X Marks the Spot
Buried treasure and burying treasure: what's the point?
Hello, hello,
It’s the end of the week. Time to look back over a hot cup of coffee, or maybe an iced coffee if where you are is like Yorkshire this week!
And glancing back at the past week it isn’t hard to be drawn further back still, into my favourite of times (for studying, not living in!): the Middle Ages. This week, one theme has been all over the news, at least in the UK and possibly only if you’re paying attention, but I am so you don’t have to! Everybody seems to be talking about buried treasure.
Maybe you’ve seen some of these headlines? These are from the BBC but the same stories have done the rounds, from what I can see, in the UK and international press.
Missing Viking treasure coin unearthed in London
How two friends found £3m treasure and ended up in jail1
Castle acquires largest Anglo-Saxon gold coin hoard
Sutton Hoo bucket believed to be cremation vessel
Never to miss a good headline, the same story was covered by The Sun:
There are a couple of themes that link together most or all of these stories, to do with what people were doing then and what people are doing now. Working backwards, then,
What to do if you strike gold?
What counts as treasure anyway?
Why did people bury treasure?
Handily, I’ve also just come back from Uppsala, where one of the things I was doing was talking and meeting with people who work on exactly these questions about medieval Scandinavia, where a whole lot of treasure got buried for all sorts of reasons and where, as a result, scholars have been wondering about buried treasure for a long time. That doesn’t mean we, or I, have all of the answers, but when there’s a sudden rush of stories about something, it often helps to look more brodly.
What to do if you strike gold?
From a historical perspective, the answer to this question isn’t actually that interesting. It pretty much breaks down into two options:
Obey the law wherever (and whenver) you happen to be
or don’t, and risk the consequences.
Several of the headlines of the last couple of weeks have been about people choosing option no. 2 (or, in one case, half of a metal detectorist partnership choosing option no. 2 and the other obeying the law. It didn’t change the overall outcome that much but presumably made for some really awkward conversations).
Property law going back at least to the Roman Empire, and therefore any law based on Roman precedent, which covers really quite a lot of the world, has included clauses about who owns whatever is found beneath the ground and lots of legal codes have specific provisions for ‘treasure’, as opposed to, say, oil or naturally occurring gold or diamonds, or mummified woolly mammoth remains. Generally, the legal rules about treasure split into 4 possibilities:
Finders keepers, losers weepers! Go ahead and crack that champagne because all that matters is that I laid hands on it. (This is not common, by the way.)
This is my land, sucker! And so is whatever is under it! (Also not common but probably commoner than ‘finders keepers’? This is my own anecdotal sense not legal guidance.)
That would be a matter for the government, thank you very much!
Some combination of options 1-3.
Each of options 1-3 has issues. If either the finder or the landowner gets all of the loot, then the other one is probably going to feel pretty narked and, of course, nobody else probably ever gets to find out anything about what was there, so scholars and the public lose a huge opportunity to learn more about the people who used to live in a place. If the state gets everything then, theoretically, the public and scholars get maximum benefit and knowledge, though the finder and landowner might still be pretty annoyed. In practice, though, ‘government gets everything’ scenarios tend to generate a lot of secrecy whenever anybody finds anything, which can result in an equal loss of knowledge.
That is why combinations are quite popular. As an example, in the UK the rules are, roughly, that you can only look for treasure on somebody else’s land with their permission and, if you find anything of value, ownership is split 50/50 between the finder and the landowner BUT if it is legally defined as treasure, then you (the finder) have to notify the local coroner, i.e. a representative of the government, within 14 days. The government can then take various steps to decide what happens to the treasure. It can be given back to the landowner and finder to sell on the open market or the government can choose to acquire it directly or give one or more museums the opportunity to raise the money to buy it.
In this system, the idea is that the finder and landowner both get something for their efforts/ownership and they won’t lose out financially by telling the government, which means that finds can be documented and, if they are important enough, acquired for the public. This is because the government still has to pay market value if it chooses to acquire treasure. Then that gets split between the finder and the landowner. And generally, this can work pretty well. As a result of the system in the UK to document those finds, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, we know a massive amount about the distribution of artefacts across the country and, as a result about all periods of history that we otherwise wouldn’t.
Many discoveries are made by metal detectorists. It is now a pretty big hobby group in the UK, with its own comedy TV show, and stories including people who have credited detecting with helping their mental health and people who use detecting to reuinte people with lost sentimental items. And most detectorists are excited to contribute to public knowledge.
But, for some, the process of the goverment valuing and then deciding to buy stuff just feels too long. For others, declaring a find and then splitting the value with the landowner isn’t that appealing. Some even want to cheat their own detecting buddies who may have agreed that whatever they found on a given day would be shared among the group. And that’s how some of these people ended up in the news. And whenever people skip the process for any of these reasons, knowledge is lost. Sometimes finds just vanish into the black market. Sometimes they are caught and the objects are found but often, by then, the place where they were discovered has been crudely dug in case there is more treasure there, so archaeologists lose whatever other clues they might have been able to uncover. (I’m trying not to be judgemental here: I’m more interested in understanding people but honestly, understanding past people would be so much easier if present people followed the law on this one.)
