Now the public has the chance to view the much talked-about discovery, as the coins and the cow’s leg bone in which they were hidden have gone on display at the Town House Museum, King’s Lynn.

The annual summer excavation of a Saxon burial ground in the valley of the Heacham River has also uncovered evidence of an earlier, Iron Age settlement.

The hoard of 32 Gallo-Belgic E staters has been described as the most significant find since the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (Sharp) began in 1996.

Twenty of the coins, depicting a stylised horse on one side, were hidden inside the bone.

Ambiani tribe of Gaul

They are believed to have been made by the Ambiani tribe of Gaul in northern France 2000 years ago, and there are two main theories about why they were buried.

One is that the owner, perhaps a mercenary who had been fighting the Romans in Gaul, had been paid in gold staters and decided to give a votive offering to the gods for his safe passage home.

Alternatively, he may have decided that his precious coins were too valuable to carry around, so hid them in the bone and buried them to be retrieved later. But he was then either killed or forgot where they were.

The hoard was declared treasure and recently acquired by King’s Lynn Museums for £4000, which was raised by the museums’ Friends and contributions from the Museums, Libraries and Archives/Victoria and Albert purchase grant fund and the Headley Trust.

It will become one of the star attractions when Lynn Museum re-opens next year after a £1m redevelopment but has gone on display at the Town House Museum in the meantime.

We thought it would be nice for people to see it – at least temporarily.

said area museums officer Robin Hanley.

It’s a very important discovery and it’s a really interesting story. It’s fantastic to have them in the collections and they’ve attracted an awful lot of interest.

Read the original article at EPD24.

Pic: Bronze-Depot.com

The Archaeozoology blog carries a report about the practice of Paleolithic Horse Hunting and they say: The site of Roche de Solutre is one of a series of ridges or cuestas in the southern part of the Maconnais region of Burgundy, France. The cuestas are oriented from east to west and are separated by broad valleys with minor streams. The archaeological site at Solutre is located at the base of the southern face of the Roche de Solutre.

The discoverer and first investigator of the site, Adrien Arcelin, tried to explain the mass of horse bones revealed during the 19th century excavations by describing Palaeolithic hunters driving herds of up to 600 animals at a time over the edge of the rock. This concept of Solutre as a ‘horse-jump’ site found favour in the late 1800s and was upheld even as late as the 1950s. However, in 1956 Jean Combier re-interpreted Solutre as a place to which hunters periodically returned to kill horses which were passing through the valley during their seasonal migrations. Continue Reading »

An Excerpt from Book Of Folk-lore. by Sabine Baring-Gould [1913] We cannot expect to find reminiscences of the gods and goddesses of the primitive Silurian or Ivernian race that peopled Great Britain and Ireland, or even of the Celtic and Roman divinities, save in a most attenuated form. Even the saints of the Catholic Church who filled the religious horizon in England and Scotland for a thousand years have faded from it.

But we will endeavor to discover some traces, and some do remainThe prehistoric rude-stone building race certainly did have a goddess of Death, and probably one of Generation. In the subterranean excavations made in Le Petit Mona, by the Baron de Baye, the necropolises were guarded by rude figures representing a female cut in the chalk, and also by a representation of a stone hammer. The female figure has also been found cut on limestone in the department of Gard, on dolmens. In Brittany, in the covered alleys, there are numerous figures of stone axes or hammers, and also a curious shield-like representation that may possibly take the place of the female figure found in the chalk tombs, but which it was difficult to execute in granite. On one of the slabs of a dolmen, near Loudun, that I examined, was cut a celt, and a cdt is also cut on the huge upper stone or table of the famous dolmen of Confolens. In Brittany, where the incoming Celts from Wales and Cornwall overflowed the land and submerged the earlier peoples, these former have been largely influenced by the people they treated as belonging to a lower stratum of civilisation. Continue Reading »

For two years, archaeologists have been studying a Bronze Age place of worship in eastern Germany. The site has a number of parallels with Stonehenge in England. By the end of the summer, researchers hope to know the full story. We’re just opening the excavation area. says Andre Spatzier, Ph.D student from the Martin Luther University in the eastern German city of Halle who is the site’s director.

