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Date: |
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Description: | Ingot
Bronze Age (Possibly) Roman (Probably)
34mm long, 47mm wide, 17mm thick
Wedge shaped and trapezoidal in plan. The top edge is uneven with occasional inclusion in the metal, the underside is extremely pitted with very frequent inclusions within the metal particularly within the recesses. The leading narrow edge is rather serrated, the sides are slightly sloped. The rear is stepped and very uneven.
It is likely that this is part of an ingot that comes from the copper working process, either as part of the tapped molten metal that would have collected out side the furnace. Or perhaps as with early smelting furnaces such as bowl furnaces the molten metal is not tapped out and instead formed at the base of the furnace. Either way the resultant ingots were bowl shaped and appears that this artefact is part of outer section of an ingot. This would explain the extremely pitted underside, which would have been in contact with either part of the furnace wall or even the ground and also the presence of a considerable amount of impurities in this part of the metal and the uneven upper surface where the metal would have formed a pool. It appears that the metal is not pure and may have a high lead content, which would mean that it is a secondary melt, possibly as a result of remelting a number of cu-alloy artefacts.
Bronze Age examples tend to be plano-convex, such as the example from Worthing (Tylecote, 1986, 23) while roman example have a flatter upper surface such as this example. Also the later examples are much larger up, around 30cm diameter such as the Aberffraw example which was 28cm. Although it is likely that this dates to the roman period a Bronze Age should not be ruled out.
The artefact is very worn. The original surface has corroded away, the surface has a greenish-grey colour, there is bright green bronze disease, there is also speckles of white on the surface. | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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