The advent of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) has added a great deal to our understanding of prehistoric metal artefacts in England and Wales, namely in expanding enormously the corpuses of objects previously thought to be quite scarce. One such artefact type is the miniature
socketed 'votive' axe, most of which are found in Wiltshire and Hampshire. As a direct result of developing such recording initiatives, reporting of these artefacts as detector finds from the early 2000s onwards has virtually trebled the number originally published by Paul Robinson in his
1995 analysis. Through extensive data-collection, synthesising examples recorded via the PAS with those from published excavations, the broad aims of this paper (in brief) are as follows: firstly, produce a solid typology for these artefacts; secondly, investigate their spatial distribution
across England and Wales. As a more indirect third aim, this paper also seeks to redress the imbalance of focus and academic study specifically applying to Hampshire finds of this object type, which despite producing a significant proportion of the currently known corpus have never been the
subject of detailed analysis.
