Description

Summary: 1 wristguard of grey slate with six holes either end, found with a primary crouched inhumation in bowl barrow Sutton Veny G11a (also known as Longbridge Deverill G3b), excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

An Early Bronze Age stone bracer, found during William Cunnington's excavation of Sutton Veny G11a, where it accompanied a crouched burial. This roundbarrow is sometimes also refered to as Longbridge Deverill G3b. The bracer is well made and polished, from a slate probably sourced in Devon. These artefacts are a feature of beaker-period graves and appear to have been sewn onto clothes in the area of the lower arm, and the grave also contained boar tusks and a beaker, although both the latter are lost.

This category of artefact is discussed by Wallis (2014), who critiques their interpretation as potential guards for use in falconry. They argue that they would have been wholly unsuitable for this purpose as it would have still required the use of a leather gauntlet, and would pose a threat to the bird during take off (as talons could have become caught). They also note that in many cases the weight of the bird and the shifting of their talons would have damaged these relatively fine bracers. Finally, they also highlight the lack of convincing faunal remains for falconry before the late Roman period.

This object has been examined by Tsoraki et al. (2022) as part of the Beyond the Three Age System project. This analysis suggests that the craftsmanship of the wristguard is poor, with one unfinished perforation, and at least one attempt to remove a corner in a controlled manner. There are no use wear traces visible.

Wilkin (2011) discusses this grave group alongside a number of other Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age graves in Wiltshire, Dorset, and Oxfordshire, in order to explore the significance of the inclusion of animal remains in graves of this period for human-animal relationships. They suggest that whilst these are not frequent inclusions, only appearing in 15% of graves, they are disproportionately non-meat bearing elements such as skulls, horns, and antlers and may have had symbolic connotations. He suggests that animal remains linked practical and cosmological concerns; for example: the quality of a year’s antler harvest may have impacted communities’ ability to construct a monument, tying social identities to natural cycles. The inclusion of domestic cattle and wild deer in the same graves may have had significance in terms of how the dichotomy of hunting and farming was viewed by contemporary communities, whilst the animal remains themselves may have referenced the inherent characteristic of the animals themselves and assisted in the evocation of spirits or powers, or have had symbolic potential.

Woodward & Hunter (2011) have examined all of the stone bracers from Britain and note some interesting themes. They suggest that bracers were ultimately introduced to Britain from the continent, bracers on the latter tend to be red or black, whilst those in Britain, except for the earliest examples which may in fact be imports, tend to be grey-green, perhaps due to a resemblence to Jadeite. Within the British corpus they are also able to identify two clear groups: one, focused on Wessex and the Thames Valley, tends to be earlier and are produced from Cornish or Welsh amphibolite stone sources, whilst the other has a more northerly distribution and is slightly later, produced from the Langdale Tuff, in Cumbria, a well known source of polished axeheads.