The Ancients - Roman Treasures of Iron Age Scotland

Episode Date: June 5, 2022

In 1919, excavators working near Edinburgh in Scotland unearthed the largest hoard of Roman hacksilver ever found. The trove, containing mostly silver vessels but also some personal items and coins, was probably buried in the early 5th century AD - just as the legions were finally pulling out of Britannia.The treasures - found at the ancient hillfort site of Traprain Law - shine a fascinating light on the connections between the Iron Age peoples of what is now Scotland and the rest of the Roman Empire.In this episode Tristan is joined by archaeologist Dr Fraser Hunter, Principal Curator at the National Museum of Scotland, who shares his passionate insights into the Traprain Law Treasure and what it tells us about late Roman Britain.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. it's the ancients on history hit i'm tristan hughes your host and in today's podcast i'm recording this intro from the royal armories in leeds we're up at the royal armories today to film some roman chariots to look at gladiators too, all coming to history hit in due course. But today's podcast episode is nothing to do with that. We're talking about Iron Age Britain once again. It was wonderful to see how well received our episodes on Iron Age Wales and on Iron Age

Britain have been over the past month or so. And now we're heading north to Iron Age Scotland. We're focusing in on a particular hoard of silver objects discovered near the modern city, near the beautiful capital of Scotland, Edinburgh. This is the Traprain treasure. Dating to late in the Roman period in Britain, it shines a light on these connections between Iron Age peoples in modern day Scotland and the wider Roman Empire. Now to talk through all of this, the Dupreyn treasure, this great treasure of Iron Age Scotland, I was delighted to interview Dr Fraser Hunter. Fraser, he's a curator at the National Museum of Scotland. He's presented documentaries on TV before. He's a legend. He's a wonderful speaker and he talks through this topic with such passion, with such interest. It was just a delight to have

him on the pod for this extraordinary part of Iron Age Scotland's history. So without further ado, to talk all about the Traprain treasure, this great Roman treasure of Iron Age Scotland, the Traprain treasure, this great Roman treasure of Iron Age Scotland. Here's Fraser. Fraser, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast today. It's a delight to be here. And particularly to talk about this topic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the story of the largest hoard of Roman silver ever found outside the Roman Empire. I mean, Fraser, to be an expert in this, that's quite a catch line. It is an absolutely remarkable find to work with. We're really lucky to have that in the

museum here in Edinburgh. It is a find of international importance. And you can choose your superlatives. You know, it's the biggest hoard beyond the edge of the empire. But of this particular kind of silver, the hacked up and crushed silver, which is the nature of Traprain, it's the biggest from anywhere, full stop. There's nothing like this. Now you mentioned Edinburgh, so a bit of a clue there, but what is Traprain law? Whereabouts are we talking in Britain? We are sitting in the southeast of Scotland here. So Traprain lies about 30 kilometres east of Edinburgh, east of the market town of Haddington. And it's like it's a failed volcano it's a what's called a lacalitha a volcanic chamber that never exploded and when the glaciation happened it eroded all the softer soil around

about leaving this massive rock sticking out of the fertile rolling east lothian plain these are the grain fields of east lothian because it's a big dominant hill it's attracted human attention for millennia. So when the first people come into Scotland after the Ice Age, there is settlement under Prane law, and the site has been used again and again ever since. And so it's been used again and again ever since. So talk me through in a bit more detail about the site's ancient occupation, because from what you're saying, it was occupied for hundreds, if not thousands of years in antiquity. Yeah Treprere is a microcosm of Scottish history and it's one of the most important archaeological sites in the country. So we see these fleeting footprints of the Mesolithic

hunter-gatherers, we see a thin scatter of the microliths that would have been the armatures on their arrowheads as they were out hunting. We see rather more sustained evidence of activity in the Neolithic, the time of the first farmer, some five to six thousand years ago, but not really evidence of settlement on the hill. There's a whole series of stone axe heads, but nothing in the way of pottery, so it may be it's a place they're visiting or conducting rituals at, rather than a place where they're living. And ritual seems to be a key aspect of the site because moving into the Bronze Age some four, four and a half thousand years ago,

