Tag: Object Reconstruction

ORP: Cruciform Brooch

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THE OBJECT

The cruciform brooch I chose for my modeling and research paper was found in a cemetery at the West Stow site. Since brooches of a similar cruciform style were found in the same cemetery at West Stow and in other locations. Considering what has been discovered of other Anglo-Saxon grave goods, it is reasonable to assume this brooch accompanied a late Anglo-Saxon into the afterlife. Twelve brooches of the cruciform style were found in the cemetery, all made of a bronze alloy.[1] According to Stanley West, the brooch is typical of the Leeds Type V.f. and is a “remarkably successful, decorative piece, with a flowing, rounding design of masks and bird heads.”[2]

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ORP: Eriswell Spearhead

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Little Eriswell

In 1957, workers digging a hole for the installation of an oil tank discovered bones and artifacts indicative of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Lakefield airfield near Little Eriswell in Suffolk. Two years later, another patch of the cemetery was discovered while foundations were being dug for a hospital. An inventory of all the findings, including objects that were buried with the people there, was kept during the process of the excavation. In one of these graves, an iron spearhead was recovered, found well above where the left shoulder of the body would have been and with wood remains still inside the conical ferrule, the section which would have affixed the spearhead to the shaft of the weapon.

The original spearhead from the Eriswell excavation.

Spears in Anglo-Saxon Culture

Spears were believed to be incredibly prolific weapons during the time of the Anglo-Saxons, due to the majority of them having been found within burial sites; roughly 4 in 5 burial sites contained one. They were much cheaper than swords to produce, and so they were frequently allotted to foot soldiers. Anglo-Saxon spears themselves definitely had certain distinctive qualities to them, such as open ferrule sockets around the spear’s mandrel, which would lead to such an assumption. It is possible that this was the role of the particular individual who died, as also found with the remains were a shield boss, a pattern welded iron sword and a small iron knife, though it is wise to remind myself that the dead do not bury themselves. In any case, it draws a strong connection to spears being symbolic of a warrior. Despite this, archaeological data on weapons burials does not corroborate this notion.
Weapon burials were, according to research, heavily associated with the “ethnically, social and perhaps ideologically based ‘warrior class’”. This was seen as many burials that included weapons were also frequently adorned with generally far more wealth than those of adults that had not. Skeletal data also suggests against the idea of the simple fact of death in battle or of being a warrior would qualify one for such a burial; there was little correlation for wounds and weapon burials and some weapon burials even had people with various diseases and disfigurements that would have precluded their service in an army. The evidence at Little Eriswell absolutely corroborates this; among the spearhead was also found several more weapons, including those of a very advanced make, including a pattern welded sword, a quite expensive and masterful piece of equipment for the time. Furthermore, the skeletal parts that did remain showed several vertebrae with Schmorl’s nodes, a condition that denotes spinal deformity, as well as evidence of osteochrodritis dissecans on the right femur in the form of a shallow concavity, a disease that causes stiffness and locking of the joints: certainly not a boon on the field of combat. While there was not much commentary on the metalwork of the spearhead itself in the Little Eriswell report, there is some implication that it was a least somewhat well made, with iron fragments of other items having been found in the same grave, perhaps implying that the spearhead was at least made durable enough to last the test of time.

 

Making, Part I: Photogrammetry

I had no experience in metalwork, nor the time to learn such an art. So I “made” in the way I knew how: digital modelling. My first attempt was through a process called photogrammetry, where I was given photos of the artifact itself on a green screen from many different angles, where I then tried to construct a digital model using a computer program. The first step in this process was called masking, where I took the 37 photos of the spearhead and cut out parts of the background that I didn’t want the computer to use in the final construction. I then began to run the program through the process of building the model from these photos; aligning the photos, building a “density cloud”, which creates a cloud of points that the program will later fill in when it creates the mesh, or the digital 3D object, and then finally building the textures, which includes all the colors and finer details that are too small to perceive properly, so they are set as variations in color in order to make a less resource intensive final product. Unfortunately, after repeating this process over and over, troubleshooting many errors and watching tutorials, as well as seeking help from other students, I was left with nothing, due to the quality of the original photos that had been taken.

The program, Agisoft Professional, and the beginning vertices of the spearhead.

The density cloud. Note the lack of detail in the spearhead itself, and mostly in the mat beneath it.

The final model. Note the correspondence to the density cloud in terms of detail.

 

The most frustrating part about this failed attempt at recreation was how hands off it had been. Unlike actual metalsmithing, this approach was far less intuitive and automated; in fact, it would be less accurate to say that I had made the model rather than communicated to a computer what I wanted, which then had made the model. This led me to seek a far more hands on and involved approach, while still utilizing skills that I possessed.

 

Making, Part II: Freehand 3D modelling

The next process that I pursued was that of freehand modelling. This process consists of using a digital workshop within which a 3D artist can align points by hand. A 3D model is primarily built from flat triangles, which themselves are composed from 3 vertices, or single points in 3D space, connected by 3 edges, which are in turn connected by a single “face”. All this data is conveyed numerically to a renderer, which projects little lines in 3D space; if it would hit a face, it renders a solid surface there. These rendering lines are drawn for every pixel on the screen; this is why higher resolution screens generally take up more resources.

