Category Archives: Birchington

VM_365 Day 222 All at sea – St Mildred’s Bay Bronze Hoard

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The image for Day 222 of the VM_365 project shows all of the the hoard  of ten Early Bronze Age palstave axes that was found in 1988 on the wave cut shelf on the foreshore at St Mildred’s Bay.

The unusual pattern of corrosion on the surface of the axes is due to the sea-waterlogged deposit the bronzes were found in. A detailed image of one axe from this group (second from the right of the top row) was previously featured on Day 219.

The bronze hoard was excavated by Dr Dave Perkins, the first Director of the Trust for Thanet Archaeology, during an extensive survey of archaeological features that were revealed in 1988 after a storm had scoured the covering of sand from the chalk of the wave cut shelf.

Several truncated features were excavated and recorded,including pits ditches and a small remannat of preserved Brickearth geology. The archaeological survey preserved a small sample of the prehistoric settlement in the landscape that had been destroyed by the encroaching sea.

 

VM_365 Day 221 Early Bronze Age Copper flat axe

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Today’s VM_365 image for Day 221 shows an Early Bronze Age flat axe that was found at Gore End, Birchington. The earliest prehistoric metalworkers used pure copper, which has been used to make this axe, making it one of the earliest examples of prehistoric metal working from Early Bronze Age Thanet.

Copper is quite a soft metal and it was later replaced by Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin,  which was much harder and could be reliably used to make a more versatile range of tools and other objects.

VM_365 Day 219 The toll of tide and time

VM 219The image for Day 219 of the VM_365 project shows one of the bronze palstave axes that were found packed together in a hoard found at St Mildred’s Bay near Birchington. The conditions of the axe is very poor, the cast metal is crumbling and discoloured and it has broken into several pieces.

The wave cut shelf on the north coast of Thanet has been the site of the discovery of many truncated prehistoric and medieval  pits, exposed as the tides cut down the chalk cliffs along the coastline. These archaeological features are known to be remnants of settlements that once occupied the rolling hill tops that occupied the surface of the land that was broken down by the sea.

The unique conditions of the preservation of the features below the sea and the sand of the foreshore has created a very different level of archaeological preservation than is generally found on the sites within Thanet’s present landmass. A woven timber pit lining preserved in one of the truncated pits at St Mildred’s Bay was shown in a previous post for VM_365 Day 65.

On the other hand, the saturation of the fills with sea water has taken a heavy toll on the bronzes that were discovered in one of the St Mildred’s Bay hoard. Unlike some of the stunningly well preserved bronze hoards that we have featured in previous VM_365 posts, the metal in the St Mildred’s Bay bronzes is decayed, discoloured and fragmented, a state that was particularly advanced in the palstave shown in today’s post.

VM_265 Day 205 The Birchington III Bronze Age hoard

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Today’s VM_365 image for Day 205 is of a Late Bronze Age Bronze Hoard given the name  Birchington III to distinguish it from other hoards. The bronzes were found by a metal detectorist near Quex Park, Birchington in 1996.

The objects include socketed axes; blade, collar and body fragments from socketed axes; fragments of blades from swords in the Ewart Park Anglo-Welsh tradition; a blade fragment from a point of a sword in the Continental Carp’s Tongue tradition; other sword blade fragments; parts of a small knife as well as part of the blade of a socketed chisel and finally, a bun ingot.

The hoard contains a large quantity of  material from the continent, probably brought in as scrap as part of cross Channel trading and presumably intended to be melted down and reused as were many of the Bronze hoards found on Thanet.

VM_365 Day 202 The Beck bronze hoard Minnis Bay

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Today’s image for Day 202 of the VM_365 project is of the bronze objects, pottery and other artefacts in what has become known as the Beck Hoard.

In 1938 a boy called James Beck noticed some dark patches on the flat wave cut platform on the beach beyond the cliffs at Minnis Bay, Birchington. With the assistance of Antoinette-Powell Cotton who lived nearby at Quex Park, James excavated and recorded several of the pits and the finds within them.

In one of the pits the large bronze hoard shown today’s image was recovered, along with some large sherds of pottery. The hoard contained swords, palstave and socketed axes, spear heads along with smaller bronze objects, ingots and fittings. The details of the Beck hoard were published in Archaeologia Cantiana by G.F. Pinfold, curator of the Powell-Cotton Museum and Major Percy Powell-Cotton.

The pits were once  much deeper, having been cut from a land surface that stood at a higher elevation, which had been truncated by wave action to the level of the eroded platform that lies at the base of the present cliff line.

The Beck hoard is one of several that have been found on the present coastline of the north side of Thanet, the earliest discovery being the Mutrix Farm hoard which was shown in VM_365 Day 81. Rapid erosion of the soft deposits along this coastline is eating its way into the valleys and hill tops that would have been some distance from the sea in the Bronze Age landscape.

