shewhomust | The missing piece

The Guardian reports that the DigVentures excavation on Lindisfarne has found a very pretty thing, a blue and white glass hnefatafl gaming piece.

It seems to have emerged from the ground with a tantalising absence of context: "from a trench that has been dated from the eighth to ninth centuries." They don't even know whether to attribute the piece to the Viking raiders who made their first landfall here (the game is associated with the Vikings, as I learned last summer, on Fetlar) or with the Anglo Saxon monastery. I can imagine the Vikings taking a break from burning and looting over a relaxing boardgame, but one of this elegance? The monks must have been importing exotic pigments for the scriptorium, but would they have indulged in personal luxuries like this one? Who knows?

Nor do they comment about where the glass might have come from...

DigVentures functions through a mixture of crowdfunding and volunteers: press coverage of this find is angled to emphasise that it's an archaeologically respectable model, that properly supervised volunteers will not overlook the small but significant items. They must have been delighted that this find was made by the even more extreme non-professional, not even a seasonal volunteer, but the mother of one of the volunteers, who joined the dig just for one day. I can't help feeling for that volunteer, though.