April 2024

The early prehistoric rooms in Orkney Museum are on the ground floor of the building, leading off one another. When you have been past a caseful of exquisite polished stone axe heads, whale vertebrae made into bowls, and some of the famous Grooved Ware pottery (Neolithic), you come into another room where steatite burial urns from Bronze Age cists and eagle claws from the famous Tomb of the Eagles catch the eye. But my favourite object in that room is a small flat trapezoidal piece of dull black stone, rather inconspicuously displayed on the top shelf of the showcase in the centre of the room. It is part of a Bronze Age necklace.

I like it because it is an interesting intellectual exercise. It is one of those finds where only a small part of an object has been found, but you can tell what was there originally if you know how to recognize it. I did a lot of that during the years I worked writing reports on medieval pottery, recognizing London Ware pitchers from a small piece of the spout, or St Neots Ware bowls from a fragment of an inturned rim. That’s archaeology. An awful lot of the time you are dealing with small broken pieces of  the original artefact. To display them to the public in a museum case does take a certain amount of creativity.

This little piece of black stone comes from the peat moss at Grind, Tankerness, in the East Mainland of Orkney. That is to say, it was recognized in a peat which had come from that moss, by William Mitchell, who donated it to the Orkney Antiquarian Society. Unfortunately I have not found a record of the date it was found, but since it was published in 1934-5 it must have been found before then ⁽¹⁾.   It is one of  the spacer plates from a Bronze Age multistrand necklace. If you tip it sideways you can see that there were four holes bored through it to hold the strings of the necklace. Its shape was designed to hold the strands in the right position to give the necklace a crescentic outline. It has geometric decoration punched into the flat surface. None of the rest of the necklace was found – imagine trying to find small black beads in black peaty soil –  but the presence of a whole 4-strand necklace can be inferred from this small object. 

It is referred to on the label as jet, which carries the implication that it was imported from Yorkshire, which is the nearest source of jet. William Kirkness, who published it, believed it to be lignite or cannel coal, both of which can be found in Scotland. However without scientific testing, which as far as I know has not been carried out on this piece, it is not possible to distinguish jet from albertite. Albertite was used for jewellery in the Bronze Age in Orkney. There are beads from Skara Brae and Swandro on Rousay, and a V-bored button-shaped object from the Tomb of the Eagles believed to be made of albertite. The Swandro bead material has been confirmed by several different methods of scientific analysis. There is a deposit of albertite at Dingwall, just north of Inverness, and in Orkney on the NE shore of Stronsay there is bed of rock which apparently resembles albertite in composition ⁽²⁾.  So the spacer plate might be jet, but it might be any of these other rocks.

So what did the necklace look like? My drawing is based on a number of complete and partial Bronze Age ‘jet’ spacer-plate necklaces found at various places in Scotland such as Poltalloch, Killy Kiaran and Mount Stewart. The carved design on the Poltalloch necklace is said to have retained traces of a white substance which would have made it stand out more against the black background. They appear to have been worn by women, and the similarity of their shape to gold lunulae has been noted. Most are now in the National Museum of Scotland, and their online collections database has images of some of them.

It reminds us that Orkney was important in the Bronze Age as well as the Neolithic or the Viking age.  Many people don’t know about the existence of the beautiful sheet gold discs from the largest barrow at the Knowes of Trotty, or the remains of an amber necklace from the same grave, because they are in the National Museum in Edinburgh. Perhaps someone could donate some really good replicas to the museum; after all there is a replica of the Tankerness Hood on display in the Iron Age gallery.

1. Kirkness, William  (1934-5) ‘Note on the discovery of a plate from an early Bronze Age necklace', Proc Orkney Antiq Soc, vol. 13, p.41 & Fig.2
2. British Regional Geology: Orkney and Shetland  1976, Natural Environment Research Council; Institute of Geological Sciences, Chapter 8 Old Red Sandstone of Orkney, Page 80

Well, yes, it may very well be an inside job. But not in the sense you are imagining. Those finds could quite well still be somewhere in the museum. It’s just that no-one knows where. Consider the following totally fictional narrative, fictional in the sense that I made it up. But it is based on my personal experience of what can happen any day in any museum somewhere in Britain. And I do mean any, I have personal experience of several so this isn't aimed at any particular museum.

