Weight regulation in British and Irish Bronze Age gold objects: a reanalysis and reinterpretation

Raphael Hermann

doi:10.15184/aqy.2021.54

Abstract

Sophisticated metrological systems were common in the European Bronze Age and mass-regulation has been argued for various classes of object, including gold artefacts. A recent study published in Antiquity used Cosine Quantogram Analysis to demonstrate mass-regulation in a small sample of gold objects from Britain, Ireland and France. Since then, substantial quantities of new data from British Bronze Age gold objects have been collated. Here, the author presents the results of Cosine Quantogram Analysis on nearly 1000 such objects—the largest sample analysed to date. The results demonstrate that, even though some regularities can be discerned, mass-regulation is no longer a tenable interpretation of gold objects from Bronze Age Britain.

Highlights

A recent study of over 3000 bronze objects in European hoards has shown that they were fragmented into pieces of specific, regulated mass values in accordance with the metrological system of European Bronze Age balance weights (Ialongo & Lago 2021)
The aim of the present study is to verify the hypothesis that Bronze Age gold objects from Britain were regulated by mass
This study has collected and analysed most of the mass values of known British Bronze Age gold objects, with results showing that a general mass-regulation could not be identified for any of the object classes

Summary

Introduction

Metal objects of regulated mass are a well-known phenomenon of European prehistory. A recent study of over 3000 bronze objects in European hoards has shown that they were fragmented into pieces of specific, regulated mass values in accordance with the metrological system of European Bronze Age balance weights (Ialongo & Lago 2021). Mass-regulation can be found in hacksilver from early second-millennium BC Mesopotamia, where extensive written evidence has shown that silver was sometimes exchanged directly for goods and that the precious metal served as a general reference value in the economic framework of the ancient Near East (Pomponio 2003; Peyronel 2010). These texts suggest that other materials, such as barley or copper, were used as exchange items The evidence suggests that mass-regulated fragments were probably used as currency

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion