Amesbury Archer

Amesbury Archer

Displayed in the Salisbury Museum
Discovered	May 2002, Amesbury
Present location	Salisbury Museum

The Amesbury Archer is an early Bronze Age man whose grave was discovered during excavations at the site of a new housing development (grid reference SU16324043) in Amesbury near Stonehenge. The grave was uncovered in May 2002, and the man is believed to date from about 2300 BC. He is nicknamed "the Archer" because of the many arrowheads that were among the artefacts buried with him. The calibrated radiocarbon dates for his grave and dating of Stonehenge suggest the sarsens and trilithons at Stonehenge may have been raised by the time he was born, although a new bluestone circle may have been raised at the same time as his birth.

The Archer's grave yielded the greatest number of artefacts ever found in a Bronze Age burial in Britain. Among those discovered were: five funerary pots of the type associated with the Beaker culture; three tiny copper knives; sixteen barbed flint arrowheads; a kit of flint-knapping and metalworking tools, including cushion stones that functioned as a kind of portable anvil and that suggest he was a coppersmith; and some boar's tusks. On his forearm was a black stone wrist-guard. A similar red wrist-guard was by his knees. With the second wrist-guard was a shale belt ring and a pair of gold hair ornaments, the earliest gold objects ever found in England.

Research using oxygen isotope analysis in the Archer's tooth enamel has suggested that he may have originated from an alpine region of central Europe. An eroded hole in his jaw showed that in life he had suffered from an abscess, and his missing left kneecap suggests that he had an injury that left him with a painful lingering bone infection.