Description

Summary: 1 incense cup, the lower half decorated with 7 lines of whipped cord and the upper half with zig-zag hatchings of the same, found with a primary cremation in the bowl barrow Boyton G4a, excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

A miniature vessel found with a primary cremation in the barrow Boynton G4a, in Amesbury. The barrow was excavated by William Cunnington in the early 1800s.

This vessel was re-examined by Copper (2017) as part of their Mphil with the University of Bradford, which covered all of the Early Bronze Age miniature vessels in Southern Britain. They divide the corpus into four groups: miniature, bi-conical, simple, and elaborate, and argue that most are derivations of late beaker and early food vessel imitations. Investigating the contexts of these vessels, they found that most were associated with primary cremations in round barrows, with no clear correlation with either age or sex – although noting that there was only limited evidence for the latter.