The Galloway Hoard

The Galloway Hoard

The Galloway Hoard is the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. Buried around AD900, the Galloway Hoard brings together a stunning variety of materials and treasures from Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and as far away as Asia. The Hoard transports us back to a critical moment in history: the formation of the political entities we now know as Scotland, England and Ireland, in a time of viking raids. The Galloway Hoard was acquired with the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Scottish Government and hundreds of generous individual supporters.

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    Item type:Journal article,
    Textiles in a Viking Age hoard: Identifying ephemeral traces of textiles in metal corrosion products
    (2023-01-17)
    Davis, Mary
    ;
    Harris, Susanna
    This paper presents a novel method and terminology to identify and describe textiles from ephemeral traces in metal corrosion products. Since the 1980s, mineralised textiles (positive and negative casts in Janaway’s terminology) have been an important source of archaeological evidence. A major issue now is the identification of textiles in metal corrosion products when only faint traces remain. These traces no longer appear like textiles and are vulnerable to misinterpretation. Confused with metal dendritic structures or the form of corrosion products themselves, they are often lost through handling or cleaned off through conservation practices. This loss is cumulatively significant. To remedy this issue, this paper defines and characterises the form and structure of ephemeral traces of archaeological textiles through examination of metal corrosion products on a Viking Age hoard from Scotland. It defines a new terminology to supplement Janaway: petal shapes, remnant textile surface, ghost textile surface. The analysis follows an investigative inquiry from assessment to laboratory analysis using a Dinolite portable digital microscope, optical light microscopy with Z stacking and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results allow the secure identification of textiles from previously unidentified corrosion features. The method has wide applicability to corroded archaeological metal objects and has the potential to significantly increase the identification of textiles associated with metals and transform current understanding of hoards.
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