The Dorset Museum and Art Gallery in southern England has raised £17 000 needed to acquire a Bronze Age hoard discovered by a metal detectorist in 2020. The hoard, which comprises a sword, and axe head, and a bracelet, was found by metal detectorist John Belgrave during an organised event at a farm in the village of Stalbridge, near Sherborne in Dorset, during an organised event, when he became separated from the group and climbed a hill outside the planned area of the survey, where he made the discovery. The £17 000 will be divided between Belgrave and the owner of the land where the discovery was made.
The sword from the Stalbridge Middle Bronze Age Hoard is a bronze rapier with a blade 535 mm in length, cast in one piece, but apparently deliberately broken into the sections, one of which is still attached to the hilt, before being buried. The hilt of the sword is made from a copper alloy, and has been cast in the form of the wooden sword hilts typical of the time. The blade is cross shaped in profile, 60 mm wide and 7.5 mm thick at the hilt. The longer of the two blade fragments is bent, and weighs 188 g, the smaller weighs 23.34 g. The hilt is 113 mm long, with an ovel pommel measuring 46.2 mm by 41.6 mm. The guard is c-shaped, with the bade of the blade still attached by four dome-headed rivets. Swords of this type have been referred to as Wandsworth-type rapiers, and are associated with the Middle Bronze Age Taunton Phase, between about 1400 and 1275 BC.
The bronze axe-head is of a type called a South-western palstave, also associated with the Taunton Phase. These have a side-loop, a mid-rib, and side-flanges which would have been used to support a forked wooden handle. It is made from a copper-alloy, and is 159 mm in length with a maximum thickness of 31.5 mm. The cutting edge of the axe flares to give a rounded cutting edge, 51.7 mm wide.
The bracelet is a copper-alloy ring-shaped bangle, of a type known as a Liss Bracelet, again associated with the Taunton Phase. It has an outer diameter of 75.6 mm, an inner diameter of 61.5 mm, a width of 16.3 mm, and a width that varies between 6.1 and 6.8mm. Its outer surface has an incised or engraved panels which with complex geometric decoration, which appears to be centred on a thickened lobe on one side. Liss Bracelets are known only from the Taunton Phase of the English Bronze Age, with most known examples coming from Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and West Sussex, though they have also been found in Norfolk and Suffolk.
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