An Egg-shaped Mace-head

Extract

Perforated implements made of stone remarkable for its beauty or rareness are reasonably regarded as mace-heads. Many such show no sign of having been used as tools for ordinary purposes, but even where such signs are present, the use of these objects as batons of command is not thereby precluded; in some cases they may have been used as hammers at a later date.

The object of this note is a beautiful specimen of an egg-shaped mace-head, or hammer head, found in the neighbourhood of Friston (Sussex) by the late Major Maitland, and presented to the Sussex Archaeological Society by his son. It is made of rich, deep reddish-brown jasper, or similar silicified rock, with white veins of quartz. In length it is 2·6 in. (66 mm.), in greatest width 2 in. (50 mm.), and in greatest thickness 1·75 in. (45 mm.); its weight is 6 9/16 oz. (Av.). The perforation was worked from both sides and is nearly cylindrical, being 0·8 in. (20 mm.) in diameter on each surface, but 0·66 in. (17 mm.) through nearly all its length; it is not perfectly true, the walls being slightly concave longitudinally towards the thicker end of the implement and convex towards the narrower; this surface is very smooth and polished. That the implement was shaped by hand, and is not an adapted water-worn pebble, is shown by the presence here and there of facets of tooling which have been smoothed down and largely obliterated by subsequent grinding; there is no deliberate polishing of the surface. Whatever the purpose for which it was originally made, whether as a sign of authority or as a tool, the flattened and battered base of the implement shows it to have been freely used as a hammer at some period.