- Chapter Twenty-One -
Key:
Iron daggers and bronze cordoned buckets with swing-handles. Daggers with composite
spindle-shaped handgrip (as from Mortlake and Hallstatt grave 555). Other relevant
broad-bladed daggers: with bi-cone ornaments: on sheaths; on pommel. Cordoned
swing-handle buckets, type as from Weybridge (Brooklands, Surrey) and Kurd, Hungary
(after Stjernquist, with additions). Cordoned buckets of closely related variant types. L,
London (Mortlake); W, Weybridge (Surrey); Ha, Hallstatt, Austria. The concentrations of
black in the Swabian area of the Upper Danube suggest the production area of daggers
with these features. Large spot indicate numerous buckets.
Figure 21.5 Map showing distribution of iron daggers across Europe, late seventh-third cen-
turies Be. Some of these daggers had been carried great distances, partly through the custom
of prestige gift-exchange. Gope 1983 with additions.)
This weapon from the Thames had, however, been carefully re-sheathed in the
distinctive British manner (retaining just the top bar of the old sheath), with twin-
loop suspension and fold-over bronze strips Gope 1961: pI. XVII), as though handed
on as a family possession, perhaps a mark of chieftaincy, a symbol of rank and
perhaps of territorial domain. In Britain we have no cemeteries of this age, and it
is quite possible that elite body-disposal might have been in some ways riverine
Gope 1961 : 320-5; Bradley 1990; Torbriigge 1972; Cunliffe 1974: 269).
This dagger at once suggests that the social standing of some chiefs from the
Thames valley lands of the seventh-sixth centuries Be would have been acceptable
among the higher rankings of the Hallstatt community (e.g. Figure 2I.4b, Sm3
(H2», and that it was realized through a convention of distant prestige gift-exchange