Viking-era silver coins found on Estonia's island of Saaremaa

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on October 05, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Eastern Europe, Estonia, Europe

Another archaeological find has been made on the island of Saaremaa, just weeks after a major haul including a 1,700-year-old gold bracelet came to light.

Credit: Saaremaa Museum

The recent find dates from a later era, the Viking period, ERR's online news in Estonian reports, and includes a large number of silver coins, according to both the Heritage Protection Board (Muinsuskaitseamet) and Saaremaa Museum.

As with the earlier treasure trove, the latest find was the work of a metal detector hobbyist, who, in line with Estonian law, informed the authorities.

Credit: Saaremaa Museum

"We are grateful for the licensed hobby detector, who reported the findings to the Heritage Protection Board, which can now preserve some of the crucial history of Saaremaa," Saaremaa Museum stated on its social media page.

Archaeologist and Tallinn University Archaeology Research Collection numismatics curator Mauri Kiudsoo said that the find was highly significant for in understanding of Saaremaa's Viking-era history, as well as running against the trend of hobbyists not handing over finds to the state on Saaremaa itself.

Credit: Saaremaa Museum

Two separate hoards were found. One of these dating to the second half of the 10th century, contained silver coins which came via the Viking trade route which crossed the Baltic from the present-day Swedish island of Gotland, to Saaremaa's southern coast, and then on to Laane County and on to present-day Tallinn.

These were likely to have been buried during upheaval or conflict in the region, as was the case with the other hoard from the Lumanda-Kihelkonna area. Both point to destruction and upheaval in particular parts of Saaremaa in the second quarter of the 11th century, according to the article.

Credit: Saaremaa Museum

Kiudsoo added very few coin hoards from the same era have been found elsewhere in Estonia.

In September, metal detector hobbyist Jegor Klimov found a substantially-sized gold bracelet, amber brooches, locally-made luxury amber brooches, silver and silver-plated brooches and a Scandinavian silver-plated belt, at a 1,700-year-old sacrificial site.

The find similarly filled in knowledge gaps on the iron age on Saaremaa, as the more recent find has done for the later viking era.

Source: ERR News [October 05, 2019]

Fragments of 100 Viking swords unearthed in northern Estonia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on September 30, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Eastern Europe, Estonia, Europe

Archaeologists have discovered fragments of about a hundred Viking swords, the largest find of Viking swords in Estonia to date, in northern Estonia.

Fragments of Viking swords found in northern Estonia [Credit: Mauri Kiudsoo]

The fragments were found in two closely located sites in a coastal area of north Estonia, in the territory of the ancient Estonian county of Ravala, late last autumn. The finds consisted of dozens of items, mostly fragments of swords and a few spearheads.

Mauri Kiudsoo, archaeologist and keeper of the archaeological research collection of Tallinn University, told BNS the two sites were located just 80 meters apart. The swords date from the middle of the 10th century and are probably cenotaphs, grave markers dedicated to people buried elsewhere.

The reason why the swords were not found intact, Kiudsoo said, is due to the burial customs of the time. It is characteristic of finds in Estonia from the period that weapons were put into the graves broken or rendered unusable.

While the Ravala fragments constitute the biggest find of Viking-era weapons in Estonia, more important according to Kiudsoo, is the fact that the grips of the swords allow us to determine which type of swords they are. They have been identified as H-shaped double-edged swords. This type of sword was the most common type in the Viking era and over 700 have been found in northern Europe.

Kiudsoo said that by 1991, eight more or less intact type H swords and about 20 fragments had been discovered in Estonia but the number has risen to about 100. The overwhelming majority of the Estonian finds have come to light on the country's north coast, which lies by the most important remote trade route of the Viking era.

Since the Ravala finds date from the middle of the 10th century they prove for the first time that type H swords were in use in the territory of Estonia in the 10th century, Kuidsoo said.

Source: ERR News [September 30, 2019]

Archaeologists find 1700-year-old gold bracelet in Estonia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on September 26, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Eastern Europe, Estonia, Europe

Earlier this month, archaeologists unearthed a rare gold bracelet and other jewellery made from precious metals in what may be the most valuable find in Estonia of all time.

