewhere outside, and there was actually several different sort of parcels sort of object. Can you say something about that? Yeah, there's two ways to conceptualise the horde. One of the things, one of the many things that is really unusual about it is it was buried in what a sort of clear separate parcels. And there are four parcels, a group at the top of bullion and a magnificent pectoral cross. and then underneath that there was a layer of gravel that separated a richer deposit underneath of three parts. There's twice as much bullion in the lower deposit. There is a cluster of unusual arm rings that are as they would have been worn, but they're sort of knitted together.

And in the centre of that was a little wooden box with three gold objects. And then the vessel that you mentioned is the fourth parcel, and it is the most sort of unusual element of the horde and where most of the unusual materials are contained within it. So the other way to think about the hoard is most of the silver bullion is outside,

the things that we would normally expect from a Viking Age horde, but it's this vessel and its contents. And because the vessel had a lid on it, there is amazing organic preservation within. So we've got inside the vessel, glass

beads, things that look like air, air, looms or relics. We've got another cluster of Anglo-Saxon metal work, which again is not what you would normally find in a Viking Age hard. We've got gold objects, but the organic preservation in there means that there is textiles, and these are things that are very rare, particularly in hordes, particularly for this period. So does that suggest then that this was something that wasn't just put in at one point in time, but that perhaps they were using this as that sort of safe as it I think that will probably come out of our eventual analysis, a decision about that. But there are various complicating factors.

It's certainly one deposit, or it seems like it's one deposit to me, despite that separation of this top layer. The interpretation of the archaeologist Andrew Nicholson on the day was that this top was like a decoy, and that that natural gravel underneath was hiding the deposit. underneath. And the metal detectorists, they only realized that there was something more underneath because they had the facility their modern devices provide. But there are enough connections between the material, particularly the bullion in the top and in the lower deposit, that suggests

they have to be closely contemporary. But again, yeah, the analysis that we're working through as we go through every object trying to understand it and then its relationship with other groups of material within the hoard and the parcels, all of that will come out in the wash eventually, I would hope. Yes, that's very exciting. Now, let's talk about that silver vessel then, because that in itself is very unusual. And is it right that it was wrapped in textiles as well when it came out? Yes, yes.

So it contains a range of textiles, but it also was wrapped in various layers of textiles. It's very like several other vessels that have been used as Viking Age hoard containers. So the one that particularly springs to mind is the veil of your cord. And so the form of the vessel, the size of it is quite similar. And because it was wrapped when we first saw it, we thought, oh, it's one of those. But one of the things that we've been able to do is we did a 3D X-raying at the British Museum of the Galloway Horde vessel. And it's allowed us to see the decoration of the vessel underneath the textiles. So the textiles are still being worked on as part of our.

a future research program and the conservation of them. But this gives us, you know, this primary glimpse of what's underneath there. So we've stitched it together as a 3D model that features in the exhibition. And what it shows you is that the decoration of the Galloway Horde vessel is quite unlike the decoration of the other hard containers. The Vale of York vessel has been linked to the decoration that you see in Carolingian manuscripts. So the types of illuminated manuscripts that are being created in Western Europe in the 9th century AD. But the Galloway Horde vessel has leopards and tigers on it, I mean, admittedly very stylized,

and a central feature that looks like a Zoroastrian fire altar. And so these are iconographic elements that make a lot more sense in a Central Asian context. Having had that sort of tantalizing glimpse of it, And again, it wasn't something I was expecting to see. We've got a bit more work to do on trying to figure out where in the vast corpus of Central Asian metalwork this may have originated from. But fortunately, the work that the former curator at the British Museum, Barry Eager, had already done on the Vale of York vessel,

he had already proposed that the form of that vessel probably had some sort of input from Central Asia. So we're seeing these connections work out. You know, we're actually seeing the manifestation of it in this more recently discovered hold. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying,

wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any other objects in there that have such long distance connections as well? Well, within the vessel there is silk, and so we have to imagine that silk again is coming.

We're not sure aware in Asia which end it's coming from, which end of the Silk Roads might have brought it to us, but it has to have come that sort of distance as well. A project that we're working on with the University of Oxford and Dr Jane Kirschar is looking at the origins of the silver and whether some of that silver might have come from Central Asian sources. So we know that these connections exist through other types of material. It's just very unusual to find this type of vessel so far west.

Yeah, and it's absolutely fantastic. The fact that it's so well preserved as well is wonderful. But wanted to ask you more about the arm rings. Some of them actually had some inscriptions on them as well, didn't they? Yeah, so at every turn there is something unusual about this horse. So even the most familiar material, the Hibernos Scandinavian armings, have something unusual. They have, in the lower bullion deposit, there are four that have runic inscriptions on them. So those four are also Anglo-Saxon rungs, and that's not something we would expect.

