Strasbourg Archaeological Museum

This guide to the Strasbourg Archaeological Museum centers on a gilded Merovingian war helmet, its silver scarred by sixteen centuries underground, found by accident by workers near Baldenheim in the winter of 1900. It traces the Merovingian graveyard they uncovered nearby, the high-ranking burial the helmet came from, and what a similar helmet of the same type fetched decades later at a London auction. Look closely at the rim for the vines, grapes and birds pressed into the metal by a distant Byzantine or Mediterranean workshop.