( Notes from Dark Age Garnet Cutting Bimson Mavis )

Tags: garnet; dark ages; lapidary; slab-cut; a

( Alloys used in the Sutton Hoo garnet cloisonne decorations )

Tags: sutton hoo; jewellery; gold; anglo-saxon

Haven't posted much in the last few weeks.

Work has blocked all access to the livejournal.com domain.  Which isn't really so bad except that I kept quite a few technical procedures in private LJ posts.  Made it handy to be able to hit one site on the internet and have my list of steps to replace a disk drive that is part of a mirrored volume, or series of steps to build a new DNS zone.

Harrrumph... now I have to find a new tool to use.

Aside from that I've been reading a lot about the Sutton Hoo garnet cloisonne, Merovingian cloissone, Anglo-Saxon garnet cutting techniques, found an online article documenting the cleaning of a die from a Saxon find used to imprint the gold foil underneath the garnets, purchased a couple of papers on using nondestructive high-energy physics and x-rays to determine the type of garnets in Merovingian cloisonne.

Interesting difference in the Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon technique for the cloissonne is that the Merovingian goldsmiths used a cement to bond the foil/garnets into place.  The Sutton Hoo pieces have the garnets cut slightly smaller than each cell and the foil is cut slightly larger than the cell.  The foil is placed over the cell, the garnet placed on top of the foil and pressed into place.  The gold foil is malleable and stretches as the garnet is pushed into place but also forms a very tight fit between the cell wall and the side of the garnet.  No cement is necessary.

New books added:

The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial A Handbook, Rupert Bruce-Mitchford.  British Museum Publications, 1979

Jewellery of the Ancient World, Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archeology University of Toronto, January 1953, Number 20

Celtic Inheritance, Ellis, Peter Berresford. Dorset Press 1992

Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, FHA AAlen , Kevin Whelan, , and Matthew Stout, editors. University of Toronto Press, 1997

Celtic Warriors 400 BC-AD1600, Newark Tim. Blandford Press 1986

The Druids, Ellis, Peter Berresford. Willian B. Erdman's Publishing Company, 1995

Kingdoms of the Celts, King, John. Blandford 1998

Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archeology and History 4, edited by Hawkes, Chaford and Brown, Oxford University Committee for Archeology 1985
     This one has six jewellery/metalwork/lapidary/enamelling articles, I'll post the article names in the next few days.



Papers:

Mineralogy of the Louvres Merovingian garnet cloisonne Jewelry: Origins of the gems of the first Kings of France. Francois Farges
     Determines type and possible sources for garnets using proton-particle induced X-Ray emission analyses.
     Earlier analysis (Arrhenius?) indicated almandine  as the likely type of garnet but this paper indicates Rhodolite (a magnesium rich garnet from the pyrope-almandite series), pyrope and a chromium rich

A Study of Cross-Hatched Gold Foils in Anglo-Saxon Jewellery. Richard Avent and David Leigh



I'll be making and posting notes from each over the next few weeks.


Also ordered several pounds of Brazilian pyrope garnets to test the thermal shock theory of producing thin slabs of garnets ready for polishing.

M

PS also continuing on digging footing holes for the deck, two footings poured, one and a half holes dug and then two more holes to dig after that.

Tags: anglo, books, garnet, merovingian, saxon, sutton hoo

The userpic is the message.

Tags: beryl

Little Beryl just before she marked me as her property.

Jewellery Through 7000 Years
British Museum Publications, 1976

Tags: books

Again wondering whether this is garnet or glass.

Would the lapidary have ground and polished the ribs on the garnet or would a glass worker have wound the molten glass around a suitably sized mandrel to get the right curvature and then used a "corrugated" marver to shape the molten glass.

Any of the glass geeks reading this know of any transparent red glass in Saxon England in the 6th to 7th century?

Or this one:

I dislike second-guessing someone who has seen the object but this looks like it might be moulded glass instead of garnet. Checking the specific gravity would be a good indicator as garnets tend to be quite dense.

Either way good info from the artifact. Now to figure out why the lapidary would cut a garnet with a flat top and concave underside.

M

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/sets/72157622378376316/

do it now, especially you Vik!

Mike

Tags: gold, saxon, staffordshire hoard

The smoke from a prescribed burn out in K Country gave us quite a sunrise this morning.

Taken from 36 ST NE just south of Country Hills Blvd.

If you look closely you can see some construction vehicle out on the new section of Metis Trail