Category: sean-williams - Part 15

The EES Archives Explored in London

EES - Ann in the lecture/meeting room

Heritage Key loves the tales woven by the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society, as mentioned at their fundraising afternoon earlier this month. So much were we interested in the project, which aims to preserve and digitise the society’s rich recorded history, that we decided to take a look for ourselves. Spread over three separate mews in a backstreet of central London, the only indicator you’ve reached EES HQ is a tiny plaque on the door and some obscured old relics in the window. Yet the minimal decoration and creeping vines embody an eccentricity of EES’ earliest explorers, looking more like an artist’s studio than an archaeological base.

EES - Heritage Key gets a tour through the archives

After meeting deputy director Chris Naunton, Heritage Key is shown round the EES’ modest working space, comprising an office, lecture room, library, and, of course, space for the archives. Which are vast: they seem to take up almost every shelf in the three buildings. The library is as comprehensive as it is labyrinthine: Chris reckons it must be one of the best Egyptology collections in Europe. The library’s greatest asset may turn out to be its downfall unless funding arrives soon, though: its expanding volume means work is needed on the archives fast to free up more room. The money to carry out such vital work has dried up since, much to the society’s dismay, the British Academy controversially withdrew funding three years ago as they demanded the EES branch out beyond Dynastic Egypt’s huge history. And Chris admits the society has struggled to find the cash to keep on their excellent work.

Above the library’s books stand photos of one of the society’s biggest benefactors, Ricardo Caminos. The Argentine was one of Egypt’s most prolific experts, his work during the Nubian rescue campaign of the 1960s recording hundreds of ancient inscriptions since lost forever thanks to the Aswan Dam. Caminos lived in one of the three mews, evident in its still-present bedroom and kitchen, which the EES bought following his death in 1992.

Heritage in Danger

J D S Pendlebury

Chris shows us some of the notebooks, photographs and negatives from the EES Lucy Gura archives. Each one is fascinating, and many show places now lost to the aforementioned Aswan works. The fundraiser of a fortnight ago was a success, Chris says, but much more money is needed to secure these precious items’ futures. Though much is labelled and filed, half have no archive-standard wallets – and many glass negatives, though digitised, are unmovable thanks to their precarious situation. Thanks to a lack of subsidiaries the society is looking at a funding deficit, and it needs your help.

Heritage Key leaves determined to help Chris, director Patricia Spencer and their cause. It would be a tragedy if the EES’ archives were lost forever; they’re the best links we have to the history of Egyptology. Work by Petrie, Carter, Naville and many more are at risk, and we want to help. We’ll be searching the archives soon, and asking which treasures you want us to unlock for the EES. If you’ve got any ideas, leave them in the comments box below, or via our contact page, and we’ll get back to you right away. The archives are more than just pretty pictures – they’re a vital step back to the glorious age of discovery which saw most of Egypt‘s incredible treasures surface for the first time in thousands of years. Get involved – and help Heritage Key unlock the wonders!

Also, look out for an exclusive video with Stephen Quirke of the Petrie Museum, as he takes us on a tour of the museum’s magnificent records – Coming soon!

Support the Lucy Gura Archive Fund

It’s a worthy cause, and one vital to the study and celebration of Egyptology. If we lose the EES’ archives, along with other prominent archives in Oxford, Geneva and further afield, we risk turning the light off on the Era of Discovery.If you wish to make a much-needed donation to the Lucy Gura archive, just visit the EES’ support page, follow the link to make ‘a donation’, then select ‘The Lucy Gura Archive Fund. You money will be saving some of Egyptology’s greatest records.

Ur’s Ritual Deaths Far More Violent than Thought

New research from an American university may have blown apart a 90 year-old secret of the Sumerian city of Ur. CT scans of crushed skulls from the 4,500 year-old city-state appear to show that palace attendants met a brutal death at the hands of spiked weapons, rather than the tranquil poisoning previously mooted.