What I did was I used the various tools provided to me by my program of choice to create what I thought, based on research, this spearhead could have looked like when it was first made. So I first decided to create the head, by first creating a rectangle, then deleting and reshaping the geometry to create the leaf-shaped figure. I then “extruded” or lengthened the back of the head, and created a conical socket by folding the vertices into themselves. I then separately created an admittedly lazy “shaft”, which consisted of little more than a stock cylinder that had been stretched out like a piece of taffy. I placed this shaft within the cone, and using a “sculpt” tool, I “hammered” the edges of the cone around the shaft, making sure to leave the joint open in true Anglo-Saxon style.

The spearhead, before use of the sculpt tool to close up the ferrule

This is where the simulation of the method began to fall apart. First off, the model was far too flat and blocky, even though it held the general shape quite well. This meant I had to apply what is known as a subdivision surface, which essentially adds detail and a smoother overall shape to the model. Furthermore, both pieces were colored a very dull gray, which is standard for almost all modeling programs, but I wanted something with color. And so I mapped the faces of the model on some stock images of metal and wood for the head and shaft, respectively, which allowed them to display the respective portions of the image within the renderer. I tried my best to mimic how the metal and the wood itself bent around the shape of the spear, but without much hands-on experience with the relevant craftwork, I found this quite difficult to ascertain. There were also lighting issues being caused by some of the unseen geometry, such as within the socket, and so I had to delete it, leaving the inside of the mesh completely transparent (only one side of a face actually renders solidly; in order to have both an inside and outside to an object, two faces must be created). This forced me to close up a bit more of the joint, and flatten the spearhead even more to the shaft. Finally, I was also having issues with the aesthetic qualities of the spearhead; that is, it was far too reflective, not only looking more like a polished plastic than steel, but also washing out a lot of detail, such as the spine of the blade.

I then took this final model, and with the help of Brittany Johnson and Austin Mason it was 3D printed, and this was the most satisfying part of the experience, because I finally got to touch and feel the object that I had been creating. It wasn’t perfect; it was only about the length of my hand. But it still gave a tactile sense of this object, which is important to understanding the lives of those who used it.

The 3D printed spearhead. A little smaller than the real deal.

 

Conclusions from the Experience

The advantages of 3D modelling were obvious enough from the get-go. The infinite material, as well as the tools that allowed for an almost limitless range of geometry and incredibly efficient workflow meant that I could produce the most functional part of this object very quickly; its shape. One thing that had occurred to me, especially during troubleshooting and tweaking, is that the intent of my design was quite different. Indeed, I was focused more on the aesthetics i.e. the shape of the spear head, the geometric qualities of the ferrule, the reflective qualities of the metal, whereas an Anglo-Saxon blacksmith would have been more focused on function. If it were easier to not have the joint be separated when smithing a spearhead, it is unlikely that we would see the split ferrule on these spearheads.

The final product.

This, I feel, highlights the value to this sort of modeling: when I tried replicate the object, as well as ape the methods used to create, I was forced to put myself in the mindset of the smith. While maybe I didn’t learn a similar appreciation for technique and limited material that the actual craft would have, considering shape and look so closely made me feel a little closer to the material culture itself, and as a result made me feel closer to the actual people, allowing a more accurate interpretation of the culture based on the things they used. The specific value of 3D modeling is its ease and accessibility in comparison to many of the crafts that would have been practiced at the time, in particular metalsmithing.

 

Further Reading:

Hutchinson, Patricia. The Anglo Saxon Cemetery at Little Eriswell, Suffolk.

Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press, 2010.

Welton, Andrew J. Encounters with Iron: An Archaeometallurgical Reassessment of Early Anglo-Saxon Spearheads and Knives: Archaeological Journal, 201

Härke, Heinrich. “”Warrior Graves”? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite.” Past & Present, no. 126 (1990): 22-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650808.

 

ORP: Ipswich Ware Urn

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Several angles of the Ipswich ware urn

Context 

This object is an Ipswich ware urn that dates back to Early Medieval England. It was crafted in Ipswich, Suffolk, a port town near the site of the Sutton Hoo burial. During the seventh and eighth centuries, underwent much expansion and economic growth as a result of its role in the North Sea trading network. It is perhaps because of that growth that a group of Frisian potters were drawn to Ipswich to found a crafting enclave around the year 700, which produced ceramic wares for approximately one hundred and fifty years.

The wares that the Frisian potters produced were very economically successful, as evidenced by how far they spread across the region. One example of how prevalent these wares became in Anglo-Saxon society can be found at the archaeological site of the West Stow Village. Excavations at West Stow, which was a rural farming community, found that the proportion of potsherds that were from Ipswich wares matched the proportion of potsherds from more local wares.

One of the main things that differentiates Ipswich wares from the traditional Anglo-Saxon wares that predate them are the fact that they were made by specialized and dedicated crafters, rather than farmers who had a broader array of skills and split their labor between a variety of tasks. Additionally, the Frisian potters had better clay and tools at their disposal when crafting the wares, as crafters were often higher status than farmers. Ipswich wares were made using turntables, and were therefore more regular in form than the traditional wares that were created purely by hand. Additionally, Ipswich wares were fired in kilns, which are more easily controlled than the bonfires used for traditional firing.

