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Description: | Incomplete gilded copper-alloy side knob from a florid cruciform brooch, originally T-shaped, with Style I decoration including a human face. On the reverse are two broken pierced lugs which would originally have held one end of the iron pin bar; no trace of this now survives. The 'base' of the knob (the part closest to the headplate) is 12 mm wide, narrower than the rest of the knob, and mostly taken up with a transverse band of ribbed decoration enclosed within a raised rectilinear border. Not all of this ribbed band survives, but there is enough to suggest that it perhaps represented a fringe above the face. The relief eyebrows take up the rest of the narrowed area; beyond these, on one side the knob is broken and on the other it steps out to include a panel of decoration beyond the face. Beneath the eyebrows are two large round hemispherical eyes; between these, the meeting point of the eyebrows is continued down and then flares out to form a nose with a wide rectangular end. Below the nose is an oval ridge around a sunken centre which forms an open mouth. If the head is held so that the eyebrows are at the top and the mouth at the bottom, the left cheek (as you look at it) is missing and the right cheek area is filled with incomplete, and therefore hard to decipher, Style I ornament. There is a curving reversed S-shaped element next to the eye, and underneath this three strands curve downwards and outwards and join at their lower end. Two or three other decorative elements are incomplete; all breaks are old. The surviving width at the end of the knob is 20 mm, but it would originally have been at least 26 mm wide. The surviving length (parallel to the pin bar) is 21 mm. A human face with curly elements next to the eye and curving parallel ridges below is also found on other florid cruciform brooch knobs, e.g. two from West Stow (East Anglian Archaeology 24, vol. 2, fig. 259), and from these the extra panel of Style I decoration can be tentatively identified as a profile bird's head. The knob is early Anglo-Saxon and dates to the second half of the sixth century AD.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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