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Curator Irving Finkel recounts a magical adventure with The Lewis Chessmen. Content warning: wizard's chess.Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Lewis Chessmen | Curator's Corner | S 2 Ep9September 24, 2017 | The British Museum<

Some have suggested that trading commodities – most notably walrus tusks – with Europe may have been vital to sustaining the Greenlanders. Ornate items including crucifixes and chess pieces were fashioned from walrus ivory by craftsmen of the age. However, the source of this ivory has never been empirically established. Now, researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Oslo have studied ancient DNA from offcuts of tusks and skulls, most found on the sites of former ivory workshops across Europe, in order to trace the origin of the animals used in the medieval trade. In doing so they have discovered...

An ivory chess piece purchased for less than $10 was recently identified as one of the missing Lewis Chessman, 900-year-old artifacts dating back to the Viking era, which could be worth over $1 million dollars. The medieval chess piece was originally purchased for $7.50 by an antique dealer in Scotland in 1964. It was passed down through his family, but they never realized its significance. “For many years it resided in a drawer in [my mother’s] home where it had been carefully wrapped in a small bag,” the family, who wished to remain anonymous, said in a statement obtained by the...