Research carried out by British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1920 discovered a 2,000 burial-strong cemetery, laden with jewels and gold treasures. Their elaborate attire showed they were various courtiers of the time – warriors, handmaids, etc – and seemed to prove human sacrifice was prevalent in the city. Yet many of the skulls were crushed by the weight of soil, leading Woolley to conclude they were led into burial chambers before drinking lethal poison.

“Its almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand.”

The latest evidence, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum, pieced together two skulls, of a man and woman. Holes in both, the team concluded, could only have been made while the person was living and the bone was strong. Thus Ur’s courtiers must have met a gruesome demise; their heads stoved in with sharp instruments such as pikes.

Getting to know your Ziggurat

Attendants at the city-state, in modern-day south east Iraq, had long been thought to have been killed upon (or before) the death of a royal. Athropologist Janet M. Monge, who led the research, attempts to explain why courtiers went so willingly to their deaths: “Its almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand,” she says. “But in the culture these were positions of great honor, and you lived well in the court, so it was a trade-off. Besides, the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.”

Ur is thought to have been one of the first cities in the world. And it may just have come through its latest bloodshed, as an air base protecting it from looting in the wake of the Iraq War was recently handed back to the Iraqi government. Yet it’s only the tip of the iceberg lurking beneath the Middle-Eastern nation’s cultural heritage: items are still being stolen from museums, and the US Army has come under severe criticism for its failure to prevent the destruction of precious sites such as Babylon.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology recently opened a new long-term exhibition, Iraq’s Ancient Past – which brings many details of the first expeditions to the ancient city of Ur vividly to life through field notes, photographs and archival documents, and more than 220 extraordinary ancient artefacts unearthed at the excavation. The exhibition looks at the present and to the future as well, exploring the ongoing story of scientific inquiry, research and discovery made possible by those excavations, and the pressing issues around the preservation of Iraq’s cultural heritage today.

New York Shrine Returns to Temple of Karnak, Egypt Today

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A lighter chapter to the ongoing issue of repatriating Egypt’s treasures will close today, as an ancient shrine fragment touches down on Egyptian soil after a year of international co-operation. The red granite chunk, part of a shrine, or ‘naos’, was bought by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from a private collector last October, with the sole intent to send it back to its home nation.

Today sees the fragment of the shrine, which commemorates King Amenemhat I, the first pharaoh of the 12th Dynasty (1991 – 1962 BC), finally return to Egypt after a combined effort between the museum and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. SCA chief Zahi Hawass praised the move as a “great deed”, stressing it is the first time a museum has bought an object with the expressed purpose of repatriating it. The shrine the piece belongs to can now be found in the Ptah Temple of Karnak, Luxor.

This is the first time a museum has bought an ancient artefact with the sole intent to repatriate it.

This episode is a high note in Dr Hawass‘ long-running campaign to repatriate thousands of Egypt’s most treasured items. The Met will certainly be on better terms with the SCA than Paris’ Louvre, whose experts were recently banned from excavation in Egypt following the ‘theft’ of objects from a Theban tomb. The famous French museum has since promised to return the items. And Dr Hawass is still pursuing the British Museum and Berlin’s Neues Museum, over their continued refusal to return the Rosetta Stone and Bust of Nefertiti respectively.

Got something you want Heritage Key to report – or do you just want to get something off your chest? Don’t hesitate to contact us either via the comments box below, our contact page or by emailing me directly.

Stonehenge is Best British Site, Say UK Kids

Stonehenge Lomo

You might expect the youth of today to be more interested in Britain’s modern icons – but what happens when you ask the kids about their favourite sites? A survey of the nation’s youngsters, compiled by budget hotel chain Travelodge, has revealed Stonehenge to be the country’s top tourist spot, closely followed by Hadrian’s Wall. The prehistoric Salisbury stone circle predates contemporary entries on the top ten list, such as the London Eye, by over 5,000 years. The capital’s giant ferris wheel could only muster third place, while Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North made eighth.

