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Description: | Description: Circular object made from gilded silver. It consists of a thick, almost-circular disc, with both faces deeply recessed. The front has chip-carved relief decoration of a cross, with each arm made up of a clockwise-turning spiral. There originally appears to have been a small raised three-sided pyramid between each terminal, but only one of these now survives as the others have been largely destroyed by the punching of neat circular holes through them. The three holes thus formed are all about 2mm in diameter, and they have raised edges to both front and reverse. They cut through the existing decoration and are therefore secondary. The pyramids and the cross are all enclosed by a narrow raised border before the vertical wall of the rim.The raised rim around the recessed decorated face is worn very smooth to the front, and is concave on its inner edge, which retains well-preserved gilding. Its outer face is decorated with longitudinal grooves, perhaps originally three but now in places only two survive. One appears to be deeper than the other and is better preserved. These grooves end in two zones of transverse grooves; all of these external grooves have traces of gilding in them, but the exterior has otherwise lost any gilding.The zones of transverse grooves flank an area of disturbance in the smooth rim, with a roughly U-shaped irregular notch occurring between them, cut into the reverse of the rim. The notch might look secondary, perhaps due to damage, if it were not flanked by the transverse grooves. There are four transverse grooves to one side and four clear ones, with perhaps two others more worn, on the other side of the notch.The reverse is rough, ungilded and undecorated. The rim around this face is lower than around the front, and is also slightly concave on its inner edge, although not gilded. There is a possible head of an integral rivet, or a filed-down projection, which cannot be seen from the front, in the centre of the U-shaped notch, behind the intact pyramidal boss. Opposite this there is the remains of another, possibly flattened, small roughly rectangular projection which emerges from the edge of the rim.Dimensions: 22.11mm by 20.47mm in size, 5.72mm in thickness, 8.61g in weight.Discussion: This is an extremely unusual object. It is the right size and shape for a Roman seal-box, has the required three holes, and the projections on the reverse may be the remains of hinge lugs. Silver and gilding are, however, very unusual materials for a seal-box, and although these objects require holes in one half, these should be in the undecorated half. The holes in this case are in any case secondary. The motif, while not unknown in Late Roman art (compare SUR-029B13) is not paralleled on any known seal-box.The motif is also known from the Anglo-Saxon world, although it tends to be smaller in scale (found, for example, on a mount from Spong Hill 3271/3 (Hills et al 1994, fig. 104), in the centre of the foot of a small square-headed brooch from Finglesham D3 (Hawkes 1958, fig. 9b), and on wrist-clasps SF10757, NMS-500581 and NMS-FB03F7). The object is similar in size to an early Anglo-Saxon apex mount from a shield boss, but the recessed faces, geometric decoration and fixings are all unlike those on shield boss apex mounts (Dickinson 2005).The closest parallel to this object appears to be a type of circular buckle plate found in Scandinavia and thought to be part of a sword-scabbard harness (Franzén 2009). These buckle plates have 'sunken interiors' or are 'elevated circular fastening plates', and examples in gilded silver come from Snartemo in Norway, Sjörup in Sweden, and Nydam IV in Denmark; there is also an unprovenanced Danish example and a similar buckle-like object from Tjurkö in Sweden (Franzén 2009, 55-56, figs 2, 3 and 5). They all have chip-carved ornament, often based on crosses with variously scrolled terminals, but the Lakenheath example differs from the others in not having niello decoration. It has clearly been re-used in some way, but for what reason remains obscure.Date: These buckle plates date to the last quarter of the fifth or the first quarter of the sixth century AD (Franzén 2009, 56-58) and so this object is likely to be early Anglo-Saxon in date.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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