Category Archives: Uncategorized

VM_365 Day 117 Anglo Saxon Sword from Sarre

Anglo Saxon, Birchington, In the Store, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

VM 117

Today’s image for Day 117 of VM_365 is of an Anglo Saxon Sword and an X-Ray taken when it was being conserved.

The sword was excavated from grave 275 at the Anglo Saxon cemetery at Sarre in 1990. Measuring 0.9 metres long, the sword was found above the skeleton of an adult male aged between 25 to 30 years old and may have been laid on a coffin lid rather than next to the body.

The X-Ray revealed a faint herringbone shadow indicating pattern-welded construction with added cutting edges. The tang and shoulder of the blade show traces of a hilt and guard, probably of bone, while the downward side of the blade retained evidence of a wooden scabbard.

The end of the tang was associated with the fragmentary remains of an iron ring suggesting this was a ring-hilted sword, although without the decorative hilt furniture usually associated with swords of this type.

 

VM_365 Day 110. Iron Age Weaving Comb

Broadstairs, In the Store, Iron Age, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

VM 110

Today’s image is of an Iron Age weaving comb from the Iron Age settlement at Dumpton Gap, Broadstairs.

Most clothing would have been made from sheeps wool woven by hand on wooden looms. Combs such as these were used to push threads in place while weaving. Other artefacts associated with cloth making such as loom weights, used to hold the threads taut on the loom, and spindle whorls, used for making the yarn are also commonly found on settlement sites.

This particular comb was found in a rubbish pit dating to the late Iron Age, around 25 BC-25 AD. It is made from animal bone and has been decorated although the irregular lines you can see on the surface are caused by tiny plant rootlets scaring the surface whilst it was in the ground.

It is not clear if this comb had actually been used as it appears to be unfinished. If you look carefully at the upper part of the comb there are four circles marked out, two overlapping, and two others are visible in the middle on the right side. These circles were scored using a compass and would then have been carved to form ring and dot decoration. The decoration on this comb did not progress beyond scoring the circles; perhaps it was a practice piece, as two sets of the circles appear to overlap and it was discarded, perhaps the teeth broke before the decoration could be finished, or, perhaps it was needed before it could be finished and was used anyway.

VM_365 Day 80: Late Neolithic Polished Axe, Margate

Margate, Neolithic, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

VM 365 80Today’s image shows a very large, polished, late Neolithic flint axe from Northdown, Margate. The axe was found in 1940 by a Mr Kelf while he was digging an Air Raid shelter behind his shop on Northdown Road.

The axe is unused and made of non-local flint. The true reason for making it is unclear; it may have been more a status object rather than a useful tool, or perhaps,  for ceremonial use, or maybe it was made to show off the skill of its creator. We can only guess at its purpose.

VM_365 Day 60 Iron plates and industrial agriculture

Uncategorised, Uncategorized
Circular iron plate with a story to tell
Circular iron plate with a story to tell

Thanet’s industrial heritage has been a relatively neglected subject, although it is increasingly obvious that more attention should be paid to the sites and artefacts associated with the industrialised agriculture of the 19th century.

A common site in many of the villages and towns of the area would have been a blacksmith, who would have been involved in manufacturing and repairing farm equipment as well as shoeing the many horses that provided transport and power.

We came across this round iron plate, nearly 1.5m in diameter on the site of an old blacksmith’s forge in St.Peters, Broadstairs. As it was not in our usual experience of archaeological artefacts we had to do some research to find out what it was.

The flat iron disc with a central hole turned out to be a hooping plate, used to fit iron hoops to the outside of wooden wagon wheels. The hub of the wheel would sit in the central hole and the hoop, which was expanded by heating it in the furnace, would be placed over the wooden rim and hammered into position against the hooping plate, which kept the wheel flat and firm. When the hoop was cooled it would tighten up around the wheel creating an iron tyre that would keep any heavily laden farm wagon going on the country lanes for another season.

VM_365 Day 54 TICI makes a mark in history

Broadstairs, Roman, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project
Personal name scratched into the surface of a Central Gaulish Samian dish from Broadstairs
Personal name scratched into the surface of a Central Gaulish Samian dish from Broadstairs

Who were the people that lived in Thanet in ancient times?

We can never know anything about a large number of them, who have left neither written records or are represented by their remains. Occasionally some small remnant of their identity is asserted in some way through an archaeological find.

Our Image for VM_365 today shows one of those tiny echoes of a person who may have lived near Broadstairs in the Roman period in the 2nd century AD.

