The ancient runes of an inscribed silver armband found in a buried Viking treasure hoard in Scotland are helping to reveal more about a place and time nearly lost to history.
“The hoard has a ripple effect — it makes you want to reconsider what was in the area,” says Martin Goldberg, a curator at National Museums Scotland.
The silver armband was part of the Galloway Hoard — buried treasure including ornate jewelry, gold and silver bullion, silk, and painted beads discovered in southwestern Scotland.
While experts transcribed some of the runes, they were never able to translate the longest runic writing on one silver band — until now.
The Galloway Hoard
Metal detector enthusiasts discovered the Galloway Hoard in 2014 in a field not far from a standing church in Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire in southwestern Scotland.
The enthusiasts reported the discovery to authorities, and the Treasure Trove Unit of the National Museums Scotland began excavating, eventually uncovering more than about 11 pounds of silver, gold and other materials, buried in several packages. The hoard appeared to be purposely buried in the remains of some sort of structure — archaeologists found evidence of post holes of a timber building that had long since rotted away. But they weren’t sure if it was a house or something else.
“It’s almost a hoard within the hoard,” Goldberg says. “The organic materials are things which very rarely survive.”
Researchers believe the hoard was buried around 900 A.D. – around the time the region was going through upheaval. Vikings had begun to conquer and move into parts of Scotland in 800 A.D. Prior to 900 A.D., Galloway was still part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. It was right around 900 A.D. that the Vikings took Galloway.
“It’s a real state of cultural flux at the time,” Goldberg says, adding that the Vikings had disrupted all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by that point. “The hoard captures this moment of change.”
Due in part to the tumultuous times, not a lot of contemporary records exist of Northumbria for this period.
“This hoard has really added to a period where there was actually less historical information than in the centuries on either side of it,” Goldberg says.
Read More: Vikings Didn’t Just Raid and Pillage – They Had Diplomacy and Trade Networks, Too
Translating the Runes
Previously, researchers had translated the runes in several armbands and found they contained shortened parts of what may be Anglo-Saxon names like Ed, perhaps short for Edward or Edgar.
But the last of these armbands went undeciphered for some time. It had a longer inscription, and while researchers could have translated the individual letters, they didn’t seem to make sense.
Two puncture marks in the ring eventually gave translators a clue about how to decipher it. They realized that these puncture marks likely served like the way periods sometimes do in English today, abbreviating certain words otherwise left out of the inscription.
Researchers now believe the whole thing reads, “This is the community’s wealth.”
Viking Family Heirlooms or Trade Networks?
Researchers can’t really tell who buried the hoard, Goldberg says. But they have a better idea of whose loot it was thanks to research on the items found within.
On one hand, nearly nothing in the hoard is actually Viking. Some of the metalwork is Anglo-Saxon, from the south of Britain, in style, while the silk comes from southwestern Asia. The reason that the hoard may have been from the Vikings has more to do with the great variety of things that were buried there, spanning across the Viking empire.
“It’s part of this international trade network that the Viking age creates,” Goldberg says.
While some treasure hoards dating to this period appear hurried — as if someone was trying to hide their wealth in a moment of crisis, for example — the Galloway Hoard looks different. There are four separate parcels buried in what was some sort of building, rather than out in the forest somewhere. Many of the things, such as the vessel and its contents, were buried with care — they may have even been family heirlooms, Goldberg says.
It’s possible that the objects in the hoard represent goods looted by Vikings from people nearby as well as from farther afield. But it could also have been buried by someone local who just acquired these objects through Viking trade network.
“It’s given you a glimpse of the cast of thousands that brought a collection like this together,” Goldberg says.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science writer. An expat Albertan, he contributes to a number of science publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, Hakai, and others.
