Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard

Dr Martin Goldberg - Principal Investigator
Senior Curator Early Medieval Medieval and Viking Collections, National Museums Scotland
Martin's interests include ancient religion, Christianity, Celtic art, early medieval material culture, sculpture, Pictish symbols, silver, hoards and hoarding practices. He co-authored Early Medieval Scotland: Individuals, Communities and Ideas (2012) and Scotland’s Earliest Silver (2017) based on research from National Museums Scotland’s award-winning partnership with The Glenmorangie Company. He has co-curated the 2013 Vikings exhibition (in partnership with the Swedish History museum) and Celts: art and identity (in partnership with the British Museum) contributing several essays for the accompanying (2015) book.

Dr Susanna Harris - Co-investigator
Lecturer in Archaeology at the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow
Susanna's research focuses on the analysis of archaeological material culture. She specialises in textiles, leather and basketry using scientific, theoretical and experimental approaches. Harris has co-edited two books: Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture: Archaeological and Anthropological Approaches and Why Leather? The material and cultural dimensions of leather. She teaches on the Material Culture and Artefact Studies MSc and modules including cloth and clothing at Honours and Postgraduate level.

Dr Alexandra Makin
Post-doctoral Research Associate, National Museums Scotland
Alexandra is a professional embroiderer and textile archaeologist specialising in the early medieval period. She is interested in processes of making and the place and meaning of embroidery and textiles within early medieval material culture. Her research is interdisciplinary involving scientific, theoretical, experimental, historical and art historical approaches. She has published a monograph, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: the sacred and secular power of embroidery. She is co-editing a volume exploring collaborative working methods between researchers, conservators, curators and makers of Viking Age textiles and their decoration. Alexandra is interested in outreach, running the online blog Early Medieval (mostly) Textiles, workshops, giving talks and undertaking consultancy.

Dr Mary Davis
Galloway Hoard Researcher, National Museums Scotland
Mary is an archaeological conservator and materials analyst, specialising in the study of inorganic artefacts. She is interested in the integration of technical and elemental analysis of objects to aid the interpretation of material culture in its wider context. She is drawn by how object biographies can feed into an understanding of technological choices within past societies, particularly through the examination of hoards and hoarding practices. She has published in conservation, archaeology and archaeological science journals and books.

Dr Adrián Maldonado
Galloway Hoard Researcher, National Museums Scotland
Adrían is cataloguing and writing up the hacksilver and bullion objects from the Galloway Hoard, and investigating the Viking-age context of hoarding. He is an archaeologist specialising in early medieval material culture, mortuary archaeology, and the archaeology of Christianity. He has published widely on early medieval burial in Scotland, and has recently been part of projects reinterpreting early medieval excavations at the monasteries of Iona and Whithorn. His most recent project was a new look at the National Museum’s collections relating to the Viking Age as part of the Glenmorangie Research Project, resulting in the book Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom (2021).

The British Museum, London for the identification of wood and textiles fibres using high-powered microscopy.

Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC, Glasgow) for radiocarbon dating program and Bayesian analysis.

Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels, (IRPA / KIK), for the analysis of textile dyes using High Performance Liquid Chromotography (HPLC).

University of Glasgow Polyomics for the identification of leather species using proteomics.

X-ray computed tomography system at the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow

Davis, M. & S. Harris. 2023. Textiles in a Viking Age hoard: Identifying ephemeral traces of textiles in metal corrosion products. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 103796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103796

Goldberg, Martin 2022. 'The Galloway Hoard', in Tom Horne, Elizabeth Pierce, and Rachel Barrowman (eds), The Viking Age in Scotland: Studies in Scottish Scandinavian Archaeology, pp 262-275. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Goldberg, Martin, and Davis, Mary (2021). The Galloway Hoard: Viking-Age treasure. Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland.

Graham-Campbell, James (2020). 'The Galloway Hoard: Viking/Anglo-Saxon Interaction in South-West Scotland', in A. Pedersen & S. M. Sindbæk (eds), Viking Encounters. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Viking Congress, Denmark, August 6-12, 2017, 449–464. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

For more multimedia outputs on the Galloway Hoard, including videos, podcasts, magazine articles and blogs, see the Galloway Hoard Collection by the National Museums Scotland Repository.