Most people when you talk about Iron Age Shields, think of metal objects with a shiny metal front
or a boss in the middle that's metal or metal edging.
But in 2015 in a field near Leicester that all changed…
Hi I'm Sophie Adams I'm curator of the Iron Age collections.
Welcome to my corner. [Music]
So we know there were shields in the Iron Age in Britain and in Europe, but we have very few of them.
And those we do have, they have shiny bronze fronts on them, or they have an iron boss.
They have metal edges. You might be familiar with the Battersea Shield or The Chertsey Shield, the Witham Shield
These are all beautiful bronze objects but all of them have got metal components.
But it wasn't until 2015, we discovered this wasn't always the case.
[Dramatic music] In a field just outside Leicester, was found a shield.
A shield like none other found before.
Not in Britain, not in Europe, not in the northern hemisphere. [Music builds]
This was a shield made entirely of organic material, of bark. [Record player scratch]
Now this isn't the original the original is very delicate it's not quite complete.
But we had to recreate it so we could understand what had been found.
It was found lying in the bottom of a pit.
A very damp pit.
So that it could preserve this organic materials.
And it was upside down and the archaeologists from University of Leicester archaeological services
carefully cleaned away the soil and revealed a thin layer of wood and half of a handle.
The bark itself was only about three millimeters thick.
It's quite incredible that the archaeologists didn't scrape through it.
But they didn't know what it was - perhaps it was the lid to a barrel or something.
So they carefully excavated round and lifted it and then in the laboratories
the other side was excavated down through the silty layers and revealed this bit.
This is the key - it's the boss.
And the boss shows that this was a shield because you don't need a boss on a lid
but you do need one on a shield.
Because when you hold the handle your fist goes around the handle you need space
for it to sit, protected.
You can also use the boss as a weapon in its own right.
The body - this part - of the shield that's made of willow bark.
If you look. If I turn it over you can see this is the outside of the tree.
You've got the rough texture of the bark and we know that the shield was made like this
because we can see this rough texture on the original one. And then the smooth inner face
of the bark is at the front.
You can only harvest willow bark at certain times of year so between about March and June.
And it's amazing as you cut around and prize the bark off the tree, you can put your hand between
the tree and the bark it's really damp behind.
And this is quite a sort of flexible material at first it feels almost spongy.
Now you want to keep it quite damp while you work it because as soon as it dries out
it starts to shrink and close. Eventually you do want the shield to dry.
If you dry it too quickly it'll twist and buckle.
If you dry it too slowly with something pressed against it, it goes mouldy.
When the original was made it was perhaps hung up, hung from the rafters in a roundhouse
so that the smoke off the fire could help stop it rotting and also help it slowly dry.
So this is the little piece of bark off a willow tree. If you look at it in the section you can see it's quite thick.
It's kind of spongy in the middle and it wants to curl around the tree.
So what we've done, and what the Iron Age people did was bend this the opposite way.
This is something that we had to make sense of.
How did they get the tree to bend or the bark to bend in the way it didn't want to?
And why were there all these different elements to the original shield?
One thing you can't really see but you might be able to make out in the light, you see we've got some ridges.
Here and here. Four of them.
These are quite surprising.
They managed to insert through the layers of the bark to stiffen the bark.. laths, sticks.
Smoothed down these made from crab apple and pushed into the layers while it's still damp
pushed through thereby reinforcing the shield itself.
Now we weren't sure why those were there. Was it to make the shield stronger?
Was it to help shape it, and they seem to have worked both ways one is to help [stop it]
it curving the wrong way - rolling up when it's drying. And the other [is that it] makes it a bit stronger
again. [It] helps to reinforce and if you remember we've got to try and fit these laths through
these laminated layers of bark, so you need to have it quite damp where you while you do that.
Most important is the boss and that's made of basketry.
It's a willow rod spiralled round it's called the foundation rod and stitched over with
stitches made from lime bast which is the inside of the bark of a lime tree.
Stitching all around and then attaching it to this body made of the bark of the willow tree and then
they also found along the edge a small segment of wood. This is what we call the rim.
Now we're familiar with these rims from metal-edged shields, where you have a metal rim going around.
We've never seen one with a wooden rim and this is made of Hazel.
So you take a round stick of Hazel,
so a nice thin branch, split it in half and then you get one flat surface and one curved surface.
And then that can be bent around, while it's fresh, can be bent around the edge of the shield
and attached with these stitches.
We've got evidence on the original shield of some of these stitches still surviving
and they seem to be in groups so that's how we've worked this out groups of maybe four stitches.
This lime bast is an amazing material to extract this you take the bark off a lime tree.
It's much thinner than the willow bark and you make a little cut and bend it and you can
peel away this inner fibre. And then you want to heat and soak this to make it flexible.
And then you can peel it into little strips and when you have long strips like here
- ones we made earlier. You can then twist them and combine them together.
Now I'm not the best at this but if you can see here where it's been twisted around itself and over
twisted around itself and over you make a chord that's really really strong
and that you can use for the stitches for attaching the boss,
and for the stitches for attaching the handle.
And then the stitches around the edge they seem to have just used the flat fibres
perhaps with a bone tool to break through the body of the shield itself so that you could stitch around.