Overall, the Ipswich ware urns represent a technological advancement in pottery, while also demonstrating that at least one part of Britain had recovered enough from the collapse of the Roman occupation to attract foreign crafters for long periods of time.

Process

I chose to attempt to digitally reconstruct this urn, since I felt that it would challenge me more than creating a physical reconstruction in the College’s pottery studio. The modeling software I used is called Agisoft PhotoScan, which uses a volume of photographs of an object from as many angles as possible to create a three-dimensional model of the object.

The first step was uploading the pictures of the urn into Photoscan into two separate chunks, one of the top and higher angles, and the other of the bottom and lower angles. next, I aligned the chunks, then aligned both of their photos. After that I built dense clouds from the chunks, and a mesh from the dense clouds.

A view of the ‘model’ after the building of dense chunks

At this point, I was confused because I had done all the steps that I should have done, but nothing resembling an Ipswich ware urn had seemed to take shape. In curiosity, I began to mess with the display to see if there was anything that I was missing. As it turns out, there was.

My completed digital reconstruction, perhaps?

I was able to create a digital model of the urn, but because of both its remoteness from the center of the monitor and my own lack of experience with the software made it so that I was only able to view it from one angle.

Insights

Overall, my efforts to digitally reconstruct this urn suffered from my own lack of skill, and from low resolutions of rendering. This is comparable to how efforts towards physical reconstruction could have suffered lack of skill with the medium of clay, or from inferior tools or materials.

If I had made a physical model, I would have had a very different experience which would have most likely been a more successful one. There is almost more to be learned from failure than from success, so I do not regret attempting the digital reconstruction. This reconstruction process made me appreciate how difficult it can be to accomplish something that can seem simple and linear, as well as the frustration when a final product does not fulfill its intended function-both experiences that novice potters first learning how to craft Ipswich ware urns surely experienced 1300 years ago.

Particularly, my difficulties with viewing the model impressed upon me the importance of viewing your work from multiple angles, and even from a distance if possible, in order to take as much of it into consideration as you can.

Further Reading

Blinkhorn, Paul. “Stranger in a Strange Land: Middle Saxon Ipswich Ware” Accessed May 13, 2018.
http://www.academia.edu/401957/STRANGER_IN_A_STRANGE_LAND_MIDDLE_SAXON_IPSWICH_WARE.

 

Fleming, Robert. Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise: 400-1070. London: Penguin
Books, 2010.

West, Stanley. West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village. Ipswich, UK: Suffolk County Council, 1985

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.

ORP: Double-Sided Comb

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About Object 1402

A double-sided bone comb found at the West Stow Settlement.

Object 1402 was described in the archeological records as a “double-sided bone comb in very fine condition.” The comb was found during the archeological excavations at the West Stow settlement that were undertaken by the British Department of the Environment beginning in 1965. During the excavation process, the department uncovered the remains of around 75 buildings and thousands of artifacts that served to add greatly to the known material culture of these people. The comb was found in Sunken Feature Building 51 (SFB 51), one of the most northern structures present at West Stow. This small building, about thirteen feet by seven feet, had a pit dug into the ground (it was estimated to have originally been about two feet deep) over which the building was situated. SFB 51 had two central support posts, as was fairly typical of the other buildings found on site, with straight walls and rounded corners. Interestingly, despite the comb being considered one of the better examples found at West Stow, there was very little else discovered in this building, only a single hook, and a few broken pieces of pottery. The small size of the building and the artifacts that were found suggest that SFB 51 was originally a domestic area that probably housed relatively few people, as would be expected in a single-family settlement.

 

Combs in Anglo-Saxon England

Bone and antler combs are by no means rare finds in excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, and at West Stow, they were one of the most commonly uncovered items. These included single- sided, double-sided, and triangular combs that were found scattered throughout many of the roughly 75 buildings uncovered on the site. While it is clear that these items were prevalent throughout England during this time, it remains uncertain of their cultural significance as they do not appear in textual sources from the era. Object 1402, for instance, though it is an unusually good specimen, but it still leaves many questions about its uses and those of many combs found throughout Britain. Were the broken teeth the result of the last 1,500 years underground, or were they teeth that snapped off before it was discarded? Who would have used it? Were combs primarily used by women, or would they have been seen as ungendered during the period? What does this comb tell us about the values of the Anglo-Saxons, does the level of detail put into the comb suggest vanity or merely a concern for hygiene?  Many of these questions will never be answered, and certainly will not be will not be derived from a single artifact, but if observing an object will not bring us to understand the lives of the people who owned it centuries ago, attempting to recreate its production and use will at least serve to bring us closer to the headspace of those who produced these objects and interacted with them years ago.

 

Recreation Process

I attempted to make a 3D model of the comb using the process of photogrammetry. Much of the process did involve mind-numbing struggles with the computer program or merely setting the computer system to run while I sat and read a book, but I also found that some of the process did give me a greater insight into the original making process. Through the process I had the ability to look at the object from many angles greatly improved my understanding of how the comb was put together, and allowed me to view the sides of the comb in much greater detail than I would have seen in a side-view photograph of so thin an object.

