The Lavant drum is small cylindrical
Neolithic chalk object excavated in 1993. It is similar to the
Folkton drums
The Folkton Drums are a very rare set of three decorated chalk objects in the shape of drums or solid cylinders dating from the Neolithic period. Found in a child's grave near the village of Folkton in northern England, they are now on loan to ...
, discovered over a century earlier and the
Burton Agnes drum
The Burton Agnes drum is a carved chalk cylinder dated from 3005 to 2890 BC which was found in 2015 near Burton Agnes, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The British Museum has described it as "the most important piece of prehistoric art to ...
. Unlike the Folkton drums, the Lavant drum is undecorated; however, it may be that earlier markings have been worn away.
The drum was associated with a
sherd
In archaeology, a sherd, or more precisely, potsherd, is commonly a historic or prehistoric fragment of pottery, although the term is occasionally used to refer to fragments of stone and glass vessels, as well.
Occasionally, a piece of broken p ...
of
Mortlake ware
Peterborough ware is a decorated pottery style of the early to middle Neolithic. Named after the region of Middlesex and East Anglia, England where the style was first discovered, it is known for the impressed pits made by bone or wood implement ...
, which implies a Middle Neolithic date.
It is currently held at
The Novium museum in
Chichester.
Anne Teather, Andrew Chamberlain and
Mike Parker Pearson have recently proposed that the Folkton and Lavant drums were tools to measure cord to standard lengths which were used in the construction of monuments such as
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around high, wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connectin ...
and the timber circle at
Durrington Walls. The circumference of each of the drums corresponds to a subdivision of 10 Neolithic 'long feet'. Chamberlain and Parker Pearson propose that the Neolithic long foot is equivalent to 1.056 modern feet or 0.3219 meters. The Lavant drum's circumference of 361.3mm corresponds to 1.1225 long feet or 1/9 of ten long feet.
The drum was discovered in 1993 as part of the excavation of Chalk Pit Lane,
Lavant Lavant may refer to:
*Lavant, Tyrol, Austria, a municipality
*Lavant, West Sussex, a civil parish
** Lavant railway station
**Lavant (ward)
*River Lavant, West Sussex, the winterbourne after which the village is named
*Lavant (river), Carinthia, Au ...
,
West Sussex. The excavation was not published due to the insolvency of Southern Archaeology, who took over the Chichester and District Archaeology Unit which carried out the original excavation. It was identified as being similar to the Folkton drum in 2005 by Anne Teather.
References
{{Reflist
Archaeological artifacts
Neolithic England
1993 archaeological discoveries