Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (32 page)

Bone-like structures found on the heads of male red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, and elk (moose), and on both male and female reindeer (caribou). Antlers are grown in the spring and shed annually in the winter, except in reindeer which shed their antlers in the spring. Antler was a valuable material for making tools and equipment of various kinds throughout northern Europe, northern Asia, and North America from Palaeolithic times through into the medieval period and beyond.

 
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A type of tool found in the Neolithic in southern Britain, and occasionally elsewhere, comprising a section of red-deer antler cut across and with the cut end grooved into a ring of teeth which are carefully pointed and in most specimens show a high degree of polish from wear. On the basis of ethnographic analogy these tools are believed to have been used for removing hair and dressing animal hides.

 
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A type of tool found widely amongst the sites of Neolithic communities in northwestern Europe. They are formed from a red-deer antler from which all but the brow tine has been removed; the beam forms the handle and the brow tine the ‘pick’. They were used for excavating soil and quarrying out stone and bedrock. The marks left by their use have been detected on the sides of ditches, pits, and shafts. Experiments suggest that they were used rather more like levers than the kind of pickaxe that is swung from over the shoulder.

 
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A piece of deer antler which fits over a stone axe to form a sleeve between the axehead and the wooden haft into which the combined axe and sleeve is fitted. Being more resilient to shock than wood, the antler sleeve lessens the risk of splitting the wooden haft while the axe is in use.

 
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Roman frontier work in northern Britain extending across Scotland across the Forth–Clyde isthmus for a distance of 60km between Carriden in the east to Old Kilpatrick in the west. There were also flanking forts along the coast on either side. Built in stages in the early 140s
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after a series of successful military campaigns in Scotland led by Antoninus Pius . The main frontier comprises a stone foundation about 4.3m wide on which stood a turf bank up to 3m high, fronted by a berm and a ditch normally about 12m wide and 3m deep. The boundary was built by troops from all three legions in Britannia at the time: the II Augusta, the VI Vitrix, and the XX Valeria Vitrix. Forts were constructed at intervals of about 3km, nineteen of them in all, attached to the back of the wall, many with annexes to the south for storage. A road, the Military Way, linked the forts. Signal stations were also built between some forts. The Antonine Wall succeeded Hadrian's Wall as the northern frontier of Britannia in ad 143, but was abandoned in ad 158 following a retreat southwards to Hadrian's Wall. After some limited re-use the Antonine Wall was finally abandoned by ad 214.
[Sum.: J. F. Keppe and J. F. Lawrence (eds.), 1990,
The Antonine Wall: a handbook to the surviving remains by Robertson
. Glasgow: Glasgow Archaeological Society]

 
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Roman emperor ad 138–161.

 
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