{"it":{"id":"ART022","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Mold gold cape","place":"London","date":"c. 1900-1600 BC","mat":"sheet gold","dims":"[see museum]","loc":"British Museum 1836,0902.1","acc":"British Museum 1836,0902.1","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[153,154],"lat":51.519,"lon":-0.127,"tags":[],"sum":"In 1833 workmen quarrying stone from a burial mound at Mold, in north Wales, found a crushed sheet of gold around a skeleton in a stone-lined grave. The mound was called Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Fairies' or Goblins' Hill. With the body were strips of bronze and amber beads, of which only one reached a museum.\n\nThe gold was a cape, beaten from a single ingot around 1900 to 1600 BC, in the Early Bronze Age. It weighs 560 g and is 235 mm high. The British Museum, which holds it, gathered its fragments over more than a century, from 1836 to 1972, and shows it in Room 51.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the skill. Beating one ingot into a seamless, decorated shape that fits a human body, without splitting the metal, took great skill. Rows of perforations along the edges suggest it was once fixed to a lining, perhaps of leather.\n\nThe museum's reading is that the cape was ceremonial. It would have pinned the wearer's upper arms, so it was not for work or war, and it may have marked religious authority.\n\nWho in Bronze Age Wales held enough power to be buried in gold?","why":"A cape beaten from one gold ingot in Bronze Age Wales was found crushed around a skeleton.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Read the British Museum's construction study.","rel":["ART023"],"hook":"Workmen found a gold cape crushed around a skeleton in a Welsh mound in 1833."},"S":{"153":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_gold_cape"],"154":["www.britishmuseum.org","https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1836-0902-1"]},"rec":{"id":"ART022","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"find_circumstances","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"—","mainstream_reading":"Ceremonial garment","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"","find_circumstances":"","claimant":"","status":"","dimensions":"[see museum]","material":"sheet gold","date":"c. 1900-1600 BC","culture":"British Bronze Age","museum_accession":"British Museum 1836,0902.1","b":"V","s":[]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0540","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_gold_cape"},{"id":"S0750","t":"www.britishmuseum.org","u":"https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1836-0902-1"}],"qs":["Who in Bronze Age Wales held enough power to be buried in gold?","A garment that stops the arms moving: what does that say about its wearer?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/The_Mold_cape.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mold_cape.jpg","title":"The Mold cape.jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Mark Ramsay","cap":"Mold cape on display at the British Museum."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/MoldCape_2012.JPG/1280px-MoldCape_2012.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MoldCape_2012.JPG","title":"MoldCape 2012.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Geni","cap":"The en:Mold cape at the en:British Museum."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Mold_cape_1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mold_cape_1.jpg","title":"Mold cape 1.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"David Monniaux","cap":"The Mold gold cape. Bronze Age, c. 1900-1600 BC. From Mold, Flintshire, North Wales. British Museum."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Mold_cape_detail.jpg/1280px-Mold_cape_detail.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mold_cape_detail.jpg","title":"Mold cape detail.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Unknown","cap":"Detail of Mold cape in the British Museum, showing tool marks."}],"sum":"In 1833, on the edge of the town of Mold in north-east Wales, a gang of workmen were digging into an old mound for stone. Local people called it Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Hill of the Goblins, or of the Fairies. Inside it the men broke into a rough grave lined with stone. In the grave lay a skeleton, already crumbling. And wrapped around the bones of its shoulders, crushed flat by the weight of some three and a half thousand years, was a sheet of gold.\n\nWhat they had found, though no one could see it at the time, was a garment unlike anything else known from prehistoric Europe. Today it is called the Mold gold cape, and it is one of the treasures of the British Museum.\n\nIt is easiest to imagine by putting it on. The cape is a short, rounded collar of solid gold that would have sat over the shoulders, the upper arms and the upper chest, higher at the back and lower at the front. It is 45.8 centimetres wide and 235 millimetres high, and it weighs 560 grams, a little over a pound of gold. It was made for someone of very slight build, perhaps a teenager. And almost every square centimetre of its surface is worked. Rows of ribs and raised bosses, pushed out from behind in a technique called repoussé, run around it in bands, with lines of small domes, lens-shaped bumps and tiny pyramids, edged with fine punched dots. Scholars have suggested the pattern imitates strings of beads, or the folds of cloth. Very little plain gold is left anywhere.