Jewellery, equine harness and weapons (hoard find)

The Museum of Prehistory and Early History owns the world’s largest collection of Bronze Age treasures originally concealed in the ground. These hoards can be interpreted in several different ways. Probably these were gifts intended to propitiate the powers held responsible for shaping human destiny. Social groups needed communal rites to hold them together, and in the Bronze Age the depositing of valuable items represented such a ritual. These hoards could also have been places of safe concealment in times of war, traders’ stores, or preparations for the next world. However, their ritual nature is suggested by the fact that so many hoards were never reclaimed, or were placed in locations from which they could not be recovered, and also by the fact that their composition varies over this thousand-year epoch. Who were the intended recipients of these sacrifices? [...] Perhaps the contents of each hoard indicates its intended recipient – with, for instance, weapons [...] offered to a god of war.