Description

Summary: 1 thin broad-bladed flint dagger with a sharp edge, found with a primary inhumation (metal worker?) in a flat grave under a sarsen at Durrington Walls, excavated by William Cunnington.

Research results

An Early Bronze Age flint dagger, found with a primary inhumation underneath a large sarsen at Durrington Walls, unearthed by a shepherd in 1809. Also included in this grave was a v-perforated shale button and belt ring, as well as a pair of chalk discs or buttons. This dagger would have been contemporary with some of the earliest metal work in Britain, although they do not appear until after the earliest beaker period graves and daggers. By comparison to other examples, the dagger was likely hafted.

Discovered in 1809 by a shepherd, the location of the Durrington sarsen grave was never recorded precisely in the writings of Colt Hoare or Cunnington and was thought lost. Re-examining this grave group and its discovery, Higham and Carey (2019) suggest that the sarsen under which the burial was deposited corresponds to that recorded on the 1887 ordnance survey map, in the north-West corner of Durrington Walls’ henge ditch. In the absence of any human remains, they date the burial to the period after c.2200 (the fission horizon), post-dating the main phase of activity at Durrington. They note that the grave group is exceptional, and potentially includes a number of heirlooms, making it especially odd that the group does not contain a beaker, something that they suggest was a deliberate choice.

This flint dagger was featured in Frieman's (2014) study of British and Irish Flint daggers as part of the Developing Archaeo-prosopography project funded by Oxford University, The Prehistoric Society and the Fell Foundation. The first major study of this class of artefact in 80 years, Frieman highlights the relatively short use period of these daggers when compared to continental traditions and suggests that the daggers produced in Britain were probably initially based on examples from the Netherlands, themselves imported from Scandinavia. She suggests their use in the later 3rd millenium BC may have related to stressing cultural links with these groups, although there may have been regional differences. Whilst found across Britain the daggers are most common in East Anglia and the South East where they are often deposited in rivers, by contrast those on the periphery of this region were often deposited as grave goods.