Birdlip Mirror
The Birdlip Mirror is an intricately decorated ornamented bronze mirror from the late-Iron Age. It was found in 1879 near Birdlip, Gloucestershire in England, and is dated to. It has a cast handle and a kidney-shaped mirror plate which is highly polished on its front to achieve reflectivity. The reverse contains intricate engraved and chased curvilinear patterns in the Insular La Tène style.
It was discovered alongside a silver gilt brooch, an amber necklace, and two bowls and bracelets made of bronze and silver. The objects were found next to the skeletons of a woman in her mid-30s—presumed to be its then and final owner— who had been buried alongside two men. It is believed that the woman was buried c. 50 AD. The bodies and high-quality artefacts are collectively known as the "Birdlip Grave Group".
The Birdlip Grave Group objects are now in the collection of the Museum of Gloucester.
The Birdlip Grave Group
The site was discovered in 1879 by the quarryman Joseph Barnfield, while digging for stone at Barrow Wake, close to the road between Birdlip and Crickley at the feet of the Cotswold Hills. It consisted of the skeletal remains of two males in plots on either side of an adult female who had been buried with several high-value metal grave goods. The bodies had been placed in a line with their feet pointing south and their heads toward the east. The mirror was found alongside the woman. A bronze bowl had been placed over her face, while the face of one of the males was covered by a metal-rimmed object resembling a bucket. No other objects were found around the male skeletons. The bodies were enclosed in cists with the slabs placed on edge and covered by whitewashed limestone flags.The woman's grave contained several other high-quality pieces of jewellery that indicate female ownership. These include bracelets made of bronze and silver, a multi-piece amber necklace, a silver-gilt brooch and four bronze rings. The quality of these objects strongly suggests that the female was of high status. Also found was a smaller bowl and a bronze knife handle with a terminal shaped as a bull's head.
Due to the dating of the find and the lack of contemporary record-keeping, there is limited contextual information surrounding the burials; some of the accounts of its rediscovery, including the exact location, are conflicting. Shortly after, a contemporary male body was found in a shallow grave about 18 meters away from the main site. He had been buried with an iron sword and the badly corroded remnants of a bronze bucket.
The site's prominent location overlooking the Severn Valley may originally have been under a large burial mound, as the findspot's name "Barrow Wake" suggests.
The woman is estimated to have been around 35 years old at death. She has not been identified, although several theories as to her status have been proposed by both archaeologists and local and popular historians. The most fanciful is that she was Boudica, queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe, who led a failed uprising against the conquering forces of the Roman Empire c. AD 60. However no conclusive evidence has been found to support this claim. A reconstruction of her face was created by the Museum of Gloucester in the early 21st century.
Description
The mirror is made from enamelled bronze and is formed from three pieces: the mirror plate, the cast handle and the tubular binding strip around the mirror's edge.Mirror plate
The reverse of the mirror is decorated with some 77 individual intricate engraved and chased curvilinear patterns in the La Tène style, which are filled in with basket hatching.The pattern's outlines were engraved twice, initially with a fine round-nosed graver before being reworked more deeply with a common graver.
Handle
The handle contains a slot used to fix it to the mirror plate. It is large and complex compared to other surviving Iron Age mirrors. It is made from cast bronze and decorated with red glass enamel inlay.The terminal ring contains a separate inner circular area, but it appears to have been repaired or replaced at some point. This is deduced from the fact that some of the metal at its top has been cut away, and the join of the terminal to the inner circular area has been precisely fitted into this gap. Based on this, the archaeologist Jody Joy has speculated that the inner circle is a later addition, and thus "a period of time elapsed between the mirror's manufacture and deposition."