…Once upon a time, in the 19^th century, there was a British soldier. He went to India to serve his queen and country, and before he came home again he bought a little gold ring with a ruby set in it. It was a very thin circle of low-carat gold, and the ruby was no more than a tiny chip because he didn’t have much money. However, his sweetheart was delighted with it and they got married and lived happily ever after, and so did their daughter and her daughter after her. The ring passed from mother to daughter until the early 21^st century and then things changed. The current holder of the ring didn’t want to wear an old cheap ring. Her husband was rich enough to buy her an expensive and stylish modern one. However it seemed disrespectful to just sell the family ring on EBay or give it to the charity shop, so they decided to donate it to the local museum.

The museum didn’t really want it, but the family had lived in the area since the soldier went to India so it had local associations, and they didn’t want to offend a pillar of the local Rotary Club, and anyway it was very tiny and wouldn’t take up much room. So they accepted it. The couple brought the ring to the museum on the appointed day, and filled in the forms with the person on the front desk and handed the ring over and went home. The person on the front desk filed the paperwork in the proper file, and put the ring, wrapped in a screw of acid-free tissue inside a small plastic box inside a brown paper envelope, on the appropriate curator’s desk (their office was kept locked). The desk was cluttered with paperwork and objects awaiting attention. The curator was too busy to do anything with the ring that day, so it got moved to the edge of the pile. During the days that followed, everybody was totally wrapped up in the redisplay of one of the main galleries. And then there was a water leak in the main store. And then there was an urgent meeting about funding. And then…  well, you get the idea. So the ring got forgotten. It sat on that desk for a while and then got put on a shelf in the cupboard in the office along with a rusty box iron and a glazed brick and a George VI coronation mug and a piece of tasteless embroidery, because the curator had to tidy the desk for a visit by the leader of the Council. And then they left. The replacement curator knew nothing about it. The ring sat in the cupboard. For a number of years.

One day, though, the donor’s grandson was doing a school project about his ancestors and they had the idea of taking him to the museum to see the Indian ring. When they didn’t see it on display, they asked where it was. The new curator (a very new curator) got a bit flustered but assured them that it would be found. They did it by the book, or rather by the database. Every museum has a collections database listing all the objects which legally belong to the museum (loans and enquiries go in a different place). All the objects have a unique number. The new curator searched that collections database every which way: ‘ruby ring’, ‘ring’, ‘gold ring’, ‘Indian ring’ and by the name of the family and by the year that the family claimed to have handed it over. No joy.

The curator wondered if they were trying it on, so they went to the file with the entry records and searched through them. And there was the record for the ring. There was no question, that ring had entered the museum. So, where was it? Had someone stolen it? How? Who? Searching the entire museum for one tiny ring was an impossible job. Like most museums, the place was full of drawers and cupboards and shelves and niches and nooks and cardboard boxes, and although most of them contained exactly what they were supposed to contain, there was always the possibility of the ring getting into the wrong place by mistake. Human beings do make mistakes, especially when they are in a hurry. The staff did their best and searched all the most likely places and contacted the previous curator and the retired front-desk person, but they couldn’t find it.

The angry family wrote to the local newspaper and their MP and it got into the national news: “Ruby Ring Goes Missing from Museum”; “Who has Stolen Heirloom Jewellery?”; “Disgrace of Museum” etc. The fact that the ring was so small that it was barely worth stealing was of course not mentioned.

Just as things were getting really embarrassing, the curator finally got around to clearing out the last cupboard in their new office. And there was the ring, which of course had never got as far as being listed on the collections database. This was done in a great hurry and the ring was put on display in the Victorian gallery in a place of honour (which it would never otherwise have attained), and the local paper had a front page picture of the grandson proudly standing beside it.

It can happen. Many different kinds of find can appear to go missing for many different reasons. Boxes of medieval pottery can go missing because the member of staff who wanted to study them didn’t leave a note or fill in the right field on the database when they moved them out of the store to their office. They never leave the museum, they just get moved so nobody knows where they are. Of course sometimes they do leave. Boxfuls of bronze artefacts can disappear and only reappear again when the specialist to whom they have been sent for a report dies of old age and his next-of-kin finds them in the downstairs toilet. A PhD student who has been doing research on the collections might smuggle something out in their briefcase to use in their evening class, fully intending to return it next week. Records which have been digitised in a hurry in the past using an old database can be incomplete, so that you can’t find things when you search. For example, if you search for ‘urn’, how do you tell which of the 200 urns that come up are Roman burial urns and which Victorian garden furniture if no-one has filled in the necessary field? Keeping track of hundreds of thousands of objects (yes, literally) is no joke. Especially if there are not really enough staff to do the job properly.

So the next time you see a dramatic headline about objects going missing from a museum, yes, they may well be valuable pieces that really have been stolen. Or they may still be in there somewhere…