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Huge Iron Age weapons sacrifice found in Denmark
An archaeological excavation near Hedensted, Denmark, have discovered a massive Iron Age weapons sacrifice in an excellent state of preservation. Almost 200 objects, including 119 spears and lances, eight swords, five knives, three arrowheads, one axe, a horse bit and one exceptionally rare chainmail shirt have been unearthed. The weapons sacrifice dates to the 5th century, a time when the Germanic tribes were in constant conflict.
A team from the Vejle Museums made the find surveying the site of planned highway expansion at Løsning Søndermark in August of this year. The weapons were not sacrificed in a bog or in a burial, but rather in two houses in a settlement. One deposit was made after the house was demolished. The load-bearing corner posts were removed and the holes packed with weapons. The other deposit was the opposite: weapons were packed around the load-bearing posts during construction.
The deliberate placement in the postholes before and after usage suggests the weapons could not have been part of the inventory of a workshop or the armory of a barracks. Archaeologists believe the weapons were deposited as a protective ritual for the home of a warlord or chieftain of the community, or at any rate someone commanding a large number of men-at-arms. Additional research into the weapons is necessary to determine if they were locally owned or whether they were spoils of war taken from a defeated enemy, but archaeologists are currently leaning towards them having been war booty. Other sites with large sacrifices of weapons, like that found at Illerup Ådal, were deposits of war booty claimed after victory on the battlefield.
In addition to the weapons offering, archaeologists also discovered sections from two bronze neck rings. The round cross-section with large bronze beads distributed along the length identifies them as oath rings, symbols of power and influence in the Nordic Iron Age. Ring-bearers holding an oath ring aloft in one hand were frequently depicted on gold bracteates like the ones in the Vindelev Hoard. The ring-bearer on the Vindelev Hoard bracteates is also clad in a high-necked garment with textured scales that could very well be representing a chainmail tunic like the one found in the Løsning Søndermark excavation.
The chainmail is one of only 14 examples known in Denmark, and it is the only one to be found in a settlement area instead of in a burial. A mail shirt like this was so expensive and laborious to manufacture it could only have been worn by an elite war leader. Discarding it, even as an offering to the gods, would have been an enormous show of wealth and power, and the sheer quantity of weaponry in the sacrifice suggests a warlord able to gather and equip and/or defeat a force of about 80 soldiers and ten officers.
There are very few large weapons offerings found in buildings. The vast majority of them come from bogs or funerary contexts, which makes this site a unique source of information about the social structure of Iron Age villages at the remote periphery of the declining Roman Empire, namely, the strength and wealth of their warrior elites.
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