Why Was The Staffordshire Hoard Buried?

I just finished watching the latest National Geographic piece about the Staffordshire hoard.  This was an amazing archaeological bounty found in a corner of a field in Staffordshire England.  And everything about the find was beyond the realm of archaeologists imaginations.

The was it came about was a gentleman by the name of Terry Herbert asked farmer Fred Johnson if he could do a little metal detecting on the farmer's land.  Not thinking he'd find anything, Mr. Johnson gave his permission and Terry set to work on what would what would become the greatest Anglo-Saxon hoard find in history.

Once Terry was able to convince professionals at the Birmingham museum to take a look, it didn't take long for the archaeologists to get involved.  When news finally broke across the world about the find, there were more than 1,600 pieces to be cleaned and cataloged.  That was in July of 2009.  Since that time, that number has more than doubled.  More pieces were found on the site, and some small pieces were found hidden within some of the larger pieces.  Once it was all said and done with, there were 3,500 pieces to the hoarde that totaled in value at around  £5M.

The only other hoard of Anglo-Saxon pieces ever found was known as the Sutton Hoo hoard.  The difference between the two was that the Sutton Hoo find wasn't a huge grouping of thousands of pieces.  It was the burial place of a great kind and showed signs of both pagan and Christian mentalities.  The most revered pieces found at Sutton Hoo were a beautifully crafted helmet and the 80-ft long burial boat.  And though experts can understand why the finds at Sutton Hoo were buried, why were the 3,500 pieces at Staffordshire buried?

Because nearly all the pieces found had been parts of swords, knives, and possibly helmets, it's thought that the site was a trophy hoard where those that had won the battle had removed the adornments of their enemies weapons and buried them for safe keeping, but either couldn't get back to them or forgot where they'd buried them.  The only issue I personally have with that is that there were no blades.  Of course, the enemy would have reused the blades for their own purposes, but why would they have removed the prestigious decorations in order to do so?  Wouldn't it have meant more to keep them on, as a way to say "Look what I won in battle".

The one thing that really struck me was that one of the objects found was a gold cross that had been folded up around itself.  It could have been that this was done simply to make it easier to move from one place to another, but these pieces were dated to be made and used somewhere between the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 8th century. That coincides with the time when the pagans were being converted to Christianity, sometimes whether they wanted to be or not.

And watching the way these items were being taken out of the ground tells me that they weren't all put into the same hole at the same time.  If that had been the case, why did they have to dig a trench that measured 30'X43'?  That's a pretty big hole.  Experts now believe that the items were buried in the same area over a period of about 150 years.  And to me, that sounds like these items were being placed in the ground at a sacred place and perhaps they were offerings to the gods.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth.  It's obvious that if all these items were of Anglo-Saxon design, then they weren't the ones who won the battles.  And in the Celtic religion, people were drawn to groves of trees as places of worship or as sacred places.  The area where these items were found was on a hill, which would be both a highly visible place and a known place to those who lived in and around the area.  If these people were fighting to keep up with their way of life and didn't want to convert to the new religion, wouldn't it make sense that they offer up these beautiful objects to appease the gods?  Or maybe it was a way to say thank you for helping them win the battle.

Though I am no expert, I do know that this was a very contentious time in England's history.  It was a time when the Romans had just left Britain to defend their own country, people from the North and the East were invading the tiny island trying to stake out there own stretches of fertile land, and some local kings were actually inviting these warring nations to come in and protect their kingdoms only to end up trying to protect themselves from the warriors.  Burying a hoard of gold and garnet laiden treasure in a sacred grove as an offering to the spirits of the land wouldn't be that much of a stretch of the imagination.



(By geni (Photo by user:geni) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Happy Celtic New Year

Happy Celtic New Year!!!

I'm sure anyone who stopped by here yesterday wondered if I was planning on doing a post about Halloween.  And though I did think about it, I thought doing a piece on the Celtic New Year would be more fun.  And the truth of the matter is that the holiday we think of as Halloween is actually a Celtic--and pagan--celebration.

The Celtic festival, Samhain, is the celebration of the changing of the seasons.  The Celtic people believed in the duality of life; dark and light, cool and warm, male and female.  The Samhain celebration was their way of saying good-bye to the summer season and welcoming in the winter.  It was during this festival that they believed the spirits of their ancestors could cross the boundary of life and death, and as such, the people would hold a huge feast in their honor, and it's from this that we get many of our own Halloween ideals.

The Celtic people saw the apple as being a sacred fruit and the act of bobbing for apples was their vision of what the ancestral spirits would do to enter into immortality.  They also believed that evil spirits would cross over with the ancestors.  In order to keep these unwanted spirits at bay, the Celts would carve faces into turnips and set them out to ward off the evil spirits.  And though today we use pumpkins, it was done for the same reasons.

One of the main aspect of the Samhain feast was the bonfire.  This was a massive fire on which the bones of sacrificial animals would be thrown and burned for the spirits.  In fact, the term bonfire is a Celtic term meaning "bone fire".  In several archaeological digs, the bones of several hundred animals have been found.  One of the most famous is the small village found about 2 miles away from the world famous Stonehenge.  According to archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson, it appears that people from all over would congregate at the site at certain times of the year and throw huge celebrations.  Could some of this have been done during a Samhain festival?  It is possible as there is some evidence that Stonehenge was a site attributed with the winter solstice and the realm of the dead.  And though the winter solstice and Samhain were a couple months apart, it may have been the beginning of the winter festivities.

As we begin our decent into the cold, winter months, we must remember that the time of the paranormal is only beginning.  To our ancestors, the scary part of the year didn't just last one day.  The winter was a terrifying time, especially if the annual harvest had failed to bring in enough to feed the entire village.  There are still things out there that scare us, even though Halloween is over.  But don't be afraid, my little ones.  They're only legends, right?



(The bonfire picture is attributed to Wikimedia Commons and the GFDL)