Fantastic beasts – found in Kent
An extraordinary bucket decorated with strange stylised horses was a highlight of “Celts: Art & Identity”, a recent exhibition at the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. Last summer, at a detecting rally near Lenham, Kent, 12 miles from where that bucket was found in 1866 at Aylesford, Rick Jones dup up the remains of another one. Both vessels had probably been buried in the graves of powerful and wealthy individuals around 50bc. But the animals on the new one are even weirder.
The rally was organised by Joan Allen Events across 540 hectares of rolling arable fields. Current policy at the Portable Antiquities Scheme is not to attend rallies, but to be on call. The evening of the discovery, Jones emailed Stuart Wyatt, his local finds liaison officer in London, who contacted the for Kent, Jo Ahmet. On the day, Ahmet told British Archaeology, recovery had been managed calmly, after Jones had informed the rally organisers and the area had been secured. The artefacts were all in the ploughsoil, and appear to have been ripped apart by cultivation.
They consist of three vessels, apparently once nested inside each other; the bottom half of the bucket has not been recovered. Five large sherds represent a Gallo-Belgic style pot. These were inside a plain copperalloy bowl, “struck through the middle by a plough”, says Ahmet. Scraps of the bucket rim, handle and upper decorative panels are, he says, “almost identical” to the Aylesford bucket. The buckets would have been wood, with metal fittings and decorative sheet casings.
Both buckets have cast human heads to take the handles; the Aylesford heads sport decorative horns which could represent headgear of the kind seen in the contemporary grave from North Bersted, West Sussex (see feature Mar/Apr 2020/171). The upper metal band on the Aylesford bucket bears face-to-face horses with human-like legs and heads like eyes. The Lenham horses are similar in style, but have only two legs: at the rear are Celtic-style fish tails. Between them lies another animal – a small horse, deer or hare? – its legs in the air.
The Aylesford bucket, which contained cremated human bones, was found with a copper-alloy jug, a handled pan, three brooches and at least four pots. The Roman-style pan and jug, which may have been used for preparing wine, were made in southern France or Italy. The vessels from Lenham were probably also used in the serving and consumption of alcoholic drink, whether wine, beer or mead. Luxury items in their time, they are now expected to be declared Treasure. Maidstone Museum hopes to acquire them.
Oldest fire?
Your feature on Barnham (“Home is where the hearth is”, Jan/Feb 2020/170) excited interest among my French archaeologist friends working on Palaeolithic sites along the Mediterranean coast from Spain to Italy, who are always interested in new material coming from more northern climes. However we were mystified by the claim that if fire-use could be established at Barnham, it would be one of the three oldest sites in Europe with this evidence, and wondered if perhaps the sentence should have read “northern Europe” rather than simply “Europe”?
There is evidence of fire at the Terra Amarta site, Nice, dated to over 400,000bc, which I have seen myself in the shape of burnt flints. My friends could point to several other sites along the Mediterranean coast of the same vintage containing similar evidence. Have we missed something in our reading of the article?
Please forgive us if we are missing the blindingly obvious!
Bridget Chase, Salisbury
• Not all obvious! I asked the authors of the feature to comment, and here is their kind response (Ed):
The question of early human fire use is a contentious issue, where debates focus on three things: whether materials are actually burnt; if the apparent burning is humanly generated; and how well the site is dated. As it is such an important issue for understanding human development, current research insists on the highest standards and hence our caution at Barnham. There are now a variety of geochemical methods, largely unavailable to earlier research, that can help to establish actual burning of sediment, stone and organic materials from other forms of alteration. Distinguishing between human and natural fire is more difficult, although fire experiments are helping to establish criteria to help differentiate between causes.
Finally, dating Lower Palaeolithic sites is not easy, where different methods are often difficult to compare and contradictory. The “holy grail” of dating is to correlate the age of a site to the global climate record, provided by changes in oxygen isotopes from deepsea cores. The glacial history of Britain makes this easier to achieve than at some other places, and the geology of Barnham and Beeches Pit places them firmly within the Hoxnian Interglacial, which is Marine Isotope Stage ( mis)
iic, around 425–395,000 years ago. The pollen record further constrains the age to the vegetational change between Hoxnian pollen zones ii and iii, at about 415,000 years ago.
The evidence of human fire-use at the coastal site of Terra Amata is strong, although geochemical analyses would help to establish it more firmly. But the age of the site is less clear. Radiometric dates differ according to method, varying from 380,000 to 230,000 years ago, with 15–20% error margins. The former date has been taken to be the best estimate, which combined with evidence of marine transgression and regression is argued to be between 400,000 and 380,000 years ago. This may be a realistic estimate, but there are still question marks over the age. We are unaware of other sites in southern France or elsewhere in Europe for uncontroversial evidence of early fireuse as early as 415,000 years ago.
Nick Ashton & Rob Davis, British Museum
Salt of the earth
Anent the willow-pattern teaplate found in a grave at St James’ burial ground (First sight, Mar/Apr 2020/171), its placement on the woman’s shoulder might be significant. Salt is indeed a symbol of eternal life, but the custom still remains when salt is spilled to toss some of the salt over your shoulder to ward off the devil.
A supply of salt left on her shoulder would provide security from the devil to someone no longer able to act for herself.
Janie C Munro, Glasgow
British hoard rd
I hugely enjoyed Chris Fern’s article l on the Staffordshire Hoard (Nov/Dec 2019/169). I am puzzled, though, as to why he seems to have concluded that the hoard was a purely “Anglo-Saxon” affair, taken from Northumbrians and/or East Anglians by Mercians. Given its location “at the very edge of the Anglo-Saxon dominion” (or actually outside it, on the basis of your map), it seems to me at least possible that the hoard was buried by Britons from Gwynedd on their way back from one of their well-documented military campaigns against the Northumbrians Steve Crabb, London
Doomed to repetition
Re “Anglo-Saxon” nomenclature (Letters Mar/Apr 2020/171, and earlier) I too, am dismayed by this ever creeping political correctness, run amuck, which has no endpoint. Like war, politics abolishes cause and effect; it obliterates the past, the present and the future. So, why bother reading history? Certainly not to learn, not to make the same mistakes. Instead, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. One may hope that the current hysteria will go the same way as Napoleon’s decimal clock and decimal calendar.
Michael Funkhouser, Florida