Talk:Torslunda plates

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Nedrutland in topic Size?

How old?

edit

The article needs to include the age of the artifacts. It just says they were dug up in 1870. Granted, 19th century archaeology often amounted to treasure hunting, with little thought of carefully documenting the historical context of the finds, but if there were remnants of the leather helmets, or other organic material, or pottery or other artifacts found with these,or what culture produced them, there should be some clue as to what century or "age" they date from. The bibliography was not very helpful, and each reader should not have to plow through hundreds of pages of scholarly prose about the joys of "lazer" scanning, or the divine right of kings looking for this basic information. Edison (talk) 16:43, 24 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Edison, they're roughly contemporaneous with the Vendel and Valsgärde graves, which is to say, c. 6th–8th centuries AD. They would have been used to make pressblech foils extremely similar to the ones found on the helmets from those graves (see gallery, missing just the Valsgärde 7 helmet]]). Most of the English literature (at least that which I have seen) approaches the plates from a technical standpoint, hence Arrhenius/Freij 1992 (36 pages on laser scanning) or Bruce-Mitford and Axboe (9 pages each, on the composition of the plates and how they were made). Much of the other literature—which I imagine goes into the details of the deposition and the iconography—is in Swedish and German, befitting of items that were found in Sweden. --Usernameunique (talk) 20:13, 25 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Size?

edit

The dimensions of the plates would be helpful. Nedrutland (talk) 08:37, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply