Hello! My name is Penn, or Sesenco, if you've met me through the SCA.
I wanted to start up this blog to have somewhere to document and share my exploration into Nordic and Northern European Bronze Age experimental archaeology.
My main focus is textiles, with some textile accessories like pins, netting and leatherwork. Check out my Projects page for things I'm working on, or have done in the past. The main skills I'm working on include sewing, weaving, spinning and leatherwork. But I'm also always eager to learn more textile and fibre skills, within or outside of the Bronze Age period.
For my SCA folk, I am from the Barony of Innilgard, and am a member of the household Casa de Fiore.
Unfortunately the people living in modern day Denmark around the Bronze Age did not leave any identifiable records of written language, so I could not source a name directly from this period. (They did leave some very beautiful petroglyphs though).
One of the oldest recognisable, written languages in Europe is an antiquated form of the still spoken Basque. Interestingly, Basque does not have a relationship between any Indo European or Proto Indo European languages.
The name Sesenco comes from an inscription on a Roman gravestone found in the modern day Northern Spain, which has been dated from between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE.
The person who had 'Sesenco' written on their gravestone had a very clearly Roman first and last name. Rather, the name Sesenco is something of a middle name or a nickname. But one important enough to include on a gravestone.
Now Sesenco is almost a 1:1 early Basque for 'bull' and the diminutive suffix: little bull. And that's the iconography that covers the gravestone and the site.
So this person who was at least Roman in name if not in culture, had someone very close to them, or likely several someones, who spoke Basque and gave them this nickname that was ubiquitous and treasured enough that bovine became the iconography on their grave and, being me, it wasn't as if I would just be able to let that go.
This is not the universe in which I wasn't going to hold that information very gently and ask if I could borrow it.
Reference 1: Indigenism and Romanization in the Highlands of Soria: New epigraphic testimonies (Gomez-Pcraving J.L. & Alfaroqeña E., 2000).
Reference 2: Towards a history of Basque anthroponymy (Areta, M.M, 2016).