And then the handle. This is another type of wood here called Poplar, and that was carefully shaped.
And the useful thing about the shape of the handle - where it's kind of chamfered -
gave us an idea that the shield did curve back towards the body of the person holding it so it did
curve away from the shape it wanted to go.
We've also added some extra little features on here which were not found on the original
but we were wondering might have been useful and these are these little pins.
These little pins are made from Hawthorne thorns and we do have evidence of Hawthorne
Thorns being used for various things at this time, and we have evidence on the metal Shields
of little pins on the rim.
On the original shield we can see tiny little scratches across dividing up the space and
it looks like these little scratches have been designed for decoration.
So this is a suggestion of how the pattern of the design would have looked.
So red ochre marking out some areas and then the natural paler colour of the bark itself
contrasting with that.
So it's a much more geometric pattern than again we're familiar with from Iron Age shields.
The Battersea Shield has all swirling designs.
So it's been fascinating for me learning about how all these different materials work.
My experience with Iron Age objects has been very much from the metal working side of things
before this.
So again we're working in modern conditions, modern environments trying to recreate
an environment of two and a half thousand years ago as well.
And I say that date because we know from radiocarbon dating the original Shield that it was buried
sometime between about 400 and 200 BC.
You can maybe narrow this down a little bit but we know that it was made and buried during that period.
So now I'm going to move all the new organic materials away because I don't want anything
that's in these to contaminate the original objects which have been carefully treated
by PEG treatment and freeze drying to preserve them.
So what I have here is the original boss from the bark shield.
So this is the basket boss. The rest of the shield is currently in the conservation lab
being prepared for display in the galleries.
So if you look closely, you should be able to see it's got this general dome shape.
It's a bit flattened on one side now and that's where it's been in the ground -
pressed in the ground. The weight of the soil above it seems to have distorted it a bit.
And then we also have surviving some of the twisted cord lime bast stitches.
that again stitched through the boss attaching it to the body of the shield.
There’s a couple of other features which you won't see on the experimental shield.
One is this hole in the middle here.
And that hole it's very dark around the edge of it and the darkening is something that
Barbara has been telling me occurs when the wood is exposed while it's in the ground.
So we think that hole was already there when the shield went into the ground and the little
stone inside it has kind of worked its way in where it's been pressed in the ground.
So it shows again that the shield’s had some use.
It's had some damage before it was buried.
And then if I turn it around to the other side.
You can see we're missing a little bit the flange, the rim here.
But you may be able to pick out a teeny tiny hole.
And we've plucked from that hole the end of a little thorn and Caroline Cartwright,
who's been able to analyse the plant species of all the different elements of the shield,
she's analysing that thorn for us to see if we can work out what that is.
Now this makes me start thinking about how the shield’s used.
We've talked about how the shield is you know, used to protect you from blows, from spears.
But it also might be used to break your way through undergrowth - sharp bristly brushes
sharp thorns - and protect you from that.
And perhaps that's how that little thorn got stuck in the boss there.
But it gives you an idea of it being used.
One other feature, another sort of dark area on the middle here and this is where the foundation
rods, so that wound Willow, has been exposed.
And it's blackened in colour.
Now it shouldn't be exposed when you're using it, it should be hidden by the stitches.
So again this is a sign of wear and tear.
A little bit old, a little bit weary when it was buried, this shield, but perhaps very loved
And then the last features are less visible without looking really close.
High definition photography brings this out well.
And that's the actual stitches of the bast over the foundation rods and very carefully
you can start to pick out each individual stitch and see how it was joined together
and its careful examination of that that allowed Diederik to create such a accurate recreation of the boss.
So there's a an expression you're often taught in archaeology.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Just because you haven't found something, doesn't mean it didn't exist.
And this is one of those rare moments, the finding this shield, where that absence is filled in.
It's the only one we know of, the only one that we found, and yet this one piece shows
how much skill the person who made it had.
They were skilled in using and working all these various materials.
If you look at the boss you know there's such fine tight stitching and to be able to attach
this rim, and know the right size of rim and Hazel to use.
When to harvest the Willow bark.
So all these combined elements and the skill with which they've been put together,
I think shows that person must have made several of these.
It wasn't a single one-off. It wasn't a practice piece.
It was a well-rehearsed well-practiced piece of construction.
So perhaps more shields are made like this than were made out of metal or with metal components,
in which case somebody could have been churning out hundreds of these or most people made themselves one.
And it would have been a technology that would have been far more familiar to
the people two and a half thousand years ago than it is to us today.
I think, in our current climate, one of the most important lessons from this Shield is
just how fantastic organic materials are - how versatile, how strong they are.
All the elements that are put together here and the strength of those
I think it's really great to see something so robust, so useful that has survived such
a long time, made entirely from organics.
And that's coming from me a metal work specialist!
[Music:] Thank you for watching my Curator’s Corner.
There's loads of others on our YouTube channel.
I'm particularly rather fascinated by one about a curious automaton.
The original shield is going on display in gallery 50 at The British Museum this summer.
You'll be able to see it across the gallery it's a little bit brown it might not look
very inviting at first, but go in close and you'll be able to see these details I've shown you.
Or step back and admire the shiny Battersea shield…
No, step forward to look close at the organic Enderby Shield