Greatest honour of my career so far. As founding editor I'm proud to announce @edinburghup.bsky.social Studies in Late Roman History. The world's first book series exclusively dedicated to the core domain of Late Antiquity. Like to discuss proposals or manuscripts? Reach out!
tinyurl.com/dujjeuth
Had a marvelous time today giving a fully seated lunch lecture at the museum about the Early Viking Age trading site of Köpingen, which has been completely unknown in scholarship abroad — I am to change that, with renewed fieldwork hopefully coming in autumn, pending funding! ⚱️
A single sheet document containing the text of a will in Old English.
'Wynflaed's Will', the earliest surviving woman's will in British history, made in the 940s. Its bequests include tapestries, jewelry, bedclothes and books for her daughter Æthelflæd.
Cotton Ch VIII 38
searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/040-...
I’m organising a Faculty panel on AI in Arts & Humanities, hence request for opinions. I’m also aware I’m coming at AI from a critical digital media perspective, which means I may not have an entirely balanced perspective (Neo Luddites unite!)
Using multi-isotope analysis @samleggs22.bsky.social’s Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social focused on the role of food and diet and its link to mobility in early medieval Britain and Ireland.
media.leverhulme.ac.uk/feature/sleg...
#InternationalWomensDay
If there was a tongue on that crossbar, it would be structurally similar to some Late Roman buckles. But it's also possible that this is a sliding bar strap adjuster, which would make it function less like a buckle, and more like the Sutton Hoo Dummy Buckle, which has a fake hinge and a fake tongue!
Zurich, St. Peter's Church, excavation 1970/71. Plan and grave goods of the heavily disturbed male grave 141, dated to around 600 AD, including parts of the belt (1, 2), seax (3), spatha (4), and associated belt set (5–8). Iron (1 silver-inlaid). 3 and 4 scale 1:4; other finds scale 1:2; grave plan approx. scale 1:20
Intriguing buckle here, from a circa 600AD burial in Zürich. The buckle plate appears to have a single lug, bent around the loop, which isn't that strange. The odd thing is the crossbar inside the loop.
Well, that's a little better, now that I've deleted the Adobe software on my computer.
How do I make AI go away? So many apps/programs are trying to force feed me.
I would not like AI to summarise. I do not want an assistant. I have not been thinking about whether AI tools will improve my productivity.
I just want to read a PDF.
A display of the grave goods, featuring a he chainmail shirt, a helmet on a stand, a long sword, small gold ornaments, and various metal, glass, and ceramic objects, all arranged against a dark background.
The early medieval burial from Gammertingen, 6th century AD.
The high-ranking warrior died in his early 30s and was buried with a Byzantine helmet (a so-called Spangenhelm), his weapons, and his mail armour, which consisted of about 45,000 iron rings!
📷Landesmuseum Württemberg
🏺
I'm stuck in Dublin airport with a delayed flight, so let me tell you about the lecture I gave this afternoon to my 2nd-year group of Law, History & Celtic Studies students who are studying early Irish law. We were looking at a piece of legislation called Cáin Adomnáin, also sometimes called
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This is interesting. Lots of distribution maps for belt sets and buckles, arriving just as I needed to think about the distribution of late Roman buckle hinges!
The full PDF *is* available, although the website suggests otherwise!
This is the content that I came here for.
Note: These aren't illustrations of buckles. Instead, they are stylised representations of the hinge components, and how they relate to each other.
I'm surprised by how many there are, and I'm interested to see whether these hinge formats match up with typologies based on the style of the buckle, or if there are other factors involved in their distribution during the Early Medieval/Migration period.
A grid of diagrams, each one is a stylised buckle with a different hinge format, based on Late Roman/Early Medieval examples.
I was thinking, how many ways *can* a buckle hinge be organised? I was thinking, there can't be that many...
Looking at Late Roman and Early Medieval buckles, this is probably almost complete. A few of the tongueless examples are hypothetical, but the rest are based on extant buckles.
3x bracteates
3x gold bracteates on display in the National Museum, Oslo, dating between the 5th and 6th c.
Discovered at Fredrikstad and Bjørnerud, in the Østfold and Vestfold respectively
Two even feature inscriptions!
The 4-lug plate could have been recycled from another hinged object, but I think it is probably an intentional design, influenced by Late Roman and/or Merovingian pinned hinges, perhaps. And certainly different to the rectangular buckle plate seen on similar Visigothic buckles.
Belt buckle. Gilt and silvered bronze and glass paste, Visigothic Aquitaine, first half (?) of the 6th century. Found in 1868 in the Visigothic necropolis of Tressan, Provence.
Here's an unusual buckle. Nothing complicated - the hinge consists of 2 lugs, bent over to hold the loop and tongue - typical for a Visigothic buckle. What makes it unusual is the buckle plate, which has 4 lugs, with the outer two being decorative, not functional.
On February 27, Laury Sarti will discuss "The Frankish Kingdom and the Eastern Empire: Rethinking Their Interconnections from a Medieval Perspective" for our joint @HarvardMedieval lecture. Join us! 12:00 pm ET on Zoom. Register: maryjahariscenter.org/events/the-f...
So my procrastination is now being *encouraged*?
I'm fascinated by the 'mythic landscape' of post-Roman Britain, and the way that barrows and other features were repurposed, while other things were abandoned.
Did they imagine terrors in the mists around a stone circle., or might they see a place where the gods are close?
Forget the asceticism, they're the Dessert Fathers, now.
The garnets were long gone by the time Theophilus was writing, in the 12thC, but he describes many techniques that descend from the corpus (or corpse?) of Germanic metalwork, indicating that the church absorbed some of the manufacturing systems.
Strangest of all, when the style does decline, it is connected to the general decline in furnished burials...but it isn't as simple as a newly Christian elite casting off barbaric trappings.
Gold and garnet cloisonné becomes associated with female dress and burial, as well as reliquaries...etc.
A decorative style that originates in Late Antiquity, in the eastern Mediterranean and around the Black Sea, and is carried west during the early Migration era, strongly associated with male burial, until the style declines in the 7th century.
I'm not sure. The gold/garnet combo had such a long history in NW Europe, and by the 7thC it might have been considered very local. The garnets came from distant places, but it's not clear if the owners of the objects knew that.
The Harpole pendant, showing the hinge components off-set, with a gap on the left. This is unusual for hinges from Antiquity and the Early Medieval.
The Harpole pendant is an interesting hinge, presumably half of some other hinged object. Almost all hinges from Antiquity/Early Medieval are arranged symmetrically, but the Harpole example is offset, with a gap on the left hand side.
Necklace from Harpole, 7th century. Two pictures. On the left, the finds, arranged as a necklace. On the left, an illustration of the same. The central pendant is a repurposed half-hinge, in gold and garnets.
I'm always amazed by the persistence of this style of adornment and burial. In the 7th century, the people who performed the Harpole burial would have recognised the objects in the Wolfsheim burial without any difficulty, although the meanings attached to them might have changed over time.