So, there you go. None of this counts as legal advice. If you go looking for treasure as a hobby or even if you stumble on it accidentally, know what the law is wherever you are! But that also includes a question that straddles the ‘now’ and the ‘then’…
What counts as treasure anyway?
Here, there is a legal answer and a historical one. The legal one is ‘whatever it says in the jurisdiction you’re in when you find it’. To continue with the UK as an example, something is treasure if it is:
two or more coins with a silver or gold content of 10% or more, from the same find (i.e. found in the same place, usually meaning in the same pot, purse or bundle, though this can also mean found in a loose scatter near to one another), that are at least 300 years old when found OR
ten or more coins with a silver or gold content of less than 10%, from the same find (i.e. as above), that are at least 300 years old when found OR
two or more prehistoric base metal objects in association with one another (i.e. found in the same place, but with a slightly broader meaning, covering finds within the same broad area or that seem to come from the same site or context, such as within a prehistoric settlement site) OR
any individual find that is not a coin and is at least 300 years old and contains at least 10% gold or silver PLUS
any object of any material found in the same place as another object which is defined as treasure (according to the list above).
There is also a clause for defining treasure in the case of:
an object substantially made from gold or silver but less than 300 years old, that has been deliberately hidden with the intention of recovery and whose owners or heirs are unknown.
Clear? Good! Don’t forget to double check the next time you dig up some old coins, gold and silver or prehistoric metal stuff.
In the meantime, though, let’s move on to a slightly different question: what counted as treasure for the people who buried the stuff that the law is now keen gets reported to the government? Of course, some of it might just have been lost by accident. A medieval bishop in Norfolk was probably quite annoyed when he realised he’d lost his ring. Still, most of what gets recovered as treasure was also buried as treasure. It was buried on purpose.
One of the major reasons people buried stuff was for safety. Imagine, for a moment, that you hear news there is an army on the way (and in a lot of times and places, it didn’t much matter whether it was ‘your’ army or somebody else’s). You’re probably going to want to leave for your own safety. You might carry a few valuables but mostly you’ll focus on having enough food, water and perhaps carrying young children or elderly, disabled or injured friends and relatives. So what to do about your other valuables? Gemstones and precious metals can survive being buried in the ground for a long time, their size to value ratio is very low, so you don’t have to dig an enormous hole to hide quite a lot of wealth, and when you come back for it, that wealth will be the starting point for rebuilding whatever you’ve lost, from burned down buildings to livestock killed and eaten by the marauding soldiers.
That seems to be how a lot of treasure got buried. Times of uncertainty and violence often show up archaeologically this way and those hoards are fascinating and always rather sad because, whoever buried them, with fear and hope in their hearts, never did come back to dig up those valuables and rebuild their life. Hopefully some of them just found somewhere else to make a life or had an epiphany about the transience of wealth and dedicated themselves to a life of spiritual fulfilment. Mostly, though, they probably just didn’t make it.
Some treasures, though, were never meant to be dug back up. We could loosely call them all ‘ritual deposits’, which is just a term for ‘buried for some sort of religious, spiritual or symbolic reason’, but they we can also split them out into some common groups. One is treasure included in burials. Whether people are buried with stuff is strongly shaped by culture. In some cultures it would be a terrible abandonment of the dead to leave them with nothing, especially where people believe(d) that things buried with the dead would be available to them in the afterlife. Imagine leaving somebody with nothing to eat or drink from or to pay for services with. In other cultures, it can be a terrible sin and a sign of irreligious pride to include anything at all in a grave or a cremation.
Cultures that bury people with stuff can produce all kinds of treasure for archaeologists to find. One of this week’s stories is linked to one of the most famous from Britain: the site of Sutton Hoo. This was a burial ground used by several people, including probably one king, in early medieval England, before these rulers became Christian (which caused a cultural shift towards burying people with less stuff). Burial goods included a boat, coins, armour (including the helmet that has become the emblem of early medieval England), plates and dishes, weapons and… a bucket (more on that later).
Other kinds of ritual deposit include ‘foundation depostis’, which are treasures buried when building a house or church or temple. These were quite popular in certain parts of medieval Scandinavia, especially on the island of Gotland, so this is where people began thinking most seriously about what a foundation deposit might have been all about: good luck? An emergency fund? Proof that you were well enough off to have the right to build a house in the first place? Foundation deposits form an interesting ‘in between’ case because some were clearly never meant to be dug up again, at least not without dismantling the building, while others clearly could be dipped into or added to now and again, but not without a bit of effort (like digging up your floor).
