It was not one or two isolated cases. It was quite a cultural trend among elite women from the 5th to 7th centuries AD. They lived throughout England, from the north to the south. Bag rings made of ivory have been found in more than 70 cemeteries, in richly furnished tombs.
The origin of these pieces has generated controversy among archaeologists since they began to be found in excavations carried out from the 19th century. It was first considered that they could be made from walrus ivory or from ancient mammoth remains. Recent excavations in Lincolnshire, however, have finally cleared up the mystery.
Work in one of the first Anglo-Saxon cemeteries found in the town of Scremby revealed a series of elaborate female burials containing the rings, researchers from the University of Sheffield and University College London explain in an article published in the Journal. of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Before trying to figure out where the ivory came from, experts dated the small earrings. Analyzes revealed that the raw material had formed sometime during the fifth and sixth centuries AD. It was then that it was possible to establish that its origin was the tusks of elephants that lived in an area of ??volcanic rocks in eastern Africa, almost 6,500 kilometers away from Scremby.
British traders would have imported the ivory to use for bag rings. The fashion even reached as far north as Germany, where these ornaments have also been found on some tombs, though in far fewer numbers than in England.
The rings were smoothed and polished to a high shine, and reconstructions made from the textile remains indicate that the bags hung in a special way that allowed ivory, a rare and expensive material among the Anglo-Saxons, to be visible.
The small bag was attached to the ring, placed on the hip, and was worn at the waist along with other objects such as tools or knives. “Displaying the ivory would have been a conspicuous display of wealth and status,” the researchers write in their study.
Elephants had not been considered a likely candidate until now because the ivory trade, both African and Asian, was believed to have stopped with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Hence, walrus tusks filled the void as a source for making luxury ornaments in the Anglo-Saxon era.
The rings found are circular and of a larger diameter than those produced from walruses, which are narrower and more oval. Hence, the option of using ancient mammoth tusks, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago, was considered as possible. This hypothesis was also ruled out after radiocarbon dating.
So the mystery continued for decades until an excavation at Scremby between 2017 and 2019 unearthed 49 burials of people buried between 428 and 598 AD, seven of which contained remains of adult women with circular ivory rings on them. the hips.
When the analyzes in the laboratory confirmed that the ivory was from African elephants, the specialists used the strontium isotopes to reduce the range of probabilities as much as possible. They finally located the origin of the ivory in the Rift Valley, in East Africa, in what are now Kenya and Ethiopia.
Researchers believe the raw material was traded by the Kingdom of Aksum, located in present-day Eritrea. This powerful kingdom had dominated the Red Sea trade after the fall of Rome, and archaeological evidence has been found that its artisans worked in ivory as late as the sixth century.
The lack of debris from this material at Anglo-Saxon archaeological sites indicates that the rings were made elsewhere and imported into England. The Aksum ivory trade declined in the 7th century with the Islamic conquests in North Africa and African ivory was diverted to China and India where demand was high.
In addition to the sharp decline in supply, the change in burial practices of the Anglo-Saxons as they became Christian also caused a reduction in demand. The combination led to the demise of African elephant ivory pouch rings in the 7th century AD.
