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Archaeologists from Network Archaeology Ltd have teamed up with Lincolnshire Live to reveal more about the incredible artifacts from a dig along part of the route of Lincoln's Eastern Bypass.

Here, Dr Richard Moore and director Christopher Taylor continue their Find of the Week series, and this week they share the amazing find of a Bronze Age earring stud...

Our Find of the Week is a curious circular object with a groove round its middle, looking like a tiny pulley wheel. It is made of jet or a very similar shiny black shale.

It was found within one of the early Bronze Age burial mounds on the north bank of the Witham.

Our first thought was that this mystery object was in far too good a condition for something of that age and we wondered if it could have been a modern object that had somehow found its way into this earlier layer.

Could it have been something that one of our digging team had accidentally dropped?

But the bypass excavations are attracting a huge interest from the world of archaeology and we are able to draw on the knowledge and experience of a wide range of experts.

One of them identified this as a ‘waisted stud’. These are unusual finds: a recent academic study found records of only sixty known examples in Britain.

Most of these were from eastern England, but there were others from Wales and Ireland. Many are made of Whitby jet, but there are others of fired clay or different kinds of stone.

Where they have been dated, almost all are from early Bronze Age sites, between 3,700 and 4,000 years old.

And as with our example, they have nearly always been found on funerary sites.

(Image: Working Pictures Ltd)

But what were they? They have sometimes been described as toggles or buttons, although if this was the case, they would be expected to show signs of wear on the inner surface of their ‘waists’.

Few if any of them do. They must have been in contact with something softer than the fibres of clothing.

There are a few clues: in several cases they have been found in matched pairs, and occasionally alongside skeletons, nearly always close to the skull. Where it was possible to tell, the skeletons were female.

So, our mystery object is probably a stud from a pierced ear. It would have taken time and great skill to make, and would have been a luxury item: it is likely to have been worn by an important and grand lady, living and dying near the banks of the River Witham.

The presence of such a person emphasises just how important a place this was in the early Bronze Age.