we see evidence of burials taking place on the site. We see evidence of it being marked as a special place by rock art. There are cup and ring markings and other rock art that is seen as, at this time, as marking places that are special or sacred in some way. So it is, if you like, seen as an important hill, a sacred hill at this period. But that changes, and we see this changing use of the hill throughout its history. So come the Late Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago, we suddenly see the first evidence of substantial occupation on the site. This is when the first ramparts are built and the first real evidence of substantial occupation on the site. This is when the first ramparts are

built and the first real evidence of settlement. Not just an everyday farm, this is a major power centre, a place that is in contact with things happening in the rest of Europe. We see evidence of imported goods, we see evidence of the production of bronze metalwork, not just bangles and rings but things like swords, the attributes of warriors at this time. So this was a major centre, and then it falls from use. So it goes from being this highly occupied central place in the Late Bronze Age to being a place in most of the Iron Age that's visited but not lived in. So our excavations show that the ramparts are maintained and new ramparts are built but

there's no houses at this time. Settlement has moved out into the landscape, there's a whole series of small-scale hill forts, effectively villages in the surrounding landscape and it seems to me for the Iron Age people at this time is a place where they come to gather on high days and holy days, it's not a place where they live. Now that changes again in what's really the peak of our story, the focus of our story, which is the Roman period. And here we would call that the Roman Iron Age. We're not really part of the Roman world. We sit on the edge of the Roman world. The Romans come in and out. So Roman Iron Age is quite a nice term for it. And Trapraeum becomes a boom town at this period. People, we suspect power-hungry people, move back

onto the hill, become friends of Rome, become people who deal with the Roman world and that's perhaps a topic worth exploring in itself and it therefore becomes one of the major sites of this period, receiving the favour of Rome for hundreds of years. And even as Rome's power declines in the 5th century, they stay in contact with the folk in Traprain. It's an incredible long-lived story. Well Fraser, I was going to ask a bit more about that now because when you mention the Roman period in Britain, of course that spans several centuries. But it sounds like from what you're saying there, is it the same type of people as it were who are occupying Traprain law, this area of South East

Scotland, over those several centuries with interactions with the Romans? It's very hard to talk about who the people themselves are. What we don't see is any evidence of significant population change over the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. So 1000 BC up to the Roman period and beyond, there's no significant population shift that we can identify. What seems to change effectively is the society and the politics rather than the people. The centuries after Rome, we do begin to see changes. We see the spread of the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, into Southeastern Scotland, but we don't really see evidence of any large-scale population movement

over that period. So I think it is very much the changing society and the changing politics that is changing the nature of Dupre. So talk to me therefore about the discovery of this hoard. Go wild. The hoard was found just over 100 years ago. So there was a series of excavations on the hill running from 1914 to 1923 and they were led by the Society of Antiquities of Scotland and in particular directed by a gentleman called Alexander Curl. Curl has a good claim to be seen as the first professional archaeologist in Scotland. He was the first person to run organised surveys in the country. He was then director of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland which was the big archaeology museum and moved on to another museum job shortly

afterwards and Curl was a polymath. He worked across a whole range of material. He was also a really enthusiastic excavator and he spotted this hill, saw the ramparts and thought this had enormous potential to illuminate what was happening inside one of these hill forts. So he dug in 1914 and 1915 using labourers. This was the way at that time. So Curl would visit the site every few days to see what was happening. The Great War, the First World War intervened. And in fact, his labour force ended up in the trenches. Unfortunately, survived the experience.

And they restarted the excavations in 1919. Two weeks into that, Curl got a phone call telling him that they had found something. But because, of course, this wasn't the days of mobile phones, they had to go down to the public phone box in East Linton, the nearest village, to call the museum. So they were very guarded in what they said. And Curl simply didn't realise the importance of it. So he didn't jump in the car and rush out to site. He had things to do in town. He went out after lunch the next day. And his diary describes how he strolled up the hill taking the odd photograph not expecting the discovery would be anything spectacular. And you can then hear the excitement in his voice when you read his diary

entry. Imagine my surprise when I saw ranged against the side of the trench an amazing array of silver and there was this huge pile of silver discovered by the workmen. The first bit, it turns out, they'd been gently loosening the soil with picks and the first silver vessel turned up on the tip of the pick of the workmen. And they then carefully excavated round about and Curl was met by this magnificent array of silver on the trench edge. And what sorts of objects were uncovered via the pick, as it were? The first find was a small bowl, and they then very carefully excavated the remainder of it.