Another quite well-known form of ritual deposit that you may have come across is ‘bog’ or ‘river’ burials. These often contained weapons as well as jewellery (and sometimes people) and involved, as the name suggests, dropping things into bogs or rivers, apparently to disappear there. They were never meant to be recovered and seem to have represented, like treasures in burials, ‘sending’ things somewhere else.
Of course, not everything buried in graves, dropped in bogs or hidden under buildings was necessarily valuable, and if we find things buried in the ground, often we only think they were hidden there for safety if they are valuable. Otherwise, why would we think anybody might want to protect them in that way? And that gets us to some of the heart of the question ‘what is treasure anyway?’ Some things have been valued by lots of people across time and space: generally, durable, shiny things like gold and silver and gemstones fall into this category. It makes sense to us to see them as treasure. Other things we can only see were ‘treasured’ because of how they were treated: a delicately carved bone comb included in a grave, a woven cloth, a bronze ear scoop (yeah, really. The Vikings were big into ear hygiene). They could be valued because they were hard to make or because what you did with them was a high-status activity in that society (spurs, for example, might not be very valuable objects, in and of themselves, but they are really only useful if you ride horses and horses historically have been valuable and elite). And sometimes, we just don’t know what something meant to somebody but we can see that it meant a lot.
And that brings me to my final question, which you may think I have already answered, but not quite:
Why did people bury treasure?
Okay, so I have answered part of it. People might bury treasure so they could come back for it later and they might bury it to ‘send’ it to another world but we also assume that the act of burying things was itself significant. Funerals tend to be public and, until quite recently, putting up a building was often a public event, involving members of the community working together or migrant communities of artisans living alongside the permanent population for months at a time.
Thinking about this overlaps with some of what I was talking about last week, to do with the landscape of Gamla (Old) Uppsala. How did doing things together, in shared places, building up codes of behaviour, or rituals, create belonging or hierarchy, or identity or exclusion?
Let’s take an example from one of this week’s news stories: the Sutton Hoo bucket. In fairness to the people who buried it, calling it a ‘bucket’ is a bit like describing the Mona Lisa as a ‘poster’. It is a really fancy bucket, made of bronze and decorated with images cut into the surface. It also came from Byzantium. This mattered because in the sixth century, when a cremated body was buried inside the bucket, with a bone comb beside them, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was several months’ journey away. Constantine I, in the fourth century had refounded Constantinople as his new capital of the Roman Empire, and had started his journey to that throne in York, many miles further north than Sutton Hoo, and ruled everytthing south of it, but that was in the age of stories, far beyond living memory.
By the time of Raedwald (the king who is probably buried in the biggest mound at Sutton Hoo, the eastern Roman capital was a place of almost unimaginable wealth. It was known mainly through occasional imports of wine and fine pottery that arrived in Britain and which were immediately snapped up by kings to show how rich and powerful they were. That, and gold coins, which sometimes turned up alongside the smaller, less fancy gold coins that sometimes turned up from what is now France and the Low Countries, and which were still much fancier than anything being made in Britain at that point: one of the stories at the top of this post also shows you some of those coins, with CONOB on them, showing that they were made in Constantinople.
So, being buried in, or, more accurately, other people choosing to bury somebody in, a really fancy bucket from the Land of Wine and Gold and Fancy Stuff and ROMANS, Far, Far Away was a big statement. It definitely communicated wealth and access to rare things. Generally, burying (or otherwise destroying) costly things, is a practice that anthropologists refer to as ‘conspicuous consumption’, which is what it sounds like: showing off that you can afford to use up stuff. It is pretty common across human cultures as a way of showing generosity, wealth, power… any combination of those things. Think:
throwing a party with more food than people could possibly finish. It is a statement that you (the person throwing the party) can afford to over-cater, potentially throwing away what is left, or at least giving it away for free, because you have the money or, in more agrarian cultures, because your land is so abundant.
buying designer outfits for a child that is growing at a rate of 20 knots a second, so that they will never wear any of them more than once, then boasting (whether loudly, or just as an off-handed comment) that you plan to give them all to charity or just dump them when they’re too small.
lighting a cigar with a $100 bill.
If some of my examples bring you out in hives, either because you think I’m being mean and sniffy about a completely appropriate and acceptable thing to do or because you think I’m not being sniffy enough about a disgustingly wasteful, boastful, obnoxious thing to do, don’t worry. You are reacting normally to conspicuous consumption. It always exists in tension in society because
it is relative: one person’s conspicuous consumption might be another person’s normal.
it creates or displays hierarchies: if one person’s conspicuous consumption is another person’s normal, that will often say a lot about those two people’s relative power or access to wealth more generally.
it is, therefore, wrapped up in millennia of culturally specific codes about exactly what displays are completely appropriate and which are completely obnoxious. Leave a big tip at a restaurant in the US and you might get coded as generous and kind. Leave a big tip at a restaurant in China and you’ll likely get coded as arrogant and insulting for suggesting that people working in the restaurant are too poor to support their family and that you are much wealthier than them.
