This brocade became highly fashionable in the late Viking and Middle Ages

The number of Urnes-style brushes found in Norway has doubled over the past decade, most likely due to an increase in metal detectors.

Things can often look like garbage with something in them when they enter the conservation lab for further analysis.

Conservator Margrethe Felter had no trouble identifying the type of jewelry she now x-rayed among the various finds from the ‘Intercity Sørli-Åkersvika’ excavation project in Stange, eastern Norway.

In a post on the Facebook page of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, she wrote: “We could immediately see the form of decoration and gilding of Urnes Brook.”

After radiography, the surgeon can begin to remove the waste.

“This is the most satisfying part of being an archeological conservator,” Felter wrote.

“Especially if the item is this wonderful.”

Mass production animal fashion

The Urnes Brook gets its name from the wood carving style of the Urnes shaft church. The central motif is an animal figure with four legs, a long thin neck and a bent head. The animal has almond or teardrop shaped eyes surrounded by eight rings.

Researchers have suggested that the animal may be a lion surrounded by snake-like creatures, a horse or a dragon.

This animal motif in jewelry was very hot during the transition from Old Norse to Christianity at the end of the Viking Age.

“It shows us that the same brushes were made en masse from the same source, from clay molds, and some of them were decorated,” said Jessica McGraw, an archaeologist at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and project leader. Urnes brooch.

Excavations in Trondheim in the mid-1970s in Norway yielded fragments of one of the clay molds, indicating a similar forest-type product recently found in Stange.

Lost and found after 1000 years

The researchers don’t know whether Urnes brushes were worn by men or women, or perhaps both.

“These forks are becoming popular at a time when burial practices are changing. During the Christian era, the custom of grave goods disappears. Urnes brushes belonging to the transition period are not found in graves, which is why we know so little about the people who wore them,” McGraw tells sciencenorway.no.

For both sexes, everyday use in the Viking Age, brooches were worn for decoration and to hold clothes and cloaks in place.

The urns brook shown in the picture was found in the top soil. In Viking and medieval times, people sometimes hid their valuables for safekeeping or kept them as gifts to the gods. In this case, however, other similar items were not found nearby. Therefore, archaeologists believe that a person may have simply disappeared here.

Excavations at two farms in Stange, Neston and Guaker, have uncovered 4,000-year-old settlements beneath the topsoil.

“He may have been one of the people who ran the largest and most important farm here in the early Middle Ages,” McGraw suggests.

Double finder

In the year In a 2012 scientific article about Urnes Bruchos in the journal Viking (link in Norwegian), archaeologist Ingunn Marit Rostad wrote that finds of these brochures are widespread in Denmark.

In 1968, eight such brushes were found in Denmark. But in 1994 there were over 100.

This volume allowed the researchers to classify the finds in different styles of Urnes Brook, which are different.

In Norway, the number of discoveries in 2012 was around 27.

“Since then, we’ve had a lot more discoveries,” says McGraw.

“We don’t know the exact figure, but since then it has at least doubled, if not tripled, due to the increase in metal detection. However, most of the time we get only bits of brush,” she says.

Numerically, this means that there are currently around 50-80 finds of Urnes brushes in Norway.

“So this brooch is not a unique find, but it is an excellent example of a type of Urns brooch that we don’t have very many of in our collection at the museum,” McGraw said.