A Catalogue of British Bronze Age Axes, Including Basic Typology, Compositional Analyses and Associated Radiocarbon Dates

Context

This archive gathers information from a range of disparate sources to provide a near comprehensive listing of flat, flanged and palstave axeheads from Bronze Age Britain. In particular, it combines two major existing digital datasets on Bronze Age axes: (a) the British Museum’s National Bronze Implement Index (BM-NBII, first collected as a card catalogue from 1913 until the 1980s, and then transcribed online by MicroPasts crowdsourcing contributors, see [1]), and (b) the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS, https://finds.org.uk/). The BM-NBII was meant to offer a listing of all known Bronze Age metal objects from various museums and collections across the UK. The BM-NBII axehead finds discussed here (n = 2511) were recovered in a wide range of ways, but the following discovery circumstances are common: agriculture (14.6% of 882 known circumstances), road and rail (14.6%), drainage and dredging (13.8%) and quarrying (11.2%). The PAS is a national effort at voluntary recording of those archaeological artefacts found by members of the public, but most of the PAS finds axeheads considered here (n = 1808) are from metal-detecting (>99%) and subject to well-known spatial biases of recovery ([2, 3]). The current listing adds a very considerable number of further axeheads (n = 3672), including typologies, bibliography and cross-references from major published catalogues (e.g. Rowlands 1976; O’Connor 1981; Schmidt and Burgess 1981; Needham 1983), as well as basic coordinate information, a consistent, basic typological classification and any known compositional, isotopic or radiocarbon analyses. The current archive began life as an output from the MicroPasts crowdsourcing project limited to the BM-NBII, but has received considerable further input from the lead author, building on advice, specific inputs and/or previous work from co-authors. The academic motivations behind the creation of such an archive are also diverse, ranging from a desire to extend the current scope of the PAS to include previous legacy metalwork lists, a wish to refine the MicroPasts crowdsourcing transcriptions of BM-NBII catalogue cards by harmonising it with other corpora, and a pressing need to establish unique identifiers and baseline information for each axehead in order to support future analysis of shape, composition, typology, etc.

Spatial coverage

Description: England, Scotland and Wales

Northern boundary: 58.5645

Southern boundary: 49.4133

Eastern boundary: 1.7381

Western boundary: –6.2668

Temporal coverage

2450 BCE – 800 BCE

Steps

As noted above, we have combined two major existing digital datasets on Bronze Age axes: (a) the British Museum’s National Bronze Implement Index transcribed online by MicroPasts crowdsourcing contributors, and (b) the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS, see above for references). These two sources do not overlap except in rare cases. All known major published catalogues of axes were then inputted by hand (especially [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]), cross-referenced (e.g. by cross-matching catalogue numbers and museum accessions) and harmonised (e.g. with regard to dimensions, provenance, museum accession, etc.) with the above BM-NBII and PAS data. Additional individual finds were added from smaller publications wherever known, and further cross-referencing and checks were done via online museum catalogues, Heritage Gateway (https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway/) and Canmore (https://canmore.org.uk/). Three major sources of existing chemical analytical data (Northover database of analyses from Wales, Bray’s synthetic database from the FLAME project, and the BBA database at the British Museum) were harmonised and then extended via further attention to other relevant publications (e.g. [12] for most of the isotopic analysis). Associated radiocarbon dates were taken initially from [13] and extended via attention to a few more recent samples.

Sampling strategy

We have sought to be exhaustive in our data collection of all known Bronze Age flat, flanged and palstave axes across England, Scotland and Wales (n = 7991), with attention to new finds up to the end of 2022. In addition, any associated elemental analyses (n = 1316), isotopic measurements (n = 143) or radiocarbon dates (n = 24) have also been provided, with as much accompanying ancillary information as possible. Chronologically, most of the coverage spans the start of the Chalcolithic up to the end of the Middle Bronze Age (Figure 1) (2450–1150 BCE, so-called Moel Arthur to Penard metalwork assemblages), with typologically ‘Late’ palstaves (1150–950/800 BCE) of the Late Bronze Age also included because of their stylistic links with earlier examples. By contrast, Late Bronze Age and earliest Iron Age ‘socketed’ axes have been excluded entirely from data collection, due simply to the massive additional workload that would have required. Some copper and bronze axeheads were checked via direct handling and museum visits, but most are here only complied via the combination of existing secondary records.

