Note 2224 — STONEHENGE

Professor Gowland (Archaeologia, lviii, 1902, p. 85) holds that the discovery of the ‘incense-cup’ proves nothing, ‘as the nature of the ground and the conditions under which it was found are not given.... In Excavation VI’, he dryly remarks, ‘I dug up a modern preserved meat tin from a much lower layer than the stone implements in the neighbouring undisturbed ground.’ Dr. Evans, however, who apparently anticipated this objection, holds (Archaeol. Review, ii, 1889, p. 322), that if the cup had not been originally deposited in the place where it was found, it would have been broken. I cannot find any proof that the so-called incense-cup was an incense-cup, in the sense in which archaeologists use the term, at all. It is described by John Webb (A Vindication of Stone Heng Restored, 1665, pp. 127-8) as ‘the Cover highly probable of a Thuribulum.... It was of Stone, light in comparison, the more by being hollow, and extream hard.’ Now incense-cups were not made of stone (though fragments of stone were often mixed with the clay of which they were baked), and they hardly ever had covers (Archaeologia, xliii, 1871, p. 383; W. Greenwell, Brit. Barrows, p. 164, note; Guide to the Ant. of the Bronze Age [Brit. Museum], pp. 61-3). The word ‘Stone’ may have been used incorrectly; but if the ‘Thuribulum’ was really stone, it was perhaps of late date. Cf. Sir J. Evans’s Anc. Stone Implements, 1897, p. 471.