File:Anglo Saxon keystone garnet disc brooch (FindID 123985).jpg

English: Incomplete Early Early-Medieval gilded copper alloy keystone garnet disc brooch, the 'Kentish disc' type, missing its pin. It is 30.8mm in diameter, 2mm thick and weighs 8.82g.
The edge has a triple-rim, consisting of three concentric ribs flanking the outside edge. The second of these is a series of conjoined circular blobs.
At the centre of the brooch is a c.3mm high circular cell 8.5mm in diameter (internal 4.9mm), now empty but presumably originally set with garnet. Surrounding this and before the concentric circles are three equally spaced square/ trapezoidal cells roughly 6/5mm x 5mm. Two of these hold (damaged) garnets; one is empty. The garnets would have been held in place with a cement. Dr Helen Geake writes "Suggested recipes (for the cement) include sand/eggwhite, ground-up roasted sea shells slaked with water, animal glue and ground chalk, or wax mixtures".
In the three panels between these cells is a Style I 'half face' design. Dr Geake comments "I think that the human half-heads are perhaps most like the faces on Class A or B button brooches. The art is hard to decipher but it doesn't look anything like the brooches in Avent's 1975 corpus. If you hold the brooch so that one Style I panel is at the top and two are at the bottom, the one in the bottom right (as you look at it) is half a face a bit like the faces on button brooches. The clearest one to look at is the one which has the pin bar lug behind. It has an eye and eyebrow, with a big double-strand curved cheek around the eye, which ends in the upper strand being turned downwards to make a little nose. There's a blob either above the nose or part of the nose too. Then below is half a mouth - quite smiley on this clearest face but more grumpy on the others. The Style I is similar also in some ways to the designs shown in David Leigh's article on 'ambiguity' in Style I art - Antiquities Journal 64, 1984, p. 34 onwards. Leigh's examples are from Kentish square-headed brooches, but the element that is the 'feather' head-dress on these becomes the mouth on this brooch. "The 'ambiguity' comes from the fact that the faces are very hard to see, and in most of his examples they can be turned through 90 degrees to make profile animal faces, although I can't get the ones on this brooch to do this - unless the long double curving element is a body, the 'mouth' is a limb and the eye is some kind of bizarre head, but then I can't explain the little turn on the 'body' which forms the nose in the human form".
The reverse of the brooch is flat with a slightly damaged curl on the catchplate and a large amount of iron staining around the lug. Dr Andrew Richardson, Kent FLO, comments "This general brooch type originates in Kent in the 2nd quarter of the 6th century, and eventually develops into the composite disc brooches of the 7th. However, I don't recognise this exact type either. It is gilded copper alloy, in contrast with most Kentish disc brooches which are gilded silver. This, combined with the rather basic rim form (which looks to be a simple beaded border without any inlay) and the slightly dodgy attempt at Style I crouching animals (although I take Helen's point about the similarity with Button brooch faces) leads me to think that this is a copy rather than a product of the main east Kentish workshop. If this is the case then I'd say it is a copy of a Class 2 brooch. I reckon on Class 2 brooches being manufactured and worn between circa 530-580/90 although this example looks to be based on one of the earlier class 2 brooches, so manufacture between circa 530-560/70 might be more likely".
This brooch being copper alloy suggests it is a local copy. There is also some question over the garnet, which where damaged looks rather like glass. Glass was used on Early-Medieval brooches in place of garnet.