The Åker Assemblage — Fit for a King? A New Account and Discussion of a Collection of Treasure of the Norwegian Merovingian Period

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries, an assemblage of stray finds dating to c AD 600 was collected at Åker in south-eastern Norway. The items included a cloisonné-decorated sword-belt buckle of exceptional quality, a pommel from a ring-sword, and various mounts and fittings from a shield, sword belts and hangers. In the early 1990s several metal-detector finds were made at the site, and it was clear that many of those had originally belonged to the same context as the earlier finds. This article presents and discusses the Åker assemblage on the basis of what has been added to the evidence, and of new knowledge about the site of Åker produced by archaeological excavation. The objective is to gain a better understanding of what the assemblage really represents.The Åker assemblage, with its famous buckle (Fig 1), is a collection of unstratified finds made on the farm of Åker, which lies in south-eastern Norway, alongside the country's largest lake, Mjøsa (Fig 2). The findspot is about 400 m north of the farmstead at Åker, on an outcrop of rock named Smørkollen, on which there formerly stood a barrow. The first objects were found as early as the period 1868-1912, when the land at Smørkollen was cleared of trees and turned into a field. Metal-detecting was carried out over Smørkollen in 1992 and 1993, resulting in a number of new finds, including the second half of a birdshaped mount, the first part of which had been delivered to the museum in 1889 (Fig 3). 2 On the basis of these detector finds, and other more recent archaeological discoveries, we can now come to a better understanding of what the Åker assemblage really represents. Archaeological excavations at Åker in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in 2016 and 2017, have also contributed new information about the site in the period between the Roman Iron Age and the Viking period, which in turn provides a basis for new suggestions about the significance of the Åker assemblage. This article features a comprehensive presentation of the Åker assemblage, in which the finds are discussed within the context of recent archaeological finds and research, and a new interpretation of the assemblage itself and of the social significance of the place of the findspot in its period is proposed.

Hvorfor Hundorp? Nytt lys på gudbrandsættens maktsenter

“…Flertallet av haugene ligger på Hedemarken og i Vestfold, hvor Borrefeltet ved Horten, området rundt Veldre kirke i Ringsaker og Åkerområdet ved Hamar står i en saerstilling. Mange av haugene er forbundet med yngre jernalder, og spesielt Åker og Borre er generelt anerkjent som to av de viktigste maktsentrene på Østlandet i perioden (Myhre 2015; Skre 2019;Røstad 2020). Tre av de fire bevarte storhaugene på Hundorp faller inn under kriteriet (jf.…”