Edinburgh Castle is the only landmark located outside England that made the list – there was no mention of sites in Wales or Northern Ireland. Mark Kemp, Travelodge’s Reservations Director, tells People: “It’s great news that the young are keen to preserve Britain’s heritage. With the UK the top holiday destination for Britons this year, youngsters have the opportunity to find out what makes Great Britain so great.”

Hadrian's Wall, near Housesteads

The list in full is: 1. Stonehenge 2. Hadrian’s wall 3. The London Eye 4. Edinburgh Castle 5. Buckingham Palace 6. Tower of London 7. White Cliffs of Dover 8. Angel of the North 9. Blackpool Tower 10. St. Paul’s Cathedral.

It’s unlikely the poll shows Britain’s youth is keen to preserve historic monuments; more a propensity for Wikipedia. Yet the poll will be a boost for Stonehenge‘s custodians English Heritage, who have come under fire recently for their controversial plans for a new visitor centre, located some 1 miles away from the famous landmark. Stonehenge is rarely out of the news, with the dramatic discovery of Bluestonehenge, another nearby stone circle, announced earlier this month.

Second-placed Hadrian’s Wall was a stone, timber and turf partition built by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD, to keep marauding Scots tribes out of Roman Britain. It was the most heavily fortified border in the empire on its inception. It spanned 73 miles across what is now northern England, and was the most formidable of four similar barriers.

Early Man Did Have Sex with Neanderthals

 Spitzer Hall of Human Origins - Neanderthal diorama One of the world’s leading geneticists claims modern man and Neanderthals were more than mere neighbours thousands of years ago. Swedish expert Professor Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is sure the two species had sex during their 10-12,000-year coexistence some 30,000 years ago.

Yet Paabo, who made the claim during a conference in New York, is unsure as yet whether the cross-copulating led to children – and whether those children would have been infertile, as is the case in the offspring of lions and tigers, or horses and zebras.

Prof. Paabo, named among the world’s most influential hundred people by TIME magazine in 2007, is hoping his questions will be answered by his forthcoming analysis of the Neanderthal genome.

Fossils containing DNA from both humans and Neanderthals have been found in

“Did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?”

recent years, leading many to concur with Prof. Paabo’s interbreeding theory. Yet studies of Neanderthal genes have thus far proved the pair’s genetic make-ups to be wildly different. Prof. Paabo hopes his work will provide an answer to this mystery.

“What I’m really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?” Prof. Paabo tells the Sunday Times. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite vigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence.” His work is due to be published shortly. It’s not surprising Neanderthals found a taste for those outside their species if a recent paper from the University of Liverpool is to be believed: its experts claim Neanderthals lost out in the evolutionary war due to a seed-spreading sex obsession, rather than the monogamy of their human cousins.

‘Atlantis and Mini-Stonehenge’ found in Devon

Tottiford Reservoir

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a prehistoric city, buried beneath a reservoir in southern England. The ‘mini-Atlantis’ was unearthed after water levels were lowered at the old Tottiford Reservoir, near Moretonhampstead – and comes complete with a Stonehenge-esque ceremonial site.

Archaeologists observing the city are justifiably astonished at its existence.

Jane Marchand, of Dartmoor National Park Authority, describes the find and its Avebury-like credentials: “It’s a proper ceremonial site – we’ve also got ten burial cairns there. It was probably a real community centre. There are a lot of earlier recordings in this area of polished stone axes and so on – and I’ve always wondered why they were there. This place could have been the focus for all that activity.

“Most of the stones we found would have been put in place around 4,000 years ago but some of the flint is much earlier,” Marchand adds, “going right back to the Mesolithic period around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago.”

The idea of a British Atlantis may be romantic, but it’s far from original. The medieval East Anglian town of Dunwich has long been lauded as the UK’s answer to Plato‘s famous lost city, having lurched into the North Sea some 700 years ago. You can check out some of the better-known and wilder Atlantis theories right here at Heritage Key, with our interactive map.

The Sun Rises on Stonehenge Virtual

Here are the stunning first pictures of our exciting Stonehenge Virtual, as it reached the early stages of its development. You can see from these pictures how quickly work is moving forward on our own famous stones, where you’ll be able to explore the wonder of Britain’s best-loved ancient landmark. Our builders are certainly putting Stonehenge Virtual together a lot faster than their Neolithic counterparts!

