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Description: | A copper alloy socket from a Bronze Age Sickle. The socket is conical with a rounded end and the mouth is complete with a slightly bevelled edge. There is an irregular hole in one side of the socket. The start of a blade with curved ribs projects to one side and points downwards. The ribs are on both faces and are matched. The object is broken across the blade. It has a well developed mottled green patina.According to Fox's 1939 paper in The Prehistoric Society Journal, socketed sickles can have lateral or vertical sockets. This one is laterally socketed (which seems to be more common), but is a little more unusual in have ins closed top to the socket, but with the blade hardly projecting over the top of the socket. This example is most similar to Fox's suggested phases of development 4 or 5, and the ridged decoration on the blade seems similar to sickles believed to have developed in Ireland. Fox suggests that the earliest sickles developed in the lowlands of the UK, then spreading to Ireland and the Highland zones. The main distribution in 1939 was in South Wales, East Anglia, Ireland and Eastern Scotland, with a notable scarcity of examples from the Midlands and Northern England.The sickle has some similarities with two sickles in Evans's Bronze Age implement corpus (1881). He illustrates two ribbed examples; fig 236 Near Errol, Perthshire and 237 Garvagh, Derry, page 200. The former is the most similar (Peter Reavill pers comm). These sickles are better known in Ireland and East Anglia and are comparatively rare elsewhere (Laura McLean pers comm). There is also an example in Devizes Museum (Katie Hinds pers comm). A Middle to Late Bronze Age date of 1500 BC - 800 BC has been suggested.
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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