Illustrating the Amesbury Archer
A pint of prehistory
I mentioned in my lairy life update that I recently left my job doing the marketing for Butser Ancient Farm, which is sad because I have always loved working there. But on a happier note, part of that job also included all the in-house design work, and I’m hoping to continue doing some one-off creative projects for the farm on a freelance basis, which is great! It’s a lovely place to work and I’m keen to stay involved with such a unique and world-renowned archaeological project. If you haven’t yet been, there really is nowhere like it!
Today I thought I’d share one of the last projects I worked on, which was designing the reusable pint cups for our Beltain festival back in May. Beltain is the farm’s biggest event of the year, when a 30ft wicker man is burnt to the ground as an offering in the hope that it might lead to a fertile summer and abundant harvest. If you’re interested in learning more about the wicker man tradition (and whether or not people were really sacrificed inside), I’ve written a chapter about it in my book Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night (Bloomsbury, 2019).
This year’s wickerman was inspired by the Amesbury Archer, an early Bronze Age man whose grave was discovered in 2002, during housing development excavations near Stonehenge. The man was estimated to be between 35 and 45 years old when he died around 2300 BC, and his grave is one of the richest found from this era in Britain.
This is from the Salisbury Museum website:
His left kneecap was missing which would have caused him to have a bad limp. Isotope analyses of his teeth show that he grew up outside Britain, probably near the Alps.
His grave contained an unusually large number and variety of objects. They include five beaker pots, 18 arrowheads, two bracers (archer’s wristguards), four boars’ tusks, 122 flint tools, three copper knives, a pair of gold hair ornaments, and a cushion stone. The gold and copper metal objects are currently the oldest found in Britain.
Our wickerman sculptors were Mark and Rebecca Ford of Two Circles Design (a lovely pair of people), and they really committed to replicating as many of the Archer’s artefacts as they could for the final design. If you look at the photo of the wickerman above, you can spot one of the beaker pots, a necklace made of curved bones, a slate wristguard, gold hair tress, copper knife, and the bow and arrows tipped with flint arrowheads.
The Beltain pint cups are always themed around the wickerman design, and I loved bringing the Archer to life this year, particularly as I started archery last summer and have become absolutely obsessed - there’s a post on that coming soon. I particularly liked that little swirl of arrows turning into shooting stars. Very fun to do!
If you’d like to learn more about the Archer and how he was discovered, I recommend the following video from Butser YouTube, which was filmed during this year’s Beltain festival. It features my lovely colleague Therese, who is the Butser archaeologist, and Richard Osgood MBE, who is the founder of Operation Nightingale, a Ministry of Defence initiative that aids the recovery of injured military veterans through archaeological projects.
I also wrote the following post back in 2023, sharing some other creative projects I worked on during my first stint at Butser. I’ve been volunteering or working there for over 20 years now! Nobody ever leaves the farm…