Thanks to some serendipidous virtual weather, you can see the midsummer sun weave its way across Stonehenge Virtual’s horizon. Maybe we’ll have 36,500 people flocking to our stones in celebration soon!

But there’s much more to our virtual experience than the stone circle itself. Stonehenge Virtual will feature its own special visitor centre, lush Wiltshire scenery and wildlife, and the chance to visit some of Stonehenge’s prehistoric celebrities. How about a guided druid tour? Or exploring fierce warriors who may have been king of the monument, such as the enigmatic Amesbury Archer? Stonehenge Virtual is taking shape at an astonishing pace, and we’ll be keeping you updated on its progress regularly. If you have any queries, advice or opinions about our reconstruction, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Learn about druids, warriors and the people who built this fearsome landmark

Our Virtual Experience is based on information and advice from Stonehenge’s best experts, and our quest to give you the latest news, views and personalities from England’s cultural epicentre never ends. We’ve got the latest from Bluestonehenge, interviews with archaeologists and spiritual leaders who worship the wonder of Stonehenge. You can visit all this and more at our Stonehenge homepage.

Stonehenge Virtual gives you the chance to get up-close-and-personal with the famous stones; a rare thing these days thanks to English Heritage – much to King Arthur Pendragon’s chagrin. Keep checking into Heritage Key, as Stonehenge Virtual segways smoothly from start to finish.

Make sure you visit the Stonehenge Virtual page to lay down you comments, suggestions, ideas and arguments. Don’t forget you can keep up-to-scratch on all our excellent content with Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube – as well as subscribing to the Heritage Key news feed!

Interview: Legendary History Writer John Julius Norwich

lord norwich at home londonHeritage Key has just returned from a blustery, biting morning trip to legendary writer John Julius Norwich‘s house, beside the pretty canals of London’s Little Venice. It was a great interview, and one which we’ll be following up with articles, videos and photos right here – see below for tips on how to keep up with our content!

A brisk wind whips up dervishes of crooked caramel and crimson leaves; whistling cold signals the city’s slide from autumn to winter. Yet a firm handshake and sincere smile minutes later leaves HK as warm as ever, as we enter Lord Norwich’s magnolia mini-mansion, set back from the busy city streets.

Lord Norwich effervesces with the warmth, dignity and charm of a man who has become one of Britain’s best-loved history and travel authors over a career spanning 45 years. Replete with booming, elegant voice and pin-sharp attire, he’s the epitome of British chic; a stereotypically suave gentleman traveler. Once a foreign serviceman stationed in Beirut and Belgrade, Lord Norwich sacked his state employment to pursue a career in print, on air and on screen – where he remains one of the nation’s favourite historical storytellers.

Tales, Trips and Tips

Once we’ve tackled light issues in the Lord’s front room – and noise coming from the building of an underground music studio nextdoor, at the house of U2’s Adam Clayton – Heritage Key is treated to fascinating facts, insightful anecdotes and concise opinions on a myriad issues facing world heritage today and beyond. TheLord bristles with energy as he tells us the story of his latest printed offering, The Great Cities in History, and eagerly recalls the past, present and future of his favourite place, Venice.Lord Norwich also explains one of the most treasured artefacts in his home, and answers the questions you submitted last week.

Lord Norwich brims with facts, stories, anecdotes and opinions from across the ancient and medieval world

The Lord also gives some great tips on how to have a modern adventure in an age of sanitised package tours and whistlestop visits. We also get the sense Lord Norwich takes travel very much in his stride when he nonchalantly mentions he is heading off to Iran tomorrow with a small group of friends to see Tehran, Isfahan and more: a trip rarely earmarked by so-called intrepid explorers the world over, much less a British octogenerian!

