Early Anglo-Saxon Buckets: A Corpus of Alloy and Iron-Bound, Stave-Built Vessels (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph)

Anglo-Saxon buckets are frequent finds in 5th- to 7th-century Anglo-Saxon graves. They are constructed of wooden staves and copper-alloy or iron bindings; some of them are no more than mug-sized, others 20 cm or more in diameter. Elaborate decorative elements on some buckets and many of the grave contexts suggest that these buckets were status goods rather than every-day household equipment. Jean Mary Cook began collecting information on Anglo-Saxon buckets in the 1950s. This posthumously published corpus comprises 339 entries on complete buckets, bucket mounts and objects erroneously published as buckets, many of them based on first-hand examination, with information on their archaeological context. The detailed information in the illustrated monograph is accompanied by a website that enables the reader to search Jean Cooks database for certain aspects of bucket construction and design.