The Enkomi Foundry Hoard in the British Museum
H. Catling
Groups of copper and copper-alloy objects (bronzes) are an
important and fairly rare type of find complex in the
excavation of Bronze Age – especially Late Bronze Age – sites in
Cyprus and the Aegean area. They are customarily described as
‘Hoards’ or ‘Treasures’. After 1960, two shipwrecked Late Bronze
Age cargoes found and archaeologically explored off the south-west
coast of Asia Minor – the Cape Gelidonya ship and the Ulu Burun
ship, both loaded to the gunwales with bronze – added a previously
unimaginably rich category of the same general kind.
Image: the Enkomi Foundry
Hoard (Excavations in Cyprus, fig. 25, p. 15)
Such groups of metal objects are studied with growing awareness
of their chronological and taxonomic importance, their place in the
history of metal technology and, most recently, to explore the
possible reasons for their deposition. Such find complexes must not
of course be confused with the very large numbers of metal objects
deposited in rich Late Bronze Age graves (e.g. the shaft graves of
Circles A and B at Mycenae, the Dendra and Nichoria tholoi and, in
Crete, LMII and LMIIIA graves at Zapher Papoura and Sellapoulo
(Knossos)).
Hoards/treasures are of two chief kinds, which
must be kept distinct. First, a hoard may be a collection of
complete/ nearly complete manufactured objects (tools, weapons,
vessels), either deliberately concealed by their owners in time of
danger and never retrieved, or overwhelmed and hidden by disaster
in the catastrophe that destroyed their place of use until
disturbed again in our own times by chance, or the excavators pick.
Conspicuous examples include the group of four huge cauldrons at
the Minoan villa of Tylissos, the palatial treasures of Knossos (NW
Treasure House; N. House; House SE of the S. House). In Cyprus, the
group of objects found by C.F.A Schaeffer in 1934 in his ‘Maison
des Bronzes.’ It is axiomatic that the constituent elements of such
collections had all been usable up to the time of their
concealment, or of the destruction of their context. This is in
marked contrast with the complicated character of the second kind
of hoard.
The second type of hoard leads, through its
contents, directly to a workshop. The objects are usually, though
not invariably, of very heterogeneous character, including a
minority of objects which could have been used, but a large
majority either not yet ready for use, or alternatively, long past
their period of usefulness, judged by their worn or damaged state,
or comprising fragments of erstwhile objects, deliberately broken
up. There are often unfinished castings, there are also bars,
billets, slabs of metal capable of being hand-worked into objects,
or components of complex objects. Often, too, there are waste
products of the casting process, including jets, runners and
risers, web from two-piece moulds or cire-perdue (lost wax) moulds.
Apart from the few items that could have been used, and the cast
blanks capable of being hand-worked to shape, all such material
must have been destined for recycling. In addition, these hoards
quite frequently include raw material, usually in ingot form –
buns, slabs, oxhide ingots. It is unusual to find intact oxhide
ingots; their presence can be recognised by the carrying handles
broken from the main body, or broken lumps from the main body of
varying shapes and sizes. Melting hoards, to give them their best
descriptive title, will have been lost in Antiquity by the same
kinds of mischance that befell ‘storage’ hoards, the first kind
described above.