Top of the comb during the photogrammetry process.

Bottom of comb during the photogrammetry process.

In addition to this, I believe that part of the photogrammetry process gave me a taste of the actual process of cutting the teeth of the comb. I spent many hours laboriously cutting away the excess material that the computer had produced from the background, carefully shaving it away from the teeth of the comb.

Cutting excess material away from the teeth of the comb.

This long and intricate process (one that would have been made infinitely harder in the Anglo-Saxon period by the absence of an undo button) gave me an appreciation for the delicacy of the work. A bone worker would almost certainly have failed many times before he was able to create a comb so intricate with nearly uniform teeth. It would assuredly have been an arduous and often frustrating process, which led me to wonder, how these combs could have been so common throughout the West Stow settlement.

 

Insight Gained

While a digital recreation of the comb found at West Stow did not necessarily shed great insight into the physical process of bone carving during the early medieval period, it did add give a greater appreciation for the time and energy that would have gone in to such a creation and the delicacy of much of the work involved. I discovered this in the process of cutting the excess material from the model, as described above but also through time spent examining the object and trying to place it within its larger context. This is one of the benefits of the field of digital humanities and the possibilities it presents for the wider exploration of history. It certainly should not replace physical models or other forms of recreation, but as an added tool, it offers the chance to produce a greater number of models of items and helps us to integrate interdisciplinary fields to better our understanding of archeological sights such as West Stow. Through the process of photogrammetry, I was able to take pictures of an item on the other side of the Atlantic and produce a physical, printed model that gives us a good idea of the original. It may not be an exact replica, but I have a much better idea of the complexity involved in the original object, and it can now be seen by a wider audience.

A 3-D reproduction of the West Stow comb.

As is often the case, the greater understanding of the piece does not necessarily offer a greater simplicity to its historical narrative, but it does serve to enrich it and to give a more wholistic view of its place in history. Perhaps the recreation and reclamation of ancient objects and crafting techniques will not serve to answer all our outstanding historical questions, but it will, without a doubt serve to enrich our historical understanding. It is a journey of self-discovery that may vastly complicate our ideas, but it will also, overtime, allow for a greater exploration of Anglo-Saxon Britain through personal experience and immersion in many different avenues of historical exploration.

 

Further Reading

Ingold, Tim. Making. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Brimscombe Port Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2003.

West, Stanley. West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village. Ipswich, UK: Suffolk County Council, 1985.

ORP: West Stow Cemetery Bowl

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Ancient Anglo-Saxons often buried their dead with grave-goods, which could range from simple beads to highly-decorated metal brooches. Pottery pieces were common throughout Anglo-Saxon graves and could usually be classified as highly decorated funerary urns or plain domestic pots. The piece pictured in Figure 1 was a bowl found in the cemetery of West Stow, an old Anglo-Saxon village that was active around the fifth to seventh century CE.

Figure 1

This is unfortunate in the fact that there wasn’t proper documentation of the items found in the cemetery, specifically the context in which they were found so it cannot be said for certain what the bowl was used for or with whom it was buried with. However, based on its shape, design, and size, it was more likely a food bowl. Domestic pots were repurposed as funeral urns, but in West Stow, there is only one unearthed pot that has been confirmed as a funeral urn. It is also less likely that this bowl was used as a cremation urn or storage vessel because of its large mouth opening unless there was some sort of lid, though there was never one confirmed in the records.

I used earthenware clay to make the reconstructed bowl. To start, I created a cylindrical base the size of my palm and then rolled out long snakes of clay. Building up the bowl is similar to a coil-pot, where you wrap the snakes around the top part of the previous layers, but then you must blend the layers together to eventually make one smooth wall. When I wrapped each coil in a circle, I first melded both ends of the clay snake together by smearing it with my thumb and some extra small pieces of clay. Once I had a smooth, uninterrupted circle, I used my thumb to smear the clay downwards to connect the clay with the base, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

I continued this process around the base until the outside of the clay was smooth without any signs of folds. Once I was satisfied with the outside, I repeated this process on the inside of the coil, pushing my thumb downwards on the coil to connect it with the base. As I worked my thumb against the inner wall of the bowl, I cupped my hand on the outside wall so that I could control the formation of the overall shape of the bowl.

As I progressed with every layer, I placed the coil slightly outside of the last one so that the bowl would widen even more. As I reached the top, I purposely left the lip of the bowl uneven, as it was in the reference photos. I don’t believe this was a result of it being broken, as the color of the rim was as aged as the rest of the piece. The lip was also rounded, not jagged. However, my reconstructed bowl’s lip was much more exaggerated than the original.

West Stow Bowl’s Uneven Lip

Reconstructed Bowl’s Uneven Lip

At this point, I started to focus on smoothing out the outside wall, as it was riddled with my thumbprint indentations. I used some water to help smooth the rim and other areas of the bowl that were cracking. Any areas that were too thick I fixed with my thumb pushing on the inside wall and my palm on the outside wall, helping keep the shape of the bowl. Doing this, however, created some holes, which I easily remediated by covering with thin scraps of clay and smoothing out with the help of water.

