MORE ON THE DAIRSIE HACKSILVER HOARD

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 51, December 23, 2018, Article 20

Remembr the Dairsie hoard of late 3rd century hacksilver discovered last year? Archaeologists have been working to put the piece back together. Here's an excerpt from a Current Archaeology article. -Editor

Recently discovered in Fife, the Dairsie Hoard represents the earliest-known evidence found outside the empire for Roman use of hacksilver to secure their frontiers. Fraser Hunter unpicks its illuminating and ornate contents. These last few months have been spent in a form of devilish torment. Our museum conservators, helped and hindered by my input, have been piecing together a silver jigsaw puzzle – pieces of Roman vessels, many only millimetres across. They have come together to reveal a remarkable find from Fife, on the east coast of Scotland: a hoard of Roman hacksilver, the earliest known beyond the Empire’s edge, which casts fresh light on Roman frontier politics in the later 3rd century AD.

What is hacksilver? It is a term used for items, mostly silver vessels, which have been deliberately cut, chopped, and crushed into fragments – converted from beautiful works of art into a weight of silver. Although this habit has a long pedigree in the Old World, our main interest is with the Roman period.

The work of the late Kenneth Painter in particular has shown that this was no barbarian habit: hacksilver is found on both sides of the Roman frontier, especially in the north-western provinces, from the 2nd century AD to the 6th, though with a strong focus in the 4th and 5th centuries. Kenneth also showed that this silver was treated as bullion: much of it clearly correlated to multiples or fractions of Roman pounds and ounces, indicating the use of Roman weight standards. Either our barbarians were terribly careful with their brutal hacking, or there was a Roman economic motive behind this process – hacksilver was a process of turning objects into bullion at times of need.

One of those needs was dealing with barbarians. Hacksilver was sent north, whether as diplomatic gifts or payments for mercenary services, to Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, as far as Ukraine – and to Scotland. For a long time, this ‘barbarian’ hacksilver was seen as a phenomenon of the late 4th and 5th centuries AD. The new Fife find changes this. For the first time, we can see this policy of bullion payments starting earlier, in the late 3rd century.

PIECES OF SILVER
The 408 fragments of silver that we recovered came from only four vessels in total, and the one least plough-scarred was the most puzzling of the lot: a silver cylinder of rather thick metal, which preserves a rounded lip on part of its edge.

The final vessel is the most remarkable, but also the most difficult to reconstruct. It was made from thin, highly fragile silver, and seems to have been carefully placed, intact and upside down, to act as a cap to cover the rest of the silver. Unfortunately, this arrangement left it extremely vulnerable to the plough, and the base has been almost totally lost, but most of the rim survives.