We would more likely expect Scandinavian ruins at this point. But again, it's part of that sort of debatable land that I was describing earlier. This was probably the westernmost part of Northumbry at this point. And the recent Whitthorn lecture by Dr David Parsons has put the runic inscriptions in the Galloway Horde into that regional context because there was already a series of late runic inscriptions that were known about Anglo-Saxon runic inscriptions from Dumfries and Galloway from southwest Scotland. So they're an interesting sort of local element, but not what you would expect. And it complicates the whole stereotype of this being a Viking horde or what we might think of as a Viking horde.

Yeah, so obviously what we would love is for that to actually tell us something about the onus of the horde. But it doesn't really quite do that, does it, those inscriptions? Well, three of them are only abbreviations. So they are old English words that usually form. name elements. So one of them is Ed, which could be the first part of any number of names, Edgar, Edward, etc. So they're tantalising because they give us the potential of names. And then the largest armoured has the longest inscription. And although we can transliterate the brooms, we can't translate what they're saying yet. And so that's another aspect of the research that will be

continuing over the following years. There is one other fragment that has a full Old English name on it, Egbert, but it came from the surrounding site, and it's on a tiny fragment of hacksilver, and it's a full name. And so we can't quite link it to the hoard. It might be plough disturbed material from the top layer, or it might be part of other material that we think is related to activity on the site. but the style of the runes and certain features, again, link it to the horde. So there are these tantalising connections, names of people, but the surprising thing is that they are old English names or name elements. Yes, absolutely not what we would expect.

But in terms of the other objects, the one other thing I really wanted to ask you about is these very strange little dirt balls that were found in the horde as well. What's that all about? Well, again, this was one of the really surprising elements. And in amongst the gold and the silver and the rock crystal and the silks, at first they got lost a little bit. You know, there was so much else for people to focus on. But I always had it in the back of my head that these things were potentially very important.

And I had a sort of working hypothesis, which was that, you know, you have to imagine that that dirt had sort of. some significance. So the only reason the dirt will have survived is because it was nestled down at the bottom of the vessel in amongst all of the sort of richest material. And it's only because they were kept dry, but also didn't have the opportunity to dry out completely that they've survived within that sealed environment. So can you just, for those reasons, who haven't actually presented probably, what are they? How big are they? And how many little balls like that? So there are two balls of dirt and they are about sort of Maltese size

and you can see how they've been formed like a child would play with plasticine there's sort of two sausage shapes that have been interlinked and then rolled together in the hand and I think that's one of the amazing things about them is you can actually imagine the hands rolling these two things together and so what you get there are small sort of cracks and fishes where those two sausage-shaped bits of dirt were rolled into a

ball and those present opportunities for us to explore them and so my colleague dr mary davis who has been doing the bulk of the conservation work on the horde started to microscopically examine the dirt balls and she was picking up absolutely minute traces of gold and bone and so this set us off. We had a working hypothesis that in early Christian tradition, people could visit shrines and a way of bringing back the sort of essence of the place that they had visited, the holy shrines that they had gone on pilgrimage to. They could get local dirt and roll it in the dust of the shrine. And so if you were looking for the dust of a sacred place, traces of gold, gilding and fragments of bone are exactly what you would be looking for.

So this justifies pursuing that theory a little bit further. And of course the big question then is, what shrines are we talking about? You know, where could these dirtballs have been brought back from? But like I say, they are there with the most valuable material in that vessel, which seems to be a sort of specially collected and treasured collection in itself. And so you know that they are of great, great value, even if they are not of what we would consider material value.

So that's just so far as, I mean, are there any parallels to that anywhere else? Have you seen them in any other hordes or any other collections at all? I have read about parallels in Italy. So there is a collection of similar relics in Bobio, but the Vatican collection in particular has a series of earthen relics that were being collected in a particular time period from six. 50 to 900 AD and they had sort of labels on them that allow that reconstruction of that time frame. And what the people in Rome, the papacy, the early popes of Rome are interested in, is the Holy Land.

So when representatives are on pilgrimage in the Holy Land, they are going to the sites associated with the life of Jesus Christ. So Bethlehem, the River Jordan, the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre, and they are bringing back earthen relics from those places. I mean, this is a sort of, you know, fantastical starting point, but we have to start somewhere. And if we're going to test these dirt balls, if we're going to try and figure out their provenance, we need to start somewhere. I think that sounds pretty convincing to me. I'm sold. I look forward to seeing the rest of the research on that. It's the time period works as well. You know, it's, that's what encourages the theory to be pursued further.

