Cups, bowls and cauldrons

The Gundestrup cauldron is 69 cm across and weighs close to 9 kg of silver. When it was cut from a Danish peat bog in 1891 it had been taken apart and its panels stacked inside the bowl, as if it had been deliberately put out of use before it was given to the bog. Its gods, warriors and animals have been argued over ever since: with Gaulish elements in its imagery and Thracian ones in its technique, made perhaps in the last two centuries BC far from where it ended up.

Vessels of gold and silver are among the oldest things in European hoards. Bronze Age goldsmiths raised thin bowls from a single disc by hammering it over a former, then chased in rows of bosses and ribs. At Eberswalde in Brandenburg eight such gold bowls were themselves used as containers for 73 more gold objects. The Valchitran Treasure from Bulgaria, dated to around 1300 BC, has 13 gold vessels weighing 12.5 kg in all, including a two-handled bowl of about 4.5 kg.

Cups and jugs were made for drinking together, and most hoards of them reflect feasting and gift-giving among elites. The Thracian kings of what is now Bulgaria collected silver on a huge scale: the Rogozen Treasure holds 165 vessels, mostly shallow libation bowls (phialai) and jugs, weighing more than 20 kg, while the nine gold vessels of Panagyurishte, a phiale, an amphora-rhyton and seven rhyta, weigh 6.164 kg. A rhyton was a horn- or head-shaped pouring vessel; wine ran out through a small hole at the base.

In the first millennium AD vessels travelled as gifts, tribute and loot. The Sutton Hoo ship burial included a nested set of ten silver bowls and a great silver dish carrying the control stamps of the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I (491-518); the Nagyszentmiklós treasure has 23 gold vessels weighing 9.945 kg, its date and makers still disputed. In the Viking age a silver-gilt cup from Frankish lands served as the container for the Vale of York Hoard, packed with 617 coins and 65 other items. Bronze cauldrons were the workhorses of feasting from the late Bronze Age onwards and were often reused as containers for hoards; the Trier gold hoard of about 2,500 aurei was buried in one.

To recognise a vessel fragment, look for curvature, a thickened or rolled rim, a foot-ring, rivet holes and handle attachments, and solder lines where separate parts were joined. Whole vessels let historians reconstruct how people drank and ate, who gave what to whom, and how far luxury metalwork moved. Inscriptions, weight marks and stamps, where present, can name owners and pin a date.