Making Must Farm (Pt.2): A Bronze Sickle
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- čas přidán 21. 03. 2023
- Mark Knight (CAU) and Dr. James Dilley (AncientCraftUK) introduce us to the Must Farm Pile Dwelling Settlement and take a closer look at some of the artefacts that were found, dating back to the end of the Bronze Age (1000-800 BC)!
The sickle is a tool that may have had its origins with hunter-gatherers who used bladed tools to harvest grasses and wild grains. The conditions at Must Farm allowed some Late Bronze Age sickles to remain preserved with fragments of their handles, the finds represent nearly one quarter of all Bronze Age sickles found in Britain!
The Must Farm settlement was built on a platform on piles over a river channel. The piles were destroyed by fire, causing the structure to collapse into the river, thereby preserving the contents in situ.
If you want to find out more about this incredible site, visit:
www.mustfarm.com/
Thanks to Cambridge Archaeological Unit, Forterra, Historic England and University of Cambridge for making the production of these video's possible.
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They might also work well as a draw knife, which would be really useful for debarking and shaping bigger logs.
With their rarity in the UK, might not sickles (if not all bronze tools) have been prestige items, similar to Otzi's axe? Even the bronze spear heads could have marked status, or a fealty relationship as well as serving their more obvious purposes.
Is the idea that the heads of the grains being bent means the sickles were not well designed for harvesting, and therefore might have been multipurpose? If so, isn't it possible that the sickles may have just gotten dull with use? Or were there enough bent grains relative to cut ones to rule that out?
Why would a sickle be used on the head of the wheat? Wheat it cut at the base and gathered in shocks to dry for threshing, meaning that the evidence for sickle use would be on the straw. We have depictions of this in Mesopotamia and Egypt that this is how they gathered wheat much as we do today.
Absolutely the reflection i immediately had
Consulting with communities possessing different skillsets should be a useful if not necessary phase when analyzing anything that can be construed as a tool or weapon
A sickle that is not used as a sickle? HEMA nerd in me wonders was it a weapon?
Looks super fun to trim bushes with
Why did bronze age peoples in Britain use sickles with a socket in a vertical haft but the axes used basically remained the same configuration as Otzi the iceman's axe? Indeed going out their way to build a Celt construction with a wooden insert rather than copying their sickles but having an axe on the end?
First
short 🚌 🚍