Cups with a long history!

Wittenberg / DPA

You might have thought disposable cups were a modern invention, but in fact they’ve been around for hundreds of years – and back in the day they had a lot more style than today.
Archaeologists at Wittenberg Castle in eastern Germany found layers of broken cups at a recent dig, which they believe were simply thrown to the ground by wealthy revellers at feasts when they were emptied.
Servants would rush to bring them fresh cups of wine and on the revelries would go.
“We’ve found a whole layer of cups as well as animal bones. They ate a lot of game, mostly venison,” says Holger Rode, who is leading the dig at the former castle, which has been so often gutted by fire and smashed that it shows little outward trace of its past.
But the rubble in the ground tells its own story.
“Feasts took place here in the courtyard in the summer. The cups were then just thrown away, just like people do today with paper cups.”
The 15th-century cups found by the archaeologists in Wittenberg were very fancy, in order to show how wealthy the aristocracy were. Some had had elaborate patterns rollered onto the surfaces, others were decorated with masks, and the colours varied from green to grey and reddish brown.
“You can see that they were only used once,” says Rode. “Their lordships would have wanted to show people what they could afford.”
The cups – or the pieces of them – have only been found at the castle, not in the nearby town, so they were only for the very rich.
“It was just for these feasts and the cups were specially made for them,” says Rode. “All of the nobles celebrated like this,” he adds.
The Wittenberg castle was built by the ducal Anhalt family who lived there until 1422, and then afterwards the Wettin family took over.
The archaeologists have been excavating since the beginning of November, before a new sewerage pipe is laid.
“What we can prove is that there was a ring wall encircling the whole site,” says Rode. “We also found the rest of the courtyard paving from when it belonged to the House of Anhalt. The problem is that we’re still missing the usual masonry like tower foundations.”
The House of Wettin’s Frederick III (1463-1525), Elector of Saxony, began building his own castle on the site of that of his Anhalt predecessors around 1480.
The discovery of colourful oven tiles are testament to the unusual decoration of the castle at that time.
“They belong to the few surviving pieces which show how the castle was first decorated,” says Rode.
The tiles have secular and biblical designs and are not dissimilar to those of an oven belonging to Martin Luther, a key figure in the Protestant Reformation and who is thought to have hammered his 95 theses to the door of the castle’s chapel in 1517.
“Those kind of ovens were incredibly expensive because of the multi-coloured tiles,” says Rode. “Luther could only have got the oven as a gift from a wealthy noble or cardinal,” says Saxony state archaeologist Harald Meller.
The dig has also turned up some colourful floor tiles. “In Europe they’re very rare,” says Rode. The enamel has worn off, which is probably the reason why after a few years of the castle’s renovation they were thrown out of the window as rubble.
“The enamel simply wasn’t made to be walked on. Apart from that the tiles would have fallen of fashion. It probably wasn’t a big deal to replace them after a few years with more modern flooring,” says Rode.
“Princes had to move with the times. They couldn’t show off if they were surrounded by old stuff.”