Description

Summary: 1 Bronze Age pottery sherd from a small collared (?) urn with high waist and flared, flat rim from saucer barrow Snail Down II, Collingbourne Kingston, Wiltshire, excavated by Nick Thomas, 1953-1957.

Research results

A sherd from a Bronze Age miniature collared urn found during the excavations of Snail Down II (Collingbourne Kingston G6), led by Nick Thomas in 1955.

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.