The hoard of gaming pieces from Lewis, Scotland: The context and meaning

Abstract

• The Lewis hoard of gaming pieces is possibly the most iconic find of medieval material culture discovered in the British Isles. They are more plentiful, more elaborate (combing both figurative and abstract pieces) and more opaque in their find circumstances than the pieces from Sandomierz, but like them appear to have been deliberately concealed. The Lewis hoard, like the pieces from Sandomierz, remains pivotal to our understanding of the social spread of chess between the 11th and 13th centuries. The Lewis hoard comprises 93 pieces, 82 of which are in the collections of the British Museum and 11 in the collections of National Museums Scotland. Of the 82 British Museum pieces, 78 are what are known conventionally as chess pieces, one is a buckle and 14 are rather plain tablesmen. The 11 pieces in National Museums Scotland are all chess pieces. The majority are made of walrus ivory but the long-held view that all the pieces were ivory was disproved by a joint technical analysis by the British Museum and National Museums Scotland, which showed that four warders and two pawns had the compact cellular structure typical of whales' teeth. Recent research (Caldwell, Hall and Wilkinson 2009 and 2010; Caldwell and Hall 2014) has established that there remains much to learn and debate about the Lewis hoard of gaming pieces and this contribution presents a summary of progress so far. We explore the alternate find spots for the hoard, favouring the one at Mealasta (rather than the traditional one of Uig bay), we look at who may have owned the pieces and the link to the cultural context of the Lordship of the Isles, we summarise the facial analysis of the pieces and other factors that help us to determine a chronology of production and assembly of the hoard, we explore the role as heirlooms and the different games that the pieces represent and finally we make an assessment of the on-going cultural impact of the hoard in books, film and television