Description

Summary: 1 rough bowl-shaped incense cup decorated with irregular squares of impressed dots around one side and smaller squares, crosses and other shapes around the other (the thick rim also has lines of impressed dots around it) found with a primary cremation under an inverted MBA urn in disc barrow Winterbourne Stoke G68, excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

A miniature vessel, possibly an incense cup, found with a primary cremation underneath an inverted collared urn in round barrow Winterbourne Stoke G68, excavated by William Cunnington. These enigmatic vessels are known from a number of Early Bronze Age graves in the Wessex region, and date to c. 2000-1500 BC.

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.