Unboxing REAL shipwrecked treasure and ancient archeological jewellery

I'm Sophie and today we're going to be unboxing buried treasure, shipwrecked gold, precious gems from the Thames foreshore. These objects have been lost for generations and then stumbled across in serendipitous moments of discovery. Isn't that amazing? All of these have come to the museum with their own story to tell and today we're going to be investigating some of their secrets. I'm wearing gloves today because the objects are of course incredibly precious. We can really damage metal objects by transferring the natural acids and oils from our fingers onto metal surfaces. Also our conservation department doesn't want to be cleaning fingerprints off all of our objects all the time. This object I think is completely stunning. It is a gold cup that was probably made at the end of the 17th century in Peru. It is made from solid gold. It was from a ship that sunk after a hurricane and the wreck lay on the seabed for hundreds of years until in the 1980s a salvage diver discovered this treasure. Next I have fragments from this gold belt which came from a ship called the Nuestra Senora de Esperanza that sunk in 1658. They are meticulously worked pieces of gold which look like they're sparkling with gemstones. We do know a little bit about the shipwreck that these came from, the circumstances in which the ship went down and what happened. In 1655 this ship formed part of a fleet that was sent to the Americas to collect treasure from Chile and Peru as well as gold and emeralds from Colombia and pearls off the shores of Venezuela. En route to Havana it was struck from the bottom and resulted in a significant loss of life among the sailors. There were over 160 passengers and a crew of 116 seamen and soldiers but by the time that they had mustered enough help for the rescue the ship had disintegrated and completely sunk without trace. Whilst these are really beautiful alluring objects there's also something I think quite mournful about them that they were witness to many lives lost at sea and the human tragedy of when a ship is sunk. Both of these objects have been transformed by the hundreds of years they have spent under the water. You can see here they have this amazing almost sand blasted texture where you can see the matte surface and the little pitted flecks from sand. On the bottom of the cup there are these floral decorations that have been chased and engraved and you can see the way that they've been softened by the years and the actions of the sea. Whilst these objects have changed from their years under the sea I think they have perhaps become in many ways like even more beautiful. I love that texture the matted pitted signs of the sea as a kind of sculptor. The fact that these objects are just sitting here next to me today is a real testament to the adventurousness and the hunger of scuba divers to go and explore these underwater worlds. This piece was made in 2016 by a contemporary artist jeweler Romilly Samara Smith. It was inspired by 16th or 17th century cabinets of curiosity and the types of objects that they contained. Objects that were supposed to inspire wonder at the artistry of nature. Here we have a glass dome and inside we have a precious box which is made up of different elements. The base is a hexagonal Tudor glass that the artist told me it came from a shipwreck originally. On the lid fragments of an antique coral necklace have been transformed into these growing coral branches and attached to the top of the lid we have tiny little pearls, seed pearls and tiny silver and gold disks that have all been fused to the surface. Let's look under the glass. I think the whole character of this object speaks to the artist's love of the sea and the idea of things growing there and building up in layers over time. When the glass arrived and was unwrapped by the artist she discovered that it had this sandy residue in the bottom it hadn't been cleaned and so she decided that she wouldn't clean it either and that this residue would remain as part of the piece. The glass too has this amazing texture from being under the sea it almost has a opalescent sheen to it and it's been softened as you see with sea glass that you pick up on the beach. It's really cool. Isn't that amazing? The artist has taken these different precious things that came from different places the coral, the gold, the pearls, the shipwrecked glass and combined them transformed them into this precious thing that takes on its own life as a new treasure. Here we have two coiled serpent armlets made from pure gold they were probably made around the first century in the Roman Empire. They came to the museum as part of the Castellani collection. The Castellani were a 19th century family of jewelers and collectors. The way that the gold has been worked on these objects is incredibly skillful you can see the smooth flat burnished texture here engraved to create the snake skin and I've just noticed actually that there's a green eye staring at me I think it looks like glass. It's really rare to have two ancient armlets like this together the only way that objects like this really ever survive is if they were part of a burial or part of a hoard. Objects that come from a hoard are usually highly precious objects that you would have wanted to stash away and preserve for a future date that might be in times of persecution or war. Often objects were taken from ancient sites from burials from hoards in a way that we wouldn't consider today good practice however I think not knowing where they were found does also add to the mystery of these objects. Serpent jewelry like this was often used