I mean, not that we would excavate it today, I should say that straight away. It was well excavated by the standards of the period, but we would of course be able to do far more with it today. Nevertheless, the workmen did a very good job. There's very little damage sustained by this stuff during excavation. Most of the damage was either done in antiquity because this material was broken up or it was done in burial. Silver does not survive well in the ground and so there's been a lot of corrosion. A lot of conservation work was needed to get it back to the glorious silver form you see it in today. And this silver, just to stress here, this isn't everyday silver. I'm not sure

you can really say everyday silver, but this silver in Roman times, this was really high level. This was really, really elite stuff that they uncovered, was it Fraser? Yeah, absolutely. We're looking at the late Roman period, so the late fourth, early fifth century. And at this point, one of the main roles of silver is as tableware, is as showing off at elite level dining, or is used in beauty treatment as a key part of feminine beauty, silver murrers and silver wash basins and so on. This is very much top level Roman society stuff. So not everybody would get access to silver of this quality. top level of Roman society stuff. So not everybody would get access to silver of this quality. Before we delve into the questions why, just kind of keeping on the early 20th

century a bit more, because of course this is around the time that Tutankhamun's tomb will be discovered a few years later. But it feels like this is another of these huge incredible discoveries that is made at the turn of the 20th century, or in the early 20th century. And it's in Britain, it's not in Egypt. This is in Britain that this huge hoard was discovered. Yeah, there's enormous excitement at the time. You can see that the discovery is reported a couple of days later in the Times and various other newspapers. This generates a lot of excitement about it. You see continental scholars writing in to find out more about it. Curl is giving lectures all around the country. There's enormous interest in this find.

And it also catches the popular imagination, both in the course of the restoration work and when replicas are made, but also things like cigarette cards. There's a series of cigarette cards are made of treasure trove. One of those includes Tutankhamen's treasure. One of those includes the treasure of Traprain.

It's seen very much in those terms. Yeah, the two Ts right there. I mean, Fraser, it therefore begs the question, why? What are the theories as to why all of this broken up, these fragments of Roman silver is at Traprain lore at the end of the Roman period? There's two avenues to take in this. One is why Traprain and one is why it's broken. Let's start with why it's broken. So this material is not pristine. If you're used to seeing the silver in the Louvre or the British Museum, our silver does not look like that.

This is Roman silver that's come to a bad end, if you like. It's been chopped, crushed and broken. And that's where the term hacksilver comes from. It gives you a sense of the treatment of this material. But hacksilver is also a bit pejorative. It sounds like it's of the treatment of this material. But hacksilver is also a bit pejorative. It sounds like it's met the blade of a barbarian axe and that was certainly Curl's interpretation. He thought this was the work of pirates because only barbarians could possibly break up this wonderful Roman silver, these fantastic pieces of art. But there are problems

in that interpretation, one of which comes from the site itself. Traprain had been a home of friendly people, people who were in good terms with the Romans for hundreds of years. It was, if you like, almost a client kingdom of Rome, beyond the edge of the empire. This was a friendly state that was dealing in good terms with Rome and was, if you like, making sure there was a buffer between the Roman world and the emerging problems to the north, the developing power of the Picts. So why would they suddenly turn on these people who had been dealing with for hundreds of years? And at exactly the same period, we see other rich Roman import goods coming off the site,

which don't look like loot. So one of the things we've been trying to do over the last decade or more now is look again at this whole question of hacksilver. Is this the work of barbarians or is there something else lying behind it? And that's really been one of the key angles, finding new aspects on hacksilver. How therefore, I mean keep going then,. So how could this hack silver be potentially valuable to the people of Trapain if it's not in a hostile relationship with Rome at that time? There's two things that we noticed when we began to look at the question of hack silver. I worked very closely on this with the late Kenneth Painter,

who was a great expert on gold and silver from the British Museum. And one of the things we noticed is we took all the evidence of hackilver since Curl. Curl knew very few examples of hacksilver. We can now plot over 60 hordes including Roman hacksilver. The first thing to notice is these do not just occur beyond the Roman Empire, they occur inside the Roman Empire as well, particularly in the northwestern provinces. So this is not just if you like a barbarian habit. It can't all be explained away as people looting and pillaging. The second point is the care that is taken over the cutting up of this material. This is being done in the first phase by skilled

metalsmiths who are using chisels and shears to divide this material very carefully. If it's being done by barbarians, they are obsessive compulsive barbarians because they're being very very careful in how they cut things up, for example into halves or quarters or sixths. So then you think well why the care? Why are they being so careful? To understand that you need to understand the basis of the Roman economy at this time. So a silver plate may be absolutely beautiful and covered in glorious decoration, but the basic value of it is the weight of silver. The art is lovely, but silver is the value.