VM_365 Day 201 Memories of metal on ring stamped Bronze Age pottery from Margate

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Today’s image is of a decorative motif on a piece of  pottery from the transitional period between the Middle and later Bronze Age.

The sherd from a vessel closely related to the one shown in Day 199, which contained the Birchington Bronze Hoard. Close inspection of the globular bowl from Birchington shows that it was decorated with a horizontal row of stamped rings, following the centre line of the body.

The sherd shown in the VM_365  image today is from another similar flint and grog tempered vessel, this time from Margate. The Margate pot is also likely to have been decorated with a single row of stamps from an object carved with a series of raised concentric circles. The stamping was added after the outer skin of the pot had been burnished to a smooth finish. On the current evidence – including the dating of the hoard from within the Birchington bowl the date of the vessel the sherd came from and other pots like this should be placed between c.1350-1150 BC.

Like much of the decoration applied to Bronze Age pottery, the ring pattern is thought to be skeuomorphic,  each of the stamped rings emulating the rivets that would have joined two sections of a bronze bowl into a globular shape.

A bronze cauldron  that was found at Shipton on Cherwell in Oxfordshire which is now in the Ashmolean Museum, gives an idea of the riveting patterns on bronze vessels that may have inspired the ring stamp motif on the pots from Birchington and Margate.

 

VM_365 Day 199 The Birchington Bronze Hoard

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After Powell-Cotton et al 1924.

The image for Day 199 of the VM_365 project shows a Middle Bronze Age Bronze Hoard found in 1904 during brickearth extraction at Birchington.

The hoard comprised 14 palstave axes found in a globular fineware bowl of Deverel Rimbury type. Deposition within a pottery vessel is unusual and few other similar examples exist.

The vessel, which had been broken and the lower parts of which were missing, was stamped with two bands of concentric impressed rings above and below a band of scored horizontal lines. The vessel was restored in 1923.

References

Powell-Cotton, P. H. G. and Crawford, O. G. S. 1924. The Birchington Hoard. The Antiquaries Journal 4, 220-226.

 

VM 365 Day 164 Earliest Iron Age red oxide painted pottery from Minnis Bay, Birchington

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Today’s image is of a sherd of Earliest Iron Age pottery with a bright red finish applied to its outer surface.  Around 900 BC, in the earliest phase of the Iron Age, a new technique was adopted by potters where  vessels were decorated by applying  iron-oxide powder as a slip to the outer surfaces.

Like the finger tip decoration  that was applied to bronze age on vessels that was shown on VM_365 Day 155, this technique is a skeuomorph, using the inspiration of one decorative form as a reference to create another decorative style.   The  process evolved with the deliberate intention of  emulating the bright colour of freshly made and polished bronze vessels.

The technique was only applied on thin-walled fineware bowls, which were most ike the bronze models. The sherd shown in the image is from a bowl found at Minnis Bay, Birchington which can be  dated broadly to around 900 to 600BC .

VM_365 Day 117 Anglo Saxon Sword from Sarre

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Today’s image for Day 117 of VM_365 is of an Anglo Saxon Sword and an X-Ray taken when it was being conserved.

The sword was excavated from grave 275 at the Anglo Saxon cemetery at Sarre in 1990. Measuring 0.9 metres long, the sword was found above the skeleton of an adult male aged between 25 to 30 years old and may have been laid on a coffin lid rather than next to the body.

The X-Ray revealed a faint herringbone shadow indicating pattern-welded construction with added cutting edges. The tang and shoulder of the blade show traces of a hilt and guard, probably of bone, while the downward side of the blade retained evidence of a wooden scabbard.

The end of the tang was associated with the fragmentary remains of an iron ring suggesting this was a ring-hilted sword, although without the decorative hilt furniture usually associated with swords of this type.

 

VM_365 Day 116 Anglo Saxon Buckle

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Today’s image is of a tiny  decorated buckle found at the Anglo Saxon cemetery at Sarre, near Birchington in 1990. It was found within grave 288,  disturbed in antiquity, with the bones of the skeleton, possibly a male aged 30-35 years, piled at the foot of the grave.

This small buckle dating to the 6th-7th century is made of bronze with a folded rectangular plate fastened by three rivets. It would have been mounted on a strap rather than a belt as the loop could only accept a strap end less than 10mm wide. It is decorated with incised lines, punched rings and lines of punched dots. Buckles of this form are common but as they are more usually plain, this decorated example is slightly more unusual.

Reference

Perkins, D. R. J. 1992. The Jutish Cemetery at Sarre Revisited: Part II. Archaeologia Cantiana CX, 83-120.