Migration period hoards

On a hillfort in East Lothian, in 1919, excavators lifted just over 23 kg of late Roman silver from a pit. The Traprain Law Treasure is mostly tableware, platters, bowls, jugs and spoons, with basins and mirror fragments from the bath, but nearly all of it has been cut into pieces or crushed flat. Recent study shows that many pieces were cut carefully to standard Roman weights, so the silver was probably turned into bullion inside the Roman world and then handed north. Older accounts called it loot; more recent ones prefer diplomatic gifts or pay for military service. It was buried in the early fifth century, well beyond the frontier: the archetypal hoard of the period, imperial wealth broken up and carried away.

Much of what moved was gold. The Roman state paid allies, recruits and enemies in solidi, coins struck at 72 to the pound, and the Germanic and Hunnic world turned that gold into ornaments of rank. The Pietroasele Treasure, found in 1837 in Buzău county in Romania, was a late fourth-century Gothic hoard of some twenty-two gold objects, among them eagle-headed brooches set with stones and a dish with a seated goddess at its centre. Only twelve pieces survive, and those spent forty years in Moscow after being sent there for safety in 1916. In Scandinavia the same flow of gold produced bracteates, thin single-sided pendants of the fifth to seventh centuries whose designs borrowed from Roman coins and medallions and turned them into images of northern rulers and gods.

The safekeeping-or-offering question is especially sharp here. At Vindelev in Jutland, a metal detectorist found 23 gold objects in 2020, 794 g in all: sixteen bracteates, some almost 14 cm across, fittings from a sword scabbard, and four Roman solidi of Constantine I to Gratian reworked as pendants. One bracteate carries a runic line read as 'he is Odin's man', the earliest known mention of the god. The hoard lay inside a longhouse that may have been a chieftain's hall, which suggests hiding in wartime; yet several of the largest pieces had been folded symmetrically before burial, which looks like ritual. Wealth hidden in the house and gold given to the gods were not always separate ideas.

Coins in these hoards were rarely used as small change. The empire went on striking full-weight solidi of about 4.5 g, and in the sixth and seventh centuries also lighter ones, marked at 20 to 23 carats instead of 24, which may have been made for trade or tribute; many of them have been found in central Europe, Russia and Georgia. Migration-period hoards cluster at the edges of the old empire, in Scandinavia, along the lower Danube and in the north of Britain, where the examples on this page were found.