We’ve hardly noticed we’ve been chatting for ages when our time is up, and we pack up to bid Lord Norwich a very fond goodbye. Another firm handshake, another knowing smile. We’ve enjoyed our time with one of Britain’s best history wordsmiths immensely – so much so we almost forget we’ve been flung straight back into the dreary grey skies of London. Almost. I personally found Lord Norwich’s views on travel very inspiring, and completely agree that the best way to experience a city is simply to walk alone and get lost in its streets. It was definitely something I’d recommend of Venice, and advice I could have done with turning to to get the most from my recent trip to Luxor. I also loved his story about the legend of Pope Joan, and the novel and hilarious way future cardinals would combat a female papacy – more details on that coming soon.

Keep Updated!

There’s so much more to come from our encounter with Lord Norwich, and there are lots of ways you can keep updated on the videos, articles and photos. Check for comments on this very blog, where I’ll be announcing further material, follow us on Twitter and/or become a fan on Facebook, where we’ll let you know the latest news, views and content from the site – and subscribe to Heritage Key email updates to get the best from our great range of content – including other ArchaeoVideos from across the historical world: Today’s latest from Egypt sees Dr Alan Zivie go face-to-face with some of Saqqara’s most amazing treasures!

Interview: Dave Simmonds of Birmingham Museum on the Staffordshire Hoard

The Staffordshire Hoard has been one of the most staggering and inspirational discoveries in British history. Hundreds of stunning gold Saxon artefacts, all bundled into one stash and found over a thousand years later by a lone metal detecting enthusiast – it’s a story that could have come straight out of an archaeological thriller. While the necessary steps are taken to secure their future, the treasures are being housed in Birmingham’s Museum and Art Gallery. Heritage Key talks to the museum’s resident scholar Dave Simmonds about his thoughts on a momentous breakthrough in British heritage.

HK: The Staffordshire Hoard is on display here how manic has it been since the artefacts arrived?

DS: It’s just been incredible. I know that in the first days it drew about 15,500 people, and I think we’re going at about two to three thousand people per day right now. So it’s all hands on deck really we’re constantly having to juggle things and learn how to manage to queue. But I think we’ve got it more or less in order now. It’s been a steep learning curve in some senses though; I don’t think we really expected such a spectacular interest!

HK: Has it surprised you how much the public has taken to the hoard?

DS: It has! I thought we would get national press coverage, and I thought we may get some sort of television coverage because it is an important find. But to be the lead item on the six o’clock BBC news, outdoing ‘Barack snubs Brown’ and an AIDS virus, was a little awe-inspiring. And then the queues have just not stopped. We’ve had people queuing for two to two-and-a-half hours to see this stuff, and they love it.

I think the other thing that’s surprised me slightly is how many people are fascinated by seeing it ‘mud and all’, because we can’t clean the material until it’s gone through the acquisitions process; until it belongs to a museum. So what’s up there are unclean pieces, and people love seeing the mud on them – they feel that they’re right there at the beginning of the tale of the hoard.

HK: Do you think a large part of their appeal is that they represent an era of British history which isn’t that well documented?

DS: There is an element of that to it – I think there’s a popular vision of the Saxons as hairy barbarians who dressed in furs and lived in holes in the ground. And I think the hoard is opening people’s eyes to the fact that, by the late 7th century, England is quite a civilised country. In the Saxon period England was probably the best-governed and one of richest kingdoms in Europe, which isn’t the picture our history books paint.

When the Normans came here, for example, they took over the Saxon way of doing things lock, stock and barrel, and the way the Saxons made their coins stayed the same completely they even kept the same people making the coins. And when you see coins being issued back in Normandy you can understand why, because they’re frankly terrible! So it wasn’t a case of civilisation being brought to these benighted islands these benighted islands were among the strongest and richest civilised countries in Europe.

There’s also the element of local pride because this is royal Mercia, and I’m fairly convinced we’re looking at a royal treasure hoard of some kind. And what it is is really open to interpretation. I think with this amount of gold it must at least belong to some very high level of aristocracy. You’re looking at evidence from right at the beginnings of the Kingdom of Mercia, just at the time when it’s rising to prominence as one of the great kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons.

