Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
An old sewer pipe needed repair in Trondheim in mid-Norway last year. A last-minute dig to save possible archaeological objects yielded a surprising and rare result: a gaming piece with runes...
The inscription is quite clear, according to Holmqvist, and reads siggsifr.
“Inscribing names on small items such as these was quite common, and Sig- is a commonly known start of many names, both female and male, such as Sigurd and Sigbjørn, or Sigfrid and Sigrid,” Holmqvist says...
“So perhaps this is a hitherto unknown name meaning ‘battlebrother’,” Holmqvist suggests.
The name could belong to the person who made the gaming piece, or the person who owned it.
Archaeologist Solem suggests another explanation – that the piece could have been a King chess piece...
Here iss the link to the original article.
Items without another clearly identified purpose are often thought to be either gaming pieces or religious items. I've commented on that before.
I've posted a variety of dug gaming pieces in the past. They include things like casino chips, and things like that, as well as other items that are not so easily and confidently identified, such as a discoidal or other blank round shaped piece of shell or flattened piece of lead.
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| Silver Sam's Twon Casino Chip. |
I found an abstract to a good article on colonial period ceramic gaming pieces. It is Heads or Tails? Modified Ceramic Gaming Pieces from Colonial California, by Panich, Lederer, Phillip and Dylla. Below is the abstract.(See Heads or Tails? Modified Ceramic Gaming Pieces from Colonial California on JSTOR
I'd like to read the entire article, but I haven't been able to get it yet. It really aggravates me when scientific articles aren't freely available to the public - especially archaeological.
Below are some examples from the peachstatearchaeologicalsociety.org site. They call them game stones.
And here is a very similar one found on a Treasure Coast beach.
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| Discoidal Found on Treasure Coast Beach. |
I've also shown a flat rounded piece of shell that could possibly be a game piece or something else. It could be a piece that hasn't been finished.
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| Rounded Shell Piece From Treasure Coast Beach. |
This could easily be called a game piece, but in my opinion it could be any of a number of things. It certainly has been painstakingly rounded. I feel the same way about the runic example shown at the top of the post.
Maybe a talisman or good luck piece, for example, or what might be called soldier art.
The art of artifact interpretation is an interesting human activity and leaves a lot of uncertainty at times. It involves perception and common daily mental processes that extend to how humans attribute meaning to things such as small ambiguous objects as well as things on a much greater scale, such as the meaning of life itself.
If I had a hundred years of life left in me I'd be tempted to attempt to quantify the ambiguity in objects. That would be a mathematical exercise. It would be applied also to UFO and paranormal sightings, which involve a lot of perceptual and cognitive uncertainty. It might be possible to develop statistical techniques such as those used in quantitative scientific methods to estimate significance levels. That would be psychological, physiological and philosophical as well as mathematical.
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I got a report that 1715 Fleet gold was found by treasure salvors on what is often called the Nieves site. I plan to post a picture tomorrow.
This has so far been a very flat-water summer allowing lots of treasure salvage time along the Treasure Coast.
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| Windy.com Projection Showing Bret's Predicted Position Saturday. |
As you can see, the ECMWF chart shows Bret Passing south of Cuba and Santo Domingo.
Tropical depression four (east of Bret and shown below) is predicted to turn north and stay out to see, passing well east of Florida.
Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net