\n\nIt was made between about 1900 and 1600 BC, in the Early Bronze Age, and here the craft becomes astonishing. The whole cape was beaten from a single ingot of gold. Think about what that means. A lump of metal had to be hammered thinner and thinner, and coaxed into a curved shape that fits a human body, without a seam and without splitting, and then decorated over nearly its whole surface. It would have taken great time and great skill, and a single mistake could have torn it.\n\nThe grave held more than the cape. There were remains of coarse cloth, and 16 fragments of sheet bronze that probably formed a backing, with the gold riveted to it in places. There were two gold \"straps\", and a second, smaller object in the same embossed style. Along the cape's edges runs a line of perforations, which suggests it was once stitched to a lining, perhaps of leather. And there were amber beads, perhaps two to three hundred of them, once set in rows on the cape. Only one survives. Not far from the grave the workmen found an urn holding a great deal of burnt bone and ash.\n\nWhat happened next is a small story about what people do when gold appears. The fragile cape broke apart as it was lifted, and the pieces were scattered among various people. The British Museum acquired most of it in 1836, but fragments went on surfacing for well over a century, the last of them in 1972, and were reunited one by one. For a time the reassembled object was not even recognised for what it was: it was mistaken for the chest ornament of a horse. Only careful study and restoration revealed its real shape, a cape for a human being. Even now, its home is argued over. Welsh politicians have called repeatedly, in 2002, 2011 and 2018, for it to return to a museum in north Wales, and in 2013 it came back on loan. A small fragment remains on display in Mold.\n\nWho wore it? The bones were too fragmentary to say whether the person was a man or a woman, though by comparison with similar graves of the period, the objects buried with them are thought more likely to belong to a woman. The cape shows signs of wear, so it was not made only for the grave. It was worn in life.\n\nThe mainstream reading follows from the shape. Because the cape reaches so far down the upper body, it would have pinned the wearer's upper arms to their sides, leaving only the forearms free. Nobody could work, fight or ride in it. It must have been ceremonial. The museum suggests it marked religious authority, and other scholars have called it a Bronze Age equivalent, perhaps, of a priest's vestment, the sign of a person of spiritual or worldly power. The wealth behind it is a clue too. Some scholars link its makers and owners to the copper mine on the Great Orme in north Wales, the largest copper mine in north-west Europe at that time. Metal was power, and whoever controlled the mine could afford to bury a pound of gold.\n\nYet the cape refuses to fit neatly anywhere. Both its form and its design are unparalleled. It rivals the richest gold of Bronze Age Wessex, but its patterns are different. Some of its motifs echo metalwork from eastern France and from Scotland, so its makers drew on ideas that travelled across Europe, yet nothing else like it has ever been found. It is also the last great piece of its kind: after it, the taste for thin sheet gold in the British Isles fades, and goldsmiths turn to solid bracelets, torcs and rings. The cape stands at the end of a tradition we barely know.\n\nAnd there is the person inside it. A young, slightly built individual, buried in a stone box under a mound, wearing a garment that held their arms still and made them glitter in the light, covered in hundreds of amber beads. Whatever that person did while wearing it, it was not ordinary work. It was something done before others, something that required the body to be held still and the gold to be seen.\n\nThe people who built the mound left no words. Long afterwards, the people who lived around it gave the hill a name of their own: the place of goblins, of fairies, of the other folk.\n\nWhat did the people of Bronze Age Wales believe their young wearer of gold could speak to, and why, thousands of years later, did the hill still carry a name of goblins and fairies when the workmen came to dig?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1900 BC","h":"Solid sheet-gold cape from the British Bronze Age","s":[243]},{"v":"c. 1900-1600 BC","h":"Date","s":[244]},{"v":"[see museum]","h":"Recorded dimensions","s":[244]},{"v":"Sheet gold","h":"Made of","s":[244]}],"hs":{"243":["Wikipedia: Mold gold cape (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_gold_cape"],"244":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_gold_cape"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/ART022.webp","w":1000,"h":667,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/The_Mold_cape.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}