Thanks Covenantor.
Posted on 07/14/2015 12:36:43 PM PDT by BenLurkin
You get those if you are engraving gold with a chisel. . . gold is soft enough that you can get a long spiral like that as you push the chisel forward. The spiral forms naturally. What I am surprised about is that the goldsmith did not collect them and resmelt the gold for re-use. Gold, then and now, was valuable and would have been reused. He must have been interrupted in his work and never gotten back to it. . . in other words he was killed, and the killers did not bother to clean up the gold in their pillaging.
The goldsmith would if his shop were attacked by Vikings and he got killed, the shop pillaged by those interested only in the large finished or partially finished pieces. Such barbarians would not take the time to clean the floor for sweepings. . . and then the workshop gets abandoned. . .
PS: Using Vikings in the generic raider sense. . . not putting the anachronistically out of their milieu.
Whatever they were chiseling must have been quite large for an object made of gold.
I wonder what it was.
Idol of Baal or Beelzebub?
Precisely because the people postulating it do not think of anything but dumb untechnological peoples who are not as modern as ‘us’. Those who used gold for decorations ( see any civilization from Egypt through the Celts etc) did so with inlays, chunks, leafing, etc.
These tightly wound spirals show purpose and precision....plus they were not on ANYTHING decorative. Instead they were in a box with an animal pelt
Thanks Covenantor.
Someone paying the Danegeld.
simple...... the “spirals” are lathe cut offs
as an article is turned, a continuous strip is cut off and is wound into a spiral
machine shop floors exhibit lots of them
Yeah, I was thinking they used them to build their computers.
But the article says that they had been inside a fur-lined wooden box, so not just left behind.
Your explanation sounds just right. Thank you.
I think they need you at this dig.
At the time, a long spiral of gold would have been a wondrous thing. A big pile of spiral gold shavings would likely not have been made for their own sake, but quite possibly kept as novel finery anyway.
“You spiral wind the gold wire to a specific diameter as you see here, and then you can cut off individual loops to make a chain. What you see here is just an intermediate stage in the production of jewelry.”
That’s crazy talk!
What we see is obviously someone attempting to hide the gold from a robbery of the Tribal Mint as shavings on the floor of a bronze workshop.
I mean, come on. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of Occam’s Razor?
Possible, but if he was killed, why wouldn’t willing to murder another man be willing to take the gold shavings, assuming that was all they could find?
Because when you're pillaging, you don't look in wooden boxes. You kill, grab the obvious gold goodies and run to the next place. . . Besides you might be weighed down with such large gold items that the chicken feed stuff is not worth a second thought. Especially if you might get killed by the Johnny come latelys as you are rummaging for the small stuff.
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