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  Reconstruction of the burial

 

Length: 4.000 cm

Gift of Mrs A.G. Neall

P&EE 1911 12-8 5

Room 50: Britain and Europe

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People in Iron Age Britain

Bronze model of a human head

This face is 2000 years old. He is a mature man with hair combed back, clean-shaven except for a well-groomed moustache. Images of prehistoric Britons are very rare; in the Iron Age people were almost never represented in statues or as part of the decoration on objects. However, at the very end of the Iron Age in the south-east of England, a few images of men can be found on coins or as decorations on wooden buckets.

This is one of three small bronze models of men's faces that decorated a wooden bucket found in a Late Iron Age cremation burial.