Letchworth Museum had a long-standing connection with archaeology. One of its curators, John Moss-Eccardt, was an archaeologist who conducted excavations at Blackhorse Road in the Garden City between 1958 and 1974. He became something of a local celebrity as a result. His circle of friends included Richard Wiggs (1929-2001), who is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the campaign against the development of Concorde, the supersonic aeroplane.
Early in 1967, Richard loaned two prehistoric axeheads to the museum. Both supposedly came from the Welwyn Garden City area, although neither had a precise findspot. The original documentation did not mention where they were from, but a later entry in the museum register, from 1975, did provide vague locations. One was a looped and socketed copper alloy axehead dating from the thirteenth century BC, from Panshanger; the other was the stone axehead we’re going to try to find out more about. The Museum Service returned them to Richard’s family in 2013 as their findspots fall outside the district.
The stone axehead measures 157.4 mm along its long axis, is 69.9 mm wide at its broadest point and 37.9 mm thick. It weighs 622 g (a small part of the axehead has been cut away, as we shall see, so it was originally slightly heavier). It is a mostly greenish-black colour with many pale grey-green mottles. Three parallel dark bands run through the axehead at about 60° to the long axis. They show separate bedding planes in the original rock. The cutting edge is asymmetrical between top and bottom, with one side showing traces of re-grinding. There are also fine scratch marks counter-clockwise by about 5° to the long axis on the reground edge. These marks are most likely from using the axe for cutting wood, perhaps in felling trees.
The overall shape is roughly triangular. Mike Pitts’s analysis of polished stone axeheads, published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society in 1996, defined seven main axehead forms, based on size, dimensions and rock type. The example from Welwyn Garden City falls into his Cluster 5, axeheads with a much broader cutting edge than butt end, and curving sides. The different shapes that Mike Pitts identified were partly a response to working a variety of stone types; they do not seem to be an indication of date.
It was one of the first stone axeheads to have a thin slice removed for petrological analysis, which can indicate the rock source used. The curator at the time filled the hole left by the sliver taken from one edge with plaster-of-Paris, most of which had fallen out by the 2000s. The thin section showed that it belonged to a stone type known to prehistorians as Group I. By the 1970s, petrologists had identified thirty-four different stone types (with four of them further subdivided into two). The stone of Group I is known as uralitized gabbro, epidiorite or greenstone. Axeheads of Group I stone are commonest in southwest England, but are also found widely across the south and into Yorkshire. Early studies suggested that the outcrop used in making the axes was somewhere in west Cornwall. Although some experts, such as Peter Berridge, questioned the idea of a single outcrop, Mik Markham’s geochemical analyses showed that Mounts Bay is the most likely source.
The earliest axeheads from this source circulated only in southwest England until about 3150 BC, during the later Neolithic. After that, they occur more widely across England and South Wales. Outside west Cornwall, they are commonest in a band running from Dorset to the London area. A recent (2019) study by Peter Schauer and others used computer modelling of the distribution of polished axes from different sources to investigate how far that can be used to determine regionality in Neolithic Britain. They recognised seven zones (1 Cumbria and southern Scotland, 2 Wessex and south Wales, 3 North Wales, 4 East Anglia and southeast England, 5 Devon and Cornwall, and 6 the north Midlands and Yorkshire); Welwyn Garden City falls on the boundary between zones 2 and 4.
The Neolithic of this part of Hertfordshire is poorly known. Most finds of this date have come from the higher ground between river valleys, especially from the northern scarp of the Chiltern Hills and from the bottom of the gentler dipslope to the south. This may show that people were living and starting to farm the higher ground, where soils were thinner and easier to clear for agriculture as they never supported dense woodland. Late finds are dense in the north, especially around Baldock and Letchworth Garden City, but they hint that people were moving into the river valleys.
