The Burial
His grave had the greatest number of artifacts ever found in a British Bronze Age burial. Among those discovered were: Five funerary pots of the type associated with the "Beaker culture"; three tiny copper knives; 16 barbed flint arrowheads; a kit of flint-knapping and metalworking tools, including cushion stones that functioned as a kind of portable anvil and that suggests he was a coppersmith; and some boar's tusks. On his forearm was a black Stone wrist-guard. A similar red wrist-guard was by his knees. With the second wrist-guard was a shale belt ring and a pair of gold hair ornaments (the earliest gold objects ever found in England).
Research using oxygen isotope analysis in his tooth enamel suggests that the man may have originated from an alpine region of central Europe. An eroded hole in his jaw showed that in life he had suffered from an abscess, and his missing left kneecap suggests that he had an injury that left him with a painful lingering bone infection.
His skeleton is now on display at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum in Salisbury.
Read more about this topic: Amesbury Archer
Famous quotes containing the word burial:
“I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)