August 10th, 2010 by Frances McIntosh

Maceheads are items which are rarely found in Britain, the PAS database has less than 15 recorded. There is a focus in central England (apparently Lincs. in particular), though a number exist close to coasts and waterways. It is thought they originated as weapons in Scandinavia.

Maceheads are copper alloy items usually shafted onto wooden poles.  Some exampels have been found with remnants of the shaft still inside the copper alloy head. However the size of some of them excludes their use as a weapon and so their exact use remains unclear.

Adam Daubney, the Lincolnshire FLO has written an extremely interesting paper which will be published soon on these items (forthcoming in 10 years of discovery PAS volume, to be published by British Archaeological Reports). In this paper he suggests an alternative use for mace heads,  as part of religious costume.

An example found in Cleveland, recorded as DUR-5ACBE0 on the database seems to be slightly out of the expected distribution area, however it does fit what Adam has noted with the costal distribution as was found less than 5 miles from the North East coast. Its form is the usual hollow cylinder of copper alloy, with three rows, each of four pyramid-shaped spikes at the top of the mace. Each of the rows is offset 90 degrees from the adjacent row. As is usual for these maceheads, the upper and lower rows are of half-pyramid-shaped spikes, while those on the central row are of full pyramid shape.

The finder of this item has kindly agreed to allow us to test the macehead to find out the alloy composition. This testing will take place either at Cardiff or the British Museum and will be non-destructive but will provide extremely useful information about this enigmatic group of objects. I will update you when we get the results in from this testing. If you are interested in this type of object do look on the PAS database for further examples and look out for the publication by Adam on these.

Tags: North East find
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