Credit: Saarte Haal

Metal detector hobbyists consider themselves lucky when they come across an old button or coin instead of just the usual old nails or scrap metal. Amateur treasure hunters, however, don't even dream of finding the type of thing that set off Jegor Klimov's metal detector in Saaremaa earlier this month.

Among the items found at a 1,700-year-old sacrificial site were luxurious local crossbow brooches, some made of silver, some gold-plated silver, as well as Scandinavian-looking belt plaques with silver plates, writes regional Saarte Haal.

The most unique item to be found at the site, however, is a massive gold bracelet or collar from the 3rd century.

"With this find, the signal was sort of indistinct, sort of heay," Klimov recounted. "I doubted whether or not to dig. But here it is! It's like winning the jackpot! Unearthing something like this is amazing. And it is amazing for Estonian history too, because nothing like this has been found in Estonia before. Gold finds are rare in Estonia to begin with; we know of just four or five finds. But this is the coolest of them all."

Archaeologist Marika Magi, PhD, who led the search team, told Saarte Haal that gold is rare in Estonian archaeology, and such a massive gold piece, with such fine details and ideological significance, has never been found before, which is why this find is a likely candidate for being the most valuable find of all time in Estonia.

"One can say that this is likely the most valuable single find,in the material sense, to be unearthed in Estonia," Magi explained to ETV news broadcast "Aktuaalne kaamera." "It is believed that whoever wore these, they were a symbol of belonging to the highest echelons of society. So these are not regular bracelets. How this particular bracelet ended up in Saaremaa is an exciting question in its own right, and one we'll likely never get a real answer for. This is a type of jewelry which throughout Scandinavia is considered one of the most significant items of the Roman Iron Age, and it is associated with royal power and royal families."

The find is also significant in archaeological terms as well, she noted, as it presents a rather different picture of the first few centuries C.E. in Estonia.

Estonia's most valuable jewelry find has been handed over to the Saaremaa Museum where, according to the museum director, it will be given a worthy spot in the museum's new exhibition, which is currently in the planning stages.

Source: ERR [September 26, 2019]

'Egypt of Glory' at the Amos Rex, Helsinki, and at the Art Museum of Estonia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 22, 2019 / comment : 0 Estonia, Exhibitions, Finland, Italy, Travel

Amos Rex, Art Museum of Estonia, and Museo Egizio will show a unique two-part exhibition on Antique Egyptian Art.

Lid of the sarcophagus of Ibi, 664-610 BC [Credit: © Museo Egizio]

Opening in October 2020, an exhibition titled Egypt of Glory will be shown in two parallel locations – at Amos Rex, Helsinki, and at the Art Museum of Estonia’s Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. The rare two-part exhibition is based on one of the most important collections of Ancient Egyptian art and culture outside Egypt – the collection of Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.

Egypt of Glory features over 500 exhibits from the Museo Egizio which will tell the long history of Egyptian civilization, from its origins to the Ptolemaic Period. Time and Art will constitute a common thread that will accompany visitors to discover the Egypt of the first millennium.

The exhibition will show what the newest technologies can bring into an exhibition about Ancient Egypt.

The exhibitions will open on consequent days; at Amos Rex on October 8th, 2020, and at Kumu Art Museum on October 9th, 2020.

Source: Amos Rex [June 22, 2019]

Ancient DNA suggests that some Northern Europeans got their languages from Siberia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on May 09, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Estonia, Europe, Genetics, Linguistics, Northern Europe, Siberia

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.

Bronze Age stone cist graves in Northern Estonia  [Credit: WikiCommons]

The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in particular areas in the distant past.

"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," says Lehti Saag of University of Tartu, Estonia.

Although researchers knew that the Uralic-speaking people share common Siberian ancestry, its arrival time in the Eastern Baltic had remained uncertain. To characterize the genetic ancestry of people from the as-yet-unstudied cultural layers, Saag along with Kristiina Tambets and colleagues extracted DNA from the tooth roots of 56 individuals, 33 of which yielded enough DNA to include in the analysis.

