Racton Man was named for the hamlet near Chichester, where his dagger was first found by a metal detector in 1989. James Kenny, now the archaeologist for Chichester district council, was one of the team who returned to the field and recovered the well-preserved skeleton and the tiny rivets that the detector had missed. He knew it was an important find, but there was no money for post-excavation work, so he wrote a report, and the skeleton and dagger went into the museum stores.
Then two years ago he and Needham were walking in another Sussex field where a small hoard had been found, and Kenny told him of his best find, so long ago.
“A riveted dagger in Sussex – my little ears pricked up,” Needham said. “I thought I knew every dagger burial in Britain, but I’d never heard of it.”
The two went to look at the bones and the dagger in the stores, and Needham’s excitement grew. They found the funding from different sources including the local authority, and assembled a team of experts from England, Wales and Scotland.
The results startled everyone. Kenny described Racton Man as “a big man” and he was literally that. To have owned such a high-status object he must have been a leader, possibly a tribal chieftain, but he also stood six foot tall, and had lived into his late 40s, much longer than the average life expectancy.
Isotope analysis of one of his teeth showed he had not come from the chalk downland of Sussex but from the West Country or just possibly Ireland or Brittany.
The copper in the bronze was also a rare type in Britain known as arsenic-only copper, which may have been specially prized because, although they couldn’t have understood the chemistry, the higher the arsenic content the harder the eventual bronze. The copper was probably imported, but the workmanship of the dagger was British.
Although he was still a tall powerful man when he died, age and a hard life had taken their toll. He had spinal degeneration, probably arthritis, a chronic sinus infection, tooth decay and an abscess in one tooth. He may have sustained a deep cut to the armpit that could have severed an artery, a blow his raised arm may have been trying to ward off when it was cut by the sword.
Needham said the combat wounds were an interesting contribution to a debate about whether tribal leaders of the early Bronze Age were hereditary or had to be military leaders: Racton Man certainly hadn’t led a life of sheltered privilege.
There was no surviving evidence of a burial mound in the field, which has been farmed for 4,000 years, nor of a nearby settlement, but he was carefully and honourably buried.
In 1989, the prehistoric age of internet archaeology, Kenny published the find in a little annual report which the team typeset before stapling the pages together themselves. The news sank like a stone.
“I knew he was important though,” he said. “I never forgot him.”
Racton Man and his dagger are on display at the free admission Novium Museum in Chichester.
