Welcome to the University of Nottingham
Museum of Archaeology.
Now, what you can see in front of you
here are two projecting loop
basal loop spearheads.
They date to between 1250 and 1125.
That is to say in the middle Bronze Age.
And they were found in the River Trent
at Attenborough and at Hoveringham.
Now in most museums
that's about all the information that you'll get
about objects like this.
But what I want to do today is to tell you
what these objects can tell us
about people in the past.
Now the first thing we need to think about
when we think about prehistoric metalwork
is that it was one of the very few shiny
things that there were in the past.
Now, if you read Homer or if you read Beowulf,
the poems are full of descriptions
of flashing metalwork because the world was very flat
apart from metal
the only thing that sparkled was water.
So metalwork was a form of bling.
It was a way of showing off.
It was a way of showing social status.
These, of course, are weapons.
This is more or less
the size and shape you'd expect for a spear head.
And you can see it's got two loops on the bottom.
That's why it's called the basal looped spearhead
from which tassels would have been attached
to make them colorful.
But this one
is a parade weapon.
It's likely to have been
used primarily for display.
This is a weapon that says
I'm hard, I'm rich,
keep away.
So metal work is not just telling us
about hunting or about combat.
It's also telling us about the social strategies
that people used to affirm their position in society.
But there's one
other actually very important thing
that this metalwork tells us
about ancient Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands.
Because there are about 200 objects
in Bronze Age metalwork
that come from the River Trent.
And the River Trent
is one of the few rivers in Europe -
the Thames is another, the Scene is another,
the Saron is another - where metalwork
was ritually deposited in the water.
So at various points along the River Trent,
for example,
at Clifton, for example, at Langford, near to Newark,
for example,
at Attenborough,
and Hoveringham where these objects come from.
Objects were thrown into the river as offerings.
So not only do these spears
tell us about society
they also tell us about belief
in the Bronze Age of the East Midlands.
Okay so here we have two other objects
from the River Trent at Attenborough.
To give you some idea about the other sorts of things
that we find in the river.
Here we have a
early Bronze Age dagger
dates
to about the first half
of the second millennium, B.C..
And here we have a rapier little Bronze Age.
So second half of the first millennium
Second millennium, B.C..
And as you can see,
it's Haft would have been very, very weak.
So this sort of weapon was a weapon
that you would use for stabbing.
You're not going to be able to slash with this.
It would have broken in your hands.
Perhaps it was even more useful
as a weapon for display.
I've got a rapier.
Keep away