West Stow Bowl Walls

Reconstructed Bowl’s Walls

Initially, I wasn’t sure what tool I should use to make the impressions in the bowl. I wasn’t sure if I should make a clay stamp or find an object with a similar shape to create the indentations. I found a file one of my peers was using for her bone-stamp carving that was similar enough, although the Anglo-Saxons probably did not use a steel file for this bowl. Upon further research, I found that it had a technique applied to it called rustication, and the indentations, which are spaced apart, were made with single impressions of the forefinger, the depression caused by the finger-tip. However, I made the mistake of letting the bowl dry for too long, and by the time I came back for indentations, the clay was too hard for me to modify. I tried to recreate the look of the Type 5 rustication by using a chisel, but I couldn’t quite replicate the work.

Failed attempt at replicating the rustication

I instead did the impressions on a small, fresh piece of clay to at least get the feel for the technique.

Rustication on a piece of clay

My re-creation of the bowl was created with as many of the same techniques the Anglo-Saxons used as I had knowledge of. It is by no means a perfect reproduction; the base of the bowl is supposed to be a wide, flat bottom that curves up immediately, whereas my bowl has a clear, circular base with walls that go out then up. The indentations are not exactly how I would have liked them to turn out, either. It was difficult interpreting the written text explaining how the indentation was made; also, my fingers are not as large as the ceramicist who made the original bowl were. Due to time constraints, I could not double fire my bowl, although I don’t think this is too important to the authentic process. Firing is done in an electric kiln, something the Anglo-Saxons didn’t have in their arsenal. There was no evidence of firings done at West Stow, so it is more likely that they were instead done in large, bonfire-like conditions.

Old Anglo-Saxon pots are often described as crude and unrefined, which is something I and the rest of the class though initially when looking at Anglo-Saxon pottery. However, the model-making process has taught me that everything is harder to make than it looks, especially when considering that people in the past didn’t have the same tools and technology as we do in modern times. My first ever attempt at an Anglo-Saxon pot was a complete, massless disaster. The next two pieces I made (this included a pot and the bowl) were better, but it still was nowhere near the level of many of these Anglo-Saxon ceramic works. There were so many factors to consider: clay dryness, workspace temperature, the amount of clay used, checking wall thickness wasn’t thin enough to tear or thick enough to explode when fired, etc. It is easy to look down on “crudely-made” objects and attribute it to the lack of aestheticism, skill, and intelligence in a culture, but once one takes time to sit down and try to recreate the object, one will realize that perhaps they’re the ones who are lacking in aestheticism, skill, and intelligence.

 

ORP: Cruciform Antler Stamp

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Cruciform Stamp, West Stow

 

Background

Over the course of this term, both individually and as a class, we have learned a good deal about both the benefits and limitations of historic recreation as a method for exploring the past and the objects that survive from it. The following project is my personal effort to learn about a cruciform pottery stamp fashioned from antler from West Stow, a small Anglo-Saxon settlement that likely flourished in the early 5th to early 7th centuries. I researched the stamp and its context, and attempted to craft a replica using modern tools and my very limited (read: literally no) experience.

 

  

 

The original stamp was found not in one of the many excavated buildings at West Stow, but was rather one of the numerous artifacts found around the buildings, indicated that it was at one point lost or discarded. Pottery stamps were sometimes used on ceramics such as everyday cookware or storage vessels, but more often on funerary urns, pots that contained the cremated remains of a deceased member of the community.

Antler was a commonly used material in the Anglo-Saxon world. Though more difficult to find than horn or bone, it has more tensile strength, and was usually used for objects that would be under stress regularly, such as combs, or in this case, stamps.

It is unclear whether the shape the stamp forms has any spiritual or religious significance. At the time of its creation, Christianity had long gone from that area of the British Isles, and had not yet returned, so the cross shape it makes was probably not intended as a Christian sign. Perhaps the shape was influenced by designs from the continent– specifically from the Franks, who often traded with the Isles and who had remained Christianized. Maybe it was just aesthetically pleasing. Or perhaps it was informed by some error during the carving, as my own copy was. Whatever the truth is, however, it remains a mystery.

 

Process

  

(Sorry about the bad picture quality for these, but I don’t know how to fix it.)

 

To start, I was given a piece of deer antler and a box of assorted tools, including metal files/rasps, saws, chisels, and clamps for securing the piece. I also ended up borrowing a knife from a friend, which was helpful in refining the stamp design towards the end of my work. All of these tools, with the exception of the clamps, are the recommended toolset of “Halldor the Viking,” a dedicated boneworker and Medieval re-enactor. 

Halldor had some other pearls of wisdom to share apart from the components of a perfect toolkit, like steering clear of roe deer antler and recommending that the horn be soaked for the 48 hours prior to carving to soften it, but I decided to dive right in. I took the tools outside with me to work in the spring sunshine and wind, as an Anglo-Saxon craftsman might have done when the weather was good. I realized fairly quickly, however, that working outside, though pleasant, was difficult without any kind of infrastructure for antler carving, such as a workbench to place my work on. In the end, I split the difference and moved to sit on a cement and rock feature that I could use as a hard and stable surface.

