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Rare Anglo-Saxon Glass Bowl Discovered

Important Site's Discovery is Vindication of Portable Antiquities Scheme

A rare glass bowl, dating from the late fifth or early sixth century, has been retrieved intact by an English Heritage conservator from a magnificent collection of grave goods unearthed in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the New Forest area of Hampshire. The graves were excavated by Time Team for a live Channel 4 broadcast in August 2001, after a metal detectorist discovered a Byzantine brass bucket at the site and reported it to Winchester Museum.

In what is thought to be a unique combination, the bowl, which was probably imported all the way from the Rhineland, was found inside one of six wooden buckets buried with skeletons in the graves. The fragile vessel, pale green with delicate white trails on the outside, measuring about five inches across and one and a half inches high, was a miraculous survivor not only of its travels from abroad but of a sumptuous pagan burial rite, most likely symbolic of feasting. It was discovered at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology at Fort Cumberland in Portsmouth, where the excavated artefacts have been analysed and conserved.

The discovery of so many ceremonial buckets of this kind from one burial site is an extreme rarity. About six inches high, they are made of wooden staves bound with copper alloy bands and could have contained food or drink. The grave goods included spearheads, knives, tweezers, shield bosses, copper alloy buckles and a Frankish buckle plate richly inlaid with garnets and blue glass. These possessions reflect the preoccupations of communities in an uncertain age, shortly after the Roman Empire lost control of Britain. The country had broken up into a patchwork of small territories under the control of warrior elites, many of whom had strong links with continental barbarian tribes. The Frankish cup and buckle plate would have been high status objects, buried in the graves in a display of power.

David Miles, Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage, said: "It is marvellous that this fragile cup which gives a rare and evocative glimpse of early Anglo-Saxon life has survived intact in such wonderful condition. This and the other remarkable finds are all the more valuable now that so many Anglo-Saxon graves and the priceless information they contain about our past are being lost to deep ploughing."

For conservator Margaret Brooks the discovery of the glass bowl hidden in hard clay at the bottom of the bucket was a high point in her career. Just retiring after 20 years with English Heritage, she said: "I couldn't believe it when I first spotted the delicate green glass of the bowl, which was completely unexpected as none have ever been found in buckets before. It was a thrilling experience to tease it gradually from its hiding place and realise it was in one piece."

The discovery of the site and its subsequent excavation represents a resounding success for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a pilot voluntary recording scheme designed to encourage members of the public to report any artefacts they find.

Sally Worrell, liaison officer for the scheme at Winchester Museum, who initiated the project and invited Time Team to excavate the site, said: "Thanks to the action of the public-spirited metal detectorist who reported his find to me and enabled the dig to go ahead we now have a wealth of new information about the site. The project has demonstrated the enormous benefits of strengthening links between professional archaeologists and interested members of the public who find ancient objects."

The objects from the graves were analysed in Fort Cumberland's high-tech XRF spectrometer. This X-ray analysis technique is ideal for archaeology because items can be placed whole inside the machine and they are not damaged in the process. Directed at small areas, less than half a millimetre in diameter, the X-rays can almost instantly determine the composition of the material.

Examination of the glass bowl revealed that the glass, made up of soda, lime and silica, had been melted in a furnace and inflated and shaped on the end of a blowing iron. Opaque white trails (coloured with tin and lead) were added below the rim and pressed into the glass. The style is Frankish, simpler than that produced by more sophisticated Roman techniques such as enamelling and engraving. This particular kind of bowl is mostly found in the Rhineland and rarely appears in Britain.

The staves of many of the buckets survived in remarkably good condition because of the amount of copper-alloy in the bands which mineralised the wood. The wood was identified using a scanning electron microscope. Three buckets were made of yew, as is usual for this type of object, and when new they would have had a splendid russet hue with light and dark stripes. One bucket was made of pine, an unusual wood to find so far south. It could perhaps have come from the north of Britain or the continent. Another bucket appears to be made of juniper, though more analysis is needed before this can be verified. If confirmed, it would be the first bucket made of juniper ever to have been recorded.

A scrap of material found on a buckle is also being analysed and could provide vital information about yarn and cloth manufacture.

For Time Team the significance of the finds lies in what they and people they were buried with can tell us about life on the edge in Dark Age Britain. It was a competitive, rapidly changing society where families would have been jockeying for position and proclaiming their importance with the richness of their grave-goods.

Tim Taylor, series producer of Time Team, said: "This has to be one of our most amazing Time Teams. Not only were the large number of objects exceptional but the way the skeletons were laid out and the information we uncovered made us all feel that we were working on a site that might actually change the way we look at this really important period of British history."

Archaeologists believe that the high proportion of weapon-graves and double burials, plus the multiple bucket burials and the number of foreign imports, could indicate a complex society with a greater contact with Europe and the Mediterranean than has often been supposed.

The skeletons are being examined at Bristol University. Analysis so far has revealed that half of them were from people under the age of 25 and two were children. No injuries and no obvious causes of death have yet come to light.

The public will be able to see the artefacts recovered from the site in a special ‘Invaders' exhibition which will travel round Hampshire, starting in May at Andover Museum.