I get a little teary eyed when I see a hoard. Maybe it’s just empathy on my part, but I can’t help but wonder about the people on the other end of the items. It’s almost like a long plastic cup telephone connecting me to them and the string has rotted, allowing a little information through but time has muffled the vowels and erased the consonants..
Artistically, Hoards are(1) treasure troves. When a new find is discovered it’s like Christmas (though most finds are done nearer to summer), allowing a glimpse at the aesthetics they left. These items have usually not seen daylight for hundreds of years and are brought out of the earth like they’ve just been woken from a long sleep, which gives off a feeling that they should be left for another five minutes. For my own practice, these are godsends for ancient motifs and forms that I can explore.
For example, when I saw the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum(2) I became enamoured with the rock art and the metalwork of the Neolithic and Bronze age. How they created beautiful stone axe heads with smooth faces and glittering gold necklaces that represent the sun, I can’t help but be in awe. Before this exhibition, I was mainly focusing on Anglo Saxon and Celtic styles, things that are 'British'. Afterwards, I noticed how stupid that is. Everything is influenced by each other and limiting myself is to ignore thousands of years of ‘European’(3) artistic expression! If I’m exploring ancient British art, this exhibition taught me that I can’t be picky.
But when I saw the Stonehenge exhibition, I found the people as well. The lost people we forget actually existed in prehistory. Those axe heads and pieces or jewellery were made and cherished by those who looked after them. They personalised them, they wore them until they broke and even fixed them. There’s life in these items, and I think they knew that as well(4). We have found items that have been repaired several times, meaning that there is a chance that they were heirlooms being passed down.
Unfortunately, this is a post about hoards. We didn’t find these artifacts in someone’s nan’s dresser. They were (sometimes) buried and left in the ground only to be found closer to our time.
So why? What lead people to leave them?
When someone intentionally buries something, there’s usually a few reasons. Stashing and Offering come to mind right now.
Stashing is what squirrels do with nuts. It’s keeping items safe for future use. There might be a threat of danger, so on the safe side people keep valuables away to only get them when they need them. Like the squirrel, some people forget where they stashed stuff, so that’s how it’s there. The sadder reason might be that there wasn’t anyone to recover them.
Offering is mostly religious. These items were left and were never meant to be recovered. This includes your funerals or your sacrifices. There are finds like the Battersea shield, which was pristine, being given to the Thames River as an offering. The Sutton Hoo burial was a funeral, so the buckle(5) was never to be found. There’s a theory that the Staffordshire hoard was a ‘killing’, where the pommels and others were ritualistically broken(6).
Like the archaeological community, hoards are extremely interesting in what they show us about the past. What people believed, how people lived, what people valued. They are extremely human things that we have access to.
Nevertheless, interest should not be the only thing to take from these things. We can learn about the people and how they interacted with the world, what they saw as important or worth saving, whilst also recognising the limits or our own understanding. Like a lot of fields of knowledge, we can get stuck in our cultural frame of knowledge and completely create a fake reality that was never there. We can also incorporate our findings to mould our world with their culture to become more ‘complete’ in a sense(7).
For me, I can’t help but try to figure out the people behind the hoard. The stories are fascinating, because every so often there will be something so personal that it will be questioned. A piece of bone in a jar of gold coins or an inscription on a piece of wood. These are as important as the metals that surround them. The Galloway hoard has silk from China in it for god sake! It has stories that are beyond our imagination, and I think people like J.R.R Tolkien knew that.
The world is so much more complex than just moments in time that we forget that people make it up(8), and that’s why I love it so much. The hoards allow us to see the past and humanise with it more than you would if the past was a series of documents. Human history is not books, it is what has made us. My practice is simply me trying to explore these different worlds through an artistic medium, but you just can’t go wrong with a good hoard!
1. Literally as well.
2. Again, conflicting opinions about that place.
3. I mean, what counts as European? It’s a term so fluid that its almost defunct. Is it a Continent? Is it a Peninsular? It’s a place for sure, but a place with no fixed residents until we started supergluing them to the soil. Remember kids, we all started as nomads until we decided to settle, and even then, that’s not even a sure thing. (David Graeber, the Origin of Everything)
4. There is poetry about ‘killing’ items and returning them to the earth. There are Bronze age sword dykes that have been folded and placed in the ground. This is not a European thing as artifacts all over the world have been found to be destroyed for the same reason.
5. That gorgeous belt buckle.
6. Back to point 5 with that. Also, Beowulf tells us of this practice. The treasures of fallen foes are broken and given back to the earth that the materials sprung from.
7. Complete. An interesting idea, poorly written here. What I’m trying to say is that we can take aspects of other ways of doing things to make a better world. It is not limited to geography or temporality. If we ignore these as ‘primitive’, we don’t learn that we are the ones changing, not history.
8. Both make it up (what it consists of) and also make it up (we write it down, and therefore neither correct nor finished).
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