Gold hat
Bronze Age artefact
Gold hats (or golden hats) (German: Goldhüte, singular: Goldhut) are a very specific and rare type of archaeological artefact from Bronze Age Europe. So far, four such objects are known and formally classified as "cone-shaped gold hats of the Schifferstadt type". The objects are made of thin sheet gold and were attached externally to long conical and brimmed headdresses which were probably made of some organic material and served to stabilise the external gold leaf. The following conical gold hats are known:
Avanton Gold Cone, incomplete, found at Avanton near Poitiers in 1844, c. 1400 BC.
Golden Hat of Schifferstadt, found in 1835 at Schifferstadt near Speyer, c. 1400–1300 BC.
Golden Cone of Ezelsdorf-Buch, found near Ezelsdorf near Nuremberg in 1953, c. 1000–900 BC; the tallest known specimen at roughly 90 cm (35 in).
Berlin Gold Hat, found probably in Swabia or Switzerland, acquired by the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin, in 1996, c. 1000–800 BC.
The archaeological contexts of the cones are not very clear; for the Berlin specimen, the context is entirely unknown. At least two of the known examples (Berlin and Schifferstadt) appear to have been deliberately and carefully buried in antiquity.
Although none can be dated precisely, their technology suggests that they were probably made between 1400–800 BC.
Gallery
Cultural context
The hats are associated with the Bronze Age Tumulus culture and Urnfield culture. Their close similarities in symbolism and techniques of manufacture are testimony to a coherent Bronze Age culture over a wide-ranging territory in western and central Europe. A comparable golden pectoral was found at Mold, Flintshire, in northern Wales, which is of somewhat earlier date.
The cone-shaped gold hats of Schifferstadt type are assumed to be connected with a number of comparable cap or crown-shaped gold leaf objects from Ireland (Comerford Crown, discovered in 1692 and since lost) and the Atlantic coast of Spain (gold leaf crowns of Leiro and Axtroki), as well as various gold bowls (such as the Eberswalde Hoard), vessels, ornaments and diadems (such as the Velem diadem from Hungary) from across central and northern Europe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gold hat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.