Understanding the Late Roman hacksilver from the Traprain Hoard
Excavation work at Traprain Law, an Iron Age hillfort in East Lothian, some 30km east of Edinburgh, was interrupted by the turmoil of the First World War. Two weeks after work began again on 12 May 1919, George Pringle loosened the soil with the tip of his pick and pulled out a Roman silver vessel. This was the first artefact to be found from what would prove to be the largest hoard yet known of Late Roman hacksilver – silver which has been chopped, cut, and crushed. More than a century later, an equally massive 784-page study has been published that tells us what the hoard represents in terms of the art and lifestyles of people from both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, as Chris Catling reports.
There is a multitude of stories about the Traprain Law hoard, and many of them are told by a book recently published by National Museums Scotland. We learn about the discovery of the hoard, the press and public interest, and the concern that the discovery would spark unauthorised digging by treasure hunters. The ownership of the hoard was happily settled by the ‘patriotic generosity’ of the landowner in donating it to the National Museum of Scotland, after which there followed much discussion about the techniques to be used to conserve the find – including whether and how to unfold those objects that had been deliberately bent and crushed.
How to pay for the work was another topic of debate, and with it the question of whether Brook & Son, the Edinburgh-based goldsmiths, should be given permission to take moulds of a few of the objects and be licensed to produce reproductions – some of which would be highly speculative because they would be based on vessel fragments. Then there was the question of study and display, and the publication of the first monograph in February 1923, a masterpiece of analysis by Alexander Curle, with its expensively produced photogravure plates.
IMAGE: Michael and Donna Brander © National Museums Scotland
Despite a waning of public interest after the Second World War, though, scholarly interest in the hoard continued and, in 2009 – 90 years on from the first discovery – a conference was held to consider one particular aspect: the implications of the fact that the artefacts had been cut up into smaller pieces. The initial conclusion, in 1923, was that the hoard represented ‘loot’, the accumulated treasure of piratical barbarians with no interest in the aesthetic value of the objects they had acquired. According to the 1923 monograph, and with Europe still recovering from the First World War, such a hoard was no doubt ‘connected with the Teutonic Migrations which overflowed the Rhine boundary at the commencement of the 5th century’. As an alternative to the ‘booty’ theory, others suggested that it consisted of the ‘capital of the prince of the fortress’, intended for melting down into silver bars to be used for exchange.
A breakthrough in understanding came in the form of a paper given to the 2009 conference by the late Kenneth Painter, a Classical archaeologist who suggested that the Traprain Law hoard – and similar hoards from other parts of the Roman Empire and beyond – had been cut into pieces that corresponded closely (but rarely precisely) with standard Roman weight units, rather than being chopped and sheared at random. This implied an underlying value system, with the pieces of silver cut into bullion and functioning like coinage. In all, the silver in the hoard weighed 71 Roman pounds, equivalent to 11,600 siliquae (weighing 2g each) – the most common form of silver coin circulating in late 4th- and early 5th-century Britain. Eric Birley sowed the seed of the idea that the hoard represented payment to the Votadini, the people traditionally associated with the Traprain Law hillfort, for services as peacekeepers in the border region north of Hadrian’s Wall. These ideas were all summarised in the conference volume that was published in 2013 (and which featured in CA 283 that same year).
This new volume adds a great deal more detail about the original form, decoration, and use of the vessels before they were turned into smaller pieces of silver, comparing the fragments in the hoard with similar vessels from across the Roman world, known both from the large number of intact tableware hoards that have been discovered over the last 100 years and the many similar hacksilver hoards – repositories of cut-up silver – that have been found over the same period.
VESTIGES OF VESSELS
The Traprain Law hoard consists of 327 individual fragments, from between 129 and 171 different items – the uncertainty about the precise number reflects the difficulty in deciding whether some fragments come from the same or a different artefact (whether the sidewall could be from the same vessel as the foot ring, for example).
The earliest objects date from the late 3rd century and the latest from the middle of the 5th century. The majority of the vessels belong to the period when beaded rims were in fashion, from the second quarter of the 4th to the first half of the 5th centuries, supplemented by later vessels with simpler rim forms and by the kind of very large (c.700mm) round platters that were popular in the 5th century. This wide chronological spectrum, with silver from several generations, makes the hoard unusual. Although comparable hoards contain ‘heirloom’ pieces, the majority of their contents typically cluster around a narrow date-range.
The authors suggest that, rather than being compiled at a single date from vessels that included a number of ‘antique’ pieces, the hoard was compiled over several generations and used like a savings account: pieces were removed and new ones added over an extended period of time. The latest pieces were added in the second quarter of the 5th century and then the burial spot seems to have been forgotten. That is suggested by the fact that there is evidence that silver- working, including the recycling of material, continued elsewhere at Traprain Law after this date.
In the absence of workshop stamps, it is all but impossible to say where the artefacts in the hoard had been made. Vessel styles and decorative and figural repertoires were widely shared across the Roman Empire. The vessels in the hoard are typical of the increasingly rich and lavish assemblages of silver used for serving and consuming food and drink in the Late Roman period by the well-travelled elite of the Roman world, who owned property in several different provinces. Unfortunately, chemical analysis of the silver has not yielded enough variation to pin the production down to a particular region or workshop, although the solder – the lead-tin alloy with a lower melting point than silver that was therefore used to join pieces of the precious metal together – consistently suggests a German (Eifel) or English (Pennine) source.
The different artefacts in the hoard represent a fairly random sample of the Late Roman silver circulating in the western Empire, but no other hoard offers such a wide range of vessel types. Most are either tableware – bowls, dishes and platters, and jugs for serving wine and water, but no drinking vessels (these would have been made of glass) – or objects used for personal hygiene – including fluted water basins, jugs, buckets, mirrors, and containers for perfumes and unguents.
Although some of the latter vessels could have multiple uses (the jugs, for example), vessels employed in bathing and toiletry rather than food can be identified from contemporary Roman wall paintings and written accounts, such as that of Clemens of Alexandria (c.AD 150-c.215), who, from a Christian perspective, accused wealthy women at the public baths of getting drunk while bathing and of putting on vulgar displays of their silver bathing accessories, which ‘show their wealth, with infinite ostentation, but above all their uncontrolled bad taste’. He concludes that they seem ‘unable to sweat without many accessories’.
One of three fragments from a bowl with a beaded rim and a feather pattern alternating with part of
an inscription that reads ‘SAVI … TISAL
… P’, which might have meant ‘may you live’, either addressed to a couple at their marriage, or qualified by ‘IN DEO’, in God. IMAGE CREDIT: National Museums Scotland
This beaded rim fragment from
a massive silver plate (some 680mm/27in in diameter) has a tiny, incised hare hiding among the acanthus leaves and the head of a Molossian hound – an ancient breed of dog and the ancestor of the mastiff – renowned for its ferocity. IMAGE CREDIT: National Museums Scotland
Further reading
Fraser Hunter, Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, and Kenneth Painter (eds), The Late Roman Silver Treasure from Traprain Law (National Museums Scotland, £89.99, ISBN 978-1910682234). Get 30% on the book from https://shop.nms.ac.uk using the code LRSCA.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 393. Read on in the magazine or on our new website, The Past (click here to subscribe), which details of all the content of the magazine. At The Past you will be able to read each article in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Minerva, and Military History Matters.
