File:Roman pendant (FindID 246061).jpg

English: A Late Iron Age/ Early Roman copper alloy figurine of a boar with a piercing through its back, and presumably intended as a pendant. It measures 40.24mm in length, stands 23.72mm high (to the tops of its ears) and is 16.70mm wide (from leg to leg). It weighs 27.9g.

The boar does not have a face as such, but does have a snout, oval in section (5.3x6.49mm) and c.11mm long. It is decorated at the end with a groove, running on a slight diagonal. Above this rise the two ears, one of which is slightly damaged. They project curving outwards and with a rounded point at the top (although this is missing on one).

Below the snout are the legs (roughly square in cross-section and 5-6mm), which have a curving profile viewed from the side at the front and a straight profile along the back of the legs. On the underside of each leg (c.4x4mm) is a deep groove to represent the trotter. A moulded projection to the front further emphasises this.

Behind, the body is roughly circular in section (9.16mm in diameter) and has a prominent triangular-sectioned spine (max.width c.4mm, min.width c.2mm) projecting c.6mm above. This is decorated along its top edge (c.2mm wide) with tiny transverse grooves (except above the drilled hole) and projects slightly beyond the body of the hog into a short and stubby tail.

Below this the back legs extend with wide haunches c.6-7mm wide which quickly narrow to much smaller trotters c.3x3mm. The back legs are much more curved than the front. The piercing has been drilled from either side to meet in the middle, and is through the spine at the centre of the boar’s length.

Sally Worrell, National Finds Adviser, comments: There are quite a number of boar figurines known from Sussex (12 examples in 2008). None have tusks and all represent caricatures (eg. SUSS-6F88D3 from Willingdon & Jevington, E.Sussex), unlike examples from further north which are more realistic (eg. LIN-2CFD83, from Rothwell, Lincolnshire). The figurines may have been placed in votive contexts, although all have been found as unstratified finds. There is the suggestion that the boar may have represented a local hunting cult in Sussex (Green 1983, 61). Also cf. an example from Woodendean, West Sussex, 32mm wide and 22mm high, in Green 1983.

100 BC - AD 100 in date.