Archaeologists in Ukraine have found a colorful belt buckle that may have been worn by a nomadic equestrian warrior 1,800 years ago on the fringes of the Roman Empire.
The belt buckle was unearthed by local residents in the Tsetsyn Forest in southeastern Ukraine and given to Antonii Moisei, a professor at Bukovinian State Medical University, according to a translated statement. The roughly square metal buckle, which is about 0.8 inches (2.1 centimeters) on each side, has teal, blue and yellow enamel decorations.
The style of the decoration and the metal construction place the creation of the buckle in the second to third centuries A.D., when this part of Ukraine was in the ancient province of Roman Dacia, according to Moisei.
Under Emperor Trajan, Rome fought the Dacian Wars (A.D. 101-102 and 105-106) against the denizens of the Dacian kingdom and its leader, Decebalus. Roman legions destroyed Dacia and annexed it as a new province. Trajan celebrated his victory in Rome, complete with a famous column that depicts details of the Dacian Wars.
The column that the Roman emperor Trajan erected in Rome following the empire's triumph in the Dacian Wars.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
In addition to the buckle, Moisei collected a decorative belt fitting and three small, round metal objects that probably belonged to the same belt. Moisei created a reconstruction of what the belt might have looked like before it was lost in the forest nearly two millennia ago.
But it's unclear who lost the belt. One of Moisei's theories is that the belt belonged to a horse-riding Sarmatian warrior originally from the Black Sea region. The Sarmatians were a group of tribes that lived outside the borders of the Roman Empire, in what are now central Ukraine, southern Russia and the Balkans. While some Sarmatian warriors fought against the incursion of the Roman Empire, others fought with Rome as mercenaries.
The metal belt fragments are part of a Roman provincial craft tradition, according to the statement, and they may have been obtained through trade or as a trophy of war. But Moisei is still studying the artifacts to confirm whether they were Sarmatian. Either way, the military belt provides new evidence of Roman military contact on the outskirts of the empire, and future work could help experts understand how the Romans interacted with the local Dacians during wartime.
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Kristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Kristina holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and an M.A. in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina, as well as a B.A. in Latin from the University of Virginia, and she was formerly a university professor and researcher. She has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing.
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