This fragment of a dish  in Central Gaulish samian fabric (Drag. 18/31 R), dating from the early to Mid 2nd century, is marked with scratched letters reading TICI, probably part of the owners name. The sherd was found in the remains of a Roman building on the cliffs above Viking Bay in Broadstairs. Samian vessels could be large and these fine tablewares were probably expensive to replace and  were often marked with names, scratched by hand into the glossy surface of the vessel.

Although we are lucky to have increasing numbers of written fragments dating from the Roman period in Britain, even sets of letters and accounts from one site, this small body of writing can only hint at the many ways that the skill of literacy might have been used in the Roman period.

In this case the writer used his skill to identify an object as his own and this act is preserved in a remarkable and rare survival into our own age.

VM_365 Day 53 The long history of the British Bake Off

Archaeology, From the Archives, Iron Age, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

VM_53

Iron Age quern (150-50 BC) found at North Foreland, Broadstairs. Reconstructed from 11 pieces, c 320mm diameter.

While prehistoric periods are often separated by innovations in the technology of cutting tools, from flints through to copper, bronze and iron implements, one technology seems to link all these periods and to extend nearly to the limits of our own living memory.

For many thousands of years hand grinding of cereals and grains were essential to processing the fruits of agricultural labour into the the food that sustained life each day. In much of the developing world hand querns, mills and grindstones remain an essential part of daily life.

While much of society was devising new and innovative ways of chopping down trees, cutting raw materials and taking a swipe at each other with the latest materials, somebody somewhere was grinding out flour with a rubbing stone, a rotary quern or hand mill. The application of animal, water or steam power eventually scaled up the process, but somewhere in the mechanism remained the grinding surfaces between two stones.

On many sites, whatever the prevailing ‘… Age’ indicated by the pottery, grain processing and storage are the predominant finds, suggesting that what unites the developing history of Britain is one long Grain Age.

 

VM_365 Day 16 The intellectual in pursuit of the unglueable!

Archaeology, Beaker, In the Store, North Foreland, Prehistoric pottery, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

Following on from VM_365 15, today’s image shows how it is possible to reconstruct vessels when only fragments remain.

VM 16

The sherds from a once complete Beaker vessel were found in the grave of a 40 to 50 year old male, radiocarbon dated to 2460-2200 BC, excavated near the QEQM Hospital, Margate. The vessel had been crushed as the grave structure decayed and some sherds had eroded completely making it impossible to reassemble. The vessel was reconstructed instead with a drawing by taking careful measurements of joining sections of remaining sherds and using the measurements to complete a full profile and section.

VM_365 Day 5 – Amazing what arrives in the post

Uncategorised, Uncategorized
Teaching skeleton in cardboard package
Teaching skeleton number two in his travelling carton

We’ve just taken delivery of our second teaching skeleton at Virtual Museum, in time to create a new archaeological activity for Archaeology for You on the 12th of July.

Teaching skelton display
Talking human skeletons with our teaching skeleton

Although we already have one excellent disarticulated skeleton for osteological instruction in our Bones and Burials activity, we’ve now got one to practise digging and planning with.

Excavating and recording human burials is one of the most complicated and painstaking tasks archaeologists undertake in the field and we would like to explain how it is done.

So our new teaching skeleton will be pressed into service as the example for excavation, while our other skeleton will let us explain which bone is connected to which.

Come and give it a go at Archaeology for You.

The story of our Museum

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museum_entrance

Our Virtual Museum has no buildings, although the image we use on the website is borrowed from elements of real buildings. We had hoped to add to our building as time went on, but it remains small.

Without the resources to create a dedicated archaeological Museum in Thanet, an area which richly deserves one, the idea of the Virtual Museum of Thanet’s Archaeology was created in 2005 over a stimulating fry up in the Beano Café in Broadstairs (the digital hub of the Isle of Thanet heritage community in that year!).

With limited resources and equally limited, but increasing understanding of the technology, the idea of the Museum developed into a statement of intent and then into a functioning website, which we have since then used as tool to communicate with our community. With no bells and whistles, our little Museum does what it can to hold up the remains of Thanet’s archaeological past to view by the public. We share three aspirations that Museums all around the country will understand:

Done: We built the Virtual Museum of Thanet’s Archaeology from the resources that were available at the time.

Dedicated: We still feel the need for the museum almost a decade after we started our project.

Donate: We could do so much more to reveal the hidden discoveries of Thanet’s past if we had more resources. Find out how you can contribute.

The idea of a virtual Museum is nearly as old as the World Wide Web; a virtual Museum was one of the first sites to work with the early Mosaic Browser around 1992-93 shortly after Tim Berners-Lee created the Web as we know it. There’s an interesting academic article on the origin and function of Virtual Museums here:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/symposia/interdisciplinary/ns120/lectures/huhtamo.pdf