Amateur archaeologists found what looked like a “rusty bucket” in an English field. The hunk of metal was initially dismissed, but further examination revealed its true identity: The artifact was a 2,000-year-old Roman helmet, once worn by a cavalry officer during the Roman Empire’s early occupation of Britain.
“It is one of a handful of silver-plated helmets ever found in Europe,” Helen Sharp, curator of archaeology at Leicestershire County Council museums, told BBC News. “It is extremely high status; it would have been worn by an extremely high-status officer."
After “years of painstaking reconstruction work,” the piece is now on display at the Harborough Museum in Leicestershire, the central England county where it was discovered. Conservators from London’s British Museum carefully restored the helmet “to approximately 80 percent completion,” reports Artnet. Created in the early first century C.E., the helmet is made of silver-gilded iron. And is displayed alongside a sparkling replica of what it would have originally looked like.
Its components include a bowl, seven cheekpieces and various fragments, many of which were carefully decorated. The brow guard sports a goddess-like figure flanked by lions. The cheekpieces feature a Roman emperor riding alongside the Roman goddess Victory, while a “cowering figure” is shown beneath them, “possibly symbolizing a native Briton,” writes Artnet.