Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/460

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432
EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN.
[CHAP. XII.

hundred cart-loads of stones a skeleton was discovered laid at full length, wearing a corselet of beautifully-wrought gold, Figs. 159, 160, which had been placed on a lining of bronze.

Figs. 159, 160.—Golden Corselet, Mold, North Wales.

Close by were upwards of three hundred amber beads as well as traces of corroded iron. The corselet is formed of a thin plate of gold, three feet seven inches long, eight inches wide in the centre, and weighing seventeen ounces, and is ornamented in repoussé with nail-head and dotted-line pattern. It is a work of Etruskan art, as we shall see in the next chapter, and not of local manufacture, like the breastplates of great value stated by Polybius to have been made and worn by the natives of Gaul[1] An urn full of ashes, about three yards off, may have belonged to an interment of the same

  1. ii. c. 11.