Fragments of jewelry and ingots
- Object Name
- Fragments of jewelry and ingots
- Culture / Site
- Manufactured in North Africa; found at Salcombe Cannon Site, Devon, England
- Medium
- Gold
- Date
- Unknown
- Dimensions
- Smallest 2 x 1.2 cm; largest 3 x 2.1 cm
- Credit Line
- The British Museum, London, England, 1999,1207.449, .450, .460, .461, .465, .470, and .474. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
- Section
- Shifting Away from the Sahara
- Description
In 1992 a shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Devon, England. The ship had sunk in the mid-seventeenth century on its way from North Africa to England. Its cargo included more than 400 gold coins, most of them minted in Morocco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as gold ingots and jewelry. Mostly worn and broken, these gold objects were on their way to be melted down and repurposed. Today these rare items provide compelling evidence of the export of African gold to Europe.