In early medieval England, conspicious consumption was critical to how political elites distinguished themselves from the people they ruled. In effect, it was part of the political structure. How did you know that the person in charge was in charge? He (or sometimes she) was wearing the best stuff, throwing the biggest feasts, riding the best horses and giving away the best gifts. That signalled that he (or sometimes she) had access to the most resources, could pay the best and most numerous armies and was the most generous and therefore the most likely to help out in times of trouble. So conspicuous consumption wasn’t just about showing people who was boss, it was also about persuading people to accept that assertion: somebody who wasn’t generous with their wealth and resources might find that somebody who started out with less but was willing to give more of it away might wind up with more and better soldiers…
Hence the importance of showing that you were rich and generous enough to bury somebody in the Bucket of Buckets.
So far, so good, but as I’ve read over the years about displays of conspicuous consumption, it has struck me more and more that there is a difference between consuming things that are either renewable (even at a cost in effort, resources or labour), like food, mined metals, wood, etc. and consuming things that are not renewable. It isn’t a fundamental difference: the logic of ‘I can afford to do this and, by choosing to, I show my power and generosity’ is the same. But it is a difference, I think, of impact.
If somebody conspicuously consumes renewables, there is an implicit promise of future participation in that consumption: join me and you can join the feast!
If somebody conspicuously consumes something that would be functionally irreplaceable, like a large bronze bucket from 2000 miles away, it is gone. There will be no more buckets like it for you or anybody else, whether you follow this person or not. Perhaps they are signalling that they can easily get hold of things equally rare and valuable, that this particular extremely fancy Byzantine bucket is of no consequence, but that doesn’t ring true to me. Too often, these things were treated as if they clearly were considered very consequential. For example, to quote The Sun, they might be used to bury a ‘dead VIP’.
And that raises another possibility. Disposing of these things was never about the fact of disposing of them (I am so awesome I can just, you know, bury something so rare and special you’ll never see another one like it!). What mattered was the act of disposing of them. Archaeologists working on the site of Sutton Hoo have made the point that the whole burial was an elaborate, lengthy performance. People would have spent months making some of the food and baskets in the grave, even if they didn’t know they were being made for the burial. The site itself would have taken weeks to prepare. Everything would have been gathered, laid out. There is evidence that the tomb was designed to be walked through before it was closed up, perhaps once, maybe many times. From descriptions of elaborate royal burials from other cultures at around the same period, it is clear that this often involved parading and displaying rare and costly items before placing them with the dead. And then, when the burial at Sutton Hoo was closed, the ends of the ship would have stuck out of the burial mound, perhaps for generations, before the mound itself remained as a permanent monument.
These were sites of action and of memory, designed to be moments that would stand out from the everyday and that could be remembered, perhaps through rituals and stories, by triggers in the landscape, like the mound. And it makes me wonder if the point of conspicuous consumption of one-off and visually distinctive objects was not to lose those objects, but actually to make them immortal, like the person buried, in memory: ghost objects, forever present. Would storytellers have spoken of the wondrous bucket in which the dead (probably) king was laid to rest, in the same way that the early medieval English poem, Beowulf, speaks of wondrous swords or buildings associated with legendary heroes?
When I visited the tomb of the emperor Qin Shu Huang Di, the ‘first emperor’, according to official histories of what is now China, with its famous terracotta warriors, what struck me was, first, that no other emperor ever did that again. It was a one-off act of massive conspicuous consumption. And second, that the legend of what else was in the tomb was even more intriguing and spectacular even than the rows of statues. We have a textual record of that tomb, which we don’t for Sutton Hoo, and it says that the emperor, in the inner mound of his tomb, had a model map of his empire constructed with liquid mercury for the rivers, and ground samples on the mound have, indeed, picked up traces of mercury. It speaks of the lavish, many-layered tomb the emperor himself lies in. And it has been decided, at least for the time being, that that central mound will not be opened. The emperor will lie undisturbed but the ghost of what was put there, never to be seen again, continues to cause wonder and to amplify the legend of the man.
Sutton Hoo was a site created in a time and a place that was not able to pass its stories on quite so fully but every generation hopes for its own posterity and perhaps now we have seen a glimpse again of something that was never meant to be dug back up but was always meant to be remembered.
There is also a podcast about this one from BBC Wales, appropriately called Fool’s Gold.
Really interesting, Rebecca. I had a Thames foreshore permit for years and never found one single Roman winged goddess or solid gold Saxon sword - mostly a few broken clay pipes and the odd rusty supermarket trolley. Maybe I should try the metal detecting. Or just give up?!