Shaping the Bronze Age

This application looks to trace the outlines of Bronze Age axes from southern England which describe their formal shape and style, allowing researchers to build more complex typological and chronological models. It asks you digitise the shape of bronze axes via your web browser. The resulting axe shapes can be used to establish stylistic and chronological groups in a formal, quantitative way (that help us better to date the Bronze Age and understand regional patterns of metal production, amongst many other benefits).

This particular application is a small pilot to see how well the process works on MicroPasts, using a combination of scanned drawings from the Bronze Age Index (that are on cards transcribed by MicroPasts contributors two years ago), plus further photographs from the British Museum's collection and Portable Antiquities Scheme. For each scanned card or photograph, we would like people to find the front-and side-views of the axe and digitise around their outline, before drawing some further simple lines across important 'landmarks' on each axe. These steps should take perhaps ten minutes per axe in total, and a tutorial is provided to help clarify the process. Thanks!

This project is on behalf of: