A plea to all archaeologists visiting the LP site

Hello to all archaeologists and fans of this site. I am writing to you with a request. Have any of you come across the artefacts from the picture attachment of this article? If you would forward this query to your colleagues who visit the LP site only occasionally, I would be greatly obliged. If any of you have any information about this find, please contact the archaeologist of the Chrudim Museum, Mgr. Mgr. Nikola Janovska _ janovska@muzeumcr.cz

Of course, I am also asking the searchers themselves. If anyone recognizes something in the find or has encountered something similar, please add it to the discussion below this post.

Thank you all in advance for your time, any opinion or direction in trying to unravel the mystery of this lead depot.

Sincerely, King Martin

Lead depot of double targets.

I picked up a faint signal in the field on Friday morning 8/18/2023. However, as the layer of soil was gradually unearthed, its strength increased. Forty centimetres and still nothing. It was not until further digging that a target appeared in the dirt. It was immediately clear that it was a lead target. The first thing I thought of was a textile weight or a barrel seal. But the back of it isn't smooth, and then there's the six feet of depth. It didn't fit anymore. Slowly I picked out more fluffy soil, which revealed a single twin - two targets connected by a bridge with two wings protruding from each side. In this case I remembered the seals, but again neither side is smooth for the extrusion of the pictorial motif and, more importantly, one target should have a mandrel and the other a circular hole. Again I reject. Then there is another single target, one doubled which is folded, and one lump which appeared to be an ingot but is several targets wrapped in lead sheet. At this point I stop digging and finish cleaning the bottom of the excavated hole. Using the viewfinder, I determine that there is another unit in the ground about twenty centimeters in diameter. There's a twin looking down at me from the bottom and I'm still thinking. Then I think of the resemblance to a Bronze Age eyeglass clasp. But this is lead, not bronze. I call the museum, carefully bury the core of the depot and call it a day. The pickup comes two days later. The core of the depot itself probably contains several dozen of these doublets wrapped in lead sheet. The total weight is about four kilograms and the actual disassembly of the depot has not yet taken place. I was able to secure an XRF test on the metal composition and it is pure lead without any alloying element of tin or antimony. Also very interesting is the nearly five percent content of rare iridium, which is found in the aftermath of a larger meteorite impact. This could play a role in a mass spectrometry test to determine the lead isotope and trace its origin. Over one and a quarter kilograms of pottery shards were collected from the vicinity of the depot, and of the metal finds, a silver denarius tinHadrian's sarcophagus, a Latin pendant, a fragment of a bronze footstool or bracelet, a bronze ring of diamond cross-section and several ingots.

In my research I learned that during the Migration of Nations period, lead was used to make models of jewellery, which were used to make casting moulds. On a foreign website I found a similar bronze artifact dated to the 3rd or 4th century, and in a book I discovered a coincidental relief match to the found targets. It is a relief of a cylindrical foot with a central point and four concentric circles of an oval bronze bowl dated to the 1st century AD.

In any case, none of the contacted archaeologists from eastern Bohemia has encountered anything similar so far, but the most common guess for the time classification is the Middle Ages.

Literature and pictorial appendix:

https://1url.cz/ru49P

Artistic craft in prehistoric times_Jan Filip

AD Unicum Antika_Stanislava Kučová a kolektiv