HK: Portable Antiquities have claimed that it’s only one of two things; a religious offering or a treasure trove which became lost. Do you agree with that?

DS: I suspect you’ll find opinions change as more people throw their ideas into the ring. A lot hinges on when the hoard was buried. This isn’t the same as how old most of the metalwork is, because it can only be as old as the latest thing in it. You could find a hoard of Victorian pennies, for example, but if there’s a 1990s pound in the hoard, then the hoard can’t have been buried until 1990.

On current showing I think a date in the late 7th century, around 700 seems to be the wise money. By then Mercia was a Christian kingdom, so if the hoard does belong to that stage I think it’s unlikely to be a sacrificial deposit by pagans. I think we’re probably looking at some sort of process of hiding it for safety that’s why you’d tend to bury a hoard like this.

Then you get the question, ‘What is the hoard?’ This is where you get even more unsure, because some of the pieces appear to span up to a hundred years. And if you’re looking at, say, swords covering decades, are you looking at an accumulation of material put together over decades? Or one big climactic battle where you have a group of nobles warriors who were all killed whilst using heirloom swords? Until the stuff is all cleaned to be properly studied, I think we’re all slightly floundering about because we just haven’t got the full evidence.

HK: What is the plan regarding its study?

DS: At the moment we’re all focusing on the next two phases. Initially it’s quite unusual for this hoard to be displayed here at the moment: normally, if it’s gone through a coroner’s inquest and been declared treasure, it will go straight to the British Museum which is where the valuation process takes place. But the British Museum have very kindly and quite unusually because of the nature of this find and its importance to the region agreed we can display some if it here for up to three weeks, before it goes down there.

Then it has to be assessed by something called the Treasure Valuation Committee, which is an independent committee including representatives of metal detecting world, museums, academics, antiquities trades and an independent chairman. They will then commission three valuations from leading antiquities dealers, which they use as advice for reaching a final value for the hoard.

Once that value is agreed – and the landowner and the finder both have to agree to the valuation – that’s what any interested museums will have to pay in terms of cash agreement. That payment then gets transferred to the finder and the landowner, and they split it between them. We are hoping that it will be ourselves and The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent who will make a joint acquisition of the hoard. Then we have to raise the money, and we’re not thinking a great deal beyond that at this stage. It’s going to be quite a challenge, I suspect!

It’s another example of how the British Museum have been really supportive and really helpful. I’d like to give them a clap because they really have been excellent partners in all this.

HK: You’re pro-BM? Plenty of people resent the power they have.

DS: Yes, I mean you have to make a balance between the fact that they are the national collection, so inevitably they are likely to be the home of the most significant finds. But they have been working very hard to try to create partnerships to deal with that perception and certainly with this they’ve already said that they would prefer this material to stay in the Midlands, which is very good and they’ve already said they’ll help with any acquisition process. So there’s a really great partnership building here, and we’re very positive about it.

HK: Some have estimated it’s worth a million –

“You looked in one box and thought, ‘wow’, then you looked in another box and thought, ‘double wow’ and it just got better and better, and you were seeing things you just couldn’t believe.”

DS: All I can say is we’re expecting it to be a seven-figure sum and beyond that I wouldn’t even try to guess. But we’re hopeful: there’s this massive popular interest; and it is an internationally important hoard, so we would sincerely hope there will be assistance from funding bodies. But again, I can’t really say more than that at this stage we’ll certainly be going all-out to keep the material in the West Midlands region.

HK: When did you first get wind of the discovery?

DS: I heard about it very early. I was actually involved in another exhibition at the time, so I didn’t have much of a chance to get heavily involved. I knew there was a hoard back in July, and it was really only in August that I got a chance to look at the material and it was…well the three words I’ve been using most are astonishing, amazing and incredible, and all three of those apply. You looked in one box and thought, ‘Wow’, then you looked in another box and thought, ‘Double wow’ and it just got better and better, and you were seeing things you just couldn’t believe. Some of the stuff is astonishing, and the quality of some of the items is as good as, if not better than, those at the Sutton Hoo burial.