Corded Ware culture pottery and stone axes from Estonia  [Credit: WikiCommons]

"Studying ancient DNA makes it possible to pinpoint the moment in time when the genetic components that we see in modern populations reached the area since, instead of predicting past events based on modern genomes, we are analyzing the DNA of individuals who actually lived in a particular time in the past," Saag explains.

Their data suggest that the Siberian ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC--around the time of the diversification of west Uralic/Finnic languages. It also indicates an influx of people from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer characteristics in the Bronze Age, including many traits we now associate with modern Northern Europeans, like pale skins, blue eyes, and lactose tolerance.

"The Bronze Age individuals from the Eastern Baltic show an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to Late Neolithic people and also in the frequency of light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance," Tambets says, noting that those characteristics continue amongst present-day Northern Europeans.

The researchers are now expanding their study to better understand the Iron Age migration processes in Europe. They say they will also "move forward in time and focus on the genetic structure of the medieval time period."

Source: Cell Press [May 09, 2019]

Scientists found common genes in different peoples of the Ural language family

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on October 15, 2018 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Estonia, Genetics, Linguistics, Russia, Siberia

The genetic diversity of peoples of the Ural language family living in Europe and Siberia are strongly influenced by a geography. However, the genetics from Estonia and Russia found common genetic component in Ural-speaking populations. Presumably, it originated from West Siberia. This means that the Ural family languages have spread over a wide area due to population migrations.

Geographical location of the Ural-speaking populations. A variety of Uralic languages and linguistic tree of their relationship. The color on the map corresponds to the color of the language group [Credit: Kristiina Tambets et al. 2018]

The Ural family languages are the third after Indo-European and Turkic most common in Northern Eurasia. According to linguists, the Ural family languages were built from a single proto-language 6000-4000 years old, which was divided into two large branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages. Ural-speaking peoples live on giant territories from Baltics to West Syberia and include Finns and Estonians, Karelians and Hungarians, Mordovian Erzya and Moksha, West Siberian Khanty and Mansi, Nenets and others. Do this different peoples share common roots and biological history? And how did these related languages spread over such a wide territory? This questions are addressed to genetics.

The authors of a recent paper in BMC Genome Biology tried to answer them. The international research team was coordinated by the genetics from Estonian Biocenter of the Tartu University, working in long-term cooperation with Russian colleagues from Moscow, Novosibirsk, Ufa and Arkhangelsk. Researchers analyzed the geographical location of the Ural-speaking populations and constructed a map, showing where different languages of the Ural family were spoken.

The scientists for the first time created a database of genetic data for the entire or full genome. The base includes more than 500 thousand positions for representatives of 15 Ural-speaking populations: from Finns to Nenets. Scientists have mapped the position of the Ural-speaking populations in the genetic space of Eurasia. These positions stretched from left to right in accordance with their geography: from west to east. Therefore, the authors concluded that geography is the main factor behind the genetic diversity of Ural-speaking populations.

The researchers also applied another standard analysis method for decomposing the genome into components derived from ancestors. It showed that the majority of the Ural-speaking populations except for Hungarians have a small genetic component in common. Scientists associate its origin with Western Siberia. If such fragments are found in people from different populations, they are likely to have a common ancestor, and if two populations have many common fragments, the are relatives. This way it turned out that many Ural-speaking populations are closer to other Ural-speaking populations, even geographically distant, than to their geographical neighbors who speak other languages.

Thus, Mari and Udmurts were closer to the Khanty and Mansi, living on the other side of the Urals, than to the neighboring Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash. At the same time, Finns and Sámi showed greater commonality with the Volga Mari, Komi and Udmurts, and even with West Siberian Khanty and Mansi, than with geographically close Swedes, Latvians, Lithuanians and northern Russians. However, there are exceptions such as Hungarians and Mordovian peoples.

Since the researchers wanted to see if there were any correlations between linguistic, geographic, and genetic data for Ural-speaking populations, they took lexical distances between languages ??(calculated by linguists proportion of common words in a special list of stable vocabulary), geographical distances between populations and, finally, genetic distances between populations, which serve as a measure of genetic similarity. It turned out that all these data types have a positive correlation, which indicates their interdependence.

