I've visited the archeological museum in Zagreb. There are many interesting artefacts, but for us it is the metal work. Artefacts are from a Roman city called Siscia, today it is a modern city Sisak (Croatia), dated from 1. to 4. century.

Thank you Davor! I love these kinds of displays, some items are so very recognizable and some not. And of course sometimes we only THINK we know what a thing was.

Is there a web site with descriptions and maybe academics best guesses about the stuff? 

Thanks again.

Frosty The Lucky.

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing.

I would like to know what that forked thing is #257 in the next to last pic. Some sort of farming implement i assume but for what?  

Sorry Billy, no idea. Can't remember everything. But as Frosty said maybe it's just someones guess. The descriptions are just general descriptions. Tongs, key, knife.

I am interested in what looks like both keys and early padlocks! Thanks for posting.

 

Keep it fun,

David

Yes there are padlocks under the knifes. But I took a picture of keys and lock plates.

John posted links to some excellent lock picking and historic lock and key sites a while ago. Lock plates and padlocks tended to use different size and to an extent types of wards and keys.

Oh Johhhnnnn where are youuuuu? We could use your educated opinion here. 

Frosty The Lucky.

I'm not 100%, but I think the forked object is a bident, in this case probably used for turning hard dirt or on some sort of root crop. Too short to be a pitchfork. There's agriculture variations, weapon versions, and of course fishing. There were versions for digging, as hoes, or on/in-place-of a mattock. Looks for all the world like an oversized forked arrowhead.

I'd like to see a chemical analysis of the inside of the socket on the Bident. Bident is a pretty general term meaning literally 2 teeth and is as much a descriptive phrase as anything.

What residues may remain on the inside of the socket could tell a person exactly what it was for. It reminds me of similar bident tools that were used to turn wool in the dye vats.

I don't think it's quite the right shape for a wool dying fork thing but it COULD be. 

My bet it is something similar though who knows what needed turning, twisting, maybe for dragging curious sheep stuck in burrows out without tangling so badly they can't get the bident off. Hmmmm?

I'll Bet it's an instrument for a Roman Conjoined Pixie brass horn duet. That's my guess and I'm sticking to it.

Next?

Frosty The Lucky.

On 12/20/2025 at 4:49 PM, Frosty said:

Bident is a pretty general term meaning literally 2 teeth

I've known a few people that resembled that term. That thing has been driving me nuts, because I know I've seen it exactly somewhere before. Went poring through a 700-page treatise on Roman tools in Britain and couldn't find it. Too many books over the years. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...I'll probably run into it again in two years and go Ah ha! and then never be able to find this thread again....

There's an old Alaskan joke about 2 teeth I won't relate. It's sort of like the old joke. "It was a trap, there were TWO of them!!"

I know that feeling, I was suffering it strongly when I wrote that post and I read about it in an article a couple months ago. I was hoping John could / wood post the link again. IIRC it was about a site in an English town that was being excavated and an ancient street was discovered and excavated by archeologists. I remember how much I enjoyed it but the AI running my comp decided it knew where it should be stored instead of me and I have trouble remembering strings of characters instead of file names. <Sigh>

At least I can blame the TBI for not remembering . . . Stuff.

Frosty The Lucky.

If it was recent, top candidates are Northamptonshire, and Bishop's Stortford, and there was a roman road recently dug up near Brighton in E. Sussex. If it's older, no telling, they're always finding something in England. My favorite has always been the viking stuff in Coppergate.

Near Brighton in E. Sussex is the dig. 

Coppergate is Wicked cool!

I have to be careful if I start surfing the online archeology of England it's too easy to get lost in the rabbit holes from the paleolithic to the cold war. You can't stick a spade in the ground without hitting an artefact. 

Frosty The Lucky.

There's an expression:  "Scratch Wiltshire, find Rome."

Somebody I know went to the museum, so I asked if she could take a picture of the description of the item #257. And it just says HAYFORK. Well that is probably wrong.