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Archaeologists are increasingly revisiting long-held theories about the past and highlighting how these ideas need to be updated in light of evolving evidence. This is especially the case with many artefact types that were first described by antiquarians or early archaeologists, who ascribed to them a particular use that was not necessarily grounded in much evidence. Recently, researchers from the University of Leicester have re-examined examples of anthropomorphic ‘art’ from Viking Age Sweden, including a type of artefact known as a ‘valkyrie pendant’. What have modern scientific techniques revealed about how these objects were made, used, and ultimately deposited?
The study focused on ten silver and bronze anthropomorphic objects that form part of the Viking World exhibition in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. These included seven full-figured valkyrie pendants, which had, up until this point, been associated with female wearers. The reasoning behind this assumption is unclear, however – not least because in the case of the only pendant to have come from a burial in which the sex of the individual was securely determined, that person was biologically male. As eight of the ten objects are antiquarian discoveries, there is very little contextual evidence to speak to their life histories – so, to see if the artefacts themselves held any clues, the team examined each object using microwear analysis (that is, using macro- and micro-scopy to interpret wear-, use-, and polish-marks on their surfaces; see CA 421 for how such analysis was applied to objects from Star Carr) and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, which uses photography and computational processing to capture surface topography.
They found that, despite seven of the objects being labelled as the same artefact type, each displayed different evidence of manufacture, use, and deposition. In terms of how they were made, eight of the ten objects were cast in silver and the last two in bronze. While all of the items would have been made using ceramic moulds, which were usually single-use as they had to be broken to extract the figure, they differ in how they were finished after the casting process. In particular, there is a high degree of variation in the polishing between the front and back of the objects. In four cases, both sides were found to be highly polished, while on two of the items the back saw less detailed polishing, and for one artefact the reverse side had not been polished at all. Could this speak to their ultimate use? Were some of these items used in such a way that only one side was expected to be seen, while others were meant to be visible from all sides? Or do these differences merely reflect varied levels of skill among the artisans who made them?
The wear patterns of the objects also reflected differences in how they had been used. While all but one of the artefacts are described as pendants and are assumed to have hung from either a suspension loop or a perforation, the team found little evidence that this was the case. Three of the objects showed no signs of wear to their attachment loops, which means that either they were never threaded and worn as pendants or, at least, were not used as such for very long. Another of the objects has a number of perpendicular striations through its suspension loop on the reverse side: these lines do not seem to correspond with suspension striations, however, and are more in line with the object having been tightly bound or wrapped against another object or material. This also seems to be the case for another two objects, which had their attachment loops partially flattened, indicating they had been attached to something hard, like metal or wood. This would seemingly contradict the idea that they were worn as a necklace or attached to clothes for personal adornment. Additionally, while five of the objects had little signs of use-wear, suggesting that they were probably deposited soon after their manufacture, two of the valkyrie pendants had significant rounding at their edges, hinting at extensive handling over time. The location of the rounding could be attributed to fabric having been wrapped around the surface of the figures or to their storage in a pouch, which could indicate that they were not on display at all.
Overall, these results show that even the same ‘type’ of objects can have vastly different life histories, and that ascribing one function to an item does not capture its full cultural meaning. The study attests that microwear and RTI analyses are able to provide us with a way to reassess many museum artefacts, particularly those that lack contextual evidence and may have previously been given oversimplified descriptions of use. The full results of this project were recently published in Antiquity: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10230.
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Image: O Myrin, Swedish Historical Museums, CC BY 4.0