A HISTORY OF SUSSEX drilled with a hole for suspension, and a perforated stone axe with one cutting edge and one slightly blunted end. A sepulchral mound of earth, or barrow had been thrown up over the interment, and the coffin was found nine feet below the surface of that mound. It is unfortunate that no very precise notes or photographs were taken when the discovery was made, but the objects found have been carefully preserved and are now in the Brighton Borough Museum. The discovery is one of the most important ever made in the county, and it is of special value as showing the association of objects of different characters in one recep- tacle. Had they been found in or near one spot merely, the juxtaposition might have been considered the result of chance or accident. The amber cup, which is probably unique, in this country at any rate, has been shaped with great pains and some skill. Its capacity is rather more than half a pint. It is 3I in. in external diameter, 2| in. high, and about yL of an inch thick. The regularity of form and of the parallel lines running round as an ornament on the outside, and the general smoothness of the surface are points which clearly indicate that the vessel was shaped, at least in part, on the lathe. Whether it was actually produced in this country or imported is uncertain, but a good many vessels turned in Kimmeridge shale and probably of Bronze Age, or Prehistoric Iron Age, workmanship have been found in Britain, and they point pretty clearly to native manufacture and the use of the lathe prior to the Roman period. The occurrence of a perforated stone axe-head in a Bronze Age burial, and associated with a bronze knife-dagger, is also important. It has, of course, long been recognized that the highly-finished and per- forated axe-heads and hammer-heads of stone, with which one is familiar in various collections in Britain, must have considerably overlapped the age of metal ; but it has remained for a recent writer * to point out the numerous instances in which such forms of stone implements have been found in connection with Bronze Age sepulchral deposits. Yorkshire, Wiltshire and Derbyshire seem to have furnished the largest numbers of such discoveries. The cult of the axe was pretty generally diffused among the Neolithic and Bronze Age races. In Brittany and Denmark stone axes are more frequently associated with Stone Age burials, but in Great Britain they are more often found with those of the Bronze Age. Mr. J. Romilly Allen suggests three reasons why stone axes should be so often found with burials, namely, (i) that they were objects prized by the deceased during his lifetime ; (2) that he would require weapons in a future state of existence ; and (3) that the axe was a symbol associated with the worship of some deity. To whatever reason the presence of the perforated axe in the Hove burial may be attributed, it can hardly be questioned that the grave marked the resting-place of a personage of considerable consequence, whilst the presence of a bronze knife-dagger ^ Mr. J. Romilly Allen, F.S.A., ' Note on a perforated stone axe-hammer found in Pembrokeshire,' in Arch. Cambr. (ser. 6), iii. 224-38. A list of such objects found in barrows in Great Britain is given in Mr. Allen's paper. 318
