An excavation of Bispevika, a neighborhood in Oslo that was once part of the city’s harbour, has uncovered the remains of a rare medieval iron gauntlet. Archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) found the piece of armature with a metal detector, but only a fragment of metal actually survives. Most of the gauntlet disintegrated leaving a remarkably clear imprint of the iron plates (lamellae) it was composed of. An unusual quantity of arms — daggers, swords, axes — have been found since excavations at the site began in 2019. Weapons and armature like the iron gauntlet were very expensive and are unlikely to have been lost or discarded carelessly in such large numbers. One hypothesis is that customs officials confiscated weapons and tossed them in the water to destroy them. There is no documentary evidence to support the hypothesis. Many medieval documents were burned in Copenhagen in the 18th century, that includes all of Oslo’s municipal laws. If customs officials did confiscate weapons and throw them into the sea, there are no records of it. How the glove ended up in the sea remains a mystery. “I find it very difficult to imagine someone losing their gauntlet during a battle. If there had been an arm in it, it would have been much more interesting, but there wasn’t,” he says. Hegdal also does not believe they will find anything more to explain the discovery. “If there had been anything else related to the gauntlet, we would’ve already found it. It’s an archaeologist’s dream to find remains of some of the battles that took place out there in the fjord, but we haven’t. So the best explanation we have so far is simply that someone lost it. You could call that bad luck,” he says.