The Rillaton gold cup
Early Bronze Age, 1700-1500 BC
From Rillaton, Cornwall, England
An exceptional gold vessel with a royal history
Workmen engaged in construction work in 1837 plundered a burial
cairn for stone on part of Bodmin Moor, at Rillaton. In one side of
the mound they came upon a stone-lined vault, or cist, 2.4 m long
and 1.1 m wide. It contained the decayed remains of a human
skeleton accompanied by this gold cup, a bronze dagger and other
objects that have not survived - a decorated pottery vessel, a
'metallic rivet', 'some pieces of ivory' and 'a few glass beads'.
The pot and gold cup were set beneath a slab leaning against the
west wall of the cist.
After discovery the finds were sent as Duchy Treasure Trove to
William IV (reigned 1831-37) very shortly before his death. They
remained in the royal household until the death of King George V in
1936, at which point the importance of the cup and associated
dagger came to be appreciated, leading to their loan to the British
Museum.
The main body of the cup was beaten out of a single lump of gold
of high purity. The corrugated profile would have required great
skill to achieve. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, it
added strength to the thin sheet metal. The handle is decorated
with two sets of grooves and is neatly rivetted to the body through
lozenge-shaped washers.
Similar cups were made in plain sheet gold as well as in other
exotic materials - silver, amber and shale - in southern England
and north-western Europe. It is thought that they were inspired by
pottery cups current in the later part of the Early Bronze Age in
central Europe (the Aunjetitz, or Únetician culture). Until
recently, only two other corrugated cups of this period were known
from temperate Europe, but in November 2001 another was unearthed
by Cliff Bradshaw at Ringlemere in eastern Kent and was acquired by
the British Museum in May 2003 (see Related Objects).
I.A. Kinnes, British Bronze Age metalwork-1 (London, The British Museum Press, 1994)
E. Smirke, 'Some account of the discovery of a gold cup in a barrow in Cornwall, AD 1837', Archaeological Journal-4, 24 (1867), pp. 189-95
C.F.C. Hawkes, 'The Rillaton gold cup', Antiquity-4, 57 (1983), pp. 124-25