I was very hesitant in making the first cut, not wanting to squander my precious single piece of antler by breaking it right off the bat. Instead, I sawed and chiseled off the very tip of the horn as practice before getting to work on the much thicker area towards its middle. That cut took some time, and I had to use a variety of saws and chisels accomplish it. As soon as I had finished, however, I realized that there was an odd slant to the cut and I was forced to take another slice off of my future stamp, which took equally as long and was just as difficult as the first time. Additionally, in the process, I accidentally chipped the top of the future stamp, which later informed my decision on how I would position the cross design.

Because the bottom half of the antler would become the true stamp, I used the other half of the antler to practice my method for forming the cross. The natural taper and smooth finish of the fragment made it exceedingly difficult to secure in such a way that would let me carve it, and so I quickly moved on to the real piece after deducing that the file shaped like a triangular prism would be my best bet for roughly forming the arms of the cross.

I had more success stabilizing the bottom half of the antler, so I knew that creating the rough shape of the cross would be relatively easier. However, I wasn’t sure if the beveling that appeared on the original stamp was created before or after the cross itself. Did it somehow facilitate the shaping of the cross, or was it added later as an design feature? How was I to even go about carving it, given the toughness of the cortical exterior of the horn? Eventually, I decided that since I had been able to create the shapes that I needed with the triangular file on my trial piece, I would forgo the beveling for the moment and carry on forming the cross.

As planned, I used the file for the cross shape and a chisel to carve the furrows in the center of the cross. I chose the site of the accidental chip to begin and worked from there to create four approximately even furrows as the spaces between the arms of the cross. With that, I had finished the rough stamp– all that remained was to refine it a bit, as much as I could.

For refining my work, I went to a ceramics studio to get a bit of a taste of the environment in which the stamp would have been used. With a knife and file, I once again tried to tackle the beveling problem, but no luck. I resigned myself to a completely rounded stamp with none of the carved planes that give the West Stow stamp its intriguing prismatic character. I spent a good hour whittling away at the arms of the cross with a knife, narrowing them down bit by bit, though they never reached the desired narrowness. I also took a stab at widening the grooves in the center of the cross, but the awkward angle of the knife seemed unsafe, so I abandoned the attempt. A few more shavings carved off here and there, and I had my stamp. I tested it on some wet clay (not leather hard, unfortunately, which is when the design would have been implemented), and it left a satisfying impression of a cross with thin ridges down the center, just as the original would have. Even if my stamp looks nothing like something the Anglo-Saxons produced, at least it works the same.

 

Insights

Overall, I enjoyed the process of creating this stamp, though it was more difficult than I had anticipated. Having worked with wood before, I was expecting the horn to be easier to carve and mold into a shape that I wanted. From the start, however, there were indicators that my copy could not be identical to the original. Firstly, the antler was shaped differently: mine was much thinner and less tapered from the get-go, and in order to achieve the appropriate proportions I had to make it shorter as well. Additionally, I believe that the spongy cancellous tissue at the center of the antler extended farther up the horn, and as a result the cross shape and grooves were muddied and rough, rather than clearly defined. Otherwise, the best explanation for the difference would be that I am a college undergraduate with no experience working with bone but armed with modern tools, whereas the original maker was presumably an experienced Anglo-Saxon craftsman using tools that may have been prone to warping or breaking. The unpredictability of his tools would have almost certainly informed how he went about carving his piece.

In my own attempts to carve a stamp from antler, I was able to feel and manipulate the material myself, giving me a greater appreciation for the craftsmanship and the purpose of the object. If a person was willing to spend the time and effort to gather the antler, soak it, and spend hours carving and refining it, then using the stamp must have been important. Recreation, though relatively novel and sometimes difficult to accomplish, is a fascinating and engaging way of understanding the past, one that we should continue exploring alongside more traditional techniques.

 

For Further Reading

Fleming, Robin. Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise. London: Penguin Group, 2011.

 

Leahy, Kevin. “Animal Skeletal Materials.” In Anglo-Saxon Crafts, 53-60. N.p.: Tempus, 2003.

 

Magnusson, Halldor. “Basic Boneworking 101: The Toolkit.” Halldor the Viking: The Adventures of an Early Medieval Re-enactor (blog). Entry posted March 20, 2014. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://halldorviking.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/basic-bone-working-101-the-toolkit/.

 

———“How to Make a Composite Antler Comb.” Halldor the Viking: The Adventures of an Early Medieval Re-enactor (blog). Entry posted April 4, 2014. Accessed May 12, 2018. https://halldorviking.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/how-to-make-a-composite-antler-comb/.

 

Welton, Andrew J. “Encounters with Iron: An Archaeometallurgical Reassessment of Early Anglo-Saxon Spearheads and Knives.” The Archaeological Journal, 2016, 1-39. doi:10.1080/00665983.2016.1175891.

 

West, Stanley, ed. West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village. Research report no. 24. East Anglian Archaeology. Ipswich, United Kingdom: Suffolk County Planning Department, 1985.