Absolutely. And also you have all of these distant links. And we see that with other hordes from Skadenao, something like the Hohen Horde, which is this wonderful hoard of jewellery, for example. It's got very many distant links, very many different places all collected together. And this seem like heirlooms, like objects that represent travels to other places that have been collected and put together. And this reminds me very much of that. It's all those connections, isn't it, with places. It isn't just random loot? There's some meaning here, isn't there? Definitely. And those are exactly the sort of parallels that we'll be looking at and the type of international context that this hoard needs to be placed into. So I think just finally, I wanted to just ask you about a horde like this. So you said there's a possibility it might have been in the house. They might have been for safekeeping. This might have been, I suppose, a family's wealth. So it might literally be a safe, safety to deposit box in the ground. But there's other thoughts as well, aren't now, on why people bury hordes, sort of beyond that sort of very pragmatic. and very useful, you know, what else would you do with your things? What's your thought on those, those other reasons that people might be burying things in the ground? Well, this is what our future work is hoping to shed some light on. So we've got a three-year funded research project from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And one of our primary questions is about hoarding. You know, why do people hoard? And I suppose if we use this hoard as a kind of prime example,

example, then we'll be able to say more than just the usual stereotype, you know, that people were afraid and they buried it in the ground. You're never going to say anything new if you just rely on that narrative. And it's the level of detail that we can reconstruct from this collection, whether it's the parcels or the bullion versus the vessel split or any of those things I've already talked about. What it gets you beyond is that people burying hordes just sort of reduces the narrative to threat and wealth being buried for security at times of stress. One element that will definitely help in the future is more work on the site. We'll be, you know, saying more about the site context will only add to the richer narrative

that we can produce and particularly using modern excavation techniques. but what our current work at the museum is focused on and the HRC project is in partnership with the University of Glasgow what we're focusing on now is so it's not so much why do people bury things but why do people hoard, why do people collect things? How did this collection come together? And with all of that organic material within it

and in the various parcels, we should be able to do a really fine-grained radio-carbon and dating program and work out some of what seems to be quite a long-lived collection, particularly within the vessel. And also there might be various motivations. You know, we might be looking at the bullying as part of the reason it was buried, you know, because of the economic context of what's happening, whereas the vessel might be something that's more about family or genealogy or memory or, you know, perhaps we're looking at a family

treasury there and that collection came together for a different set of reasons, but then the two elements have been brought together in this one horde. So I think it's looking at a sort of richer history and a variety of motivations rather than any sort of single answer to this. I think that's just such an amazing opportunity, isn't it, to actually answer those questions because so many of our other hordes have been dug up maybe 100 years ago and we don't have that context and we also have all those new methods that you already mentioned some of. So yeah, it's a great potential there, I think. I think for the wider people that are interested in this hoard, what you can connect to with this is the number of ancient lives that is embodied in this

material. So you've got the people who made the objects and some of those might have been, you know, from nearby, like the old English names suggest, some of the, Some of them, you know, the people who wove the silk are going to be from somewhere really far distant. You've got the people who wore the objects, the people who traded them. And then you get to the people who began collecting them in groups. And suddenly you're looking at hundreds of ancient lives that we had no previous record of. Yeah, absolutely love that. It's all these biographies and all these, yeah, individual personal lives that are just wrapped up in a parcel,

almost literally in this case. It's a wonderful thought. And just the final question, if people want to come and see the Galloway Horde for themselves, where can they go? And what's happening to it now? Because it's moving around, isn't it? Yes, so the exhibition of the Horde is going on tour. Our exhibition in Edinburgh just closed. We're moving it to Cacubri Art Galleries, and it will be opening there on the 9th of October. And it will run for nine months until the 10th of July, 2022.

After that, it moves to Aberdeen Museums and Art Gallery from the end of July until the 23rd of October. So yes, there's plenty of opportunities to see it. And the tour will be getting updates from the research because this is an ongoing project. And the exhibition sort of unavowedly presents that this is just an interim stage and that we are actively researching this material

because this Horde is going to present endless opportunities for future research. And so with that, we'll be doing some lectures by various members of the project team, and the exhibition is accompanied by educational packages for schools that have been prepared by our learning team. Fantastic. So, yeah, this is just the beginning, really, isn't it, for the Horde? Yes, seven years in, and we're at the beginning. Yeah, a lifetime's work, I think. Yeah, fantastic. Well, I can't wait to see what else comes out of this. Martin, it's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your knowledge today.

Thank you very much for having me. So this has been an episode of Gone Medieval, the history hit podcast all about the Middle Ages. I should say, actually, also there's a couple of other episodes. If you've enjoyed this, there's an episode on the Vikings in Northumbria with Dr. Jane Quershaw, and we also have an episode on Rooms with Professor Judith Jesh. So look back through the archives and see that might give you a little bit more context. I will be back again next week and my brilliant co-host will be back on Saturday. That's Matt Lewis. So thank you so much for listening and I hope you join us again very soon.