Description

Summary: 1 Aldbourne (incense?) cup (distorted by pressure) perforated twice for suspension and decorated with a band of incised zigzags around the flared inner lip and chevrons around the outside of the lip (every other zigzag or chevron of which contained impressed dots) and two bands around the waist - one plain and one with chevrons (below which are a line of dots), found with a primary (?) cremation in bowl barrow Durrington G65c, excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

A miniature vessel, possibly an incense cup, found with a primary cremation in bowl barrow Durrington G65c, excavated by William Cunnington. The vessel has been perforated twice, potentially for suspension. Enigmatic miniature vessels such as this are known from a number of Early Bronze Age graves in the wessex region, dating to c. 2000-1500 BC. This vessel is highly distorted, and it is likely that it was fired in an uncontrolled environment, such as the pyre itself.

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.