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My two favourite artefacts found in Orkney both Viking-age brooches, and both are thought to have originated in Ireland. One comes from a hoard, the other from a burial. Although they are slightly damaged, reconstruction shows that they were very beautiful when they were in use.

The Skaill brooch is a penannular silver thistle brooch. It comes from a hoard of silver objects discovered in 1858 near St Peters Kirk, at Skaill, Sandwick, on West Mainland, by a boy digging up a rabbit hole. Alas, there were no archaeologists at that time to call in, and the hoard was dug up by local people and later reassembled by local antiquarians. It consisted of 8kg of brooches, neck and arm rings, pins, ingots, hacksilver, ring money; and 21 Arab coins, which allowed its dating to the late 10^th century CE.  The size of the brooch is not reported in any of the sources to which I have had access, but thistle brooches, while varying a lot in size, are usually around 20cm in diameter by 52cm long.

The Westness brooch was found in the grave of a wealthy Viking woman at Westness on the island of Rousay. The grave was discovered by accident in 1963 by a farmer burying a dead cow, who fortunately notified the archaeologists. The stone-built grave was in a Viking cemetery and is that of a young woman who probably died in childbirth, as it also contained the bones of a newborn infant. It contained many rich grave goods. This brooch was probably intended for fastening a cloak or shawl, and was more elaborately decorated than the Skaill brooch. It was 175mm long, silver-gilt decorated with zoomorphic gold filigree, large amber studs and red glass inlay. The amber studs were already missing when it was placed in the grave. Although the grave is believed to be early 9^th century, the brooch is thought to have been made in the mid-8^th century, so that it was 100 years old when it was buried with the young woman.

Both of these brooches are in the National Museum of Scotland. They are on display and you can access the collections database to see images of them online.

I have just returned from a short trip to the London area. While I was down there I caught a cold. Having tested myself every second day for a week, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t covid, so I felt safe to fly home. However, I decided to wear a mask on the journey, to protect my fellow-humans from any lingering common cold germs, especially as I was still coughing and blowing my nose rather more frequently than usual, and I didn’t want anyone to feel threatened. Masks, as everyone ought to know by now, don’t give much protection to the wearer unless they are hospital-grade, but they protect other people from the wearer’s germs. In the Far East it has long been considered ordinary good manners to wear a face mask in public spaces if you have a cold.

As I progressed from bag-drop to security to the departure lounge, I don’t think I saw a single mask on a passenger, and precious few on the staff. A huge multinational airport, with people flying in from all over the world, is the likeliest place of all to encounter something nasty in the way of a virus from an exotic place. Haven’t people learned anything from the covid pandemic?

Over the past months I have seen a lot of little notices at the entrances to shops and public transport, asking people to help keep everyone safe by wearing a mask, sanitising hands and keeping their distance. The notices are usually small and inconspicuous and nobody is taking any notice of them at all. Why would shops, airports, public libraries etc. be asking people (timidly) to wear masks if we didn’t all secretly recognise that masks protected us from viruses? And why haven’t they got the courage to make the notices twice the size, and have someone standing beside them to encourage people to take some notice of them?

I am absolutely certain that it should still be a legal requirement, properly enforced, to wear them in public places – shops, cinemas, trains, buses and planes etc. The pandemic isn’t over. People may not be dying in such large numbers, hospitals may not have so many beds taken up with covid patients, but has no-one noticed how many shops, offices and schools have recently been closed for a day or so because there aren’t enough staff to run them? One person has come in with covid and infected enough of his fellow-workers to close them down. Isn’t that damaging the economy? And is there anyone in Britain who doesn’t know at least one person who is still off work with Long Covid weeks after contracting the disease?

And why are people in this country so bothered about being ordered to wear masks anyway? When I was young, there were no such things as seat-belts in cars. When it became a legal requirement, there was a storm of protest about civil liberties, the validity of the evidence that it did any good, people who would need to be exempted for medical reasons, etc. In the end people have accepted them. When smoking started being banned in most public spaces, there was an outcry. Now it is taken as normal.

Most people would now consider driving over the speed limit or driving when you have been drinking a disgrace, given that it is obvious you are endangering other people’s lives by doing so. Well, you are endangering them by not wearing a mask as well. Winter is now upon us. This is the season for colds, flu and noroviruses. And covid? We shall see…

The darkness was absolute. The air was cool and clammy. The small train rattled on, swaying as it went around curves, passengers clutching the rails of the open carriages. Suddenly it stopped. There was silence for a moment and then lights flashed on, dazzling us for a moment after the blackness, and our guide started speaking in heavily-accented English, asking us to leave the train.

We were far underground in the huge cave system of Rouffignac in SW France, sometimes called “La Grotte des Cent Mammouths” (the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths). We walked carefully through the roughly-levelled passages in dim light. From time to time the guide asked us to stop, and turned on lights to illuminate one side of the chamber we were passing through. The limestone walls were covered with drawings of animals, mostly mammoths, engravings or bold outlines in black made by prehistoric hunters of thirteen centuries ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

There have been suggestions that some or even all of the Rouffignac drawings are not authentic, although it seems that most are now accepted as genuine. The cave has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. It was used for clay extraction in the 15^th century, and a 16^th century writer mentioned that he saw paintings in several places there. It first drew the attention of archaeologists in the 19^th century.

There are frozen mammoths preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and North America so we know what they looked like, although they became extinct thousands of years ago. Most died out at the end of the last cold period of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, although a few small isolated populations survived until around 4,000 years ago.  The drawings at Rouffignac are accurate and give all the details of their adaptation to extreme cold: the humps of fat on the top of their heads and on their shoulders, the long sweeping hair of their outer coat, the two finger-like ends of their trunks, the massive tusks. They are so well drawn that they almost seem alive, especially if they had been seen by flickering torchlight by men who had crawled for ages through silent darkness to reach them.

To this day we do not know the reason for the drawings in Ice Age caves. How can we, since they were made millennia before the first writing? We cannot know what people believed unless they explain it in words. It seems likeliest that they were something to do with hunting magic.

I was lucky to see Rouffignac in the 1970s, before the flood of tourists had caused such damage to all of the prehistoric caves that the number of visits had to be restricted, or in some cases such as Lascaux, entirely discontinued. Increased light, heat and moisture encourage mould growth. If you want to see the mammoths today, you have to get up early and queue for tickets.

I have been involved with the Romans one way or another for over 60 years, and when I finally visited Rome itself it was one of the great experiences of my life. It was like coming home. It is difficult to choose which of the things I saw on that visit made the greatest impression on me, but I think that the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the Capitoline Museum, was very near the top. Not only is it a statue of my favourite emperor, but the lively pose of the horse is a beautiful piece of art.

Marcus Aurelius was born in 121CE and was emperor from 161 to 180CE, at first ruling jointly with his brother Lucius Verus until Verus’ death in 169CE. He succeeded his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, and is often referred to as the last of the five “good emperors”. His reign was the last in a long period of peace and stability for the Roman Empire.

Marcus Aurelius had been deeply interested in philosophy since his childhood, adopting the Stoic ideal. In his later years he jotted down his private thoughts on various subjects, which survive today and are known as the “Meditations”. For the most part they are very gloomy, perhaps because of his solemn character and his poor health, but probably also because a long period of ‘pax Romana’ was ending, and the empire was entering a troubled period, with continuous war on both frontiers, invasions, civil disobedience, and outbreaks of a devastating pandemic. The ‘Antonine Plague’ also known as the ‘Plague of Galen’, is believed to have been either smallpox or measles, spread by soldiers returning from war in the Middle East.

The larger-than-life-size statue of the emperor on horseback is made of gilded bronze. Its date is not certain; it probably dates from early in his reign, to honour a victory, but possibly from just after his death. He is shown without armour or weapons to signify his peaceful role, his right hand is outstretched and his left hand may have originally held just the reins, or an object such as a globe surmounted by a figure of the goddess of Victory. He rides without stirrups, not yet in use in the western world, but with a fringed Sarmatian saddle cloth, possibly a reference to victory over the Sarmatians.

It is suggested that the statue survived when so many other masterpieces of Roman art were melted down to re-use the metal because it was believed for many years to show the Christian emperor Constantine. It is now in the Capitoline Museum, on the Capitoline Hill. A replica stands outside in the courtyard and the statue itself is preserved inside.

This drawing of a fish is based on the decoration of a 9th century CE Chinese bowl. One of the places I enjoyed visiting most on my holiday in Singapore in 2017 was the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the exhibit I enjoyed most was the Tang shipwreck, also known as the Belitung shipwreck.

The stoneware bowl with the fish decoration was found on the wreck of an Arab dhow, discovered by fishermen in 1998 off the shores of Sumatra at Belitung Island. It was dated to the 9^th century CE by radiocarbon dating of star anise preserved on the wreck, and by a bowl inscribed with a date which is equivalent to 826CE. The dhow was on the return journey from Canton in China to the Middle East, carrying luxury goods which included over 60,000 ceramic objects. The majority of the cargo was hand-painted stoneware bowls, made at Changsha in Hunan Province, packed for the journey inside large jars or straw bundles.  

China’s Tang Dynasty is dated between 618-907 CE. It is regarded as having been a golden age, when China was well-governed, prosperous and cosmopolitan, and poetry and art flourished. Foreign trade expanded, with merchants from all over the Near and Far East coming to China, overland by the Silk Road, but also by sea, including the long-distance export of mass-produced ceramics.

The Chinese character for “fish” is a homophone for prosperity or abundance, so fish are considered to be lucky. The arowana or dragon fish is considered to be particularly auspicious. I have been unable to access any detailed information or images on the subject, but perhaps this fish, which has a dragon-like appearance, was painted onto the bowl as a good-luck symbol. I shall continue my researches!

I particularly loved this perky little fish as an attractive piece of art. But I was also stunned to think that at the time when the 9^th century Saxons were making handmade, low-fired, grass-tempered pottery in Southern England, and the 9^th century Viking occupants of Orkney were mostly not making pottery at all, on the other side of the world people were making wheel-thrown, high-fired stonewares with coloured decoration!