Publisher's Synopsis
This publication comprises a complete inventory of the Ashmolean Museum's holdings of metalwork in gold, silver, copper-alloy and lead, dating from the early Anglo-Saxon period (5th-7th centuries AD). Each of the almost 1200 items are described and illustrated, and chemical analyses are given for numerous examples. Many individually important pieces are included, such as the well-known Amherst and Monkton composite brooches, the Ixworth cross and the Tostock buckle, all of gold embellished with garnets, as well as a range of everyday ornaments, dress-fittings and domestic items.;As one of the most important corpuses of Anglo-Saxon material, the Ashmolean collections have an added dimension to their interest in that they have been accumulated over the entire period during which the discipline of Anglo-Saxon archaeology has evolved, from the Reverend James Douglas's activities in Kent in the 1780s, through the work of J.Y. Akerman, Stephen Stone, William Wylie and George Rolleston in the 1850s and 1860s, to the period of the keepership of E.T. Leeds during which much of his fundamental work on the period took place and beyond to recent large-scale excavations in the 1980s.
