A small Bronze Age axe hoard with a rare button has been discovered near Barton Turf in Norfolk. It is one of only 19 Bronze Age buttons ever reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Britain, and only the third found in Norfolk.
The hoard was discovered by metal detectorists in two stages. One socketed axe was found in March 2021. The second socketed axe and the button were found in 2023. The objects date to between 1000 B.C. and 700 B.C.
The button is circular with a central boss set in a deep concave circle that rises to a thick outer rim. The boss is conical and originally came to a tip, but that is now gone, probably from corrosion rather than breakage. This is the only of the 19 recorded Bronze Age buttons to have a central conical boss. While the known buttons are all different, they generally follow this design of a central boss surrounded by concentric rings or mouldings. On the back of the button a short rectangular loop from which it was attached.
Archaeologists are not certain how (or if) they were worn in Bronze Age Britain. There’s no explanatory context in a hoard and while a couple of comparable buttons have been found in graves in northwestern Europe, it was not clear if they were fasteners or even mounted to garments as opposed to, say, a horse harness.
According to Oxfordshire’s finds liaison officer and Bronze Age small finds specialist Dr Ed Caswell:
“This type of button is only found in the late Bronze Age, and to find it with axe heads, when they are all perfectly usable, does suggest it was intentionally deposited in the ground.”
Experts are still debating whether people did that to recycle the objects for use later, or because there was some sort of ritual behind it.
“The exciting thing is when we see it, we call it a button, but in UK context we have never found it showing how it was attached,” Caswell added. “It does give us a hint about how people want to decorate themselves, but buttons do seem to go out of fashion from the Iron Age onwards (from about 750BC), replaced by brooches.”
* This article was originally published here
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