The common genetic component found in the Ural-speaking populations indicates that they share common history. Apparently, the spread of the Uralic languages ??was associated with the spread of genes or with migrations. Scientists consider the center where the migrating groups originated to be placed in Western Siberia. Thus, in their opinion, the peoples of the Ural linguistic family are linked by genetic roots of Western Siberian origin.

"This is the third joint article by Estonian Biocenter and Russian scientists," commented Dr. Oleg Balanovsky, the head of Genomic Geography Laboratory of the Institute of General Genetics. "The first was devoted to the Turkic-speaking peoples, the second to the Balto-Slavic peoples, and the third to the Ural-speaking ones. In all cases, it was shown that the geographic factor plays the main role in the formation of the gene pool, and linguistic kinship fades into the background. At the same time, the analysis of the Turks and the Ural-speaking populations revealed a common component in their gene pool. This small but real share can be connected with the people through whom these languages ??were spread initially."

"Yet, the article about the Ural-speaking peoples does not answer all questions," continues Oleg Balanovsky. "The thousand-year intrigue remains unresolved: the origin of the Hungarians, who historically and linguistically are descendants of the Magyars, relatives of the Ugrians who conquered the territory of present Hungary in the 9th century. However, genetically modern Hungarians are indistinguishable from their geographical neighbors and do not show similarities with other Ugric peoples (Khanty and Mansi). Perhaps the genetic trail of the Ugric origin of the Hungarians can be traced with the help of ancient DNA. Such a work is already in progress."

Source: Akson Russian Science Communication Association [October 15, 2018]

Building site in Estonia's Talin continues to yield medieval treasures

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 21, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Eastern Europe, Estonia, Europe

The haul of late medieval artifacts found in ongoing excavations on a Tallinn building site has continued to increase, with the figure so far standing at 15,000; this is the single largest number of finds at one site in Estonia.

The building site today [Credit: Jan Vutt/ERR]

The plot, at the junction of Väike-Patarei 1/Jahu 6 in the Kalamaja district just to the west of the Old Town, has seen an area of approximately 1,000m2 excavated so far with roughly as big an area still to be dug over.

14th/15th Century bone dice, first of its kind found in Estonia (a similar example had been found in Turku, Finland) [Credit: YIT]

The treasure trove of items is particularly notable given the short time frame which the artifacts derive from. Previous excavations at sites in Tallinn and Tartu have yielded an even larger number of finds (between 20,000-30,000 items in both cases) but over a larger area and much longer time span, according to archeologist Erki Russow from Tallinn University.

Ring probably depicting a mythical animal, of a type not found in Estonia before. 14th/15th Century [Credit: YIT]

The bulk of the items found at Väike-Patarei 1/Jahu 6 date from the last few decades of the 15th century, at a time when Tallinn was in its late medieval heyday, according to Rivo Bernotas, the archaeologist in charge of the site. They were apparently deposited in earth used to level or elevate the ground at the location, some time in the early 16th century, making up a layer of almost one metre in depth.

Metal carved figurine. 15th/16th Century [Credit: YIT]

Thousands of medieval artifacts unearthed at Kalamaja construction site. The makeup of most of the finds suggests that the ground was brought from a demolished religious building as well as a property which had been used for artisan purposes working with leather.

Detail of a painted glass window fragment from the Kalamaja find (c. turn of the 15th/16th centuries) [Credit: YIT]

Highlights, many of which are rare or even unique in European finds, include a small ivory figurine representing Christ, 25 badges worn by pilgrims, a fragment of a glass window depicting a musician and a ring bearing the image of some sort of mythical creature in a gothic (14th-15th century) style.

Wooden comb, 15th Century [Credit: YIT]

The most recent coin to be found was minted during the bishopric of Johannes II Bertkow who was Bishop of Tartu in 1473-1485, according to Bernotas.

15th Century carved bone chess piece [Credit: YIT]

Chess pieces, dice, arrowheads, canon balls, fragments of ceramics, a variety of tools and writing implements and other items have also been discovered.

Knife, 15th/16th Century [Credit: YIT]

"The plot contains everything that we should be finding in the Old Town, but don't," said Russow.


The remainder of the plot is to be excavated through the course of the summer.

Source: ERR News [June 21, 2018]