Description

Summary: 1 miniature (incense?) cup with thick sides, a flat rim and a sharply projecting waist but no decoration, found with a primary cremation in the central tump of three tumps in disc barrow Winterbourne Stoke G14 (?), excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

A Bronze Age miniature vessel, immitating a food vessel, found with a primary cremation in the disc barrow Winterbourne Stoke G14, excavated by William Cunnington.

This vessel was re-examined by Copper (2017) as part of their Mphil with the University of Bradford, which covered all of the Early Bronze Age miniature vessels in Southern Britain. They divide the corpus into four groups: miniature, bi-conical, simple, and elaborate, and argue that most are derivations of late beaker and early food vessel imitations. Investigating the contexts of these vessels, they found that most were associated with primary cremations in round barrows, with no clear correlation with either age or sex – although noting that there was only limited evidence for the latter.