Does anyone have any correlation of similar cases of armour also being found with these swords in the rivers? Absence seems rather suspicious.

We have all seen those Hollywood productions where the dead soldier is set adrift on a burning boat. One wonders if there was a ritual with the sword, why wouldn't other equally valuable parts of the warrior's equipment be found in cases where a sword is found?

If a drowning accident occurred, one would contemplate why a whole suit (or at least some type of remains) would not be found. I would not want to sail in armour knowing that I could not hope to make it if I fell overboard. A 3 lb sword would not stop me from being able to swim in many rivers. Numerous cases of isolated swords being found alone in rivers seems rather suspicous unless one buys into the ritual theory.

Votive offerings have spanned many cultures throughout history, and were performed to gain the favor of the gods. Especially in the Celtic countries, pits, bogs, rivers and lakes have revealed huge deposits of gold, jewellry, and weaponry. It was generally believed that the more you gave the gods, the more they'd favor you or your cause. Here's a couple of links:

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~liskmj/living-spring/s...fs8cl1.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/trea...s_01.shtml

I also think that swords and etc ended up in rivers through accident and battle, who knows how many battles and skirmishes have occurred in history that went unrecorded? Also, the Thames river has given up many an oddity in it's time, as has been noted on this site more than once.

Ken

I think it is important to remember that any river we are looking at today, is probably not what the river was 100, 300, or 500 years ago. There is a very good chance it was not even where it is today.

My family has a hunting lodge and boathouse on a medium sized river in North Eastern Ohio. At our property, the river is probably 100 yards accross. In my life the main flow has moved from the far bank, to our bank. It built a large sandbar on the other side of the river, and is about 50 feet closer to our buildings than it was when I was a child. Bricks we put into the bank to stabalize it were swept away by winter ice and spring floods. As were various docks and trees over the years. Searching hundreds of yards downstream I can't find any of them today. All this happened in about 25 years and I expect that before I die our buildings will be gone one spring, as will our property.

Probably 300 yards behind our property is an old river channel that silted in. The remains of a large Indian settlement sit on a small rise near it, in what is now a corn field. In the spring, when the farmer turns the ground, especially after a good rain you can still find arrow heads and tools. The site is probably 200-300 years old. The river valley/flood plain is perhaps 2 miles wide and geology indicates that the river has been in every part of it at one time or another.

Joe,

Yes indeed, rivers meander and change their channel throughout history. Many factors affect how quickly this happens, but of course the velocity of the flow and the degree of spring flooding are big factors. Over many centuries a river will wander throughout it's floodplain. Metal detecting and exploring old river channel areas would be a fascinating hobby.

I can't argue that it depends on the river.

This is not the perfect example since it is limited to cases that are only 200 to 300 years old. But it does apply even in cases where rivers have changed course, rivers flowed pretty fast, etc. Fans of Clive Cussler may note that he has in real life uncovered many ship wrecks, including Civil War era shipwrecks in rivers such as the Mississippi. This includes rivers that flood and flow quite fast at times. In quite a few cases, the majority of items actually do not end up spread out further than 100 feet (about 30 meters.) It requires proper technology to locate everything that becomes mired down under the bottom silt, but if the river is not fast (less than 7 mph or around 5 km/hr), an accident site can leave a large assortment of things that pretty well stay put once they become mired in the bottom.

As to the "why" I propose this dilema.... even if things lost in accidents did scatter and become randomly located over very large downstream areas, the statistically chance of finding any type of item should relate to its popularity / population when lost. I'll bet we can agree that most warriors were not equpped naked with only a sword. This is "why" I think incidents of recovery (if they are in fact limited to primarily uncovering swords?...my original question) strikes me as suspicious.

I make no claims that this is a bullet proof or well thought out theory. But if cargo simply fell overboard or people had drowned, I would expect a variety of things to be uncovered in rivers. Items that are easily 2000 years old have survived in rivers and one can frequently purchase such antiquities found from rivers. There are a variety of web sites similar to the ones below. The last time I checked it, they stated that several finds came from rivers. I can not vouch for their credibility.


http://www.ancienttouch.com/

Shipwrecks and boatwrecks, unless really beaten up, effectively are containers and as such I would expect them to hold many of their contents together at the site where they went down if they are silted in before flood or iceflow moves them. Items in the posession of an individual, I suspect, are much more loosely associated with each other.

