Bronze Age is over!

And here you all thought it ended around 600BC, if not earlier. Nah. The real completion occurred in June 2009, when I finished sewing the sleeve on this quilt and took some final pics (not that good - I am continually amazed at what inconsistent results I get despite using photofloods and a camera that is many megapixels smarter than I am). I'm calling it "Bronze Age Settlement With Artifacts."

Here's a closer look at some of the artifacts:



A hoard of silver coins, a Goddess figure, 2 plates - one terracotta, the other polychrome - reconstructed from potshards.











Another look at the polychrome plate, and two bronze spear heads. They've got a lovely greenish patina on them; too bad it didn't show up in the pictures.





A feast of anachronisms. The little fat Venus figure is Neolithic, but I like her so much that I decided this style lasted into the Bronze Age. See the patina on her? Then there's the ax head in the upper right, which came out looking more like iron than bronze; well, my husband says that some bronze age metal workers accidentally made tools and weapons that were a funny color and harder than they expected, due to "impurities" in the ore. Let's chalk this one up to impurities and not assume my people were so far ahead of their time that they had an iron forge in the woods.



And finally, a look at the outermost building, where the messy work was done, and where two bone implements for scraping leather hides were found, along with the remains of a terracotta plate. The wealth of this household (as evidenced by the silver hoard) probably didn't make it back to this outbuilding where the poorest farm laborers lived.