Accessions to the British Museum (Bloomsbury)

Abstract

INTERESTING additions to the collections of British antiquities of the British Museum (Bloomsbury) were announced at the December meeting of the Trustees. Among these the most important is an iron sword of the second century B.C., with its bronze scabbard mount, which has been lent for temporary exhibition by the Duke of Northumberland. It was found in the River Witham below Lincoln in 1826, probably at the same time as the famous bronze shield of the iron age, which, with its characteristic Celtic ornament combining the use of metal and enamel, has long been one of the Museum's most striking exhibits among British antiquities. The decoration of the scabbard mount is an example of the earliest Celtic art of Britain, and shows the La Tene curvilinear style of ornamentation in the form in which it reached Britain. Other accessions, also of great interest, come from a round barrow at Riffley Wood, near King's Lynn, which has been excavated by Mr. I. J. Thatcher and Mr. P. L. K. Scbwabe. Among these are a segmented bead and a ring pendant of bluish-green faience, which were associated with nine or ten cremated urn burials of the Middle Bronze Age found on top of the mound. They belong to a class of ornament which has been found in bronze age burials in Britain and on the Continent; and they agree in all respects with examples found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, dating from about 1400 B.C. The grave pit of the mound below the level at which the urn burials were found, contained no remains; but the whole of the surface-level below the barrow was covered with pottery fragments, representing hundreds of vessels. These sherds were of beaker pottery of the Early Bronze Age, of the approximate dating of 1800 B.C. It seems clear that this was not a habitation site, and the sherds are thought to be either the debris of the floor of the dead man's hut, which was brought here entire, or, perhaps more probably, the result of a ritual, which involved the scattering of a large number of potsherds.