File:A rare 'skeuomorphed' Bronze Age socketed axe (FindID 137472).jpg

English: A rare, almost complete, cast copper alloy looped and socketed Late Bronze Age axe. The axe is wedge-shaped in profile. The moulded mouth of the axe is missing,the damage extending down onto the body on one side of the axe, but the continuing socket is sub square in profile. The body of the axe is faceted, being hexagonal in section, wider across the top and bottom than the sides giving it a ‘squashed’ appearance (though it is not squashed in reality). The body of the axe is tongue shaped in plan, in that it tapers and ends on each face of the blade with a slightly raised moulded curved end. The integral blade of the axe seemingly expands from the side of the body just behind the curved ends. If the body and blade were separate entities, it is as if the blade was wedged between a split in the body.

The blade is fan shaped. The cutting edge is intact, except where damage has created broad shallow nicks along the blade in two places. One blade tip is intact, the other missing due to one of the shallow nicks. Casting seams are clearly visible on both sides of the axe, and on the loop. The loop is semi-circular with a semicircular perforation. It extends from below where the mouth was and is 23.58mm long. Most of the original surface of the axe survives with a dark green patina. There are patches of damage and abrasion and these show as bright or light green. The axe is undecorated. Chipped and broken edges are not fresh but not worn, suggesting damage occurred in the more recent past. The axe is 107.4mm long and 24.88mm at the thickest point. The axe is 30.36mm wide across the body and 55.02mm from tip to tip across the remains of the cutting edge. The axe weighs 189.27g.

This highly unusual axe was shown to Dr Stuart Needham at the British Museum. Dr Needham did not recognise it as a known foreign type and suggested that even if it was, it would not be of a common type. He suggests rather that it is a rare native innovation. He explains that the axe is a skeuomorph, the long tongue-like body mimicking the shaped end of a wooden haft gripping a flat, rather spatulate blade. A similar process of skeuomorphism may be seen in an adze from Barrow Gurney, Somerset (S. Pearce 1983, Bronze Age metalwork of south-western Britain, BAR 120, cat no 566). That example has a flat collar moulding suggesting an early style of socketed implement (Taunton-Penard). Unfortunately the example recorded here has lost its mouth, but Dr Needham suggests that the faceted body indicates the axe is of a date, most probably the Ewart Park phase of the late Bronze Age c.1000-800 BC. BC (Needham et al. 1998, Archaeological Journal, 154, pages 93-8).