We must be talking royal workshops here. And then there are these wonderful personal touches in some of the finds. To me, the thing I’d have if given the chance is this wonderful folded-up Christian cross. It doesn’t sound terribly exciting it’s a gold cross that’s been folded into a lump, essentially, and most of the mounts that once held its precious or semi-precious stones have fallen off.

We’ve actually got the mounts – they’re in the hoard. Actually we’ve got the whole thing, but it’s essentially just this folded ball of cross and a few pieces that have dropped off. Which doesn’t sound too impressive: but we got one of our technicians to do a reconstruction and painting of it, and the thing would have been astonishing I think it was the processional cross on the end of a long staff. But what really appeals to me is that when you look at the mounts you can see that they had a kind of tooth border, and you can see where the border’s been pulled back to take the stones out. So it’s quite obvious they actually recycled the stones except for one garnet, which is silver.

But the garnet broke in Saxon times, and it’s now held in place with a little strip of gold along one edge, which kept it in position as a Saxon running repair. They obviously took one look at this and thought, ‘There’s no point taking that out, it’s broken,’ and there wouldn’t be any point in recycling it so they just left it there. So there you’ve got an incredible little human story you can see in just those two or three pieces on the cross.

The more you look, the more you find these stories, and the more you start seeing parallels with other stuff. Or you suddenly realise you’re looking at things that are different, that are new, and that’s one of the interesting things that’s going to come out of this hoard. There are already pieces that we’ve had specialist experts in Saxon metalwork looking at and saying, ‘We have no idea what they are.’ So there’s going to be so much coming out of this in the next two or three years.

HK: In that sense, and of the drama of its discovery, is it a more important find than Sutton Hoo?

DS: I would say that it’s of the same level as Sutton Hoo. It’s going to make us re-evaluate Sutton Hoo, because Sutton Hoo was simply unique and now there’s this massive extra source of elaborate gold work. We’ve got stuff that looks very much like Sutton Hoo material, but with Sutton Hoo they had around 45 pieces of gold, some of them very dramatic: we’re running into several hundred already. So this is going to throw wide open the field of study for this kind of material, and I think what we learn from this will enable people to look back on the Sutton Hoo find. It’s possibly not got as dramatic stuff as Sutton Hoo, but in terms of quantity and depth it’s probably better. So I would say on balance it’s as good as Sutton Hoo.

HK: And I guess you can cross-refence Saxon kingdoms easier now –

DS: Well that raises another question. People might say, ‘That’s East Anglian metalwork because we’ve found x-style stuff from Sutton Hoo.’ But that’s because there wasn’t anything else – I mean, if we’ve got another 40 pieces of the same style of metalwork from Mercia, you start asking yourself, ‘Is that actually from a Mercian school, and some of it went to East Anglia? Or is it an East Anglian school, and some if it’s come to Mercia? Or what?’ That’s what I mean about re-evaluating things. We’ve had to make assumptions based on evidence, but the evidence has just multiplied several times over. There’ll be a lot of re-thinking going on.

HK: Does it also imply Britain wasn’t quite as fragmented as was previously thought?

DS: I think there’s a kind of common warrior-aristocrat culture. If you were a 7th century king of Mercia, you probably had more in common with a 7th century king of East Anglia in terms of your lifestyle and ethos than you did with a peasant working on a field in Mercia. So there is a kind of common heroic world. Again, we are seeing styles which are very unusual, so we definitely are wondering if there is a Mercian school of goldworking which wouldn’t be a surprise.

Mercia is one of the great kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon world. The 7th century is the exact time that Mercia is rising to dominance – it ends up ruling everything from the Humber to the Thames; a big kingdom. In the next century of course we have King Offa, probably one of the most famous Saxon kings people have heard of, and he’s a king of Mercia. So there is a powerful rich kingdom here, and now suddenly we’ve got the evidence for it in terms of its archaeology. And this hoard comes from just a few miles from Tamworth in Staffordshire which is the royal capital of the Mercians, and from Litchfield in Staffordshire which is the ecclesiastic capital of the Mercians. It’s right in the area you’d expect there to be a concentration of wealth of this kind.

