Author: lekkis

ORP: Wrist Clasps

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For my object reconstruction project, I focused on re-creating a pair of Anglo-Saxon wrist clasps, which were found in grave 28 at the Little Eriswell cemetery in Suffolk.

 

Background

Wrist clasps were a fairly ubiquitous item in the kingdom of East Anglia and showed up in many of their inhumation cemeteries. They are often made of bronze, are rectangular, and have a hook and hole closure system that allowed them to be linked together. They would have been used to hold together the sleeves of a woman’s dress in a manner similar to that of modern cufflinks.

 The hook on the back of one clasp

The clasps found in grave 28 were fairly nondescript compared to the the more embellished ones cast in silver or covered in intricate patterns found elsewhere, but when considered alongside the other items in the grave (such as a waist bag and girdle hangers) on can infer that the woman in the grave was of high status, or had relatives who wanted her to appear that way in death.

The metalworking needed to produce the clasps would have been accomplished by a trained craftsperson, who could have used one of two casting methods. The first would involve carving a mold out of clay block and then pouring the molten metal in. The second, known as lost wax casting, would involve making a wax blank of the clasps, forming a mold around it, melting out the wax while firing the clay mold, and then casting the piece. Irregardless of the methods used, the time, materials and expertise needed to make them meant that even the most basic wrist clasps conferred an image of material wealth.

Reconstruction

Through the process of trying to make models of the clasps I encountered what Tim Ingold, a scholar of material objects, refers to as “material resistance” or what might colloquially be referred to as problems. Photoscan is an interesting program because while it does create something, the user inputs are almost the direct antithesis of making by hand. Ingold describes making as the process of “a correspondence between mindful attention and lively materials” and in the case of Photoscan, there is very little material to work with. Throughout the process of modeling the clasps, I didn’t feel like I was taking part in the process of creating, but rather I was troubleshooting the creations of the computer when something odd happened. I didn’t sequence the photos, find matching points, or generate polygons (all steps in the generation of a 3D model), the computer did all those things, and I was left to scratch my head and consult YouTube tutorials to find out why the model looked more like an angry swarm of bees than a wrist clasp.

 Wrist clasp or pointillist art?

Another interesting aspect of Photoscan is how it takes away time as a variable in the practice of making. Where metal cools and pottery dries, all the data in my model sat in perfect stasis until I had figured out what the next step in the process was.

Insights

Despite the issues I encountered, the process of modeling the wrist clasps yielded valuable insights about material correspondence and the analogous similarities between making by hand and making digitally.

Zooming in and out from the model the same way one would step back from the table when making a pot made me feel more connected to what I was making and I was able to view it as an object rather that a cloud of points that the computer spat out for me. Masking out the putty in the source images to keep the gray color out of the final texture also has elements of metalworking mixed in. When a cast piece of metalwork was removed from a mold, it would likely have some remnants of the mold attached to it, such as clay dust or sand, and I saw the process of masking out the gray color to be the same as cleaning up a cast to finish the making process.

 Masking out the putty

Similarly, the time spent waiting to see if the last input create a workable model or a formless blob was similar to the process of waiting for the metal within a mold to cool. Every time I launched a new step, I felt similarly to how a metalsmith may have as they waited to see if their cast turned out correctly.

Even in the failures of the model, I saw mirror images of how physical making could have failed, further interlocking the physical and the digital as I worked through the modeling process. After creating blobs that followed the general contours of the wrist clasps, I was a little disheartened. But after a while, I noticed how the way that one end of a clasp looked like a description Kevin Leahy, a modern craftsperson, provided when explaning the danger of metal cooling and solidifying before it reached the bottom of the casting mold.The incomplete end of my model looked as if the same problem had occurred in the casting of my clasp.

 The “incomplete” end

While I was examining the class, I noticed one had extra texture that wasn’t on the clasps themselves. I understood that it existed because I hadn’t cut all of dark background points away from the clasps, but it also looked like what would happen if a ceramic mold cracked and metal had pooled outside of the shape the clasp was supposed to be in.

 The “pooled” metal behind a clasp

The idea that two completely different methods of creation could result in the same visual effect, even across hundreds of years, really shifted my opinion on digital model making.

In the end the result were not perfect, or frankly even that good, but through the process of making the clasps I learned more about the way Anglo-Saxon metalworkers may have felt and got a better sense of the benefits and limitations of making digitally compared to physically.

 

The finished models: a valiant effort, but not quite the genuine article.

Further Reading

Hutchinson, Patricia. “The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Little Eriswell, Suffolk,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 59 (1966): 1–32.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London:Routledge, 2013.

