Description

Summary: 1 miniature (incense?) cup (broken) with thick sides and two imitation perforations on side and decorated with two of three lines of large impressed dots around sides from Rockley, Ogbourne St. Andrew, collected by J.W. Brooke.

Research results

A miniature vessel, possibly an incense cup, gifted to the Museum by prominent local collector J.W. Brooke and said to be from Rockley, Ogbourne St. Andrew. Miniature vessels such as these are an enigmatic class of artefact found in a number of Early Bronze Age graves in the Wessex region, and date to the period c. 2000-1500 BC; this vessel almost certainly originated in such a grave.

Jones (2012) discusses Early Bronze Age miniature vessels as part of an exploration of how scale impacts our experiences of materiality. He argues that models are a representation of the essence of the objects that they miniaturise; the wessex miniature vessels are part of a wider suite of miniature objects and exotic grave goods that Jones argues represents a pattern of cosmological acquisition, which through their materials and form embody distant connections through the demonstration of specialised knowledge. He also suggests that the vessels are often relatively poorly made and may have been made specifically for inclusion in the graves.

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.