Description

Summary: 1 fragment of an antler spatula, from burial A, barrow G 51, Amesbury, Wiltshire, excavated by Paul Ashbee, 1960.

Research results

A fragment of red deer antler worked into a spatula, deposited with 'Beaker Burial A', a secondary inhumation in round barrow Amesbury G51, excavated by Paul Ashbee in 1960. This burial was inhumed adjacent to the primary inhumation, which had been deposited in a timber mortuary house, and contained a number of other grave goods: a beaker vessel, copper alloy awl, horn core, roe deer point, and a flint scraper. Spatulae such as this are now thought to have potentially been used as pressure flakers during flint knapping.

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.