Leahy, Kevin. “Anglo-Saxon Crafts.” Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2010.

Owen-Crocker, Gale R. “Dress and Identity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Anglo Saxon Archaeology, edited by Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Craft Fair: Boneworking

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Bones were for the Anglo-Saxons what plastic is for us today. A workable substance able to be molded into a variety of shapes and sizes, early craftsmen used bone and antler tip to make such diverse objects as combs, needles, pins and sword hilts as well as a number of other small specific pieces to meet everyday needs.

Our group endeavored to enter the mindset of early Anglo-Saxon craftspeople by procuring bone and antler and attempting to prepare them for working at the fair. We drew heavily on the teachings of a historical re-enactor, Halldor the Viking, and used his described methods of bone working as well as other contemporary sources. Due to a lack of instructional manuals from the period, trial and error proved to be our biggest teachers.

Preparing the bone:

We purchased 5 cow femurs at a butcher shop, still covered in gristle and some meat.

After researching the best way to clean bone for carving, we decided to simmer them gently in a pot for 4-5 hours. Even after the simmering, a fair amount of the meat remained on the bone, so we had to do the final cleaning by hand by scraping the bones clean with forks.

Later, in order to maximize the number of bones available to fairgoers, we split two of them longways down the center with power tools. Finally, about 36 hours before the start of the fair, we soaked them all in water to soften them for carving.

For more information about bone click here or here.

Preparing the antler:

Two antler tines were provided, and we used a combination of sawing and chiseling to cut them in half.

Like the bones, we soaked them for 36 hours prior to the fair.

For more information about making with antler, click here.

At the Fair:

We set out an array of the bones and antler pieces and provided saws (a hacksaw and a coping saw), chisels, knives, and rasps of varying coarseness for visitors to use.

Our goal was for fairgoers to correspond with the materials and feel their resistance, rather than attempting to make specific objects. As a result, the most common action that people took was to carve their own name into the bone (ignoring the antler), either in modern English or in the Futhorc alphabet from a nearby table. They carved the bone, rather than carving objects from the bone.

Overall, though none of the visitors suddenly became an expert in boneworking, we feel that they enjoyed the experience, and appreciated the toughness of the bone and the resistance it offers when being manipulated.

Craft Fair: Funeral & Burial Practices

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One of the areas our class spent time considering and researching was Anglo-Saxon burial practices. Due to the prevalence of cemeteries in the archaeological record, this is easier than researching clothing for example which tends to disintegrate while in the ground, but it is not without its own issues. The main challenge in understanding burials is deciphering why certain decisions were made. Without a well-maintained written record, archaeologists must infer based on objects that did not decay, such as those made of metal, and what texts have survived such as riddles and epic poems such as Beowulf.

Our group decided to explore burial practices through making by re-creating the burial process of grave 28 at the Little Eriswell cemetery in Suffolk, England. This consisted of making the grave goods and reenacting the procession and burial process at the craft fair. We were limited, however, by our own skills and experience, as well as time and access to appropriate materials. In order to assemble an exhibit that satisfied our desire to correspond with the materials but still echo an Anglo-Saxon grave, we limited the number of artifacts and substituted some of the metal objects for ones made of wood or clay. 

We procured many of our items from the costume department, including glass beads, the bases for our brooches, and a pillowcase to form a bag. We made the brooches, wrist clasps, belt buckle, and “ivory” ring from clay, and Elise made wooden replicas of the girdle hangers that well-to-do Anglo-Saxon women wore on their belts. The textile group made a peplos-style dress for our “body” (a borrowed plastic skeleton) to wear in the grave.

Making

Grave Goods:

Brooches:

Brooches were worn by many Anglo-Saxon women: one on each shoulder and sometimes one in the center of the chest with beads strung between them. There were different types of brooches, some of which would have indicated higher status than others. There were also regional styles of brooches that could indicate where people were from or whether they had traveled in their lifetime. Some even display influences from cultures outside England itself, indicating contact with continental societies.

We suffered a slight complication in the display of our brooches which stemmed from a misreading of the architectural report from the Eriswell cemetery. The brooch pictured above is a square headed brooch and would usually be placed in the center of the dress. We instead placed a model of a bronze rivet in the center of the chest with a square headed brooch at each shoulder. In there Eriswell grave, two cruciform brooches would have adorned the shoulders of the dress, keeping the peplos on the body. See Gale R. Owen-Crocker’s “Dress in Anglo-Saxon England” for further readings on brooches and their ritual significance.