ORP: Bone Needle

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By Brendan Glenn,  class of 2021

When one considers the objects of importance in one’s life, it is often the largest or most complex things which first come to mind. The buttons on my shirts or the zippers on my backpack, however, are as vitally important to my life, or at least to my lifestyle, as my phone or my computer. Such unseen but ever-present objects are probably more populous nowadays, in the age of mass-production and unobtrusive design, but they have doubtless existed for nearly as long as groups of humans have been producing things. One particular invisible object, a needle of carved bone, can be used to shed a little light on a certain group of humans: the people inhabiting the early Anglo-Saxon settlement of West Stow in the middle centuries of the first millennium. Despite the fact that it was likely taken for granted in its “life,” or perhaps because it was, it can if thoroughly noticed offer insights about those who created and used it.

The needle in question (Fig. 1) is a fairly simple object comprised of two main sections: a head and a shaft. The shaft is thin and cylindrical, descending from the head and tapering at the other end to a somewhat sharp point. The head is  a roughly shield-shaped structure with a hole in its center, which is positioned directly in line with the shaft. The needle likely originates from a pig fibula which was carved down into a needle shape around its central axis, preserving the tensile strength provided by the original bone while also minimizing the space the item would have taken up.

I bet whoever owned this lost it on purpose. Would *you* want to sew with it? It's made of a pig's leg and its head probably gets stuck in every piece of fabric it passes through.

Figure 1: An image of the bone needle I reconstructed, and one of many photographs used in that reconstruction.

This object was most likely used either as a simple dress-pin or for single-needle knitting. It shares with sewing needles found at and near West Stow a perforated triangular head and a simple design, although it is more elaborate than other needles due to the extra carving on its head which makes it shield-shaped. That this needle is fancier than other, similar objects, however, raises several questions about the people who used it. Why might someone want a more elaborate version of a bone tool whose uses were fairly mundane? The answer is likely that this needle’s relatively-ornate design served to highlight the bone-working skill of the person who created it, and therefore the status of its user. From this, one can infer that there was a certain amount of value placed on having finely-made things in the community at West Stow, which isn’t necessarily surprising, but also that this applied even to small, seemingly mundane items such as needles.

Finely-made needles have been important tools and status symbols in many societies.

Why, then, didn’t a person with the means to have a nice needle have a needle made for themselves out of a higher-status material? Iron, silver and bronze dress-pins are present at the West Stow site, but no needles of anything but bone have been found. Why make metal pins but not metal needles? Since needles, unlike dress-pins, are unlikely to be buried with people, it’s possible that metal needles were used and didn’t end up where archaeologists could find them, but it seems unlikely that no metal needles would ever be lost, unlike the many doubtlessly-misplaced bone needles found in other excavated dwellings. Perhaps metal simply couldn’t be shaped into fine enough needles for the purposes of West Stow’s needle-users. Either way, the fact that this simple object is the nicest needle found at the site provides a glimpse, however murky, into the sorts of things that its people valued in their invisible objects.

Despite the fact that this needle was probably used for fairly mundane purposes, such as doing simple, decorative embroidery, it nonetheless is an object which could be said to have had a higher level of importance than other quotidian tools. The people of West Stow lived simple lives and had access, from the perspective of even people alive in their own time in places not terribly far from Britain, to very little indeed.

Pictured: two residents of West Stow

    Despite that, however, they had the time and energy to make even their simple tools prettier than they necessarily had to be. Knit-work is useful for keeping oneself warm and dress-pins are necessary for holding certain types of clothing together, but there’s no need for the objects that facilitate knitting or pinned dresses to be nice. Despite this, some inhabitant of West Stow nonetheless wanted this needle to be prettier than it absolutely had to be, to make things nicer rather than simply do the bare minimum in a time and place where even achieving the bare minimum of survival was a fairly pressing task. It is things like this small, simple-yet-ornate needle which remind us that even the people who do not appear in histories have inner lives, and are, essentially, human.

Of course, producing this needle was not a task accomplished via the crafter’s deep belief in the innate human quest for beauty, but via bone-working tools and the leg of a slaughtered pig, which are much less romantic to ponder but substantially more useful. My own work to recreate this object was significantly less bloody and physical than its original creator’s, but did give me an appreciation for the effort required to produce such an object. Several of the issues which I encountered in my quest to convince Agisoft PhotoScan to produce a 3D model of the object could be taken as oblique metaphors for the experience of a human interacting with a needle like this one.

Not quite.

The program initially, for instance, had difficulties separating the needle from the background of the photos in which it was pictured. I have had the same experience multiple times when attempting to find similar small objects against backgrounds which seemingly ought to highlight their presence, and while I understood that PhotoScan was having a different issue than I do when I drop a red thumbtack and cannot find it on a solid green carpet, I still empathized with the program’s struggle. For reference, see Fig. 2, where the program constructed a horrible amalgam formed of photos of the object taken from many angles due to its inability to distinguish it from its  background.

And when the shapeless thing in skies above/does take the sun within its charnel form/the sky will tear itself apart for love;/ the stars despite that darkness will us warm.

Figure 2: an in-progress screenshot of my attempt to model the needle.