The axehead we are looking at comes from the lower ground, if its attribution to Welwyn Garden City is correct. Its owners would have been farmers who began clearing the slightly thicker woodland in the river valleys after about 3000 BC. In 1863, Henry Cowper described a polished axehead found on his estate at Panshanger, in the Mimram valley. The Portable Antiquities Scheme records another polished stone axehead near Stanborough Lakes, southwest of the Garden City (https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/62249), showing that farming communities were beginning to exploit the Lea valley at this time.
As earlier generations of prehistorians discovered that many polished stone tools came from sources a very long way from their findspot, they sought explanations. That axeheads rather than blanks travelled is shown by the lack of unfinished examples distant from the quarries. Some axeheads, deriving from continental Europe and Ireland, must have arrived in Britain by sea. As most are found close to their stone outcrops and drop off in number with distance, it was first proposed that they were traded by professional pedlars, even travelling ‘salesmen’! The distribution maps also suggested that there were secondary distribution centres. W A Cummins also suggested that some may have moved as gifts. Tim Darvill also wondered if some axe users might have travelled to the sources to buy them directly from the producers or even if the distribution showed patterns of seasonal migration.
During the 1990s, these views came under scrutiny and attack. Some rightly pointed out that ‘trade’ in Cummins’s terms is a relatively modern concept and that it is dangerous to project it back into the prehistoric past with assumptions of mercantilism and profitability. Surveys of source sites indicate that the scale of production was not large, the numbers of axehead finds representing long-term rather than intensive exploitation of the sources. It is also notable that a number of quarries – such as Great Langdale in Cumbria – are not easily accessible even though there are nearby places that would have been more convenient. Further critiques focused on earlier assumptions that producers at the different sources competed against each other and to what extent expanding patterns of distribution were a result of increased demand among consumers.
Schauer and his colleagues used computer-based spatial analysis on more than 18,000 provenanced axeheads for their 2019 paper. Their results show that concentrations of finds away from regions with quarries probably match areas of high population density. They also show that some types were more popular than others and travelled further from their sources. The two most widely distributed axehead types are of the west Cornish Group I, like the present example, and of the Great Langdale Group VI. Flint axeheads, on the other hand, rarely moved far beyond areas where flint nodules occur, perhaps because it was inherently more fragile.
They also point out that the findspot is the final place an axehead had travelled. It may have experienced many journeys between the quarry and there. Indeed, one of the critiques of the long-distance trade model focuses on the nature of pre-modern trade. It was very rare before the late Middle Ages for merchants to go on long journeys, taking products from their homeland to exchange for products in a distant port of trade.
In 1973, Thomas Beale used ethnographic data to examine different types of trade. He recognised that they form an additive sequence. The simplest is trickle or down-the-line trade, where goods are exchanged between neighbouring communities. Some goods will then be re-exchanged, gradually reaching more distant places. Slightly more complex, local redistributive or market-centred trade involves people from different communities meeting regularly at recognised centres to exchange goods. This type can grow into a regional organised trade, based on emporia, places to which people will travel sometimes long distances to exchange goods. The most complex type, long-distance organised or mercantile trade is what we are used to in the twenty-first century.
In the Neolithic, we are probably looking at local redistributive trade. There is good evidence for people meeting seasonally at special sites, such as causewayed enclosures, where they would engage in all sorts of activities, including exchange. This type of trade could have been informal, using barter, or based around gift-giving or ceremonial exchange. Details of this type are all but impossible to reconstruct from archaeological data. As the distribution of axehead finds does not match the regions defined by Peter Schauer and his colleagues, it seems less likely that we are looking at a pattern produced by gift exchange, as that tends to cover regionally organised communities.
The value of these axeheads is unknown, but as they were traded from place to place, they would have acquired value and stories. It is likely that people learnt something about their histories and places of origin. Perhaps, like early medieval swords, they had their own names and reputations. To their owners – even if ownership was merely temporary – they meant a great deal more than a simple tool for chopping down trees!
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
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