Dating.
There is no secure archaeological context for the finds. It looks as if Fred Johnson set his plough to go four or five inches deeper than usual this year, and just hooked one of the tares right beneath the hoard (which when packed together would have fitted into a one foor square box) leaving it scattered over an area of about 50x20 feet in the ploughsoil. Excavation and magnetometry surveys have produced what
might be a ditch, but even if the hoard was originally hidden in this ditch, there are no securely stratified and dateable finds in the ditch. They'll be doing a resistivity survey next year, but Dr Leahy didn't seem to hold out much hope of finding structures or even much in the way of features.
Stylistically, all the work on the pieces analysed so far is of a type called Salin Style II, which comes into fashion on the continent around 600 CE, so there is a lower bound for the age of the hoard. It's unlikely to come from much before 625CE. First attempts to use paleography to date
the strip with the biblical quote have produced everything from the early 6th to the 9th century. It's possible that a later date for the strip could point to a much later interment of the hoard, but the balance of probabilities suggests that it went into the ground in the mid to later 7th century.
Further work on dating can be done by analysing the composition of the gold. The gold probably came into England in the form of Merovingian coins, and the gold content of these coins declined during the 7th century, with a particularly steep drop off in mid century. The crummier the gold content, the more likely the hoard dates from post 640.
Carbon dating of the few pieces of wood found in the hoard (no indication yet as to whether it was part of the box or part of the mounts of some of the pieces) is being considered, but the standard deviation of 40-50 years will still only provide a very general date for the hoard.
The real eye-opener last night was that there's almost certainly a Sutton Hoo-style helmet in pieces in there. There are die-stamped pieces of silver foil that are almost identical to those from Sutton Hoo and the die stamps from Torslunda.
All the pieces examined so far are stylistically Anglo-Saxon/Germanic (and in the case of the helmet pieces, quite possibly Swedish). Pretty much zilch in Celtic style, so it's not some Mercian's hoard of stuff nicked from the Welsh. The possibility of it being something the Welsh grabbed from the Mercians and never managed to come back for does remain open, particularly as it was found next to the main road from the Mercian royal centre in Tamworth to Wales (aka Watling Street).