Bullion is the basic value of silver and gold at this time. So many vessels are made to set weights of silver. If I have a dish weighing a pound and I chop it up into four, I automatically have four lumps of a quarter of a pound of silver. So what we discovered was that the first phase of hacking up of silver takes place inside the Roman world at times of economic stress, when the powerful people in the Roman world themselves are turning their portable possessions into bullion, into raw material. It may be a lovely silver plate, its basic value is raw material. So at a time of stress, you need bullion. So this Trapane treasure was more bullion than booty, shall we say, and the silver may well have been cut up before it even reached the people of Trapane.

This is what the people of Trapane wanted. They wanted was cut up before it even reached the people of Traprain. This is what the people of Traprain wanted. They wanted it cut up. Well, whether they wanted it or not, we don't know what their agency is involved in this. This is what the Roman world is providing. Right across the northwestern frontier at this time, silver is moving as bullion. This is less true in the Eastern Empire. So, for example, there's a series of rich burials at Kerch and Crimea, which have produced beautiful Roman silver bowls of exactly this period. Some of those silver bowls actually modified for suspension. They very clearly display items, not bullion. So you see different treatments in

different areas. Hack silver within the Roman world is mostly a phenomenon of the northwestern provinces. And we know that in both the 3rd the fourth centuries there's enormous economic turmoil in these areas. In the third century in particular in Gaul and Germany because of raids from across the frontier and then in the late fourth century Britain comes under turmoil as the empire begins to collapse. So you can see these moments where you can imagine a powerful Roman wants to convert their plates into cash, wants to make sure that they have the bullion to hand. But there's also then the question of why does it move beyond the frontier? So the basic motivation of hacking up your silver is economic, at times of stress, whether it's personal crisis, a time of your crops have failed, whether it's wider ranging crisis because

there's barbarians banging on the gates. Why does it move beyond the frontier? And this seems to be part of a deliberate Roman policy of subsidy. You're either paying people off or hiring soldiers. So we see literary references to gold and silver being used to effectively pay off barbarians beyond the Rhine and beyond the Danube. We also see silver being used to pay soldiers, both formal troops and people we would now call mercenaries, federati. So my suspicion, my strong suspicion with Traprain is that this stuff is coming north as payment for services rendered. Services in keeping the northern frontier secure, service in providing swords in the service of Rome. And we see that in some of the fittings from the site where there are bits

of late Roman military equipment from the other finds discovered. It almost sounds like a buffer zone kind of thing, Fraser. It's exactly that. The Roman world doesn't stop at the frontier. Hadrian's Wall is just a lie. The Romans almost have an interest beyond that. They often think they control the lands beyond that, but they can't just control that by scouting, for example, or by expeditions. They also need friendly faces beyond the frontier, and particularly in southeastern Scotland at this time, they seem to be developing it as a buffer zone. It's not just Traprain, although Traprain is the main focus. They are pumping other material into eastern Scotland, up the east coast to Fife to the Firth of Tay. Beyond that, there's a gap in Roman material and beyond that lies the Picts.

And it's almost certainly tied into the emerging power of the Picts as a threat for the Roman world. So they are trying to develop friends who are effectively a cushion between the Romans and the Picts beyond. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas.

Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. Do we know at all why or how the people of Trapane Law, for instance, would have wanted to use this cut-up silver once they'd received it? Yeah, we do. We've got really good evidence for that because I said the initial steps of this hacking was being done very carefully. One of the things I spent more days than is sensible doing was staring down a microscope at the cut-up edges. So not for me, the glamour of the art, I was looking at the little broken edges, trying to work out how they were chopped up. their little broken edges, trying to work out how they were chopped up. And what you see is different phases of tool marks and different degrees of care being taken. And from that you can argue these

things are being cut up in different times and places. Some of these people are trained metalsmiths within the Roman world, some are trained metalsmiths beyond the Roman world, some are not metalsmiths at all. They're just breaking up silver. So we can see that some of the silver lives several lives. It's probably moving around quite a bit before it gets to Traprain. Some of it is coming directly to Traprain. Now on this stuff from Traprain, we can see a very distinctive form of tool mark. It's almost like somebody's nibbled along the edge with a small tool. What they're doing, I think, is creating little strips of silver that they break off and put into a crucible for melting it down. A crucible is just a ceramic pot for melting metal. When we analyse those crucibles, when we analyse the surface of them using extra fluorescence,

we can see that there is silver in some of the crucibles from the site so we can prove that silver is being worked on Traprain log. We then start opening the drawers in the collection and we find both small and large silver items from the site. Tiny pins and finger rings and grand silver neck chains. Now silver at this period is something new. In the world beyond the frontier they didn't have silver. So this exotic Roman metal coming in almost as an emblem of the emperor's treatment of you, their desire to deal with you, is a marker for these

people. A new metal, an exotic metal with imprint of Rome on it. So silver has a power far beyond what we would imagine it has today. I'll definitely go back to that in a bit. And just before we really delve into some of these particular artefacts that were discovered, you mentioned that they have the imprint of Rome. And one other thing I'd love to ask is, do we know from where in the Roman Empire some of this silver came from? Because I believe you've also done a bit of work around this too. Yeah, that's always been one of the big questions. So when Curl published his material, he thought at the time the connections were to Gaul and perhaps to Rome itself, because there were very few finds of silver at that date from Britain. Really, discoveries

since the Second World War have revealed that Britain was a land rich in silver. Britannia, south of the Wall, was a land rich in silver. But the question of where the silver was coming from, where was it being made, has always been problematic. And this is mainly because Roman silversmiths are drawing from a very consistent decorative pool. So some of the vessels that we find in Traprain or in other hordes like Milton Hall in Suffolk, you find exactly the same vessels in Surrey. Similar styles right across the Roman world. So style doesn't help us. There's been loads of arguments over artistic developments, but they actually don't help us pinpoint where this stuff's coming from.

What does help us is science. And what we've been trying to do is look at the silver and also look at the other things associated with the silver. The technique that can help us understand this is a technique called lead isotope analysis. Silver very rarely occurs native. It's not like gold. So gold is discovered uncorrupted in nature. This is very rare for silver. Most silver is extracted from lead.

So you smelt rock to create lead and then extract the silver from the lead. So it's a two-stage process. Because it's come out of lead, little traces of the lead survive and we can measure the different isotopes of lead and these isotopes help us to work out the geological age of the lead and therefore where it comes from and different lead in different parts of the world is of different geological age. So the isotopes are a fingerprint, they allow us to see where the silver is coming from. Now we've not yet been able to get the funding together to analyze the silver. If there's any wealthy listeners in the background it would be delighted to hear from them. What we have been able to do as a

trial really is to look at the solder. Solder is the glue that holds some of these vessels together and solder is an alloy of lead and tin. But the other reason I started with solder, it wasn't just traditional Scottish meanness. It was also because one of the big questions is, of course, silver gets recycled. And if you recycle silver from different sources, you mess up the fingerprint. Whereas solder is very unlikely to be recycled. This is just the glue. So the chances are you take the local glue

and use it to stick the silver together. So we analysed all the solder we could find in the hoard, which was five or six fragments, and it doesn't match the Mediterranean. It doesn't come from Eastern Med, it doesn't come from Spain or these other great sources of silver and lead. It comes from Western Germany or from Britain

itself. So it shows that the silver is being assembled in the provinces and the chances are it's being, some of it at least, is being made in the provinces. So the next clue will be to look at silver once we get some money together because colleagues working on a big hoard from Hungary have been applying this kind of same technique and they've got excellent results pinpointing particular ore sources. So that's really going to be the next, I think, exciting stage in the development of the story of telling where the silver comes from is revealing the workshops through lead isotope analysis. And the clues already are fascinating. Already, and I love the fact, once again, as so many times in this podcast and so many episodes gone by, how ancient history is still alive and kicking, how we're still going to

