Hello my name's David Dawson I’m director of the Wiltshire Museum here in Devizes,
welcome to my corner.
The Wiltshire Museum has fantastic collections from across the Stonehenge and Avebury World
Heritage Site, but I’m going to share with you the finds from Bush Barrow, which you'll see
in the case here. Bush Barrow is located on a ridge looking out over Stonehenge itself.
In this mound was the burial of a chieftain, a really important person
who died just after 2000 BC when Stonehenge was at its height. We know that this man was
important because of two things; firstly where he was buried on the crest of a ridge looking
down over the monument of Stonehenge, his is one of 50 burial mounds across that ridge,
and the second is the objects this man was buried with show how important he was. The gold and the
bronze just represented unimaginable wealth in the bronze age and that shows how important he
was. We call him: the Bush Barrow Chieftain. We don't know for sure what area the Bush
Barrow Chieftain was in charge of, whether it was Wiltshire or it was the whole of the south west,
but what we do know is that with two to three hundred burial mounds very close to Stonehenge,
this was a place where people chose to be buried and it's likely that there were a whole series
of chieftains with their territories that came together at Stonehenge to be buried at a place
that was so important to them. He was buried with objects that those who left behind wanted to show
how important he was and that he could take with him into the next life. Your eye immediately goes
to the gold lozenge. This is made of very thin sheet gold that was wrapped over a wooden backing.
The point at the top and the bottom has a very precise angle of 81 degrees; that's the same angle
between where the sun rises at the mid-winter and mid-summer solstices so it has an astronomical
importance, and the very finely detailed emboss decoration particularly around the outer border
is laid out to a tolerance of less than half a millimetre. What that tells us is
that they understood astronomy, geometry, and mathematics, four thousand years ago.
But the most amazing object isn't that lozenge - it's actually this dagger you can see here on
the right. The blade is made of bronze maybe made in Brittany across the English channel
and it has a handle, the modern wood handle there is to hold what's left of the original
4000 year old dagger and it's decorated with thousands of tiny gold studs, each of which is
the same thickness as a human hair and most of them are less than a millimetre long. We know
from the pieces that are left how many studs there are per square centimetre,
we know the size of the handle, it's easy just to multiply that up, 140 000 gold studs.
If you could put one in place a minute, that's nine month’s worth of work, let alone making them
in the first place. But this chieftain was not just buried with that, he also is buried with this
mace. It's a ceremonial mace, the head is made of a fossil sponge from Cornwall that's over 150
miles away that's been ground and polished - that represents well over 200 hours of constant work.
The handle is decorated with bone mounts and it's possible those bone mounts
made a gleaming white polished shaft. So this would have been so impressive.
He was also buried with over here you see a gold hook that was a fitting for one of the daggers and
it would have stopped it slipping through his belt but this is purely decorative and again it would
have shimmered in the sunlight. He was buried also with a second dagger, even bigger than the first,
and an axe. And it's worth remembering that axes and daggers are carved on the stones of Stonehenge
at roughly this time and that just shows the importance of the burial mounds and the
monument itself - that interrelationship. But there's more to the story of his barrow because
we know that there was an earlier burial. Down in the bottom of the case here are the
studs of the handle of a second dagger but this one will have dated to about 2400 BC,
and in the back corner you see that sherd of pottery an enormous sherd of pottery
carefully excavated by a rabbit digging into the burial mound. That is a cremation vessel,
so it would have held a cremation of another important person and that dates to about 1600 BC.
What that tells us is that the burial mound where the Bush Barrow Chieftain was laid
was being used for burials for more than 800 years - almost spanning the time between when
the Sarsen stones were put up at Stonehenge and when Stonehenge goes out of use at 1500 BC.
It's a family burial vault. This man is part of a noble dynasty. The objects in the burial show how
complex Bronze Age society must have been because clearly he is at the top, he's the boss,
but to make these objects you had to have a whole range of people with incredible craft skills
and they couldn't have been growing food, they wouldn't have been looking after crops,
so other people had to do that. We also have evidence of shamans, of priests,
so it just shows that you have a highly organized society with the chief at the
top people to organize things, craftspeople and then everyone who did the hard work.
You may remember I jokingly said the cremation urn was excavated by a rabbit - that's because
the mound was burrowed into by rabbits and it was found on the surface just by a rabbit burrow. But
the burial was excavated by William Cunnington. He was one of the very first archaeologists
and he excavated nearly 200 burial mounds across Wiltshire and the Stonehenge and Avebury landscape
and he was learning as he was going, and one amazing story is about the Bush Barrow dagger.
It was in the grave upright and the man who was excavating it thought it was a spearhead, so he
trowelled his way down and Cunnington describes how he scattered the shining points of gold with
the end of his trowel because he didn't expect to find a fully preserved bronze age dagger handle.
I hope you've enjoyed finding out about the Bush Barrow Chieftain and you might wonder
why the British Museum Curator's Corner is coming from the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes.
The reason for that is we're lending these amazing finds,
Britain's richest bronze age burial to The World of Stonehenge exhibition,
which is on at the British Museum from February until July - do go and see it.