Description

Summary: 1 miniature (incense) cup with vertical and diagonal lines of impressed dots around body, and forming zig-zags around rim, found on a ledge behind a primary female inhumation in Bowl barrow Preshute G1a, excavated by Howard B. Cunnington, 1907.

Research results

A miniature vessel, possibly an incense cup, found by Howard Cunnington during his excavation of the round barrow Preshute G1a in 1907. The vessel was found with a female inhumation buried with a number of other grave goods made of a variety of substances: in addition to gold and amber pendants were shale, chalk and stone beads a copper alloy dagger and awls and an amber pommel, in addition to a second miniature vessel made to resemble a fossil sea urchin. Enigmatic vessels such as this are known from a number of Early Bronze Age graves in the Wessex region, dating to c. 2000-1500 BC.

Jones (2012) discusses Early Bronze Age miniature vessels as part of an exploration of how scale impacts our experiences of materiality. He argues that models are a representation of the essence of the objects that they miniaturise; the wessex miniature vessels are part of a wider suite of miniature objects and exotic grave goods that Jones argues represents a pattern of cosmological acquisition, which through their materials and form embody distant connections through the demonstration of specialised knowledge. He also suggests that the vessels are often relatively poorly made and may have been made specifically for inclusion in the graves.

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.