Iron Age Bucket Reconstruction Project

I've busied myself with some reconstruction work this Sunday morning. The girls went shopping while I slaved over making a convincing picture of how my Iron Age boar head bucket mount would have looked on its parent object.

The Aylesford Bucket was used as a template from which to create the correct perspective. A bucket was drawn, the mount traced from the right angles for a correct fit then put in place upon the bucket rim and finally the handle was drawn to complete the thing. It looks just as it should and probably much as it once did, give or take an inch here and there.

Such an exercise is worth all the effort. The item cosseted in its little box is one thing but an imagination of how it was once used lifts it out of the collection and pushes it into another realm.

The mounts at left appear about life size on my screen. The buckets were quite small things too. Viewed in pictures they seem large because our notion of a bucket comes in a certain size and that's the size of a modern 5 gallon one. Perhaps they should be called pails? That term that would suggest something smaller than those black plastic utility buckets we buy from the DIY store and that skew our idea of these Iron Age vessels.

The Aylesford bucket is approximately twenty centimeters across the rim and thirty deep, so it's diminutive compared to the B&Q version and more the size of an ice bucket for chilling the champers than a vessel for carrying building rubble about. Its capacity was probably about a gallon or two.

The boar mount has the front of the deep slot that accommodated the rim of the bucket broken off. However, it's well known how such mounts were formed so I used the Alkham human head mount in the British Museum for the purposes of drawing a convincing missing front section where the rivet would have been.

The bronze bands that held the wooden staves in place would probably have been decorated but there's no point in my drawing my idea of what that decoration would have been without some evidence in the form of fragment of the bands, but I never found them so presume the mount was simply lost from the vessel after it broke.

The reconstruction works well for the purposes of having a clear idea of how my mount worked and once looked on its bucket. I think it was labour well spent on an otherwise ordinary Sunday morning.

The Lexden Boar — Victim of Acid Attack?

After giving the discrepancy between the two pictures of the Lexden Boar a day's thought I think I have at least a plausible theory as to why they should be so very different.

Firstly I think the two pictures are of the same object but one is reversed. The angles are different and shot with different focal length lenses too but I don't think I've ever seen two Iron Age items (though this is Gallo-Roman in a British Iron Age context) so very similar to each other. This item would have been a one-off lost wax casting and another would have required a new wax model to be made because the process destroys it just as the name of the technique suggests. They are just too similar to be different objects from different places, I think, and I doubt that Miranda green would have made such a mistake even if were possible.

I'm beginning to think that this figurine has been inexpertly 'cleaned' some time soon after excavation. The excavation took place in 1924. Most Iron Age objects found before this date were routinely removed of all trace of patina because the 'standard' at this time was that set by the famous Iron Age finds from the Thames such as the Battersea Shield and Waterloo Helmet, all of which actually came up in river dredging perfectly preserved, un-patinated and naturally a bright bronze colour, which is quite normal for copper alloys from the anaerobic muds of the Thames as any mudlark will attest. It is almost unknown from soils though, where patinas will certainly develop well on copper-based objects and be heavy to the point of almost total conversion of metal to copper compounds in some.

The results of this highly jeopardous curatorial 'fashion' for stripping back Iron Age objects to the bare metal can be seen with many of the most famous treasures of the period in the British Museum collections with objects that were originally patinated to some degree or even to a considerable degree.

The Trelan Bahow Mirror

The Stanwick Horse

The Trelan Bahow Mirror is bright bronze and so is the Stanwick Horse, but they both would have been green — brown on discovery, as you can imagine with ancient finds from average soils and not anaerobic muds. The mirror shows what happens when what must have been a fairly thick patina is removed to expose a bronze surface — lots of detail is lost and vulnerable edges are bitten clean through because often whole areas of metal are converted in the ground into copper chlorides, sulfides, sulfates and carbonates, all of which are easily soluble in acids whereas the metal is far more resistant.

The truly beautiful Stanwick Horse has thankfully survived the acid test with just a little pitting around the forehead which suggests it was lightly patinated when found.

I reckon the early picture of the Lexden boar is of it when fully patinated, and the second of how it is now but after acid removal of patina some time back in the 1920's when thin areas such as the tip of the lower jaw and the lower parts of the legs, all of which may well have been converted completely from metal into other chemical compounds, suffered very badly and simply dissolved away to nothing.

Legless — Is the Lexden Chieftain's Boar in Safe Hands?

Whilst researching Iron Age bucket mounts I came across an awful lot of stuff concerning Iron Age and Romano-British sculpture. It's quite a subject and I can feel a book coming on such is the wealth of material, however the following revelation really got my blood up and my mind racing suggesting as it does that museums and their staff may not be the safe hands we would like to think they are when it comes to our own donations, archaeologists finds, and their own bought-in acquisitions.

Here's a picture of the boar figurine found in the Lexden Chieftain's burial near Colchester ~

This picture appears in Miranda Green's, 'Animals in Celtic Life and Myth,' 1992, and you can see clearly that the animal has a complete left hind leg and right foreleg. However, in a more modern picture of the piece just as it is displayed right now in Colchester Museum, things do seem to be somewhat different ~

In comparing both it seems clear that the boar no longer has a left hind leg, has the stump of the right hind leg much reduced, has seemingly gained a left foreleg shank and hoof, and lost its right foreleg shank and hoof too! It's almost as if it's been dipped and left to rot away in a very strong acid.

Now this is most perplexing, because I believe there was only the one boar found in that burial and not a pair. So, how did this damage occur, if damage is what it is? One of the pictures must be reversed, but that still does not explain it all away, in fact it confuses things even further because it would then be the right foreleg once complete that is now reduced!

To be honest I haven't a clue. Apparently the burial was looted and items damaged long before excavation, but presumably the boar was found as it appears in Green's illustration and has suffered damage since, unless that is, the picture was taken before excavation by a looter and the figurine damaged before it was acquired by the Museum?

All the information I can find suggests the contrary, though; that the piece was excavated by archaeologists. If that's the case then the damage must have been caused in storage and by handling since the moment it was dug up by either the excavators or Colchester Museum staff, which would be unforgivable, surely?

I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this discrepancy between two pictures of the same object taken decades apart from each other, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine what it might be...

But I'd really like to know, and wouldn't you?