The initial hint had not been a glitter of metal but a persistent mass of old vegetable fibrils. In an excavation of a housing-development at Rosemarkie on the Black Isle of Scotland, an archaeologist was lifting a small block of soil when X-rays quickly revealed within a nice pile of bronze ornaments. The most intimate detail only appeared later, when the jewellery was subjected to laboratory analysis: the jewellery had been stuffed with bracken and tied with tree bast so strongly that even after almost three thousand years they could still be joined together with an overhand knot.
There are nine bronze objects in the hoard, consisting of six bracelets, two penannular ringed ornaments, and a cup-ended ornament, to have a pit in which they fit snugly and yet not so deeply that they could not be easily retrieved. The burial is dated to be 894-794 BCE, at the very end of the Bronze Age, by a radiocarbon sample of tree bast used as binding.
The objects are engineered to favor slow looking. A single ornament–penannular, giving it the shape of an incomplete circle–has 37 small rings, and has been referred to by the analysts as the most complete and intricate of its kind in Scotland. The fractured partner still has 13 rings, and it has been discovered that both were probably cast in lost-wax by the same artisan, a method of casting used on prestige work since it is a tedious process that requires expert knowledge. The cup ornament, also cup-ended, introduces another technical commentary: the ornament is cast in one piece, the seams not visible, and once the metal has melted and hardened, there is very little to be done to correct the piece.
The manner in which these pieces were worn is still not clear. The entire ringed decoration is too minor to slip around an average head and presents no traces of being beaten into shape to fit the neck. Certain bracelets are distorted by frequent use, but some of them seem to be nearer to pristine. The diversity is quite remarkable since the bracelets were piled up but there was no two of similar ones implying that the hoard was not based on the possessions of a particular owner but rather a collection of matched bracelets.
No less disclosive is what remained with the metal. The bracken stems and fronds seem to have served as packing between the top and bottom of the pit, and the bast–inner bark, must have been applied along the lines of the ornaments, and collected at the bottom in a thick mass, which was not easily to be separated. There is an easy reason as to why this has been preserved: copper alloys are capable of mitigating micro-organisms, and the bronzes were useful in the protection of fragile plant material that would otherwise be lost. The knot is important in that it transforms an established archeological conjecture into a proven activity: the objects were physically bound together, and not simply placed in a manner to appear bound.
The hoard that Rosemarkie is in is also within a wider narrative of craft and provision. Excavation uncovered a small village of over centuries-old roundhouse settlements, with evidence of metalworking in the form of crucibles and fragments of clay moulds. The bronze has been scientifically associated with other sources outside Highlands and the metal has been dated to Wales and England and this suggests that Rosemarkie was part of the broad dissemination networks also evident in other Scottish hoards.
The mystery that remains unsolved is the deposition itself. Archaeologists differentiate between scrap hoards that are intended to be recycled, ritual depositions that are to be recovered never, and well-packed collections buried at or near homes to be preserved. Rosemarkie is of the kind last: pitting, intentional piling, packing of the plants to save, a knot take care to knot. Why the jewellery had been buried in the earth is not the question, but why no one came back to so carefully prepared a finding again.