Then again, this is all just my speculation.

I certainly can't attest that any of my claims are bulletproof either. I have no scientific background in fluid dynamics or archeology, and I have not subjected my claims to testing. All I can base anything on is my experience with local river systems and my knowledge of regional history, including regional river finds.

I just have a feeling that many of the claims that finds have ritual or religious meaning, especially as we move along the histroic continium, are somewhat suspect. So I'm seeking to show that there are quite a few reasons why things end up on the bottoms of rivers and lakes including accidents, conflicts, stupidity, efforts to hide them, desire to deny other people their use, getting rid of garbage, and yes, even ritual. So finding anything underwater may not have any cultural significance attached to its being there.

I had thought about the container aspect of the sinking ship as well. With regard to ships capsizing, the explanation for search area given by experts seems to be that it has more to do with the way a given density object sinks (degree of boyancy) versus speed of the water. There is a scientifically provable degree of credible scatter at the time of an accident that is not that large. If the river or ocean is soft bottomed (mud silt, etc.) even surface objects that were not "containerized" in any way have a way of becomming permanently lodged close to the main wreckage in the silt within a few months.

What I had meant to enquire about originally (not actually assert any theory one way or the other), in these reports of swords being found... is there any thing else like armour fragments or other items also being found?

Most swords that are lost in the ground are just that, lost. they corrode away to nothing. Fresh water finds allow some of the oldest swords to survive. I believe a 1000 BC was found in a enlish river, and discovered only when they dredged it up.

I know that some of the better Roman swords have survived that way.

I got the opportunity to think about river-found weapons during the course of my studies. And here's something worth taking notice :

For my MA I studied a group of river-found weapons, about 25 of them in total, saved from dredging capaings int he Seine river in the early 20th century. I compared them with the better-known examples found in the Saône river near from my birthplace.

And the fact is that for the early medieval period (and before - stretching back to the Bronze Age), there is hardly a ford that did not yeld a weapon of any sort : seaxes, axes, spears...

And suddenly, from the 10th-11th cent. on, it just stops. You don't get as many weapons as before.

So, there is definitely a possible 'ritual' environment on the earlier weapon deposits in rivers, and there is a change of sorts that happens at some point, about a thousand years ago - though it can aslo be a mere 'surface' effect, linked to what the dredge operatos would decide to keep or reject (actually, the Seine river-find yelded over 800 iron weapons - and only the 25 I studied survived, while the rest was sold as scrap).

Another thing worth noticing :
La Tene swords were found in their scabbards. Early Medieval seaxes were sometimes accompanied by miniature axe heads. Spearheads were sometimes IMHO totally unpractical as weapons (weighing well ofer 5 lbs).

Late medieval swords were apparently used.

Though there are a few exceptions (the Castillon find is a good example).


Ah well. This has been the subject of many a talk on another forum, and will hopefully be one of my research main lines in the future, if things go well.

For those interested in Bronze Age river-found weapons, Dr Stefan Wirth will lecture about thel in the next HEMAC event in Dijon (next week, that is - eep ! )

Fab

I referred the topic of this thread to a friend who is a serious amateur historian, mostly focysed on roman age but well knowledgeable about later periods (he is a graduate from a university but he doesn't teach).

The theory of the religous discarding is most appropriate for him, since it can be surely seen as one of the many remnants of pagan rites that survived in Europe well into post medieval times.

After all many women burned as witches were actually expert of rites still surviving from old pagan cults.


Another interesting thing that surfaced from conversating with him was the existence in roman times of two kind of metals: one for military and one for civilian use.

Military style metal could be melted and reworked again, while civilian style metal was almost impossible to reforge.

So subjects tryng to rebel to Rome would have had an hard time turning their plows and tools into swords, and this is not a joke.

Sweet !

Mooking forward to seeing it in person ( 6 days now...)

Sorry for taking this thread OT, guys.


To add on the topic : several roman arge swords found in the Saône were crap - while contemporary knives found in the same places were made of quaility steel...