Dorset museum crowdfunds rare Bronze Age gold bracelet

The Dorset Museum & Art Gallery has raised the money to acquire a rare Late Bronze Age (950–750 B.C.) gold bracelet with a crowdfunding campaign to get them over the finish line.

The bracelet was discovered by a metal detectorist in Hilton, Dorset, in 2020. It is incomplete, a long fragment of a flat strip with a flared terminal. The strip was deliberately bent, folded over with the terminal on the inside. The other end was deliberately cut, not broken. The edges were raised to create low flanges on both sides. Comparison of the features of the band, particularly the flared terminal and low flanges, to similar pieces found in other locations confirmed that it was a bracelet dating to 950–750 B.C. The total weight of the gold is 14.05 grams (half an ounce).

The piece underwent the Treasure adjudication process, but the result was a foregone conclusion as it is more than 300 years old and composed of a precious metal. After it was declared treasure, a valuation committee of experts at the British Museum assessed its fair market value at £1,200 ($1,530).

As always, the museums closest to the find site are given the first chance to acquire the piece for the assessed value. Even a comparatively modest valuation is challenging for local museums with no acquisition budget to speak of, but the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery was highly motivated by the rarity and significance of the piece to Dorset’s history.

This item is a rarity in the county. Whilst Bronze Age gold objects are by their nature rare, those known from Dorset and dating to the Late Bronze Age only comprise a limited number of forms, and gold items are vastly outweighed by finds of base metal objects.

This item provides an indication that the deliberate modification of gold objects prior to their deposition continued into the Late Bronze Age in Dorset. Many Bronze Age metal objects were deliberately modified in antiquity, but this is not apparently related to treating the object as scrap, but rather carries some other social meaning within which larger objects such as bracelets and torcs were portioned and changed before entering the ground. This object is also significant for the location where it was found. The majority of finds of Bronze Age gold (and indeed bronze) objects have been recovered from the more north-easterly part of the county around Cranborne Chase. This was located in the centre of the county in the chalk valleys, an area which is rich in prehistoric archaeology but less researched and poorly understood.

The museum was keen to exhibit the piece, study it and share it with other researchers. They did not want to risk the piece being sold to a private collector. They were able to raise £720 on their own, which left just £480 ($612) to raise. The crowd pitched in with alacrity, and a week later the fundraiser was over with its goal easily met.

* This article was originally published here