• Altengottern, Unstrut-Hainich District, Thuringia, Germany

This woman's grave of Altengottern is the richest that has been discovered to date in central Germany. It is part of a cemetery for cremated remains of the imperial Roman era. All the dead were burned on a funeral pyre together with a large part of their grave goods. The ashes were then either interred in urns or placed at the bottom of the burial pit. In the part of Thuringia settled by Rhine-Weser Germanic peoples, these burial customs and the opulent grave goods seem quite foreign. Burial in metal vessels, on the other hand, is a feature of he Elbe Germanic peoples and thus can be associated with the cultural group to whom the Lombards belonged.

Grave contents:
1. A bronze vessel used as an urn, with leaf-shaped attachments and movable handles.
2. A pair of showy fibulae made of silver with pressed golden foil plating. Both fibulae display damage by the funeral pyre.
3. A pair of showy fibulae similar to pair 2, but somewhat smaller and deviating in details.
4. Necklace. Several parts of a long chain of bronze wire rings (over 700 of them, length ca. 160 cm) made with the foxtail technique. Deformed by fire; lacking the original ends.
5. Necklace trimmings: a silver double-layer, hollow bead with rich stamped decoration; one or two large Roman colored glass bead(s) still attached to the bronze necklace; a medium-sized, flattened round blue glass bead; a cylindrical bone pearl; a fragment of a bronze animal head bracelet bent into an eyelet shape and probably used as a pendant; two s-shaped silver clasp hooks that were already firmly joined to one another in antiquity; one more s-shaped clasp hook of bronze.
6. Strongly worn Roman silver coin, probably included as an obolus (payment for passage to the underworld). It has been preliminarily identified as a Republican denarius.
7. Fragments of two fossilized sea urchin stone cores, broken by the heat of fire (probably used as an amulet).

• Photographed while on display from 22 August 2008 to 11 January 2009 in the exhibition "Die Langobarden. Das Ende der Völkerwanderung" at the Rheinisches LandesMuseum Bonn. On loan from the Museum für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Thüringens, Weimar.