HK: This hoard is just one of glut of amateur finds in the past few weeks. What is your view on metal detecting?

DS: If it’s done responsibly I think it’s quite reasonable, and most metal detectors are responsible people. I think nowadays we’re mainly over the large squabbles. Inevitably there are the night-hawks and the out-and-out rogues who are there to make a buck and really don’t care, but they’re the sort of people responsible metal detectors don’t like either. And to be fair there are some archaeologists who harbour quite extreme views the other side.

In typical British fashion I think the middle way is probably the best because it works, and is seen to be working this hoard is a case in point. If this had not been found now and that field had been ploughed for two or three more years, a lot of this stuff would be in pieces, or more pieces than it is. So Terry’s find was just at the right time; he did the responsible thing. Within the first few days of seeing the first thing he was in contact with a finds liaison officer here, who then did exactly the right thing and contacted the local archaeological authorities in Staffordshire. There was an excavation that uncovered a lot more material, and everybody’s done exactly what they should have done and has worked together brilliantly.

People probably don’t realise quite what an achievement this is. The first find was made on the fifth of July, and on the 24th September is the inquest, which I think is about eleven weeks. That’s included the find, the reporting, four weeks of excavation and the Portable Antiquities official listing 1,381 pieces by the time of the inquest! So to get all that done, and to have kept the site and hoard secret it’s been an astonishing achievement the news only really started to come out the night before the inquest. You really couldn’t have asked for the process to have gone better, it’s been a fantastic thing to be involved in.

Minotaur Labyrinth Could be in Crete Quarry, Not Knossos

Village

An unheralded Cretan quarry could be the site of the legendary labyrinth in which Theseus killed the Minotaur, says an Anglo-Greek team of experts. The group claims the stone quarry, located just outside the tiny town of Gortyn, is just as likey to be the scene for one of Greek mythology‘s most famous tales as the better-known Palace of Knossos 20 miles away.

600,000 people pass through the palace ruins each year; nearly all of whom are told it is the place where King Minos built his fabled maze to house the fearsome Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature who feasted on human flesh.

Yet following a recent explosive archaeological incident, a team of experts have earmarked the Gortyn quarry as just as viable a location for the legend as Knossos. Its cave complex, known locally as the Labyrinthos Caves, comprise almost three miles of interlocking tunnels and chambers. Travellers had once flocked to their winding corridors in search of the Labyrinth, but they have been largely deserted since Knossos’ excavation in 1900 by British antiquarian Arthur Evans. They were even used by the Nazis as an ammunition dump during World War Two.

Knossos

Yet a recent attempt by treasure hunters to dynamite one of the caves’ chambers in search of gold was too much for Oxford University’s Nicholas Howarth and his team. Howarth bemoans the unilateral view of the legend most visitors get nowadays, and fears it could be lost in time. “People come not just to see the controversial ruins excavated and reconstructed by Evans, but also to seek a connection to the mythical past of the Age of Heroes,” he says. “It is a shame that almost all visitors to Knossos have never heard of these other possible ‘sites’ for the mythical Labyrinth”

Gortyn has its own rich heritage, having been the political centre for the Roman occupation of Crete, around the 1st century AD. It is also the home of the Gortyn Code, the oldest example of Greek law. Its bigger cousin Knossos is the largest archaeological site on the island, and is thought to have been inhabited since around 7,000 BC. Yet it is most famous for the palace built there between 1,700 – 1,400 BC, which legend says was the seat of King Minos – after whom the Minoan civilisation, prelude to Classical Greece, is named. Greek merchant Minos Kalokairinos first discovered the city in 1878, but it wasn’t until Evan’s systematic excavation 22 years later than its full extent became known. Experts ‘finding’ the true locations of Greek myths is hardly a novel excercise – just take a look at the dozens of places claimed to have been the site of Plato‘s legendary city of Atlantis.