Description

Summary: An incense or pygmy cup, bowl shaped, 5 rows of circular punch marks around the body and one on the flat rim. Orange-red well baked ware from Boreham, near East Kennet, Wiltshire, found by J W Brooke while digging for flints.

Research results

A miniature vessel, probably immitating an early Bronze Age food vessel, found by the collector J W Brooke, apparently while digging for flints, at Boreham near East Kennett, Wiltshire.

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.