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Description: | Description: Tiny fragment of gilded silver, decorated with a double spiral ridge, both ridges emerging at the same point from a flat-topped pellet at the centre. There are V-shaped grooves between the ridges, which vary in width somewhat; the fragment appears to be very worn. Beyond the spiral there is an unclear pattern of parallel ridges which are damaged, perhaps cut through at right angles. One edge is original, curving around the spiral and then turning out very slightly to a corner which projects a little. The breaks are neither particularly fresh nor particularly worn. The reverse is ungilded and undecorated.Dimensions: Length 12.8mm, width 9.2mm, thickness 1.8mm. Weight 1.1g.Discussion and Date: The V-shaped grooves suggest that this object was decorated in the technique of chip-carving. Bold linear chip-carved grooves like these are most common in the early Anglo-Saxon period, when spirals are found, most commonly on saucer brooches where the individual spirals are, as on this example, about 10mm across.Although a general parallel can be drawn with early Anglo-Saxon material, the precise details of the decoration are hard to match exactly. Saucer brooches are not normally made from silver; there are none on the PAS database, although an unusual composite gilded silver example with perhaps nine running spirals has recently been found in Suffolk (2013T167).Spiral decoration was one of the geometric motifs adopted from the repertoire of late Roman art (Dickinson 1991, 41) and it was occasionally executed in chip-carving (compare, for example, WMID5951, a late Roman copper-alloy strap-end with slightly smaller spirals). A late Roman to early Anglo-Saxon date-range, late fourth to early sixth century, is therefore proposed for this object. Its original function is unknown.
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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