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The Bronze Age
When copper & bronze were first introduced across Europe it was accepted as being a flexible material & was welcomed by the native people as a new & wonderful thing.
At first casting methods & metal purity were crude leaving much to be desired but as time moved on people found new & better ways to produce artefacts of a much higher quality.
This in itself lead to the development of new tools & weapons which were much more effective than the flint implements which they had been used to, but at the same time contributed greatly to the demise of the use of flint in general, after all if your bronze implement became damaged or broken then you could simply trade it in for a new one & the smith would smelt the broken implements or scrap metal & produce new tools & weapons.
This was in effect one of the earliest examples of recycling, converting old back into new & classed as a new form of trade. Recently James recovered one of the best known examples to date of an early bronze age diminutive axe in perfect condition confirmed by Dr Stuart Needham at the British Museum in London as being of the Willerby culture & dating to 1900BC & one of only a handful found in the British Isles, the others being found in early bronze age burials at Bush barrow in Wiltshire also widely regarded as one of the most important bronze age burial sites in Britain.
This is strong evidence of a possible, previously unknown bronze age burial site in the Warburton area. Another highly valuable & important material to the bronze age culture in Britain was amber used for producing beads, jewellery and high status artefacts. It was often considered as being more valuable than gold, bronze tools were often exchanged for amber such was itís value, Recently James recovered a large piece of amber from his site which shows signs of being worked by hand & this has been sent to an amber expert at the Liverpool museum for analysis & is being compared with known bronze age amber samples from the Isle of Man. Amber is not native to Britain & was brought here on ancient trade routes from the Baltic regions. Below is a gallery of the bronze age finds made by James in the Warburton area & it will be added to as more artefacts are recovered from the fields which surround this ancient settlement
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