Unexpected!

[ossamenta]

I'm in between bone reports at the moment, so I spend my time helping the enviromental department with soil sample processing. We take soil samples on excavations to find remains of charred grains, small fish bones, snails etc - i.e. things we can't find by hacking out a ditch with a mattock (depite popular belief, trowels aren't the most commonly used tools on excavations). Soil samples are also taken from burials. After the skeleton has been recorded and removed, the grave fill gets sampled so we don't miss small bones - particularly when the graves contain infants or small children - possible foetal remains or calcified cysts.

Buckets with soil then come to the processing area, where the environmental archaeologists sieve them through various mesh sizes. Not the most exciting part of archaeology in my opinion, since I don't find charred grains and snails to be that interesting. But yesterday the soil revealed something that made my day: an Anglo-Saxon spindle whorl! I don't think I've ever seen one outside a museum before.


Admittedly not that exciting, but compared to the rest of the stuff that remained in the mesh - 96% gravel, 1% pottery fragments, 2% bone, 1% snails - it was utterly awesome.

Comments

[sara]

You don't think that's a loom or net weight? It looks a bit irregular for a spindle whorl.

(Usual disclaimer: I'm an Americanist! Anglo-Saxons are so not my area of expertise! But if someone passed me that in the lab and said, "What is it?" I would say, "I'll bet a lot of people would think this is a spindle whorl, but I bet Elizabeth Barber would call it a loom weight, and if I found it somewhere locally I would be sure it was a net weight.")

[ossamenta]

It's only an inch across, so it would be too small for a loom weight. It's a bit irregular, but not excessively so - although I have no practical knowledge of spinning, so I can't say whether the irregularity would be a large impact or not.

I searched in Sweden's National History Museum's online database and found two contemporary(-ish) spindle whorls from Birka, which are quite similar although a bit more symmetrical: 106426 and 107602.

[sara]

Having a bit of practical knowledge of spinning (or more to the point, being the child of someone who has a tremendous amount of practical knowledge of spinning), this particular object looks romply enough that I would be surprised if it worked well as a spindle weight (which, of course, may account for its appearance in an archaeological context, ha ha).

But, like I say, am nothing like an expert on the place or time. I wonder what other contemporaneous household thingies might have needed weighting.

[ossamenta]

See, this is why we need communication between people who do the book parts and people who do the practical parts. Ideally all archaeologists should have tried at least one craft relevant to their preferred time period and/or interests. Even if you never gain expertise in these crafts, you have the basics and hopefully enough knowledge to know where and whom to ask.

I wonder how many archaeological spindle whorls are too wobbly to function as spindle whorls? Perhaps there were other household items that needed to be weighed down with a small weight, or perhaps such spindle whorls were the first attempts of a novice potterer?

[sara]

Well, see this is why you need Elizabeth Barber's book, because she has a whole thing about how many "spindle whorls" can't be spindle whorls because they'd be utterly useless for that.

I am v. much for the hands-on myself, yes (even if I don't flint-knap any more after that incident where I almost took my thumb off....*GRIN*)

scale

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com]

What size is it? If I remember rightly—which is quite unlikely—loom weights are bigger than spindle whorls. Though I also know that both loom and net weights are more typically toroidal in Anglo-Saxon contexts, aren't they?

Re: scale

[ossamenta]

It's about an inch across, so way too small for a loom weight.

Regarding toroidal shapes, I have to look that up in the library. I'm not that knowledgeable on textile tools, as my main focus of textile knowledge has been sewing/embroidery and not the process of making the threads and textiles.

[ranunculus]

Ah it is the little things in life!