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Purported Metal Casting Mould Identified As Fossil Cast [Aardvarchaeology]
A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a 2004 publication that it was for a Viking Period tortoise brooch. I’ve never seen the find live, but I could tell from the pictures that the pattern was certainly not from the Viking Period. I wrote in my 2011 book about the area (p. 119), “the object in question has a shape and a geometrical decoration style that is quite alien to the Viking Period, and must belong with the considerable amount of High Medieval material also found on the site.” Later another similar piece was found at a nearby site, but nobody’s found a good explanation for what was cast in these moulds or when.
Now it turns out that everybody who’s commented on these objects, including myself, has been wrong. My hugely talented and versatile colleague, archaeobotanist Jens Heimdahl, cracked the case. His doctorate is in quaternary geology, and he’s studied palaeontology as well. Jens explains that the cupped brown thingies with a geometrically patterned inside are in fact fossils of Ordovician echinoderms of the genus Stichocystis! We were all fooled because these are concave casts of a domed animal. Had it been a fossil of the beastie itself, then there would have been no confusion.
Stichocystis fossil.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2015/11/13/purported-metal-casting-mould-identified-as-fossil-cast/