Likewise, the refusal of the program to assign any tie points to the object or its environs I assumed to be similar in aspect to my own difficulties when attempting to, say, seize hold of such small items as the needle. The solution for both of us in this sort of situation appears to be the application of additional computing power to the problem; I, on my second attempt, take time to resolve the depth of the evasive object before attempting to pick it up again, while PhotoScan required a greater limit for the number of points which it’s allowed to apply when aligning its images in order to sufficiently “acquire” the needle and model it sufficiently (see Fig. 3). In other words, I was able to experience an interaction with this item in vicarious fashion through the trials which PhotoScan went through in attempting to locate, acquire, and correctly model it.

Please ignore the blobs near the head, or imagine that they are there so as to avoid the wrath of God by the creation of a perfect thing.

Figure 3: My final model for (the upright perspective of) the needle.

    The stories which something as simple and seemingly unimportant as a needle can tell are, honestly, surprising in their scope and occasional depth. Through attempting to understand this object one can learn not only about its history but about the concerns, both social and aesthetic, of its user or users. That this needle holds so much information within it despite the fact that it likely went almost unnoticed by those in whose lives it was present has induced in me a sort of paranoia concerning the materials with which I live my life. What will my shirt-buttons tell the archaeologists and college students of the future? My discarded coffee-cup lids? My headphones? It’s not paranoia in the sense that I feel threatened (though I suppose it’s always uncomfortable to consider the prospect that nameless others will understand in great detail how I live my life), but more in the sense that my every use of an object is now paired with the thought, “what will they think of this when they find it?”. This has the uncomfortable effect of making objects that ought to be invisible (like my suddenly-fascinating shirt-buttons) quite visible indeed. Perhaps the owner of this needle felt the same way when considering its shield-shaped head. “I hope” they might have thought, “that nobody notices how inconvenient the shape of this thing is for sewing.”

 

Bibliography:

West, Stanley. West Stow, Suffolk: The Anglo-Saxon Village. 2 vols., East Anglian Archaeology Report 24. Ipswich, Suffolk: Suffolk County Planning Dept., 1985.

The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, edited by Hamerow et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

West, Stanley. West Stow Revisited. West Stow: West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village Trust, 2001.

ORP: West Stow Spindle Whorl

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This spindle whorl (one of many found not only at this particular site, but also in Anglo-Saxon England on the whole) is made from clay and was found at an unspecified location on the West Stow archaeological site. It would have been hand-made, and used along with a spindle (basically a short, smooth, stick) to spin wool into yarn, which could then have been woven into textiles. The spindle whorl was placed at the end of the stick, which tapered to keep the whorl from sliding off, and helped to keep the spindle spinning and twisting the wool into yarn. Today, spindle whorls are generally attached to their spindles, but in Early Medieval England this would not have been the case, allowing the user to trade out spindle whorls when convenient. They might have done this to adjust the weight — spindle whorls were often made from lighter materials like glass or heaver ones like lead as well as clay, and as the yarn ball around the spindle grew larger the added weight could cause the yarn to break — or simply to replace a broken whorl without needing to find a new spindle.

In reconstructing this spindle whorl, I went through two separate processes. First, I attempted to model it using PhotoScan, a 3-D modelling software. Unfortunately, the low light in the photographs I used and the dark color of the spindle whorl combined to make the second half of the whorl difficult to model, and I ended up with a strange cloud of blobs where solid spindle whorl was supposed to be. As I felt like my process hadn’t really taught me anything about the spindle whorl or how it was made, I decided to make a physical model using PlayDoh and attempt to spin some wool with it to get a feel for how weighty it might have been, and how that would have affected the spinning process. I first did a considerable amount of YouTube research on how spinning with a drop spindle actually worked (this video, as well as this blog), then put my PlayDoh spindle whorl on a pen and attempted to spin some wool. I learned mainly that spinning is a very finicky process, but also that the weight of the spindle whorl correlated to how long and how well my makeshift spindle would spin. Larger, heavier iterations of my spindle whorl were more likely to make the wool break off, but less likely to spin my wool too tightly and make it kink up. Overall, being able to adjust my spindle whorl was definitely worthwhile, and I can see why the Anglo-Saxons would have wanted different spindle whorls to use. I also realized how much easier it was to spin my spindle when the whorl was when it was even, and not larger on one side than the other. The West Stow spindle whorl was slightly lopsided, as I learned from my Photogrammetry recreation, so it would have spun at a bit of an odd rate, sort of like my PlayDoh spindle whorl (though not nearly as off-kilter).

 

In the end, my efforts left me with some very uneven yarn (a side effect of my inexpert handling of the wool) and a passable digital model of a spindle whorl in 180 degrees, if not 360 (see the above screenshot). Intangibly, though, I gained a rudimentary sense of how it might have felt to spin, or at least how it might have felt to learn to spin, the way the Anglo-Saxons would have, and the role a spindle whorl would have played in that.

Bibliography

Kania, Katrin. (2018). Medieval Spindles – Hints on Spinning and Weaving [web log comment]. Retrieved from https://www.pallia.net/en/main-page/articles/medieval-spindles.

“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.

“Weaving and weaving implements.” In East Anglian Archaeology Report No. 24, edited by Stanley West. Suffolk: St Edmund House, 1985.