Another mystery object

[Sunny]

This bronze wire-like artefact has had me beat....it is a good quality bronze and the patination is at least medieval.

Any suggestions ?

[painshill]

Perhaps part of some kind of serpentine or “coil” fibula? Those are frequently Celtic, but the Romans also used the same kind of design and into later times. This one is Roman from the 2^nd to 1^st Century BC and of an adopted style from the Celtic La Tene culture:


[Picture from Colchester Treasure Hunting & Metal Detecting website]


These are later Roman examples:


[Copyright: Trustees of the British Museum – Creative Commons License]


[Copyright: Trustees of the British Museum – Creative Commons License]

[Sunny]

Not sure on the brooch side Rog. I have a couple of La Tene brooches and they have the remains of the catch-plate. This has nothing even close; but could have been chopped off in antiquity and reused as something else.

The coil does fit a finger and it occurred to me (clutching at straws) that it could simply be an open-work finger decoration. Although, once again, whether that was from a recycled brooch is anyone's guess.

I didn't think it was a recognised form; more of a home-made job. I haven't seen anything similar in whole or part before.

[painshill]

There doesn’t have to be a catch plate, because they didn’t always have a spring-pin. There were two-part hook-and-eye forms like the one below and also single piece coils that simply threaded through or hooked onto a couple of loops in the garment.


Although “fibula = brooch” in most people’s thinking, these were initially just utilitarian objects to hold clothing in place (usually a cloak or cape) and progressively became the ornate decorative spring-pin or pin-and-hinge objects most people think of as a fibula.

[G10+]

That was a handle off a jar or something along those lines and someone reused it for a piece of tie wire

[Sunny]

G10+ thanks for the suggestion; I wished it were that simple. However, it is bronze, which we never used for jars or other wiring; certainly not since industrialised jar manufacture.

The site it came off is dominated by roman settlement material and was located alongside a major roman road from Venta Belgarum (now Winchester) to Sorbiodunum (Old Sarum; outside what is now Salisbury). The site does have a Deserted Medieval Village (DMV) close by, so I cannot discount that period. Detecting finds have also included iron age and saxon material, so it remains a mystery at the moment.

But I can say, from 30 years of detecting finds that it is definitely not modern