find so much more thanks to science and in the years ahead. I mean, so let's now delve into some of these artefacts proper, Fraser. As you've mentioned already, a wide range of silver vessels. I mean, what types of vessels do we have from the hoard? There's a couple of things worth saying. One is the time depth. So we think the hoard is being buried in the middle of the 5th century, but the earliest vessels date 100 to 150 years before that. So it shows the hoard is accumulating over a period of time. And that suggests people, entrepreneurs, dealing with

the Roman world receiving this material over a long period. Because antique silver is relatively unusual in the Roman world. Stuff gets recycled and reused very quickly so we're seeing a long build-up. Within that build-up the two main categories of vessels are either tableware, so things that come from elite dining services, or what you'd call toilet silver and these are things related very much to feminine ideas of beauty. So the wealthy woman of the household would be using silver as part of her washing and beauty regime. And the fact you're using silver, of course, is a key part of showing your status.

And I'd love, therefore, to delve into the decoration, because on many of these vessels, don't we, we get just such an incredible amount of decoration. What sorts of decoration are we talking about? You see both pagan items, if you like, figures straight from Roman mythology. So we see figures such as Hercules and Pan and Bacchus and Aneriades, a sea nymph. There's a glorious fluted basin, which is a basin for hand washing or for washing yourself, with a sea nymph riding on a sea panther.

It's an absolutely magnificent piece of work. Then you also see Christian items. So we see the earliest pieces of Christian iconography that we have from Scotland, whether that's emblems with the Cairo symbol, the first letters of Christ's name in Greek, but also a wonderful flagon with a series of biblical scenes from the old and the new testament so there's a real mixture of material confirming again this mixture of sources from which the material is coming well you mentioned that flagon there that is something that i'd love to really focus in on and i'd love you to take it away with all of the detail to really describe this flagon because of all the objects this one

it seems about the trend is not a fragment this seems to be a huge thing and it is so beautiful when you see images of it what is it we should be a little cautious because it looks lovely today but it has been stuck back together oh okay fair enough and this has been in the case with a lot of the silver from the hoard it was very heavily restored at the time now having said that all the component parts are there so this is a piece that had been chopped. The neck was taken off, the rim was taken off, and the vessel was chopped in half.

But then the whole vessel came north, and this allowed the restoration work to take place to restore it to, effectively, its original form. It's about 20 centimetres high or so, a little bulbous pear-shaped thing. So not massive, but beautifully decorated. Beads around the foot hammered out of the silver, gilding applied to various places, and two main friezes of decoration. The big frieze, the bulk of the story, is aspects of early

Christianity. Two scenes from the Old Testament, two scenes from the New Testament. And one of these scenes shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the snake offering tempting words. One of these scenes shows the flight from Israel with Moses striking the rock of Horeb to bring forth water for the Israelites. So two key elements within the Old Testament story. And then within the New Testament story, there's a very clear image, which is the three magi, the wise men, bringing gifts to Mary and the Christ child. A beautifully depicted scene with the wise men in their ornate robes and their typically certain caps, and Mary sitting in a very nicely defined, beautifully depicted chair with the Christ child in her lap. And then there's a fourth scene that has always proved mysterious. Mysterious because

it's damaged. A handle has been removed from this flag and that seems to have caused damage to the decoration. And opinions have varied enormously. Some people thought it represented the betrayal of Christ, so the story of Judas. Some people thought it represented St Peter denying he knew Christ. Some people thought it represented the miracle of the quails in the desert, which is an Old Testament story. The basic problem with that is that there are no quails, so it's a quail-free interpretation, which is a fairly major flaw. So opinion has been highly divided. We were really lucky to get the skills of Joseph Engelmann, the late Joseph Engelmann, who was professor in Christian archaeology at the University of Bonn for many years,

and one of the great scholars of Christian art, late antique art. And he thinks what it shows is a scene of the Ascension. You have these figures standing there in a gesture of amazement, as far as we can see, and the central damaged figure, who's clearly caught in motion if you like and he's pointing at the ground seems to represent an angel and there's a scene there's a

in the description of the ascension a messenger in white appears as if by magic and says you know christ will reappear at this point so engelman argues i think it's very convincing this is a depiction of the ascension so on this flagon we both, so we have the two key moments in Christ's life, his birth and his ascension to heaven. So that's the main story. The frieze up above it, a really narrow little frieze up above it, has often been called just decorative. It's got sheep and buildings and vegetation and so on. But what Joseph Engelman was able to say is this also links into the story. The building isn't just a building, the building is a stable.