to protect the wearer worn like an amulet it was thought to be good luck and from the ancient world until today serpents and snakes have a really enduring protective power in jewelry. I think maybe we're drawn to imagery of snakes because we wouldn't actually want to get very close to one in real life and that's maybe what makes them so alluring. This is a comb that was made in the 19th century beautifully decorated with enamel. It would have been worn in the hair as part of a jewelry set that would have included a diadem, tiara, earrings and a belt slide. This comb has set into it four gemstones that have been carved the stone is type of stone called carnelian it is an orangey red translucent stone it's incredibly difficult to carve and they've been highlighted really beautifully by the maker with this kind of sky blue enamel that encircles them and also these dots of enamel that you can see across the breadth of the comb. In the 19th century there was a moment of real archaeological fever in styles of jewelry often you find ancient gems or glass beads being incorporated into 19th century jewelry sets. Jewelry experts think that the ancient stones were given to Empress Josephine who was the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte who then had it made into this elaborate jewelry set. Josephine was a highly highly fashionable figure in society at the time a real trendsetter. This style of jewelry that looked back to the classical past but then incorporated something new something of its time was incredibly popular within elite society and it really defined the jewelry style. By the mid 19th century it wasn't just the super rich and royal who could own souvenirs of the ancient past. In this box here I have a selection of micromosaic jewelry that was made in Italy. Micromosaics are images made of thousands of tiny colored glass pieces called tesserae. These objects link to the ancient past in a number of ways. Firstly they depict these ancient sites that people wanted to travel to and secondly the technique itself was inspired by the ancient past when mosaics with very very small pieces were discovered in sites like Hadrian's Villa. On this set we have a number of well-known sites that you can still see in Rome today so here we have the Pantheon we also have the Temple of Vesta and the waterfall at Tivoli and on the earrings here you also have Trajan's Column. I can also show you on the back we have figures of people in regional dress from the areas of Italy around Rome. This jewelry set is kind of a two-for-one on one side you get your ancient sites on the other you get all of the people in regional dress that remind you of the places that you visited. Also made of colored glass micromosaic but this time set into the shape of these tiny little archaeological style ewers or jug-shaped objects we have this pendant so it would have gone on the end of a necklace and also a pair of earrings. It also has this amazing waterfall with gold chains with little seed pearls on the end that just dangle really beautifully. What I really like about micromosaic jewelry as a luxury souvenir is probably also what most people loved about it at the time that it's something that's kind of kitsch in a really wonderful way it's very fun and it reminds you of a special time and place. This is a ring that was made by jeweler Ruth Tomlinson in 2021. This piece is named Time Capsule it's made up of tiny pieces that reference different points in history. The different mudlark elements that are set into this ring include ancient glass beads possibly Roman in dating, a piece of green glass that's still sharp and a polished piece of shell that may have been part of a button at one stage. These little pieces when they come together in this ring are like deposits from vanished worlds that have existed along the Thames. Mudlarking is the activity of going down to the foreshore of the river to the beaches to look for really interesting historical treasures that have been left there by the tide. To mudlark on the Thames foreshore you do need a permit it is illegal to mudlark without a permit and that is because the Thames foreshore is part of our cultural heritage and we all have a responsibility to preserve the integrity of the shoreline and the hundreds and hundreds of years of human history that it holds. This ring is actually one of a series of four that Tomlinson made the three others she cast them back into the Thames as future treasures for future mudlarkers to find. This is why this ring comes with a flint hagstone weight and a string. I think this is such a nice piece for the museum to have in the jewellery collection because it's really poetic and romantic and whimsical and it's really evocative of all the treasures that are out there and that might be found by someone in the future who's in the right place at the right time. Seeing all of these objects together really makes me think about the moment that each was discovered and what that must have been like to just stumble across this incredibly precious thing. What is it that makes these objects feel so precious? Is it that they are all beautifully crafted, that they are made of incredibly rare materials or is it that they have this power and that comes from the fact that they connect us to people from hundreds if not thousands of years ago which is why they are so enchanting and endlessly fascinating. Everybody has things that are precious to them so please do let us know in the comments what you would hide for future generations to uncover. Maybe I would hide my dog's identity tag and people will find it in the future and be like who was Otis? What was that guy like?