Here in the fertile soil beneath Spatzier is a Bronze Age place of worship, one which in the last two years of work has shown remarkable similarities with Stonehenge. This summer, work on the site has just been resumed, and Spatzier’s team hopes that by the end of the digging season, they will have completely excavated and deciphered the site. It has, though, not been easy — While Stonehenge is made out of stones that have weathered thousands of years, the German prehistoric site was built of wood, which rotted away many years ago.

Archaeologists have already discovered six rings of wooden pillars — the biggest of which has a diameter of 115 meters. In one of the structure’s outer areas there was also a circular ditch with a diameter of 90 meters. By analysing ceramic vessels found at the site, the researchers have worked out the place of worship dates back to the 23rd century before Christ and was used until the 21st century BC.

We don’t know of any other structure like this on the European mainland from this time.

Spatzier said. It was, in fact, an exciting time in Europe: trade networks for ores, amber and salt were rapidly developing. Mankind’s knowledge was also growing by leaps and bounds, as not only goods but ideas were travelling across the continent. Around 2,500 years earlier at the very end of the Stone Age, Neolithic people had already constructed the nearby Goseck Circle — a wooden ring 70 meters across considered the oldest solar observatory in Europe. In the Bronze Age, some 500 years after the Pömmelte site was built, the famous Nebra sky disc was made. The circular bronze object likewise depicts the heavens.

Source

While there are various explanations of the origins of fairies and the nature of them and their lands, there is little explanation in any studies of where the modern conception of fairies has come from. None of the books suggest that fairies have wings like dragonflies or butterflies. The wee-folk of Celtic mythology are generally thought to be the size of small children or dwarfs, rather than the size of insects as they are thought of today.

They also tend to be suitably disproportionate, like chunky hobbits rather than the tiny but perfect adult fairies in modern storybooks. It is likely that these modern depictions of fairies sprang more from the minds of individual humans than any specific culture or mythology.

For almost as long as people have been seeing fairies, people have been writing about them. The countries of the world have a wide variety of myths and legends, but the “little people” crop up in a great many of them. Into more modern times, we have Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen”, and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummers Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan times, both of which did much to cement the modern conception of what a “fairy” is.

A wide variety of cultures believe in fairies similar to the Celtic version, and some cultures see fairies as the animistic spirits of nature. None of these fairies bear much resemblance to the modern fairies and if they had wings, it is a detail that is usually left out. Spencer’s fairies were like the Celtic version, Shakespeare’s were like a combination of tall elegant elves and the wee-folk, but it was not until the Victorian era that fairies were established as little winged beings.

Thomas Croker (1789-1854) in his collection of Irish Fairy Tales, described fairies as being “a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dew drop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks.”

One of the first of these “delicate” fairies to impinge on popular consciousness was probably Tinkerbell in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Around that time, there was also a large amount of sentimental art, creating cutesy portrayals of fairies and cherubs. There was also a large fuss made about the fairy photographs taken by two young girls in England at Cottingsley. These photographs sparked a world-wide debate that did much to “fix” the image of the small, winged, fairy in the public mind, and if you ask any group of people, there’ll no doubt be someone who remembers seeing the pictures at some time. The Victorians had a soft spot for the “cute”, and much of the modern conception of the little delicate, insect size fairy came from them.

Disney also has a part to play from the 1950s onward, pushing the sanitised Tinkerbell as a sort of happy go-lucky nature sprite, making fairies happy and unthreatening, reinforced even more by having Julia Roberts play her in the live action version.

From these images people have come to see fairies as happy, positive, creatures… a far cry from the baby-stealing wee folk of Celtic mythology from which they derived.

by Willie Meikle

Thank you to Willie Meikle for allowing us to post this article on our site

Willie is a Scottish author now living in Newfoundland. He has written eight novels and over 150 short stories, you can find Willie and his books at

http://www.williammeikle.com

A new fun project has just been launched called Becky’s Arthurian Challenge! She has come up with a superb way of organising her Arthurian reading and encouraging others to do the same. Check out Becky’s Arthurian Challenge 2008-2009 here. What a shame that we have not got to the Arthurian Tales yet – it would be a great way for our listeners to share in the experience.

The aim is to read between 6 and 12 books based on or around the Arthurian myths, legends and characters. It runs between April 1st 2008 and March 31st 2009. She says: Continue Reading »