More information on brooches can be found here or here

Girdle-hangers:

The girdle-hangers were metal key-shaped items discovered hanging from the belts of a few different buried Anglo-Saxon women across Early Medieval England, and likely indicated that they were of high-status. The significance of they girdle-hangers is that they either resembled keys or had keys hanging from them, and symbolized the individual as the ‘keeper of the household’ because they held the keys.

More information on girdle hangers can be found here

Wrist-clasps:

Wrist clasps are small rectangular pieces used to hold together the sleeves of women’s dress. They would have been symbols of status due to the specific skills required to cast them. Ours were made of clay like many of the other representations rather than their original bronze. Due to the need to make inferences about what the dress would have looked like, we are unsure if these clasps were functional parts of a long sleeved dress or merely decorative adornments to a cylindrical gown

More information on wrist clasps can be found here 

Belt Buckle:

The peplos garment would have been belted and the belt buckle would have held the belt together. Though they were often made of bronze, fancier belt buckles made from other materials such as silver indicated that some women were of wealthier means.

Necklaces:

Most women wore beaded necklaces as accessories, though finer pieces were probably worn by wealthier women. They often became heirlooms, passed down for several generations from mother to daughter (or daughter-in-law), and as a result archaeologists have found necklaces in graves that were already decades old when they were buried.

Bag:

In addition to girdle hangers and other items that hung from the belt, women carried bags made of cloth with a sturdy ring to shape the opening. The ring in the Eriswell grave that we copied was made of ivory, but our recreation was made of unfired clay.

Peplos:

A dress in the traditional style of East-Anglia, it is belted at the waist and secured at the shoulders with a pair of brooches. Because clothing rots away and does not exist in the material record, we based the dress of of contemporary dresses from the continent and the archeological remains of more durable materials such as fasteners like brooches or belt buckles.

More information on textiles can be found here

Funerary Pottery:

 

Many Anglo-Saxon graves were found with pottery, usually containing ashes. However, other “storage pottery” have been found; usually, the type of pottery found in these graves were funerary urns or food bowls/pots. It was also common for normal food pots to be repurposed into funerary urns.

For more information about Anglo-Saxon pottery click here or here 

The grave itself: 

Though it is difficult to know exactly the significance of every single detail of Anglo-Saxon burials, archaeology can provide some information for us as we went about digging and preparing the grave in which the deceased was to be buried. The grave was designed to accommodate a supine burial. It was oriented north to south, lined at the bottom with wooden sticks and the edge surrounded with stones.

Pyre:

Anglo-Saxons cremated their dead by burning them with a pyre, though it is debated how it was done. One idea is that the Anglo-Saxons would stack the wood on top of the body, but there are debates against this, as some people believe there wouldn’t be enough oxygen to sufficiently burn the entire body. Another idea is that the body was instead stacked on top of the pyre that was filled with brushwood. The cremation process was most likely a public event.

Burial Presentation:

Display: 

Funeral:

There is little known about actual Anglo-Saxon ritual funeral practices beyond how bodies were prepared, because the rituals do not leave traces in the record. However, evidence can be found in primary sources such as Beowulf, and also deduced from what does remain archaeologically.

Procession:

We began with the body prepared and displayed on the island where the rest of the fair took place. It was meant to symbolize the preparation and display of the body and all of its grave goods within the Anglo-Saxon village before it was to be buried.

Classmates and visitors alike helped to pick up the body and carry it over to the grave site. Everyone walked together with the body as Elise, leading the procession, read laments from The Word Exchange, including excerpts from “The Husband’s Message,” “The Riming Poem,” and “The Song of the Cosmos.” When we reached the grave, the body was placed inside and Elise then gave a eulogy for the deceased which had been planned beforehand by her and Spencer. (See video below)

Eulogy:

The eulogy for the deceased, “Ecgwynn,” described some of her accomplishments during her life and the significance that she had based on the burial context and grave goods chosen to be buried with her.

The girdle-hangers were meant to signify that she was the keeper of the household, and the eulogy indicated this by describing how Ecgwynn advised her husband and took charge of various duties within the household, such as making clothing and overseeing the production of food. It was also significant that, under her care, none of the family was cast out, all debts were paid, and nobody starved or froze.

To indicate the generally poor health of the Anglo-Saxon people, the eulogy claimed that Ecgwynn died of the ‘black pox,’ which is an ambiguous name for any number of diseases that may have killed the deceased.

Another important detail about Ecgwynn’s life would have been her role as a mother and the contributions that her children had made to the household. It was described that her two oldest sons, ‘Aescwig and Aldwin’ were warriors who effectively defended the household’s herds from another neighboring clan.