Description

Summary: An iron involute brooch with expanded foot, from a ploughed field west of the temple site, Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire.

Research results

An Iron age involute bow brooch loaned to the museum by collector Richard Hattat in 1988, and reportedly discovered in a field ploughed field west of the possible Romano-British temple on Cold Kitchen Hill. In addition to the romano-british occupation, the site was also occuapied in the Iron Age period, and a number of brooches have been found during excavations and by chance in the surrounding fields. Brooches with involuted bows are an insular development in fashion during the middle iron age, but which did not reoccur in the later iron age or Romano-British period.

This brooch was examined by Adams (2013) as part of her PhD with the University of Leicester. This PhD examined an updated corpus of Iron Age Brooches across Britain in order to re-evaluate existing typologies and widely accepted chronology, as well as to investigate potential regional patterns and production. In particular the study highlights that direct dating evidence for most brooches is in fact quite poor, despite them often being used as chronological markers in the period. Reviewing all published radiocarbon dates associated with Iron Age brooches, Adams suggests that brooches were first introduced c. 450 BC, as well as refining the chronology of a number of specific types, although they note that the evidence is scarce.