Archaeologists Keep Finding Evidence of a Mysterious Ancient Cult In Europe

Gilded belt buckles discovered across Europe have revealed a previously-unknown ancient fertility cult with ties across the continent, researchers believe.

Four bronze belt ends depicting a snake devouring a frog—thought to be a symbol of creation and/or fertility—were recently discovered in Moravia, Bohemia, Bavaria, and Hungary. Because of their near-identical shape and make, archaeologists now believe that these belt ends are evidence of an unknown pagan cult with far-reaching and diverse populations across Europe in the early Middle Ages.

“When the belt with the motif of a snake devouring a frog was discovered with the help of metal detectors at the site near Břeclav in southern Moravia, we thought it was a rare find with a unique decoration,” said lead researcher Jiří Macháček in a news release. 

“However, we later found that other nearly identical artifacts were also unearthed in Germany, Hungary and Bohemia. I realized that we were looking at a previously unknown pagan cult that linked different regions of central Europe,” the head of the Department of Archaeology and Museology at the Masaryk University Faculty of Arts said.

Macháček’s team conducted a thorough series of analyses to learn more about the buckles and their provenance, which they reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 

Their work involved making high-tech scans and conducting a lead isotope analysis of the buckles to determine their composition, as well as three-dimensional scans to see how closely-related the four buckles really were to one another.

According to the analysis, not only were most of the buckles made from the same wax cast, but the copper used to make them came from the same metal ore in the Slovak Ore Mountains—one of the main suppliers for this material in Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries. The 3D models suggest that the buckles came from the same workshop. 

Because of how widespread and similar the fittings are, the authors believe the belts were a way to communicate between classes and peoples. This theory upends a previously-held idea that this style of belt was only used by elites  within the Avar ethnic group—a powerful group of people who conquered southeast central Europe in the sixth century and whose empire lasted some 200 years. 

Iconographic analysis of the snake-eating-a-frog motif also revealed that its symbols are ones that show up in various artifacts across cultures in Europe at the time. For example, the snake appears on Avar artifacts symbolizing creation and in Slavic mythology to mean coming from the earth. The frog, on the other hand, could represent a Slavic deity of fertility or a woman who has just given birth. “It was a universally comprehensible and important ideogram” said Macháček.

Taken together, the study’s authors believe the belt buckles were worn by members of a pagan cult, with members spread across Europe through the sixth to eighth centuries. “Today, we can only speculate about its exact meaning, but in the early Middle Ages, it connected the diverse peoples living in Central Europe on a spiritual level,” said Macháček.