Textile Textured Silver Ingots: A Technical Investigation into how these Textures came to be on some Viking Hoard Ingots

Abstract

The ‘West Coast Cumbria’ hoard, discovered in 2014, is a late ninth/ early tenth-century Viking silver hoard, housed at the Beacon Museum, Whitehaven, UK. It is composed of 20 Viking silver objects: bar-shaped ingots and ornaments, in various stages of fragmentation (PAS ‘Find-ID’ LANCUM-FA14C8). One, complete ingot (museum no. 2016.162.5) bears coarse cloth-impressions on its upper surface i.e. the face that was in direct contact with the mould. How such textile imprints were acquired is somewhat of a mystery.

Keywords

• silver
• textile
• metallurgy
• clay
• viking age
• usa