The treasure found at Traprain Law in south-east Scotland in 1919 is one of the most spectacular UK archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Published not long after its discovery, with hindsight it is surprising that it has not been the subject of substantive re-evaluation until now. A new project began in the mid-2000s, hosted by the National Museum of Scotland, and led by the editors of the volume under review. (In the interests of transparency, I should state here that I purchased the book at a discount as an attendee at a conference at the National Museum of Scotland in 2022.)
It was ambitious from the start, seeking not only to republish and re-evaluate the treasure itself, but also to set it in a wider indigenous and European context, assisted by a team of scholars from across the UK and Continental Europe. This was necessary not only because of the similarity of silver plate assemblages across the late Roman empire, but also because the phenomenon for which Traprain is most famous, hacksilver (cut up or crushed fragments of silver objects), is a wider feature of the western empire and beyond, especially its northern periphery. The results are magnificent.
For such a large volume, the second of those produced by the project, it is impossible to cover in a book review the entirety of the admirable contribution to scholarship that it represents, so I will focus mainly on the topic of hacksilver, as in my view the most important and ground-breaking element. To give a flavour of the volume’s contents, however, in addition to the thorough documentation and description of the treasure, individual or jointly authored contributions study the objects in further detail, including discussions of their iconography, inscriptions and composition as ascertained through scientific analysis. These provide new insights. For example, the analysis of solders suggests that the objects come from the north-west provinces, and some of them may have been manufactured in Britain. There are also wider contextual studies, supplementing those presented in the first project volume (Late Roman Silver: The Traprain Treasure in Context, published in 2013). These include an informative account of silver production in the late Roman and early medieval period, and the history of the find in the modern period, including the production of replica silver artefacts in the 1920s that have become collectibles in their own right. The volume is divided into sections that reflect the life history of the treasure from manufacture to its recovery and reception, a structure that is interpretatively productive, though it does lead to some repetition between the sections, and discussion of the same material being split across different parts.
No longer thought to be the wanton destruction of looted items by uncivilised ‘barbarians’, an interpretation long present in the scholarly literature, hacksilver is now recognised as a complex phenomenon. Its production demonstrates that the original objects were no longer valued in functional or cultural terms, but the context could be one of normal metal recycling or motivated by a variety of other particular circumstances. It seems clear from new studies of a variety of hacksilver hoards, including Traprain, that the overriding purpose in a late Roman context in which precious metal coinage was in increasingly short supply was the production of set quantities of bullion. A large silver platter (many late Roman examples are more than half a metre in diameter) is cumbersome, and while it always had a bullion value alongside its status as an art object, it probably represented too great a value in monetary terms to be useful in most exchange situations. By contrast, small fragments, sometimes folded up into neat rectangular packages, are both portable and fungible. The authors propose that the first stage of hacking for much late Roman silver most likely took place within the empire, with the predominant motive in the first instance probably the payment of military personnel, as persuasively argued by Kenneth Painter in his seminal contribution to the first Traprain project volume. There, Painter also discussed the interesting question of whether hacksilver was regarded as special-purpose money, in anthropological terms — that is, felt appropriate to specific uses only. Certainly, it appears that once the hacked fragments reached Traprain, they were destined for transformation (in some cases following further hacking, that is well argued to have taken place at Traprain itself). We are fortunate to have contextual evidence from the site for silver-working, and for the types of objects that were being produced there from hacked silver, such as massive neck-chains, and projecting-headed pins. Perhaps the silver had to be transformed into elite indigenous artefacts before it could be recirculated — then being used in gift-exchange to bolster the position of Traprain’s ruling elite. Hunter interprets the evidence for the presence of vast quantities of silver in early medieval Scotland more widely in relation to the value of silver, suggesting it may have been particularly prized in the region. There is a stark contrast with other fifth-century areas of Britain, such as south-east England, where silver appears very scarce. Here, cross-cultural comparisons drawing on economic anthropology could be helpful: there are historical examples, such as the fourteenth- to fifteenth-century ‘silver famine’ in Europe, of the way that precious metals accumulate in regions where they are most highly valued, as more can be obtained for them in exchange terms, creating shortages elsewhere (discussed in The Anthropology of Money by Di Muzio and Robbins, 2017).
One of the fascinating aspects of the study is how it reveals the complexity of the hacking process and the way this involved many different participants over a prolonged period of time. Initially there is evidence that many of the objects were halved or quartered, with this work apparently done by professional metalsmiths with access to specialist tools. Later, objects were reduced to rectangular fragments, with these sometimes folded or combined into packages, and in this further process, the cuts were sometimes made apparently using whatever equipment lay to hand, or even by bending and snapping the silver into pieces. A long lifespan is also evident at an earlier stage in many objects’ lives, with the widespread presence of multiple name inscriptions attesting to successive owners and the way the objects may have functioned as valuable heirloom pieces before they became hacksilver. The volume includes much fundamental and valuable work on the identification and dating of the specific vessel types and other objects that are represented in the hoard, with dates assigned between the beginning of the fourth century and the mid-fifth century. I would be interested to see if any correlation can be demonstrated between the dates of the vessels and the level of hacking — are older vessels more likely to be present in smaller fragments, and the latest ones in the hoard in larger pieces? Conversely, is there evidence that even the latest vessel types were subject to multiple phases of hacking? This would have significant implications in any assessment of the burial date of the treasure, suggested here as around the mid-fifth century c.e.
Weight is also important in any assessment of hacksilver, as this volume conclusively shows. While the hacking of the Traprain silver tells us that these cultural products of empire were no longer valued, there is also evidence that the empire’s culture was alive and well, as represented by its systems of measurement. Hacksilver assemblages were stored in Roman weight units, silver pieces were made up into packages that had specific Roman weights, and individual hacked fragments also sometimes correspond to Roman weights. Those that do not may represent later stages of hacking and the use of the objects within different metrical systems. If we are thinking about weight as a measure of value, it is worth noting that the book’s own weight comes in at a hefty 3.25 kg (nearly ten Roman pounds) — by some distance the heaviest item on my bookshelf. It is an almost literally monumental achievement and will be a fundamentally important reference work for the foreseeable future.
