Bush Barrow dagger

[Brian G Turner]

This object is so fascinating:

Bush Barrow dagger - Wessex Museums

The Bush Barrow dagger is one of the most incredible Bronze Age finds in Britain. The blade is made from bronze, but the handle is decorated with microscopic gold studs set in a zig-zag pattern.

www.wessexmuseums.org.uk

Each gold stud on the dagger handle is as thin as a human hair and most are less than one millimetre in length.

We counted how many studs there were in a single square centimetre. Then by multiplying that up for the surface area of the dagger handle, we estimated that there were around 140,000 gold studs.

 

[paranoid marvin]

It's incredible isn't it? Without physical evidence, it's likely that most experts would declare that the technology required would be far beyond Bronze Age man. Yet here we are.

 

[The Judge]

That's the one at the Wiltshire Museum at Devizes, isn't it? We've been to the museum several times, so we must have seen the dagger, but the place is made up of a number of different buildings** and it's like a maze, so it's hard to remember what's where!

Incidentally, they have occasional online talks which might be of interest. David Dawson, the director, is an excellent communicator and anything by him is well worth seeing. They also host talks from the Victoria County History for Wiltshire which have been a bit of a mixed bag, but we've enjoyed quite a few of them.


** they're hoping to move the museum into an old Assizes Court building just down the road in Devizes, so the collections would have a little more space and a far better arrangement (and some of the online talks about the work involved in that are free to view on YouTube, I think) but even if they get all the grants available from eg the Heritage Lottery Fund, they'll need to raise millions to make it happen, so if anyone finds a spare few hundred thousand pounds down the back of the sofa...