This is a stable from Bethlehem where Christ is born and you then have badly damaged figures of shepherds and sheep who were tending their flocks when they became aware of the birth of Christ. And you also have depicted in one corner a star, the star of Bethlehem drawing the wise men from the east. So you have this really nice evocation of key aspects of the Christian story and linking between the two friezes. It's a really complicated piece of art.

Really complicated, but extraordinary that it survives and that you've been able to piece it together and deduce so much from it. I mean, thank you for explaining all that, because it did really feel like all that detail we should definitely go into it it is amazing but away from the slightly bigger objects as it were because smaller items too within the horde they're smaller but size isn't everything with the horde because it really does seem these are some of the most extraordinary items when we focus in on the smaller ones that survive. Absolutely. One of the key things is the coins. I guess coins are the kind of thing you might expect to find hoarded. They're often hoarded in great numbers. Intraplane, we have five. So it's not exactly a fantastic coin hoard. And they are tiny. They're 10 millimetres across, a little thing's called siliquid. And yet there is something funny about them.

Siliquae are not meant to be 10mm across, they're about twice that size when they're minted. So these are what are known as clipped siliquae. People have trimmed the edges off the silver, nibbling away a little bit to silver, but always being keen to leave the face of the emperor behind. So the coins still have literally a face value. Now if you want to start an argument among coin specialists, if you lob a Clip Siliquid in, they will argue happily for days on end about it. But bits of a consensus have begun to emerge in recent years. The first is that this is a very British habit. Clip Siliquid are vanishingly rare in any other province outside Britain and when you do find them they tie into Brits abroad. So a number of them are connected with the movement of soldiers leaving

Britain in 409 under the usurper Constantine III and he campaigns through bits of the near continent and where he campaigns you find hoards with these clipsipped silicoids. These are coins that have come from Britain to the continent. They are otherwise a very British habit. Why are they doing it? Well normally people see clipping as fraudulent. You're trying to sneak bits of silver off a coin and on an individual coin this makes no difference at all. If you clip thousands of coins then it's actually a significant amount of silver. There was a great hoard of tens of thousands of silicae from Hoxham in Suffolk, and Peter Guest worked on this material, and he calculated that you'd have got a couple of kilograms of silver from all the clipping they were doing. So it's a significant resource you're getting. But is it really fraudulent? Because what they're doing with this stuff, it seems, is making new coins. We find copies of the Silicway in Britain at this time. And there's a

plausible argument that what you're seeing is the remains of the government of Roman Britain desperately trying to sustain some kind of market economy after the Roman world has washed its hands of this troublesome island. So silver stops flowing into Britain pretty much around about 409. When Constantine III takes the best bits of the army out of Britain, silver stops coming back to Britain. Once he's killed, silver does not come back to Britain. The Roman Empire does not try to re-engage with Britain. But of course there was an existing power structure here, an existing government structure, and one of the arguments is the people in that government structure are trying to keep coinage going, and they're doing that with a finite resource of

silver. They're clipping down these coins in order to mint new silver. The concentration of this material is very much in the civilian zone. It's in the south and east of the country where the towns and the bigger villas are. And that gives us another clue. These clipped silicae from Traprain are not telling us about the frontier. They're showing us relationships to the world further south. People in Traprain are players in a world beyond the frontier. They are dealing with groups beyond just in their immediate zone. It's wonderful.

As we start to wrap up with all of these artefacts that there were from the hoard, how much it tells us about, I guess, the nature of Britain at that very, in many times, quite a murky time, isn't it? That early 5th century

that we don't know too much about. This hoard is helping shine more light on it. Absolutely. I think it's one of the great benefits of archaeological evidence is that you can cast light into the dark shadows. And particularly here, it's by going back to an apparently well-known find. Treprane's been out to the ground for over 100 years. Curl's publication of it is exemplary. It's a fantastic publication. But his focus was on the original objects.

When you begin to ask, so for him the hacking was an inconvenience. That's why he saw it as the work of barbarians. He wasn't really that interested in the hacking. For me, the hacking is a key part of the story because it reveals stories about the Roman economy and how it deals with times of trouble. But in particular, it deals with the way that looks at the way Rome is dealing with people beyond its frontier. And in Britain, in Ireland, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Denmark, silver, hacked up silver is the way you're dealing with these groups beyond the frontier. And in particularly in Britain and Ireland, it's silver, not gold that matters. On the continent, they're interested in gold as well.