Figure 1

Quality Control

The NBII was subject to a range of quality control measures during its compilation including oversight by, for example, Christopher Hawkes, first at the BM then at Oxford Institute of Archaeology, and Gill Varndell, Stuart Needham and others after the return of the Index to the BM in ca.1970. In general, the quality of recording, both text and line drawing, inevitably improved over the near-century of the Index’s existence but some early records are also of good quality. The UK Portable Antiquities Scheme data relies on the diligence of the original finder in reporting the find and its location and the skills and knowledge of the regional Finds Liaison Officers in recording it descriptively and photographically. In many instances, however it has been possible to cross-check PAS measurements against available photographs. A self-consistent basic typology has been provided for all axeheads (by the lead author based on consultation of photographs, drawings and measurements, as well as some museum visits) using the typological scheme devised by Needham 2017 scheme for Early Bronze Age axes, and the one devised by Schmidt and Burgess 1981 for Middle and Late Bronze Age axes. Quality control for this typology was based on cross-checks with published attributions and discussion with co-authors. Museum MDA codes were added to improve the quality of museum accession information wherever possible. The quality of findspot georeferencing has been enhanced by cross-checking for consistency across different publications, and in terms of expected overlap with GIS layers of county borders. Where the findspot already has a widely agreed 4-figure national grid reference, the longitude and latitude pair indicates the centre of this grid square in all cases, not the bottom-left.

Constraints

This archive adopts the georeferencing protocol also used by the UK Portable Antiquities Scheme in which all findspot coordinates have been degraded to the equivalent of a 4-figure national grid reference (i.e. to the nearest 1km). However, an indication is also given for each find as to whether finer resolution coordinate information might be available via further consultation with the relevant institution or published literature. It was not possible to revisit most museum collections or to cross-check with all region-level heritage environment records. A small selection of heritage environment records (HERs) were contacted for further checks and additional finds (see Acknowledgements), but only Norfolk HER involved a sustained programme of consultation, so we would expect some further unrecorded finds from other HER sources, particularly in England for the period 1980–2002 (when metal-detector finds were increasing dramatically and the PAS had yet to get underway). Drawings or photographs of the axes are in many instances available via a URL field in the main dataset, but these are not persistent links and the images themselves have not been archived (although they may be in future, if resourcing permits). This dataset is clearly also constrained by patterns of archaeological, chance-find and metal-detecting recovery (Figure 2). For example, a well-known pattern of increased recovery is associated with wetlands (e.g. in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia) and it remains difficult to know if this reflects preferred Bronze Age deposition in watery contexts, greater metalwork loss and better metal preservation in such contexts in the past, higher-intensity metal-detecting in such places in the present, or some combination thereof.

Figure 2

Object name

earlyaxes.tsv and related files with chemical analyses, radiocarbon and bibliography.

Data type

secondary data, processed data, interpretation of data

Format names and versions

ASCII (.tsv); Excel (.xlsx)

Creation dates

2018-10-15–2023-06-15 (representing wider data collection since 1913)

Dataset Creators

Please list anyone who helped to create the database (who may also not be an author of the data paper), including their roles and affiliations.

Authors as above, but also:

Contributors to the National Bronze Implement Index (BM-NBII, the name since 1978, formerly the British Association Card Catalogue (on Bronze Implements), 1913 onwards)

Contributors to MicroPasts online crowdsourcing (transcription of National Bronze Implement Index)

Contributors to the UK Portable Antiquities Scheme, including the PAS organisers and finds liaison officers

Christopher Hawkes and his colleagues (British Museum and University of Oxford)

Individual publications of axes are cited find-by-find in the dataset itself.

Compositional analysts otherwise not directly cited including Paul Craddock, Duncan Hook, Sue LaNice and Anthony Simpson at the British Museum.

Language

English

License

CC-BY

Repository location

https://doi.org/10.5284/1122315

Publication date

20/08/2024