Beneath the ruins of a Roman villa in the German state of Bavaria, a grieving medieval family laid to rest a boy who was only a year and a half old, along with an unprecedented array of funerary goods. The toddler’s stone-lined grave, which dates to around a.d. 675, was outfitted with a floor of Roman tiles and completely sealed with lime mortar. The boy is known as the Ice Prince because archaeologists transported his burial to a laboratory in a block after freezing it with liquid nitrogen. He was interred wearing a belted garment that featured exceedingly rare braided silk. Among the other valuable objects archaeologists discovered were a scabbard with gold appliqué, silver spurs and bracelets, and a gold foil cross.
Scholars suspect that the child belonged to a high-ranking family that ruled the region on behalf of the Frankish Kingdom, a medieval Germanic realm that eventually encompassed much of Western Europe. “His parents likely buried him with objects that would have been important to him had he lived to adulthood and assumed a high station,” says archaeologist Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection. The team found evidence that the villa above the burial was furnished with a new wooden roof soon after the boy was entombed. “We assume the building was used by the family for memorial purposes,” says Tolksdorf. “Perhaps future burials had been intended there.”