In Britain, they're pretty much ignoring gold. Silver is the stuff that really matters to them. And this becomes the power symbol, the raw material of choice for the emerging early medieval kingdoms, recycling the silver into prestige goods north of the old wall. Perhaps it might be a bit difficult question to ask we start wrapping up but it's one that comes to mind because sometimes when someone mentions the word hoard and i think of the corbridge hoard you get an idea that someone's just

trying to save what they've got by putting it all together in this hoard and then obviously they don't come back and get it and it's found there by later generations. But with Traprain, you mentioned how we've got artefacts over several centuries there. Do we know why it's a hoard, as it were? Why is all of this stuff together at Traprain? Why is it left in this state? That's one of the really tricky questions to answer. And for any particular hoard, it's really difficult to answer

why is it gathered and why is it left there. In the case of Traprain, I think in that sense it's a treasury. It's material that's been gathered together that represents the collected wealth of the powerful people on the site or one particular sept of the people on the site. And it's gathered over several generations and every so often they'll draw on it to recycle, to melt down, to make wonderful silver chains, perhaps to give as gifts to clients, building their own social relations. Silver becomes the oil that lubricates the social wheels, giving gifts of silver objects to other people. The question of why it's buried is intriguing, but also really hard to answer.

It's easy to think that people bury treasure because they're under threat. This is the standard view of hordes. That may be true, but if that was the true, it wasn't an existential threat for the site because the site keeps going. This hoard is buried in the middle of the 5th century. There's activity on the site through the rest of the 5th century and beyond. So it's not a catastrophic attack on the site. It may be a very personal reason. It may be this particular family are heading off on a raid or a tour somewhere and they don't come back. So I think with the Traprain hoard, it's likely it was buried for safekeeping. But this is not a universal explanation for hoards. There are three other hacksilver hoards from Scotland, and in each of those, excavation at the fine spot tells a very different story. Each of those comes from beside an ancient monument.

So there's a hoard from Golcross in Aberdeenshire, which is buried between two stone circles. There's a hoard from Norrie's Law in Fife, which is buried beside an ancient burial cairn. And these are both Pictish hoards with Roman hacksilver in them. But the one I really like is a horde from Dersay in Fife. This is purely Roman silver. It dates about 100 years or so before Traprain. It's the earliest evidence of hacksilver beyond the frontier. It's the first evidence for hacksilver being used as a way of dealing with barbarians.

It was found in a metal detecting rally. The detectists told us about it, and we went out to excavate the find spot, recovering more silver, but critically recovering a context. So this hoard from Dersay was buried, not just in a random field, but between two important monuments or sites.

It was buried to one side of a peat bog, to the other side, two standing stones, two old standing stones. The standing stones are by this stage already ancient monuments, places that would have had stories and the myths and the memories attached to them. Peat bogs are like the wishing wells of prehistory. They are sacred places where you deposit things in order to contact the gods. So this was not just being placed and being buried for safety. This was being buried in a special, most likely a sacred place, as some kind of offering. So on the one hand, you have Traprain being buried, I think, for safety,

but other silver is being buried as offerings, as sacred possessions. So we shouldn't just assume hoards implies trouble. Hoard can also imply offering and the deliberate sacrifice of wealth as a way of winning favour with the gods, of marking major life events, of showing what a rich and powerful person you are. Well, there you go, Fraser. This has been an absolutely great chat. I mean, we've only just scratched the surface of the Trapane treasure. We didn't talk about the panthers or the jewellery. There's so much more, but people can learn all about that

from your new book on this, which is called? It's called The Late Roman Silver Treasure from Traprain Law. He has to think very rapidly there. It is, it has been due to come out for ages, been badly held up by COVID and pandemic and all kinds of things. But I am assured it is imminently out.

It's off at the press just now, so it should be out very soon. Fantastic. Well, Fraser, it only goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Fraser Hunter talking all about the Traprain treasure. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, if you'd like more ancients content in the meantime, you can, of course, subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week, I write a bit of a blurb for that newsletter explaining what's been happening in Team Ancient

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