An Anglo-Saxon girl who died 1,500 years ago in England was buried with an even older artifact that has archaeologists’ heads spinning: an enameled Roman-era cup that was once filled with pig fat, a new study has revealed.
Archaeologists dug up the 1,800-year-old multicolored cup when they found the girl’s sixth-century grave in the village of Scramby, Lincolnshire, England.
“This cup was found in an ‘ordinary’ burial,” Hugh Willmott, a medieval archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, told Live Science in an email, but its unique nature “leads me to think that it had a more unique purpose.”
In a study published in the November issue of the European Journal of Archaeology, Willmott and his colleagues detail their investigation of the “Scramby Cup.” It was found in 2018 in a cemetery along with 49 other graves dating from between 480 and 540 A.D. during the Anglo-Saxon period.
The fully intact vessel was placed on the headstone of a teenage woman, whose grave also included two plain brooches. The Scramby Cup is 2.2 inches (5.7 centimeters) tall and can hold about 1.2 cups (280 milliliters) of liquid. Half-moon and heart-shaped inset motifs were incised on the vessel’s copper-alloy surface and then filled with red, aquamarine and deep blue-violet enamel.
The cup’s style and material suggest it may have been imported to England from France in the mid-third century A.D. during Britain’s Roman period. “I’m sure the cup was originally made as a drinking vessel,” Willmott said, suggesting that Romans may have drunk wine from it. “However, when it was selected for placement in the grave, its function changed again,” he said.
To better understand why the Roman wine goblet was buried with the Anglo-Saxon girl, Willmott and his colleagues analyzed organic residues left at the bottom of the vessel. They found that it contained high concentrations of lipids that were likely from pig fat.
This fat may have been simply a food product, but animal fats were sometimes used as moisturizers in Roman times, Willmott and his colleagues wrote in their study. Alternatively, the fat may have also had medicinal purposes. They noted that the sixth-century Byzantine physician Anthimus wrote that the Franks consumed raw bacon fat to treat intestinal parasites and used it to clean and heal wounds.
“It may be worth considering,” Willmott said, “that the woman buried there may have been someone who practiced folk medicine in the local community.”
The second mystery about the Scremby Cup is where the Anglo-Saxons got it from, because the remarkable condition of the Roman cup suggests it was not found by chance: Was it passed down as an heirloom, or was it excavated from a Roman grave? Given their analysis of the cup, either explanation is possible, the researchers wrote.
“The fact that it was clearly something older suggests that this is where its real social relevance lies,” the researchers wrote. “The location of the cup, its possible symbolic associations and its contents represent a ritual that has not been observed in any other female grave in the cemetery.”
No other environmental evidence, such as pollen, remains from the grave, Willmott said. However, samples from this and other skeletons from the cemetery are currently being analyzed for ancient DNA, so additional clues may be found about the Anglo-Saxon girl and her fat-filled Roman cup.